"
"Let Robbia's craft so apt and strange
Arrest the remains of young and fair,
And rivet them while the seasons range."
"Make me a face on the window there,
Waiting as ever, mute the while,
My love to pass below in the square!"
"And let me think that it may beguile
Dreary days which the dead must spend
Down in their darkness under the aisle,"
"To say, 'What matters it at the end?
I did no more while my heart was warm
Than does that image, my pale-faced friend.'"
"Where is the use of the lip's red charm,
The heaven of hair, the pride of the brow,
And the blood that blues the inside arm--"
"Unless we turn, as the soul knows how,
The earthly gift to an end divine?
A lady of clay is as good, I trow."
But long ere Robbia's cornice, fine,
With flowers and fruits which leaves enlace,
Was set where now is the empty shrine--
(And, leaning out of a bright blue space,
As a ghost might lean from a chink of sky,
The passionate pale lady's face--
Eying ever, with earnest eye
And quick-turned neck at its breathless stretch,
Some one who ever is passing by--)
The Duke had sighed like the simplest wretch
In Florence, "Youth--my dream escapes!
Will its record stay?" And he bade them fetch
Some subtle moulder of brazen shapes--
"Can the soul, the will, die out of a man
Ere his body find the grave that gapes?"
"John of Douay shall effect my plan,
Set me on horseback here aloft,
Alive, as the crafty sculptor can,"
"In the very square I have crossed so oft:
That men may admire, when future suns
Shall touch the eyes to a purpose soft,"
"While the mouth and the brow stay brave in bronze--
Admire and say, 'When he was alive
How he would take his pleasure once!'"
"And it shall go hard but I contrive
To listen the while, and laugh in my tomb
At idleness which aspires to strive.
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