BY MICHAEL ANGELO IN THE BARGELLO,

What beauteous form beneath a marble veil

Awaited in this block the Master's hand?

Could not the magic of his art avail

To unseal that beauty's tomb and bid it stand?

Alas! the torpid and unwilling mass

Misknew the sweetness of the mind's control,

And the quick shifting of the winds, alas!

Denied a body to that flickering soul.

Fair homeless spirit, harbinger of bliss,

It wooed dead matter that they both might live,

But dreamful earth still slumbered through the kiss

And missed the blessing heaven stooped to give,

As when Endymion, locked in dullard sleep,

Endured the gaze of Dian, till she turned

Stung with immortal wrath and doomed to weep

Her maiden passion ignorantly spurned.

How should the vision stay to guide the hand,

How should the holy thought and ardour stay,

When the false deeps of all the soul are sand

And the loose rivets of the spirit clay?

What chisel shaking in the pulse of lust

Shall find the perfect line, immortal, pure?

What fancy blown by every random gust

Shall mount the breathless heavens and endure?

Vain was the trance through which a thrill of joy

Passed for the nonce, when a vague hand, unled,

Half shaped the image of this lovely boy

And caught the angel's garment as he fled.

Leave, leave, distracted hand, the baffling stone,

And on that clay, thy fickle heart, begin.

Mould first some steadfast virtue of thine own

Out of the sodden substance of thy sin.

They who wrought wonders by the Nile of old,

Bequeathing their immortal part to us,

Cast their own spirit first into the mould

And were themselves the rock they fashioned thus.

Ever their docile and unwearied eye

Traced the same ancient pageant to the grave,

And awe made rich their spirit's husbandry

With the perpetual refluence of its wave,

Till‘ twixt the desert and the constant Nile

Sphinx, pyramid, and awful temple grew,

And the vast gods, self-knowing, learned to smile

Beneath the sky's unalterable blue.

Long, long ere first the rapt Arcadian swain

Heard Pan's wild music pulsing through the grove,

His people's shepherds held paternal reign

Beneath the large benignity of Jove.

Long mused the Delphic sibyl in her cave

Ere mid his laurels she beheld the god,

And Beauty rose a virgin from the wave

In lands the foot of Heracles had trod.

Athena reared her consecrated wall,

Poseidon laid its rocky basement sure,

When Theseus had the monstrous race in thrall

And made the worship of his people pure.

Long had the stripling stood in silence, veiled,

Hearing the heroes’ legend o'er and o'er,

Long in the keen palæstra striven, nor quailed

To tame the body to the task it bore,

Ere soul and body, shaped by patient art,

Walked linked with the gods, like friend with friend,

And reason, mirrored in the sage's heart,

Beheld her purpose and confessed her end.

Mould, then, thyself and let the marble be.

Look not to frailty for immortal themes,

Nor mock the travail of mortality

With barren husks and harvesting of dreams.