y a gift God grants me now and then,
In the mild decline of those suns like moons.
Who walked in Florence, besides her men.

This, then, is a poem of many moods, beginning with Giotto's Tower; then
wondering why Giotto did not tell the poet who loved him so much that
one of his pictures was lying hidden in a shop where some one else
picked it up; then, thinking of all Giotto's followers, whose ghosts he
imagines are wandering through Florence, sorrowing for the decay of
their pictures.

"But at least they have escaped, and have their holiday in heaven, and
do not care one straw for our praise or blame. They did their work, they
and the great masters. We call them old Masters, but they were new in
their time; their old Masters were the Greeks. They broke away from the
Greeks and revolutionised art into a new life. In our turn we must break
away from them."

And now glides in the theory. "When Greek art reached its perfection,
the limbs which infer the soul, and enough of the soul to inform the
limbs, were faultlessly represented. Men said the best had been done,
and aspiration and growth in art ceased. Content with what had been
done, men imitated, but did not create. But man cannot remain without
change in a past perfection; for then he remains in a kind of death.
Even with failure, with faulty work, he desires to make new things, and
in making, to be alive and feel his life. Therefore Giotto and the rest
began to create a fresh aspect of humanity, which, however imperfect in
form, would suggest an infinite perfection. The Greek perfection ties us
down to earth, to a few forms, and the sooner, if it forbid us to go on,
we reject its ideal as the only one, the better for art and for mankind.

'Tis a life-long toil till our lump be leaven--
The better! What's come to perfection perishes.
Things learned on earth, we shall practise in heaven:
Works done least rapidly, Art most cherishes.

"The great Campanile is still unfinished;" so he shapes his thoughts
into his scenery. Shall man be satisfied in art with the crystallised
joy of Apollo, or the petrified grief of Niobe, when there are a million
more expressions of joy and grief to render? In that way felt Giotto and
his crew. "We will paint the whole of man," they cried, "paint his new
hopes and joys and pains, and never pause, because we shall never quite
succeed. We will paint the soul in all its infinite variety--bring the
invisible