I go in the rain, and, more than needs, A rope cuts both my wrists behind, And I think, by the feel, my forehead bleeds, For they fling, whoever has a mind, Stones at me for my year's misdeeds.
Thus I entered Brescia, and thus I go!
In such triumphs people have dropped down dead.
"Thou, paid by the world,--what dost thou owe Me?" God might have question; but now in
'Tis God shall requite! I am safer so.
MILAN with plenty and with wealth o'erflows, And numerous streets and cleanly dwellings shows: The people, blessed with Nature's happy force, Are eloquent and cheerful in discourse;
A circus and a theatre invites
The unruly mob to races and to fights. Moneta consecrated buildings grace,
And the whole town redoubled walls embrace; Here spacious baths and palaces are seen, And intermingled temples rise between; Here circling colonnades the ground enclose, And here the marble statues breathe in rows: Profusely graced the happy town appears, Nor Rome itself her beauteous neighbor fears. AUSONIUS.
By Leonardo da Vinci, in the refectory of the Convent of Maria della Grazia, Milan.
THOUGH Searching damps and many an envious
Have marred this work, the calm, ethereal grace, The love, deep-seated in the Saviour's face, The mercy, goodness, have not failed to awe The elements; as they do melt and thaw The heart of the beholder, and erase (At least for one rapt moment) every trace Of disobedience to the primal law.
The annunciation of the dreadful truth
Made to the Twelve survives: lip, forehead, cheek, And hand reposing on the board in ruth Of what it utters, while the unguilty seek Unquestionable meanings, still bespeak A labour worthy of eternal youth!
LEONARDO'S "LAST SUPPER" AT MILAN
COME! if thy heart be pure, thy spirits calm. If thou hast no harsh feelings, or but those Which self-reproach inflicts,—ah no, bestows, Her wounds, here probed, find here their gentlest balm.
O the sweet sadness of that lifted palm!
The dreadful deed to come his lips disclose;
Yet love and awe, not wrath, that countenance
As though they sang even now that ritual psalm
Which closed the feast piacular. Time hath done His work on this fair picture; but that face His outrage awes. Stranger! the mist of years Between thee hung and half its heavenly grace, Hangs there, a fitting veil; nor that alone,— Gaze on it also through a veil of tears!
LINES WRITTEN ON THE ROOF OF MILAN CATHEDRAL
"A mount of marble, a hundred spires."
THE long, long night of utter loneliness, Of conflict, pain, defeat, and sore distress, Hath vanished; and I stand as one whose life Wages with death a scarcely winning strife, Here on this mount of marble. Like a sea Waveless and blue, the sky's transparency Bathes spire and statue. Was it man or God Who built those domes, whereon the feet have trod Of eve and night and morn with rose and gold And silver and strange symbols manifold Of shadow? Fabric not of stone but mist Or pearl or cloud beneath heaven's amethyst Glitters the marvel: cloud congealed to shine Through centuries with lustre crystalline; Pearl spiked and fretted like an Orient shell; Mist on the frozen fern-wreaths of a well.
Not God's but man's work this: God's yonder fane, Reared on the distant limit of the plain. Around me rise the grey-green olive trees, From azure into azure, to blue sky Shooting from vapours blue that folded lie Round valley-basements, robed in royal snow, Wherefrom life-giving waters leaping flow, Aerial Monte Rosa!-God and man
Confront each other, with this narrow span Of plain to part them, try what each can do To make applauding Seraphs from the blue Lean marvel-smitten, or alight with song Upon the glittering peaks, or clustering throng The spacious pathways. God on man's work here Hath set His signature and symbol clear;
Man's soul that thinks and feels, to God's work
Gives life, which else were cold and dumb and bare. God is man's soul; man's soul a spark of God: By God in man the dull terrestrial clod
Becomes a thing of beauty; thinking man Through God made manifest, outrival can His handiwork of nature. Do we dream Mingling reality with things that seem? Or is it true that God and man appear One soul in sentient art self-conscious here, One soul o'er senseless nature stair by stair Raised to create by comprehending there?
JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS,
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