Charles, perjured traitor, for his part, Do I grow old and out of strength. 66 Freedom grows licence," some suspect Inquired of all her fortunes-just So much for idle wishing-how It steals the time! To business now. 1845. PICTOR IGNOTUS I COULD have painted pictures like that youth's Ye praise so. up! No bar Stayed me-ah, thought which saddens while it soothes! How my soul springs -Never did fate forbid me, star by star. To outburst on your night with all my gift Of fires from God: nor would my flesh have shrunk From seconding my soul, with eyes uplift or North, Bound for the calmly satisfied great State, Or glad aspiring little burgh, it went, Flowers cast upon the car which bore the freight, Through old streets named afresh from the event, Till it reached home, where learned age should greet My face, and youth, the star not yet distinct Above his hair, lie learning at my feet!Oh, thus to live, I and my picture, linked With love about, and praise, till life should end, And then not go to heaven, but linger here, Here on my earth, earth's every man my friend, The thought grew frightful,'t was so wildly dear! But a voice changed it. Glimpses of such sights They drew me forth, and spite of me. . . enough! These buy and sell our pictures, take and give, Count them for garniture and householdstuff. And where they live needs must our pictures live And see their faces, listen to their prate, Partakers of their daily pettiness, Discussed of,-"This I love, or this I hate, This likes me more, and this affects me less!" Wherefore I chose my portion. If at whiles My heart sinks, as monotonous I paint These endless cloisters and eternal aisles With the same series, Virgin, Babe and Saint, With the same cold calm beautiful regard, --- At least no merchant traffics in my Shrewd was that snatch from out the corner South He graced his carrion with, God curse the same! Yet still my niche is not so cramped but thence One sees the pulpit o' the epistle-side, And somewhat of the choir, those silent seats, And up into the very dome where live The angels, and a sunbeam 's sure to lurk : And I shall fill my slab of basalt there, And 'neath my tabernacle take my rest, With those nine columns round me, two and two, The odd one at my feet where Anselm stands: Peach-blossom marble all, the rare, the ripe As fresh-poured red wine of a mighty pulse. --Old Gandolf with his paltry onionstone, [peach, Put me where I may look at him! True Bedded in store of rotten fig-leaves soft, That brave Frascati villa with its bath, So, let the blue lump poise between my knees, Like God the Father's globe on both his hands Ye worship in the Jesu Church so gay, For Gandolf shall not choose but see and burst! Swift as a weaver's shuttle fleet our years: Man goeth to the grave, and where is he? Did I say basalt for my slab, sons? Black 'T was ever antique-black I meant ! How No gaudy ware like Gandolf's second line- Tully, my masters? Ulpian serves his need! And then how I shall lie through cen turies, And hear the blessed mutter of the mass, And see God made and eaten all day long, And feel the steady candle-flame, and taste Good strong thick stupefying incensesmoke! For as I lie here, hours of the dead night, Dying in state and by such slow degrees, I fold my arms as if they clasped a crook, And stretch my feet forth straight as stone can point, And let the bedclothes, for a mortcloth, drop Into great laps and folds of sculptor'swork: And as yon tapers dwindle, and strange thoughts Grow, with a certain humming in my ears, About the life before I lived this life, And this life too, popes, cardinals and priests, Saint Praxed at his sermon on the mount, Your tall pale mother with her talking eyes, And new-found agate urns as fresh as day, And marble's language, Latin pure, dis creet, —Aha, ELUCESCEBAT quoth our friend? Ever your eyes were as a lizard's quick, They glitter like your mother's for my soul, Or ye would heighten my impoverished frieze, [vase Piece out its starved design, and fill my With grapes, and add a visor and a Term, And to the tripod ye would tie a lynx That in his struggle throws the thyrsus down, To comfort me on my entablature Whereon I am to lie till I must ask "Do I live, am I dead?" There, leave me, there! For ye have stabbed me with ingratitude To death-ye wish it-God, ye wish it! Stone Gritstone, a-crumble! Clammy squares which sweat [through As if the corpse they keep were oozing And no more lapis to delight the world! Well, go! I bless ye. Fewer tapers there, But in a row: and, going, turn your backs -Ay, like departing altar-ministrants, And leave me in my church, the church for peace, That I may watch at leisure if he leersOld Gandolf-at me, from his onion SAID Abner, "At last thou art come! Ere I tell, ere thou speak, Kiss my cheek, wish me well!" Then I wished it, and did kiss his cheek. And he "Since the King, O my friend, for thy countenance sent, Neither drunken nor eaten have we; nor until from his tent "I know no other piece of modern English, prose or poetry, in which there is so much told, as in these lines, of the Renaissance spirit,--its worldliness, inconsistency, pride, hypocrisy, ignorance of itself, love of art, of luxury, and of good Latin. It is nearly all that I said of the central Renaissance in thirty pages of the