"O crowned by God with love and flame!
O crowned by Christ the Holy One!
O listen ere the scorching sun
Show to the world my sin and shame."
Nor can it be wondered at that the devotion to the Madonna which forms so essential a feature of the Catholic Faith should impress his young and ardent spirit as it does nearly every artist to whom the poetic beauty of this side of It naturally appeals.
The Pope's captivity moved him again and again to express his indignation in verse, and from his poem, "Easter Day" we can gather how deeply he was impressed both by the stately ceremonial at St Peter's and by the sight of the despoiled Pontiff. At this time also he seems to have been more or less yearning after a more spiritual mode of life than he has been leading, at least so one gathers from poems like "E Tenebris" in which he tells us that—
"The wine of life is spilt upon the sand,
My heart is as some famine-murdered land
Whence all good things have perished utterly
And well I know my soul in Hell must be,
If I this night before God's throne should stand."
That he had visions of a possible time when a complete change should be worked in his spiritual condition seems clear from the concluding lines of "Rome Unvisited."
"Before yon field of trembling gold
Is garnered into dusty sheaves
Or ere the autumn's scarlet leaves
Flutter as birds adown the wold,
I may have run the glorious race,
And caught the torch while yet aflame,
And called upon the Holy name
Of Him who now doth hide His face."
Apart from the light these poems throw upon his mental and spiritual attitude at that period, they are extremely interesting as revealing the literary influences governing him at the time. I have already referred to the resemblance between his sonnets and the more finished ones of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and this point cannot better be illustrated than by placing the work of the two men in juxtaposition.
If we take, for instance, Rossetti's "Lady of the Rocks."
"Mother, is this the darkness of the end,
The Shadow of Death? and is that outer sea
Infinite imminent Eternity?
And does the death-pang by man's seed sustained
In Time's each instant cause thy face to bend
Its silent prayer upon the Son, while He
Blesses the dead with His hand silently
To His long day which hours no more offend?
Mother of grace, the pass is difficult,
Keen as these rocks, and the bewildered souls
Throng it like echoes, blindly shuddering through.
Thy name, O Lord, each spirit's voice extols,
Whose peace abides in the dark avenue
Amid the bitterness of things occult."
and compare it with "E Tenebris." We are at once struck with the same mode of expression, the same train of thought and the same deep note of pain in the two poems.