For me who stand in Italy to-day Where worthier poets stood and sang before, I kiss their footsteps yet their words gainsay. I can but muse in hope upon this shore Of golden Arno as it shoots away Through Florence' heart beneath her bridges four: Bent bridges, seeming to strain off like bows, And tremble while the arrowy undertide Shoots on and cleaves the marble as it goes, And strikes up palace-walls on either side, And froths the cornice out in glittering rows, With doors and windows quaintly multiplied, And terrace-sweeps, and gazers upon all, By whom if flower or kerchief were thrown out From any lattice there, the same would fall Into the river underneath, no doubt, It runs so close and fast 'twixt wall and wall. How beautiful! the mountains from without In silence listen for the word said next. What word will men say,--here where Giotto planted His campanile like an unperplexed Fine question Heavenward, touching the things granted A noble people who, being greatly vexed In act, in aspiration keep undaunted? What word will God say? Michel's Night and Day And Dawn and Twilight wait in marble scorn[3] Like dogs upon a dunghill, couched on clay From whence the Medicean stamp's outworn, The final putting off of all such sway By all such hands, and freeing of the unborn In Florence and the great world outside Florence. Three hundred years his patient statues wait In that small chapel of the dim Saint Lawrence: Day's eyes are breaking bold and passionate Over his shoulder, and will flash abhorrence On darkness and with level looks meet fate, When once loose from that marble film of theirs; The Night has wild dreams in her sleep, the Dawn Is haggard as the sleepless, Twilight wears A sort of horror; as the veil withdrawn 'Twixt the artist's soul and works had left them heirs Of speechless thoughts which would not quail nor fawn, Of angers and contempts, of hope and love: For not without a meaning did he place The princely Urbino on the seat above With everlasting shadow on his face, While the slow dawns and twilights disapprove The ashes of his long-extinguished race Which never more shall clog the feet of men. I do believe, divinest Angelo, That winter-hour in Via Larga, when They bade thee build a statue up in snow[4] And straight that marvel of thine art again Dissolved beneath the sun's Italian glow, Thine eyes, dilated with the plastic passion, Thawing too in drops of wounded manhood, since, To mock alike thine art and indignation, Laughed at the palace-window the new prince,-- ("Aha! this genius needs for exaltation, When all's said and however the proud may wince, A little marble from our princely mines!") I do believe that hour thou laughedst too For the whole sad world and for thy Florentines, After those few tears, which were only few!