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,

I am alone.

Great hymns float through

The shadowed aisles. I hear a slow

Refrain, "Forgive them, for they know
Not what they do."

With tender joy all others thrill;
I have but tears:

The false priests' voices, high and shrill,
Reiterate the "Peace, good-will";
I have but tears.

I hear anew

The nails and scourge; then come the low, Sad words, Forgive them, for they know Not what they do.”

Close by my side the poor souls kneel;
I turn away;

Half-pitying looks at me they steal;
They think, because I do not feel,
I turn away.
Ah! if they knew,

How following them, where'er they go,
I hear, "Forgive them, for they know
Not what they do."

Above the organ's sweetest strains
I hear the groans

Of prisoners, who lie in chains,

So near, and in such mortal pains,
I hear the groans.

But Christ walks through

The dungeons of St. Angelo,

And says, "Forgive them, for they know
Not what they do."

And now the music sinks to sighs;
The lights grow din:

The Pastorella's melodies

In lingering echoes float and rise;
The lights grow dim;

More clear and true,

In this sweet silence seem to flow
The words, "Forgive them, for they know
Not what they do."

The dawn swings incense, silver gray;
The night is past;

Now comes, triumphant, God's full day;
No priest, no church can bar its way:
The night is past;

How on this blue

Of God's great banner, blaze and glow
The words, "Forgive them, for they know
Not what they do!"

Helen Hunt.

ST. JOHN LATERAN.

OF temples built by mortal hands,

Give honor to the Lateran first; 'T was here the hope of many lands The infant Church was nursed;

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