THE PANTHEON.

NO, great Dome of Agrippa, thou art not Christian!

canst not,

Strip and replaster and daub and do what they will with thee, be so!

Here underneath the great porch of colossal Corinthian columns,

Here as I walk, do I dream of the Christian belfries above them?

Or on a bench as I sit and abide for long hours, till thy whole vast

Round grows dim as in dreams to my eyes, I repeople thy niches,

Not with the martyrs and saints and confessors and virgins and children,

But with the mightier forms of an older, austerer wor

ship;

And I recite to myself, how

Eager for battle here Stood Vulcan, here matronal Juno,

And with the bow to his shoulder faithful
He who with pure dew laveth of Castaly
His flowing locks, who holdeth of Lycia
The oak forest and the wood that bore him,
Delos' and Patara's own Apollo.

Arthur Hugh Clough.

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.

-

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.

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