s--what matters?"

20.

Give these, I exhort you, their guerdon and glory
For daring so much, before they well did it.
The first of the new, in our race's story,
Beats the last of the old; 'tis no idle quiddit.
The worthies began a revolution,
Which if on earth you intend to acknowledge,
Why, honor them now! (ends my allocution)
Nor confer your degree when the folks leave college.

21.

There's a fancy some lean to and others hate--
That, when this life is ended, begins
New work for the soul in another state,
Where it strives and gets weary, loses and wins:
Where the strong and the weak, this world's congeries,
Repeat in large what they practised in small,
Through life after life in unlimited series;
Only the scale's to be changed, that's all.

22.

Yet I hardly know. When a soul has seen
By the means of Evil that Good is best,
And, through earth and its noise, what is heaven's serene,--
When our faith in the same has stood the test,--
Why, the child grown man, you burn the rod,
The uses of labor are surely done;
There remaineth a rest for the people of God:
And I have had troubles enough, for one.

23.

But at any rate I have loved the season
Of Art's spring-birth so dim and dewy;
My sculptor is Nicolo the Pisan,
My painter--who but Cimabue?
Nor even was man of them all indeed,
From these to Ghiberti and Ghirlandajo,
Could say that he missed my critic-meed.
So, now to my special grievance--heigh-ho!

--
St. 23. Nicolo the Pisan: Nicolo Pisano, architect and sculptor,
b. ab. 1207, d. 1278; the church and monastery of the Holy Trinity,
at Florence, and the church of San Antonio, at Padua,
are esteemed his best architectural works, and his bas-reliefs
in the Cathedral of Sienna, his best sculptural.

Cimabue: Giovanni Cimabue, 1240-1302, "ends the long Byzantine succession
in Italy. . . . In him `the spirit of the years to come'
is decidedly manifest; but he never entirely succeeded in casting off
the hereditary Byzantine asceticism."--Heaton. Giotto was his pupil.
Ghiberti: Lorenzo Ghiberti, the great Florentine sculptor, 1381-1455;
his famous masterpiece, the eastern doors of the Florentine Baptistery,
of San Giovanni, of which Michael Angelo said that they were worth