CASA GUIDI WINDOWS.

A Poem,

IN TWO PARTS.

LIFE AND LOVE.

I.

FAST this Life of mine was dying,
Blind already and calm as death.
Snowflakes on her bosom lying
Scarcely heaving with her breath.

II.

Love came by, and having known her
In a dream of fabled lands,
Gently stooped, and laid upon her
Mystic chrism of holy hands;

III.

Drew his smile across her folded
Eyelids, as the swallow dips;
Breathed as finely as the cold did,
Through the locking of her lips.

IV.

So, when Life looked upward, being Warmed and breathed on from above, What sight could she have for seeing,

Evermore... but only Love?

CASA GUIDI WINDOWS.

PART I.

I HEARD last night a little child go singing
'Neath Casa Guidi windows, by the church,
O bella libertà, O bella! stringing

The same words still on notes he went in search
So high for, you concluded the upspringing
Of such a nimble bird to sky from perch
Must leave the whole bush in a tremble green,
And that the heart of Italy must beat,
While such a voice had leave to rise serene

'Twixt church and palace of a Florence street! A little child, too, who not long had been By mother's finger steadied on his feet, And still O bella libertà he sang.

Then I thought, musing of the innumerous
Sweet songs which still for Italy outrang
From older singers' lips, who sang not thus
Exultingly and purely, yet, with pang
Fast sheathed in music, touched the heart of us
So finely, that the pity scarcely pained.

I thought how Filicaja led on others,

Bewailers for their Italy enchained,

And how they called her childless among mothers, Widow of empires, ay, and scarce refrained Cursing her beauty to her face, as brothers

Might a shamed sister's,-'Had she been less fair She were less wretched,'-how, evoking so From congregated wrong and heaped despair Of men and women writhing under blow, Harrowed and hideous in a filthy lair Some personating Image, wherein woe Was wrapt in beauty from offending much, They called it Cybele, or Niobe,

Or laid it corpse-like on a bier for such, Where all the world might drop for Italy Those cadenced tears which burn not where they touch,

'Juliet of nations, canst thou die as we?

And was the violet crown that crowned thy head So over-large, though new buds made it rough, It slipped down and across thine eyelids dead, O sweet, fair Juliet?' Of such songs enough, Too many of such complaints! behold, instead, Void at Verona, Juliet's marble trough.*

As void as that is, are all images

Men set between themselves and actual wrong,
To catch the weight of pity, meet the stress
Of conscience,-since 'tis easier to gaze long
On mournful masks, and sad effigies,

Than on real, live, weak creatures crushed by strong.

For me who stand in Italy to-day

Where worthier poets stood and sang before,

I kiss their footsteps, yet their words gainsay. I can but muse in hope upon this shore

Of golden Arno as it shoots away

Through Florence' heart beneath her bridges four!

*They show at Verona, as the tomb of Juliet, an empty trough

of stone.

Bent bridges, seeming to strain off like bows, And tremble while the arrowy undertide

Shoots on and cleaves the marble as it goes, And strikes up palace walls on either side,

And froths the cornice out in glittering rows,
With doors and windows quaintly multiplied,

And terrace-sweeps, and gazers upon all,
By whom if flower or kerchief were thrown out
From any lattice there, the same would fall
Into the river underneath no doubt,

It runs so close and fast 'twixt wall and wall.
How beautiful! the mountains from without
In silence listen for the word said next,

What word will men say,-here where Giotto planted His campanile, like an unperplexed

Fine question Heaven-ward, touching the things granted

A noble people who, being greatly vexed In act, in aspiration keep undaunted?

*

What word will God say? Michel's Night and Day And Dawn and Twilight wait in marble scorn," Like dogs upon a dunghill, couched on clay From whence the Medicean stamp's outworn, The final putting off of all such sway By all such hands, and freeing of the unborn In Florence and the great world outside Florence. Three hundred years his patient statues wait

In that small chapel of the dim St. Lawrence. Day's eyes are breaking bold and passionate Over his shoulder, and will flash abhorrence

*These famous statues recline in the Sagrestia Nuova, on the tombs of Giuliano de' Medici, third son of Lorenzo the Magnificent, and Lorenzo of Urbino, his grandson. Strozzi's epigram on the Night, with Michel Angelo's rejoinder, is well known.