how I earned the tagnation of my nid was saved if Je my death?

nazi where the oil

the surface sink, Aa God, I know

ten fig-leaves soft, 1 a tight olive-frail, sex, di lapis lazuli, bad cut off at the nape,

er the Madonna's breast wqwathed you, villas,

Pasesti vil'a with its bath, ee Cup poise between my e Father's globe on both his

te Jesu Church so gay, stall not choose but see and weaver's shuttle fleet our

The grave, and where is Saxat for my slab, sons? pblack I meant ! How

out as my frieze to come

every word,

No gaudy ware like Gandolf's second line

Tully, my masters? Ulpian serves his need!

And then how I shall lie through centuries,

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

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 onionstone,

As still he envied me, so fair she was!1

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

I.

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

An

So much was saved if aught were missed!

My sons, ye would not be my death?

Go dig

The white-grape vineyard where the oilpress stood,

Drop water gently till the surface sink, And if ye find... Ah God, I know not, I!.

Bedded in store of rotten fig-leaves soft,
And corded up in a tight olive-frail,
Some lump, ah God, of lapis lazuli,
Big as a Jew's head cut off at the na
Blue as a vein o'er the Madonna's i
Sons, all have I bequeathed you,
all,

That brave Frascati villa with it
So, let the blue lump poise bet
knees.

Like God the Father's glob

hands

e pride of our dwel the great march

ns to man to assist hir

arch

k; who shall harm them Then, the chorus intone s go up to the altar in glor] el here: for here in the dark I groaned.

"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 fire-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

PASS

of one

of my spirit,I voice,

ame out of sorrow,

light it was made for are I say,

ny, in rapture of service, hough its array,

reth the cherubim-chariotcried I, and stopped,

the thing that should follow. Saul, who hung propped the tent's cross-support in the centre. as struck by his name.

Have ye seen when Spring's arrowy Sammons goes right to the aim, And some mountain, the last to withstand her, that held (he alone, While the vale laughed in freedom and flowers) on a broad bust of stone A year's snow bound about for a breastplate,-leaves grasp of the sheet? Fold on fold all at once it crowds thunderously down to his feet.

And there fronts you, stark, black, but alive yet, your mountain of old, With his rents, the successive bequeathing of ages untold

Yea, each harm got in fighting your battles, each furrow and scar

Jove, tempt the goat and its the green on his crest

in the ardors of summer.

or thrilled

The very air tingled, vas stilled

Self left standing before and aware.

ne, what remained? All setwixt hope and despair, as past, life not come: so he Awhile his right hand

the brow, helped the eyes left too vacant forthwith to remand

To their place what new objects should enter: 'twas Saul as before.

I looked up and dared gaze at those eyes, nor was hurt any more

Than by slow pallid sunsets in autumn, ye watch from the shore,

At their sad level gaze o'er the oceana sun's slow decline

Over hills which, resolved in stern silence, o'erlap and entwine

Base with base to knit strength more intensely so, arm folded arm

O'er the chest whose slow heavings subsided.

XI

What spell or what charm, (For awhile there was trouble within me), what next should I urge To sustain him where song had restored him?-Song filled to the verge His cup with the wine of this life, pressing all that it yields

Of mere fruitage, the strength and the beauty beyond, on what fields, Glean a vintage more potent and perfect to brighten the eye

And bring blood to the lip, and commend them the cup they put by? He saith, "It is good;" still he drinks not: he lets me praise life,

Gives assent, yet would die for his own part.

XII

Then fancies grew rife Which had come long ago on the pasture, when round me the sheep Fed in silence-above, the one eagle wheeled slow as in sleep;

And I lay in my hollow and mused on the world that might lie

'Neath his ken, though I saw but the strip 'twixt the hill and the sky: And I laughed- Since my days are ordained to be passed with my flocks, Let me people at least, with my fancies, the plains and the rocks,

Dream the life I am never to mix with, and image the show

Of mankind as they live in those fashions I hardly shall know! Schemes of life, its best rules and right uses, the courage that gains, And the prudence that keeps what men strive for." And now these old trains Of vague thought came again; I grew surer; so, once more the string Of my harp made response to my spirit, as thus

I began

XIII

"Yea, my King,"

thou dost well in rejecting mere comforts that spring From the mere mortal life held in common by man and by brute:

In our flesh grows the branch of this life, in our soul it bears fruit. Thou hast marked the slow rise of the tree, how its stem trembled first Till it passed the kid's lip, the stag's antler; then safely outburst The fan-branches all round; and thou mindest when these too, in turn, Broke a-bloom and the palm-tree seemed perfect: yet more was to learn, E'en the good that comes in with the palm-fruit. Our dates shall we slight, When their juice brings a cure for all sorrow? or care for the plight

Of the palm's self whose slow growth produced them? Not so! stem and branch

Shall decay, nor be known in their place, while the palm-wine shall stanch Every wound of man's spirit in winter. pour thee such wine,

Leave the flesh to the fate it was fit for! the spirit be thine!

By the spirit, when age shall o'ercome thee, thou still shalt enjoy

More indeed, than at first when inconscious, the life of a boy.

Crush that life, and behold its wine running! Each deed thou hast done Dies, revives, goes to work in the world! until e'en as the sun

Looking down on the earth, though clouds spoil him, though tempests efface,

Can find nothing his own deed produced not, must every where trace The results of his past summer-prime,— so, each ray of thy will,

Every flash of thy passion and prowess. long over, shall thrill

Thy whole people, the countless, with ardor, till they too give forth

A like cheer to their sons, who in turn, fill the South and the North With the radiance thy deed was the germ of. Carouse in the past!

But the license of age has its limit; thou diest at last :

As the lion when age dims his eyeball, the rose at her height,

So with man--so his power and his beauty forever take flight.

No! Again a long draught of my soulwine! Look forth o'er the years! Thou hast done now with eyes for the actual; begin with the seer's!

Is Saul dead? In the depth of the vale make his tomb--bid arise

A gray mountain of marble heaped four-
square, till, built to the skies,
Let it mark where the great First King
slumbers: whose fame would ve know?
Up above see the rock's naked face,
where the record shall go

In great characters cut by the scribe,-
Such was Saul, so he did;
With the sages directing the work, by
the populace chid,-

For not half, they'll affirm, is comprised
there! Which fault to amend,
In the grove with his kind grows the
cedar, whereon they shall spend
(See, in tablets 't is level before them)
their praise, and record

With the gold of the graver, Saul's story, --the stateman's great word

Side by side with the poet's sweet comment. The river 's a-wave With smooth paper-reeds grazing each other when prophet-winds rave: So the pen gives unborn generations their due and their part

In thy being! Then, first of the mighty, thank God that thou art!"