Yet I hardly know. When a soul has seen By the means of Evil that Good is best, And, through earth and its noise, what is heaven’s serene,-- When our faith in the same has stood the test,-- Why, the child grown man, you burn the rod, The uses of labor are surely done; There remaineth a rest for the people of God: And I have had troubles enough, for one. 23. But at any rate I have loved the season Of Art’s spring-birth so dim and dewy; My sculptor is Nicolo the Pisan, My painter--who but Cimabue? Nor even was man of them all indeed, From these to Ghiberti and Ghirlandajo, Could say that he missed my critic-meed. So, now to my special grievance--heigh-ho! -- St. 23. Nicolo the Pisan: Nicolo Pisano, architect and sculptor, b. ab. 1207, d. 1278; the church and monastery of the Holy Trinity, at Florence, and the church of San Antonio, at Padua, are esteemed his best architectural works, and his bas-reliefs in the Cathedral of Sienna, his best sculptural. Cimabue: Giovanni Cimabue, 1240-1302, “ends the long Byzantine succession in Italy. . . . In him ‘the spirit of the years to come’ is decidedly manifest; but he never entirely succeeded in casting off the hereditary Byzantine asceticism.”--Heaton. Giotto was his pupil. Ghiberti: Lorenzo Ghiberti, the great Florentine sculptor, 1381-1455; his famous masterpiece, the eastern doors of the Florentine Baptistery, of San Giovanni, of which Michael Angelo said that they were worthy to be the gates of Paradise. Ghirlandajo: Domenico Bigordi, called Ghirlandajo, or the garland-maker, celebrated painter, b. in Florence, 1449, d. 1494; “in treatment, drawing, and modelling, G. excels any fresco-painter since Masaccio; shares with the two Lippis, father and son, a fondness for introducing subordinate groups which was unknown to Massaccio.”--Woltmann and Woermann’s History of Painting. 24. Their ghosts still stand, as I said before, Watching each fresco flaked and rasped, Blocked up, knocked out, or whitewashed o’er: --No getting again what the Church has grasped! The works on the wall must take their chance; “Works never conceded to England’s thick clime!” (I hope they prefer their inheritance Of a bucketful of Italian quicklime.) 25. When they go at length, with such a shaking Of heads o’er the old delusion, sadly Each master his way through the black streets taking, Where many a lost work breathes though badly-- Why don’t they bethink them of who has merited? Why not reveal, while their pictures dree Such doom, how a captive might be out-ferreted? Why is it they never remember me? -- St. 25. dree: endure (A. S. “dreo’gan”). 26.