And so all’s saved for me, and for the church
A pretty picture gained. Go, six months hence!
Your hand, sir, and good bye: no lights, no lights!
The street’s hushed, and I know my own way back,
Don’t fear me! There’s the gray beginning. Zooks!

A Toccata of Galuppi’s

I

Oh Galuppi, Baldassaro, 29this is very sad to find!
I can hardly misconceive you; it would prove me deaf and
blind;
But altho’ I take your meaning, ’t is with such a heavy mind!

II

Here you come with your old music, and here’s all the good it
brings.
What, they lived once thus at Venice where the merchants
were the kings,
Where St. Mark’s is, where the Doges used to wed the sea with
rings?

III

Ay, because the sea’s the street there; and ’t is arched by ...
what you call
... Shylock’s bridge with houses on it, where they kept the
carnival:
I was never out of England—it’s as if I saw it all.

IV

Did young people take their pleasure when the sea was warm in May?
Balls and masks begun at midnight, burning ever to mid-day,
When they made up fresh adventures for the morrow, do you
say?

V

Was a lady such a lady, cheeks so round and lips so red,—
On her neck the small face buoyant, like a bell-flower on its
bed,
O’er the breast’s superb abundance where a man might base
his head?

VI

Well, and it was graceful of them: they’d break talk off and
afford
—She, to bite her mask’s black velvet—he, to finger on his
sword,
While you sat and played Toccatas, stately at the clavichord?

VII

What? Those lesser thirds so plaintive, sixths diminished,
sigh on sigh,
Told them something? Those suspensions, those solutions—
“Must we die?”
Those commiserating sevenths—“Life might last! we can but
try!”

VIII

“Were you happy?”—“Yes. ”—“And are you still as happy?”—
“Yes. And you?”
—“Then, more kisses!”—“Did I stop them, when a million
seemed so few?”
Hark, the dominants persistence till it must be answered to!

IX

So, an octave struck the answer. Oh, they praised you, I dare
say!
“Brave Galuppi! that was music! good alike at grave and gay!
I can always leave off talking when I hear a master play!”

x

Then they left you for their pleasure: till in due time, one by
one,
Some with lives that came to nothing, some with deeds as
well undone,
Death stepped tacitly and took them where they never see the
sun.

XI

But when I sit down to reason, think to take my stand nor
swerve,
While I triumph o‘er a secret wrung from natures close
reserve,
In you come with your cold music till I creep thro’ every
nerve.

XII

Yes, you, like a ghostly cricket, creaking where a house was
burned:
“Dust and ashes, dead and done with, Venice spent what
Venice earned.
The soul, doubtless, is immortal—where a soul can be discerned
.

XIII

“Yours for instance: you know physics, something of geology,
Mathematics are your pastime; souls shall rise in their degree;
Butterflies may dread extinction,—you’ll not die, it can not
be!

XIV

“As for Venice and her people, merely born to bloom and
drop,
Here on earth they bore their fruitage, mirth and folly were
the crop:
What of soul was left, I wonder, when the kissing had to stop?

xv

“Dust and ashes!” So you creak it, and I want the heart to
scold.
Dear dead women, with such hair, too—what’s become of all
the gold
Used to hang and brush their bosoms? I feel chilly and grown
old.

An Epistle Containing the Strange Medical Experience of Karshish, the Arab Physician

Karshish, the picker-up of learning’s crumbs,
The not-incurious in God’s handiwork
(This man’s-flesh he hath admirably made,
Blown like a bubble, kneaded like a paste,
To coop up and keep down on earth a space
That puff of vapour from his mouth, man’s soul)
—To Abib, all-sagacious in our art,
Breeder in me of what poor skill I boast,
Like me inquisitive how pricks and cracks
Befall the flesh thro’ too much stress and strain,
Whereby the wily vapour fain would slip
Back and rejoin its source before the term,—
And aptest in contrivance (under God)
To baffle it by deftly stopping such:—
The vagrant Scholar to his Sage at home
Sends greeting (health and knowledge, fame with peace)
Three samples of true snake-stone—rarer still,
One of the other sort, the melon-shaped,
(But fitter, pounded fine, for charms than drugs)
And writeth now the twenty-second time.

