mming in my ears,
About the life before I lived this life,
And this life too, popes, cardinals, and priests,
Saint Praxed at his sermon on the mount,
Your tall pale mother with her talking eyes,
And new-found agate urns as fresh as day,
And marble's language, Latin pure, discreet,
--Aha, ELUCESCEBAT quoth our friend?
No Tully, said I, Ulpian at the best! {100}
Evil and brief hath been my pilgrimage.
All lapis, all, sons! Else I give the Pope
My villas! Will ye ever eat my heart?
Ever your eyes were as a lizard's quick,
They glitter like your mother's for my soul,
Or ye would heighten my impoverished frieze,
Piece out its starved design, and fill my vase
With grapes, and add a visor and a Term,
And to the tripod ye would tie a lynx
That in his struggle throws the thyrsus down, {110}
To comfort me on my entablature
Whereon I am to lie till I must ask
"Do I live, am I dead?" There, leave me, there!
For ye have stabbed me with ingratitude
To death: ye wish it--God, ye wish it! Stone--
Gritstone, a-crumble! Clammy squares which sweat
As if the corpse they keep were oozing through--
And no more lapis to delight the world!
Well go! I bless ye. Fewer tapers there,
But in a row: and, going, turn your backs {120}
--Ay, like departing altar-ministrants,
And leave me in my church, the church for peace,
That I may watch at leisure if he leers--
Old Gandolf, at me, from his onion-stone,
As still he envied me, so fair she was!

--
1. Vanity, saith the preacher, vanity!: "The Bishop on his death-bed
has reached Solomon's conclusion that `all is vanity'. So he proceeds
to specify his particular vanity in the choice of a tombstone."
--N. Brit. Rev. 34, p. 367. "In `The Palace of Art', Mr. Tennyson
has shown the despair and isolation of a soul surrounded by
all luxuries of beauty, and living in and for them; but in the end
the soul is redeemed and converted to the simple humanities of earth.
Mr. Browning has shown that such a sense of isolation and such despair
are by no means inevitable; there is a death in life which consists in
tranquil satisfaction, a calm pride in the soul's dwelling among
the world's gathered treasures of stateliness and beauty. . . .
So the unbelieving and worldly spirit of the dying Bishop, who orders
his tom