ay when noontide wakes anew
The buttercups, the little children's dower
--Far brighter than this gaudy melon-flower!

After this it seems hardly possible that Browning, himself speaks in "De
Gustibus," yet long and happy living away from England doubtless dimmed
his sense of the beauty of English landscape. "De Gustibus" was
published ten years later than "Home-Thoughts from Abroad," when Italy
and he had indeed become "lovers old." A deeper reason than mere delight
in its scenery is also reflected in the poem; the sympathy shared with
Mrs. Browning, for the cause of Italian independence.

"DE GUSTIBUS----"

I

Your ghost will walk, you lover of trees,
(If our loves remain)
In an English lane,
By a cornfield-side a-flutter with poppies.
Hark, those two in the hazel coppice--
A boy and a girl, if the good fates please,
Making love, say,--
The happier they!
Draw yourself up from the light of the moon,
And let them pass, as they will too soon,
With the bean-flower's boon,
And the blackbird's tune,
And May, and June!

II

What I love best in all the world
Is a castle, precipice-encurled,
In a gash of the wind-grieved Apennine.
Or look for me, old fellow of mine,
(If I get my head from out the mouth
O' the grave, and loose my spirit's bands,
And come again to the land of lands)--
In a sea-side house to the farther South,
Where the baked cicala dies of drouth,
And one sharp tree--'tis a cypress--stands,
By the many hundred years red-rusted,
Rough iron-spiked, ripe fruit-o'ercrusted,
My sentinel to guard the sands
To the water's edge. For, what expands
Before the house, but the great opaque
Blue breadth of sea without a break?
While, in the house, for ever crumbles
Some fragment of the frescoed walls,
From blisters where a scorpion sprawls.
A girl bare-footed brings, and tumbles
Down on the pavement, green-flesh melons,
And says there's news to-day--the king
Was shot at, touched in the liver-wing,
Goes with his Bourbon arm in a sling:
--She hopes they have not caught the felons.
Italy, my Italy!
Queen Mary's saying serves for me--
(When fortune's malice
Lost her--Calais)--
Open my heart and you will see
Graved inside of it, "Italy."
Such lovers old a