ng old. Each had forgotten that unhappiness existed
anywhere in the whole world. The armored, blood-stained men about them
were of no more importance than were those wantons in the tapestry.
Without, dawn throbbed in heaven. Without, innumerable birds were
raising that glad, piercing, hurried morning-song which very anciently
caused Adam's primal waking, to behold his mate.

BALTHAZAR'S DAUGHTER

"_A curious preference for the artificial should be mentioned as
characteristic of ALESSANDRO DE MEDICI'S poetry. For his century was
anything but artless; the great commonplaces that form the main stock
of human thought were no longer in their first flush, and he addressed
a people no longer childish. . . . Unquestionably his fancies were
fantastic, anti-natural, bordering on hallucination, and they betray a
desire for impossible novelty; but it is allowable to prefer them to
the sickly simplicity of those so-called poems that embroider with old
faded wools upon the canvas of worn-out truisms, trite, trivial and
idiotically sentimental patterns._"

Let me have dames and damsels richly clad
To feed and tend my mirth,
Singing by day and night to make me glad;

Let me have fruitful gardens of great girth
Fill'd with the strife of birds,
With water-springs, and beasts that house i' the earth.

Let me seem Solomon for lore of words,
Samson for strength, for beauty Absalom.

Knights as my serfs be given;
And as I will, let music go and come;
Till, when I will, I will to enter Heaven.

ALESSANDRO DE MEDICI.--_Madrigal, from D. G. Rossetti's version_.

BALTHAZAR'S DAUGHTER

Graciosa was Balthazar's youngest child, a white, slim girl with violet
eyes and strange pale hair which had the color and glitter of stardust.
"Some day at court," her father often thought complacently, "she, too,
will make a good match." He was a necessitous lord, a smiling, supple
man who had already marketed two daughters to his advantage. But
Graciosa's time was not yet mature in the year of grace 1533, for the
girl was not quite sixteen. So Graciosa remained in Balthazar's big
cheerless house and was tutored in all needful accomplishments. She
was proficient in the making of preserves and unguents, could play the
harpsichord and the virginals acceptably, could embroider an altarcloth
to admiration, and, in spite of a trivial lameness in walking, could
dance a coranto or a saraband against any