The following rather more serious imitation of Rossetti is from “_The Diversions of the Echo Club_” by Bayard Taylor. Mr. Taylor remarks that Rossetti’s poetry is encumbered with the burden of colour, sensuous expression, and mediæval imagery and drapery; but he forgot to mention that Rossetti wrote as an artist, and that some of his finest poems were written to accompany, and to elucidate, certain of his own pictures. CIMABUELLA. I. Fair-tinted cheeks, clear eyelids drawn In crescent curves above the light Of eyes, whose dim, uncertain dawn Becomes not day: a forehead white Beneath long yellow heaps of hair: She is so strange she must be fair. II. Had she sharp, slant-wise wings outspread, She were an angel; but she stands With flat dead gold behind her head, And lilies in her long thin hands: Her folded mantle, gathered in, Falls to her feet as it were tin. III. Her nose is keen as pointed flame; Her crimson lips no thing express; And never dread of saintly blame Held down her heavy eyelashes: To guess what she were thinking of, Precludeth any meaner love. IV. An azure carpet, fringed with gold, Sprinkled with scarlet spots, I laid Before her straight, cool feet unrolled: But she nor sound nor movement made (Albeit, I heard a soft, shy smile, Printing her neck a moment’s while); V. And I was shamed through all my mind For that she spake not, neither kissed, But stared right past me. Lo! behind Me stood, in pink and amethyst, Sword-girt and velvet-doubleted, A tall, gaunt youth, with frowzy head, VI. Wide nostrils in the air, dull eyes, Thick lips that simpered, but, ah me! I saw, with most forlorn surprise, He was the Thirteenth Century, I but the Nineteenth: then despair Curdled beneath my curling hair. VII. O, Love and Fate! How could she choose My rounded outlines, broader brain, And my resuscitated Muse? Some tears she shed, but whether pain Or joy in him unlocked their source, I could not fathom which, of course. VIII. But I from missals, quaintly bound, With either and with clavichord Will sing her songs of sovran sound: Belike her pity will afford Such faint return as suits a saint So sweetly done in verse and paint. ――――:o:―――― THE LEAF. Those who have read Rossetti’s lines, commencing “Torn from your parent bough, Poor leaf, all withered now, Where go you?” will remember that he gives them as translated from Leopardi. It is, however, rather curious that Rossetti does not seem to have noticed that Leopardi headed his little poem “Imitazione” thus distinctly disclaiming the authorship. The following is Leopardi’s version:――