’Tis not the subject!— More than this

My eye had loved to greet

Some quiet scene of past’ral bliss,

The Muses’ calm retreat:

Or watch-tower, beetling o’er the sea:

Or broken bank, with scathed tree:

Or, yet more mildly sweet,

The matron majesty and grace

Of some Madonna's lovely face.

Such is the beauty whose soft spell

Is dearest to my heart:

On which thought most delights to dwell

In Nature or in Art;

Its gentle, fascinating power

To Sorrow's darker, colder hour

Brief sunshine can impart,

Wakening calm thoughts and feelings high

Which soar beyond mortality.

Yet much the genius would I prize

In nobler form displayed,

Whose sterner, stronger energies

Are deeply here pourtrayed:

Whose power, like Rembrandt’s, has imbued

With solemn grandeur, bold and rude,

And magic light and shade,

This portrait of the olden time,

Dim, sombre, shadowy, and sublime!

Not brightening tint, not mellowing tone,

Thy mastery supply:

A higher charm is round thee thrown

By hoar antiquity;

In thee my musing thought reveres

The memory of revolving years,

Now passed for ever by!

Of them, of thee, how many a thought

With vague conjecture might be fraught.

Thrice fifty years, and more, hast thou

Time's devastations dared,

And still that hand, and arm, and brow,

By age are unimpaired;

While he, whose master-hand first drew,

And gave to each its living hue,

Man's common lot hath shared:

His life a scanty span appears

Compared with thy protracted years.

But who wast thou?— that flask of wine,

The uplifted tambourine,

Should speak a mood of joyaunce thine

Which loved the festive scene:

Yet no glad smile of humour gay

Is seen in sunny light to play

O’er thy stern, fearless mien,—

Projecting from its mass of shade

Laughter to chill, and mirth upbraid.

A bandit, at his lonely feast?

A monk within his cell,

From cloistered solitude released—

Art thou?— or, truth to tell,

Did Spagnoletto here design

To paint himself ? — face, form like thine

Befit the artist well,

If in his works we rightly scan