A touch, a glimpse, a sound, a breath--
It is a song the oriole sings--
And all the rest belongs to death.

But oriole, my oriole,
Were some bright seraph sent from bliss
With songs of heaven to win my soul
From simple memories such as this,

What could he tell to tempt my ear
From you? What high thing could there be,
So tenderly and sweetly dear
As my lost boyhood is to me?

PORDENONE.

I.

Hard by the Church of Saint Stephen, in sole and beautiful Venice,
Under the colonnade of the Augustinian Convent,
Every day, as I passed, I paused to look at the frescos
Painted upon the ancient walls of the court of the Convent
By a great master of old, who wore his sword and his dagger
While he wrought the figures of patriarchs, martyrs, and virgins
Into the sacred and famous scenes of Scriptural story.

II.

Long ago the monks from their snug self-devotion were driven,
Wistful and fat and slow: looking backward, I fancied them going
Out through the sculptured doorway, and down the Ponte de'Frati,
Cowled and sandalled and beaded, a plump and pensive procession;
And in my day their cells were barracks for Austrian soldiers,
Who in their turn have followed the Augustinian Friars.
As to the frescos, little remained of work once so perfect.
Summer and winter weather of some three cycles had wasted;
Plaster had fallen, and left unsightly blotches of ruin;
Wanton and stupid neglect had done its worst to the pictures:
Yet to the sympathetic and reverent eye was apparent--
Where the careless glance but found, in expanses of plaster,
Touches of incoherent color and lines interrupted--
Somewhat still of the life of surpassing splendor and glory
Filling the frescos once; and here and there was a figure,
Standing apart, and out from the common decay and confusion,
Flushed with immortal youth and ineffaceable beauty,
Such as that figure of Eve in pathetic expulsion from Eden,
Taking--the tourist remembers--the wrath of Heaven al fresco,
As is her well-known custom in thousands of acres of canvas.

III.

I could make out the much-bepainted Biblical subjects,
When I had patience enough: The Temptation, of course, and
Expulsion;
Cain killing Abel, his Brother--the merest fragment of murder;
Noah's Debauch--the trunk of the sea-faring patriarch naked,
And the garment, borne backward to cover it, fearfully tatt