My journeyings were brought to Jericho:
Thus I resume. Who studious in our art
Shall count a little labour unrepaid?
I have shed sweat enough, left flesh and bone
On many a flinty furlong of this land.
Also, the country-side is all on fire
With rumours of a marching hitherward:
Some say Vespasian cometh, some, his son.
A black lynx snarled and pricked a tufted ear:
Lust of my blood inflamed his yellow balls:
I cried and threw my staff and he was gone.
Twice have the robbers stripped and beaten me,
And once a town declared me for a spy;
But at the end, I reach Jerusalem,
Since this poor covert where I pass the night,
This Bethany, lies scarce the distance thence
A man with plague-sores at the third degree
Runs till he drops down dead. Thou laughest here!
‘Sooth, it elates me, thus reposed and safe,
To void the stuffing of my travel-scrip
And share with thee whatever Jewry yields.
A viscid choler is observable
In tertians,30 I was nearly bold to say;
And falling-sickness31 hath a happier cure
Than our school wots of: there’s a spider here
Weaves no web, watches on the ledge of tombs,
Sprinkled with mottles on an ash-gray back;
Take five and drop them . . . but who knows his mind,
The Syrian run-a-gate I trust this to?
His service payeth me a sublimate
Blown up his nose to help the ailing eye.
Best wait: I reach Jerusalem at morn,
There set in order my experiences,
Gather what most deserves, and give thee all—
Or I might add, Judæa’s gum-tragacanth
Scales off in purer flakes, shines clearer-grained,
Cracks ’twixt the pestle and the porphyry,
In fine exceeds our produce. Scalp-disease
Confounds me, crossing so with leprosy:
Thou hadst admired one sort I gained at Zoar—
But zeal outruns discretion. Here I end.

Yet stay! my Syrian blinketh gratefully,
Protesteth his devotion is my price—
Suppose I write what harms not, tho’ he steal?
I half resolve to tell thee, yet I blush,
What set me off a-writing first of all.
An itch I had, a sting to write, a tang!
For, be it this town’s barrenness—or else
The Man had something in the look of him—
His case has struck me far more than ’t is worth.
So, pardon if—(test presently I lose,
In the great press of novelty at hand,
The care and pains this somehow stole from me)
I bid thee take the thing while fresh in mind,
Almost in sight—for, wilt thou have the truth?
The very man is gone from me but now,
Whose ailment is the subject of discourse.
Thus then, and let thy better wit help all!

’T is but a case of mania: subinduced
By epilepsy, at the turning-point
Of trance prolonged unduly some three days
When, by the exhibition32 of some drug
Or spell, exorcisation, stroke of art
Unknown to me and which ’t were well to know,
The evil thing, out-breaking all at once,
Left the man whole and sound of body indeed,—
But, flinging (so to speak) life’s gates too wide,
Making a clear house of it too suddenly,
The first conceit that entered might inscribe
Whatever it was minded on the wall
So plainly at that vantage, as it were,
(First come, first served) that nothing subsequent
Attaineth to erase those fancy-scrawls
The just-returned and new-established soul
Hath gotten now so thoroughly by heart
That henceforth she will read or these or none.
And first—the man’s own firm conviction rests
That he was dead (in fact they buried him)
—That he was dead and then restored to life
By a Nazarene physician of his tribe:
—’Sayeth, the same bade “Rise,” and he did rise.
“Such cases are diurnal,” thou wilt cry.
Not so this figment!—not, that such a fume,
Instead of giving way to time and health,
Should eat itself into the life of life,
As saffron tingeth flesh, blood, bones, and all!
For see, how he takes up the after-life.
The man—it is one Lazarus a Jew,
Sanguine, proportioned, fifty years of age,
The body’s habit wholly laudable,
As much, indeed, beyond the common health
As he were made and put aside to show.