Long ago the monks from their snug self-devotion were driven, Wistful and fat and slow: looking backward, I fancied them going Out through the sculptured doorway, and down the Ponte de'Frati, Cowled and sandalled and beaded, a plump and pensive procession; And in my day their cells were barracks for Austrian soldiers, Who in their turn have followed the Augustinian Friars. As to the frescos, little remained of work once so perfect. Summer and winter weather of some three cycles had wasted; Plaster had fallen, and left unsightly blotches of ruin; Wanton and stupid neglect had done its worst to the pictures: Yet to the sympathetic and reverent eye was apparent-- Where the careless glance but found, in expanses of plaster, Touches of incoherent color and lines interrupted-- Somewhat still of the life of surpassing splendor and glory Filling the frescos once; and here and there was a figure, Standing apart, and out from the common decay and confusion, Flushed with immortal youth and ineffaceable beauty, Such as that figure of Eve in pathetic expulsion from Eden, Taking--the tourist remembers--the wrath of Heaven al fresco, As is her well-known custom in thousands of acres of canvas. III. I could make out the much-bepainted Biblical subjects, When I had patience enough: The Temptation, of course, and Expulsion; Cain killing Abel, his Brother--the merest fragment of murder; Noah's Debauch--the trunk of the sea-faring patriarch naked, And the garment, borne backward to cover it, fearfully tattered; Abraham offering Isaac--no visible Isaac, and only Abraham's lifted knife held back by the hovering angel; Martyrdom of Saint Stephen--a part of the figure of Stephen; And the Conversion of Paul--the greaves on the leg of a soldier Held across the back of a prostrate horse by the stirrup; But when I looked at the face of that tearful and beauteous figure,-- Eve in the fresco there, and, in Venice of old, Violante, As I must fain believe (the lovely daughter of Palma, Who was her father's Saint Barbara, and was the Bella of Titian),-- Such a meaning and life shone forth from its animate presence As could restore those vague and ineffectual pictures, With their pristine colors, and fill them with light and with movement. Nay, sometimes it could blind me to all the present about me, Till I beheld no more the sausage-legged Austrian soldiers, Where they stood on guard beside one door of the Convent, Nor the sentinel beggars that watched the approach to the other; Neither the bigolanti, the broad-backed Friulan maidens, Drawing the water with clatter and splashing, and laughter and gossip, Out of the carven well in the midst of the court of the Convent-- No, not even the one with the mole on her cheek and the sidelong Look, as she ambled forth with her buckets of bronze at her shoulder,