Its colonnades, with wide embracing arms,

Spread forth as if to bless and shield from harms,
And draw them to its heart, the inner shrine,
From the grand outer precincts, where alway
The living fountains wave their clouds of spray,
And temper with cool sound the hot sunshine.

Step in, behind your back the curtain swings;
The world is left outside with worldly things.
How still! save where vague echoes rise and fall,
Dying along the distance, what a sense
Of peace and silence hovers over all,

That tones the marbled aisle's magnificence,
And frescoed vaults and ceilings deep with gold,
To its own quiet. See! how grand and bold,
Key of the whole, swells up the airy dome
Where the apostles hold their lofty home,
And angels hover in the misted height,
And amber shafts of sunset bridge with light
Its quivering air, while low the organ groans,
And from the choir's gilt cages tangling tones
Whirl fuguing up, and play and float aloft,
And in its vast bell die in echoes soft.

And mark! our church hath its own atmosphere,
That varies not with seasons of the year,
But ever keeps its even, temperate air,
And soft, large light without offensive glare.
No sombre, Gothic sadness here abides
To awe the sense, no sullen shadow hides
In its clear spaces, — but a light as warm

And broad as charity smiles o'er the whole,
And joyous art and color's festal charm

Refine the senses and uplift the soul.

*

*

William Wetmore Story.

MICHAEL ANGELO BUONAROTTI.

READ AT A CELEBRATION OF THE FOUR HUNDREDTH ANNIVERSARY OF HIS BIRTH.

No numbers can compute, no tongue translate in words.

Patient to train and school

His genius to the rule

Art's sternest laws required;

Yet, by no custom chained,

His daring hand disdained

The academic forms by tamer souls admired.

In his interior light

Awoke those shapes of might,

Once known, that never die;

Forms of Titanic birth

The elder brood of earth,

That fill the mind more grandly than they charm the eye.

Yet when the master chose,

Ideal graces rose

Like flowers on gnarléd boughs;

For he was nursed and fed

At Beauty's fountain-head,

And to the goddess pledged his earliest, warmest vows.

Entranced in thoughts whose vast

Imaginations passed

Into his facile hand,

By adverse fate unfoiled,

Through long, long years he toiled; Undimmed the eyes that saw, unworn the brain that planned.

A soul the Church's bars,
The State's disastrous wars,

Kept closer to his youth.

Though rough the winds and sharp,
They could not bend or warp

His soul's ideal forms of beauty and of truth.

Like some cathedral spire

That takes the earliest fire
Of morn, he towered sublime
O'er names and fanes of mark

Whose lights to his were dark;

Facing the east, he caught a glow beyond his time.

Whether he drew, or sung,

Or wrought in stone, or hung

The Pantheon in the air;
Whether he gave to Rome

Her Sistine walls or dome,

Or laid the ponderous beams, or lightly wound the stair;

Whether he planned defence
On Tuscan battlements,

Fired with the patriot's zeal,
Where San Miniato's glow

Smiled down upon the foe,

Till Treason won the gates that mocked the invader's steel;

Whether in lonely nights
With Poesy's delights

He cheered his solitude;
In sculptured sonnets wrought
His firm and graceful thought,

Like marble altars in some dark and mystic wood,

Still, proudly poised, he stepped

The way his vision swept,

And scorned the narrower view.

He touched with glory all

That pope or cardinal,

With lower aims than his, allotted him to do.

A heaven of larger zone-
Not theirs, but his- was thrown

O'er old and wonted themes.

The fires within his soul

Shone like an aureole

Around the prophets old and sibyls of his dreams.

Thus self-contained and bold,

His glowing thoughts he told

On canvas or on stone,
He needed not to seek

His themes from Jew or Greek;

His soul enlarged their forms, his style was all his own.

Ennobled by his hand,

Florence and Rome shall stand
Stamped with the signet-ring
He wore, where kings obeyed
The laws the artists made.

Art was his world, and he was Art's anointed king.

So stood this Angelo
Four hundred years ago;

So grandly still he stands,
Mid lesser worlds of art,
Colossal and apart,

Like Memnon breathing songs across the desert sands.

Christopher Pearse Cranch.

CHRISTMAS NIGHT IN ST. PETER'S.

Low

OW on the marble floor I lie:
I am alone:

Though friendly voices whisper nigh,
And foreign crowds are passing by,