where Anselm[114] stands;
Peach-blossom marble all.
Swift as a weaver's shuttle fleet our years:
Man goeth to the grave, and where is he?
Did I say basalt for my slab, sons? Black--
'Twas ever antique-black[115] I meant! How else
Shall ye contrast my frieze to come beneath?
The bas-relief in bronze ye promised me,
Those Pans and Nymphs ye wot of, and perchance
Some tripod, thyrsus, with a vase or so,
The Saviour at his sermon on the mount,
St. Praxed in a glory, and one Pan,
And Moses with the tables ... but I know
Ye mark me not! What do they whisper thee,
Child of my bowels, Anselm? Ah, ye hope
To revel down my villas while I gasp,
Bricked o'er with beggar's mouldy travertine,
Which Gandolf from his tomb-top chuckles at!
Nay, boys, ye love me--all of jasper, then!
There's plenty jasper somewhere in the world--
And have I not St. Praxed's ear to pray
Horses for ye, and brown Greek manuscripts.
That's if ye carve my epitaph aright,
Choice Latin, picked phrase, Tully's every word,
No gaudy ware like Gandolf's second line--
Tully, my masters? Ulpian serves _his_ need."

Sec. 34. I know no other piece of modern English, prose or poetry, in which
there is so much told, as in these lines, of the Renaissance
spirit,--its worldliness, inconsistency, pride, hypocrisy, ignorance of
itself, love of art, of luxury, and of good Latin. It is nearly all that
I said of the central Renaissance in thirty pages of the "Stones of
Venice" put into as many lines, Browning's being also the antecedent
work. The worst of it is that this kind of concentrated writing needs so
much _solution_ before the reader can fairly get the good of it, that
people's patience fails them, and they give the thing up as insoluble;
though, truly, it ought to be to the current of common thought like
Saladin's talisman, dipped in clear water, not soluble altogether, but
making the element medicinal.

Sec. 35. It is interesting, by the way, with respect to this love of
stones in the Italian mind, to consider the difference necessitated in
the English temper merely by the general domestic use of wood instead of
marble. In that old Shakesperian England, men must have rendered a
grateful homage to their oak forests, in the sense of all that they owed
to their goodly timbers in the wainscot and furniture of the rooms they
loved best, when the blue of the frosty midnight was contrasted, in the
dark diamonds of t