"Welcome is sleep, more welcome sleep of stone
Whilst crime and shame continue in the land;
My happy fortune not to see or hear;
Waken me not;—in mercy whisper low."[32]
The artist's verse may be taken as a keynote to the solemn tragedy of the work. In fact, the monuments are not really to Lorenzo and Giuliano, but to Florence, to "the great city which had struggled and erred so long, which had gone astray and repented, and suffered and erred again, but always mightily, with full tide of life in her veins and consciousness in her heart, until now the time had come when she was dead and past, chained down by icy oppression in a living grave."[34]
[32] Both translations are from Horners' Walks in Florence. Symonds has also translated the verses, but less literally.
[33] Swinburne in his lines, "In San Lorenzo," answers these lines, "Is thine hour come to waken, slumbering Night?"
[34] This and the preceding quotations are from Mrs. Oliphant's Makers of Florence.
XV
CENTRAL FIGURES IN THE LAST JUDGMENT
There are in the Bible certain references to a great day when the Son of Man shall be seen "coming in the clouds with great power and glory." "And he shall send his angels with a great sound of a trumpet, and they shall gather together his elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other."[35] St. Paul, in a letter which he wrote to the Christians in Corinth, speaks of this as a "mystery," and says:[36] "We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed."