Nor wronged Lippino--and not a word I
Say of a scrap of Fra Angelico's.
But you are too fine, Taddeo Gaddi,
So grant me a taste of your intonaco--
Some Jerome that seeks the heaven with a sad eye?
No churlish saint, Lorenzo Monaco?

* * * * * * *

Margheritone of Arezzo,
With the grave-clothes garb and swaddling barret,
(Why purse up mouth and beak in a pet so,
You bald, saturnine, poll-clawed parrot?)
No poor glimmering Crucifixion,
Where in the foreground kneels the donor?
If such remain, as is my conviction,
The hoarding does you but little honour.

The conclusion of this poem rises to a climax:--

How shall we prologuise, how shall we perorate,
Say fit things upon art and history--
Set truth at blood-heat and the false at zero rate,
Make of the want of the age no mystery!
Contrast the fructuous and sterile eras,
Show, monarchy its uncouth cub licks
Out of the bear's shape to the chimaera's--
Pure Art's birth being still the republic's!

Then one shall propose (in a speech, curt Tuscan,
Sober, expurgate, spare of an "_issimo_,")
Ending our half-told tale of Cambuscan,
Turning the Bell-tower's altaltissimo.
And fine as the beak of a young beccaccia
The Campanile, the Duomo's fit ally,
Soars up in gold its full fifty braccia,
Completing Florence, as Florence, Italy.

How really deplorable is all this! On what theory of art can it possibly
be defended? In all the fine arts alike--poetry, painting, sculpture,
music--the master works have this in common, that they please in the
highest degree the most cultivated, and to the widest extent the less
cultivated. _Lear_ and the _Divine Comedy_ exhaust the thinking of the
profoundest student, yet subdue to hushed and breathless attention the
illiterate minds that know not what study means. The "Last Judgment,"
the "Transfiguration," the "Niobe," and the "Dying Gladiator" excite
alike the intelligent rapture of artists, and the unintelligent
admiration of those to whom art and its principles are a sealed book.
Handel's _Israel in Egypt_--the wonder of the scientific musician in his
closet--yet sways to and fro, like a mighty wind upon the waters, the
hearts of assembled thousands at an Exeter Hall oratorio. To take an
instance more striking still, Beethoven, the sublime, the rugged, the
auster