So much I love her! Yes, that look is marvellous like you,
Wandering, tender--such as I'd give my salvation to win you
Once to bend upon me! But I knew myself better than make you,
Lest I should play the fool about you here before people,
Helpless to turn away from your violet eyes, Violante,
That have turned all my life to a vision of madness." The painter
Here unto speech betraying the thoughts he had silently pondered,
"Visions, visions, my son?" said a gray old friar who listened,
Seated there in the sun, with his eye on the work of the painter
Fishily fixed, while the master blasphemed behind his mustaches.
"Much have I envied your Art, who vouchsafeth to those who adore
her
Visions of heavenly splendor denied to fastings and vigils.
I have spent days and nights of faint and painful devotion,
Scourged myself almost to death, without one glimpse of the glory
Which your touch has revealed in the face of that heavenly maiden.
Pleasure me to repeat what it was you were saying of visions:
Fain would I know how they come to you, though _I_ never see them,
And in my thickness of hearing I fear some words have escaped me."
Then, while the painter glared on the lifted face of the friar,
Baleful, breathless, bewildered, fiercer than noon in the dog-days,
Round the circle of pupils there ran a tittering murmur;
From the lips to the ears of those nameless Beppis and Gigis
Buzzed the stinging whisper: "Let's hear Pordenone's confession."
Well they knew the master's luckless love, and whose portrait
He had unconsciously painted there, and guessed that his visions
Scarcely were those conceived by the friar, who constantly
blundered
Round the painter at work, mistaking every subject--
Noah's drunken Debauch for the Stoning of Stephen the Martyr,
And the Conversion of Paul for the Flight into Egypt; forever
Putting his hand to his ear and shouting, "Speak louder, I pray
you!"
So they waited now, in silent, amused expectation,
Till Pordenone's angry scorn should gather to bursting.
Long the painter gazed in furious silence, then slowly
Uttered a kind of moan, and turned again to his labor.
Tears gathered into his eyes, of mortification and pathos,
And when the dull old monk, who forgot, while he waited the answer,
Visions and painter, and all, had maundered away in his error,
Pordenone half envied the imbecile peace of his bosom;