"Till the stream of years encrust her
With a numbing mail of stone,
Till her laugh lose half its lustre,
And her truth forswear its tone,
And she see God's might and mercy darkly through a glass alone!
XV.
"While our childhood fair and sacred.
Sapless doctrines doth rehearse,
And the milk of falsehoods acrid,
Burns our babe-lips like a curse,
Cling we must to godless prophets, as the suckling to the nurse.
XVI.
"As the seed time, so the reaping,
Shame on us who overreach,
While our eyes yet smart with weeping,
Hearts so all our own to teach,
Better they and we lay sleeping where the darkness hath no speech!"
[Footnote 1: Those unacquainted with the forms of the old decorated Venetian glass will hardly understand the phrase in the text. Those who know them will feel the accuracy of the picture.]
[Footnote 2: "Non toccare che brucia," Tuscan proverb.]
It is impossible for any but those who know—not Florence, but—rural Tuscany well, to appreciate the really wonderful accuracy and picturesque perfection of the above scene from a Tuscan afternoon. But I think many others will feel the lines to be good. In the concluding stanzas, in which the writer draws her moral, there are weak lines. But in the first eleven, which paint her picture, there is not one. Every touch tells, and tells with admirable truth and vividness of presentation. In one copy of the lines which I have, the name is changed from Bice to "Flavia," and this, I take it, because of the entire non-applicability of the latter stanzas to the child, whose rearing was in her own hands. But the picture of child and nurse—how life-like none can tell, but I—was the picture of her "baby Beatrice," and the description simply the reproduction of things seen.
I think I may venture to print also the following lines. They are, in my opinion, far from being equal in merit to the little poem printed above, but they are pretty, and I think sufficiently good to do no discredit to her memory. Like the preceding, they have no title.