Griselda: a society novel in rhymed verse. Blunt Wilfrid Scawen

a delicious land, strange, barren, fair,

      An old-world wilderness of greys and browns,

      Rocks, olive-gardens, grim dismantled towns,

      Deep-streeted, desolate, yet dear to see,

      Smelling of oil and of the Papacy.

      Griselda first gave reins to her romance

      In this forgotten corner of old France,

      Feeding her soul on that ethereal food,

      The manna of days spent in solitude.

      Lord L. was silent. She, as far away

      Saw other worlds which were not of to-day,

      With cardinals, popes, Petrarch and the Muse.

      She stopped to weep with Laura at Vaucluse,

      Where waiting in the Mistral poor Lord L.,

      Who did not weep, sat, slept and caught a chill;

      This sent them southwards on through Christendom,

      To Genoa, Florence, and at last to Rome,

      Where they remained the winter.

      Change had wrought

      A cure already in Griselda's thought,

      Or half a cure. The world in truth is wide,

      If we but pace it out from side to side,

      And our worst miseries thus the smaller come.

      Griselda was ashamed to grieve in Rome,

      Among the buried griefs of centuries,

      Her own sweet soul's too pitiful disease.

      She found amid that dust of human hopes

      An incantation for all horoscopes,

      A better patience in that wreck of Time:

      Her secret woes seemed chastened and sublime

      There in the amphitheatre of woe.

      She suffered with the martyrs. These would know,

      Who offered their chaste lives and virgin blood,

      How mortal frailty best might be subdued.

      She saw the incense of her sorrow rise

      With theirs as an accepted sacrifice

      Before the face of the Eternal God

      Of that Eternal City, and she trod

      The very stones which seemed their griefs to sound

      Beneath her steps, as consecrated ground.

      In face of such a suffering hers must be

      A drop, a tear in the unbounded sea

      Which girds our lives. Rome was the home of grief,

      Where all might bring their pain and find relief,

      The temple of all sorrows: surely yet,

      Sorrow's self here seemed swallowed up in it.

      'Twas thus she comforted her soul. And then,

      She had found a friend, a phœnix among men,

      Which made it easier to compound with life,

      Easier to be a woman and a wife.

      This was Prince Belgirate. He of all

      The noble band to whose high fortune fall

      The name and title proudest upon earth

      While pride shall live by privilege of birth,

      The name of Roman, shone conspicuous

      The head and front of his illustrious house,

      Which had produced two pontiffs and a saint

      Before the world had heard of Charles le Quint;

      A most accomplished nobleman in truth,

      And wise beyond the manner of his youth,

      With wit and art and learning, and that sense

      Of policy which still is most intense

      Among the fertile brains of Italy,

      A craft inherited from days gone by.

      As scholar he was known the pupil apt

      Of Mezzofanti, in whose learning lapped

      And prized and tutored as a wondrous child,

      He had sucked the milk of knowledge undefiled

      While yet a boy, and brilliantly anon

      Had pushed his reputation thus begun

      Through half a score of tongues. In art his place

      Was as chief patron of the rising race,

      Which dreamed new conquests on the glorious womb

      Of ancient beauty laid asleep in Rome.

      The glories of the past he fain would see

      Wrought to new life in this new century,

      By that continuous instinct of her sons,

      Which had survived Goths, Vandals, Lombards, Huns,

      To burst upon a wondering world again

      With full effulgence in the Julian reign.

      In politics, though prudently withdrawn

      From the public service, which he held in scorn,

      As being unworthy the deliberate zeal

      Of one with head to think or heart to feel;

      And being neither priest, nor soldier, nor

      Versed in the practice of Canonic lore,

      He made his counsels felt and privately

      Lent his best influence to "the Powers that be," —

      Counsels the better valued that he stood

      Alone among the youth of stirring blood,

      And bowed not to that Baal his proud knee,

      The national false goddess, Italy.

      He was too stubborn in his Roman pride

      To trick out this young strumpet as a bride,

      And held in classic scorn who would become

      Less than a Roman citizen in Rome.

      A man of heart besides and that light wit

      Which leavens all, even pedantry's conceit.

      None better knew than he the art to shew

      A little less in talk than all he knew.

      His manner too, and voice, and countenance,

      Imposed on all, and these he knew to enhance

      By certain freedoms and simplicities

      Of language, which set all his world at ease.

      A very peer and prince and paragon,

      Griselda thought, Rome's latest, worthiest son,

      An intellectual phœnix.

      On her night

      A sudden dawn had broke, portentous, bright.

      Her soul had found its fellow. From the day