Stones of Venice, put into as many lines, Browning's being also the antecedent work. The worst of it is that this kind of concentrated writing needs so much solution before the reader can fairly get the good of it, that people's patience fails them, and they give the thing up as insoluble; though, truly, it ought to be to the current of common thought like Saladin's talisman, dipped in clear water, not soluble altogether, but making the element medicinal." (Ruskin.) Other aspects of the Renaissance spirit, finer but equally true, are expressed, with similar concentration, in Old Pictures in Florence, Pictor Ignotus, Andrea del Sarto, The Grammarian's Funeral, etc. etc. Thou return with the joyful assurance the King liveth yet, Shall our lip with the honey be bright, with the water be wet. For out of the black mid-tent's silence, a space of three days, Not a sound hath escaped to thy servants, of prayer nor of praise, To betoken that Saul and the Spirit have ended their strife, And that, faint in his triumph, the monarch sinks back upon life. II "Yet now my heart leaps, O beloved! God's child with his dew On thy gracious gold hair, and those lilies still living and blue Just broken to twine round thy harpstrings, as if no wild heat Were now raging to torture the desert!" III Then I, as was meet, Knelt down to the God of my fathers, and rose on my feet, And ran o'er the sand burnt to powder. The tent was unlooped; I pulled up the spear that obstructed, and under I stooped; Hands and knees on the slippery grasspatch, all withered and gone, That extends to the second enclosure, I groped my way on Till I felt where the foldskirts fly open. Then once more I prayed, And opened the foldskirts and entered, and was not afraid But spoke, "Here is David, thy servant!" And no voice replied. At the first I saw naught but the blackness: but soon I descried A something more black than the blackness-the vast, the upright Main prop which sustains the pavilion: and slow into sight Grew a figure against it, gigantic and blackest of all. Then a sunbeam, that burst through the tent-roof, showed Saul. IV He stood as erect as that tent-prop, both arms stretched out wide On the great cross-support in the centre, that goes to each side; He relaxed not a muscle, but hung there as, caught in his pangs And waiting his change, the king-serpent all heavily hangs, Far away from his kind, in the pine, till deliverance come With the spring-time.-so agonized Saul, drear and stark, blind and dumb. V Then I tuned my harp,-took off the lilies we twine round its chords Lest they snap 'neath the stress of the noontide-those sunbeams like swords! And I first played the tune all our sheep know, as, one after one, So docile they come to the pen-door till folding be done. They are white and untorn by the bushes, for lo, they have fed Where the long grasses stifle the water within the stream's bed; And now one after one seeks its lodging, as star follows star Into eve and the blue far above us,-so blue and so far! Then I played the help-tune of our reapers, their wine-song, when hand Grasps at hand, eye lights eye in good friendship, and great hearts expand And grow one in the sense of this world's life. And then, the last song When the dead man is praised on his journey-" Bear, bear him along, With his few faults shut up like dead flowerets! Are balin seeds not here To console us? The land has none left such as he on the bier. Oh, would we might keep thee, my brother!"-And then, the glad chant Of the marriage,--first go the young maidens, next, she whom we vaunt As the beauty, the pride of our dwelling. And then, the great march Wherein man runs to man to assist him and buttress an arch Naught can break; who shall harm them. our friends? Then, the chorus intoned As the Levites go up to the altar in glory enthroned. But I stopped here: for here in the darkness Saul groaned. VIII And I paused, held my breath in such silence, and listened apart And the tent shook, for mighty Saul shuddered and sparkles 'gan dart From the jewels that woke in his turban, at once, with a start, All its lordly male-sapphires, and rubies courageous at heart. So the head: but the body still moved not, still hung there erect. And I bent once again to my playing, pursued it unchecked, As I sang:: IX "Oh. our manhood's prime vigor! No spirit feels waste, Not a muscle is stopped in its playing nor sinew unbraced. Oh, the wild joys of living! the leaping from rock up to rock, The strong rending of boughs from the fir-tree, the cool silver shock Of the plunge in a pool's living water, the hunt of the bear, And the sultriness showing the lion is couched in his lair. And the meal, the rich dates yellowed over with gold dust divine, And the locust-flesh steeped in the pitcher, the full draught of wine, And the sleep in the dried river-channel where bulrushes tell That the water was wont to go warbling so softly and well. How good is man's life, the mere living! how fit to employ All the heart and the soul and the senses forever in joy! Hast thou loved the white locks of thy father, whose sword thou didst guard When he trusted thee forth with the armies, for glorious reward? Didst thou see the thin hands of thy mother, held up as men sung The low song of the nearly-departed, and hear her faint tongue |