Vanity, saith the preacher, vanity!

     Draw round my bed: is Anselm keeping back?

     Nephews—sons mine . . . ah God, I know not!  Well—

     She, men would have to be your mother once,

     Old Gandolf envied me, so fair she was!

     What's done is done, and she is dead beside,

     Dead long ago, and I am Bishop since,

     And as she died so must we die ourselves,

     And thence ye may perceive the world's a dream.

     Life, how and what is it?  As here I lie                   10

     In this state-chamber, dying by degrees,

     Hours and long hours in the dead night, I ask

     "Do I live, am I dead?"  Peace, peace seems all.

     Saint Praxed's ever was the church for peace;

     And so, about this tomb of mine.  I fought

     With tooth and nail to save my niche, ye know:

     —Old Gandolf cozened me, despite my care;

     Shrewd was that snatch from out the corner South

     He graced his carrion with.  God curse the same!

     Yet still my niche is not so cramped but thence            20

     One sees the pulpit o' the epistle-side,

     And somewhat of the choir, those silent seats,

     And up into the aery dome where live

     The angels, and a sunbeam's sure to lurk;

     And I shall fill my slab of basalt there,

     And 'neath my tabernacle take my rest,

     With those nine columns round me, two and two,

     The odd one at my feet where Anselm stands:

     Peach-blossom marble all, the rare, the ripe

     As fresh-poured red wine of a mighty pulse.                30

     —Old Gandolf with his paltry onion-stone,

     Put me where I may look at him!  True peach,

     Rosy and flawless: how I earned the prize!

     Draw close: that conflagration of my church

     —What then?  So much was saved if aught were missed!

     My sons, ye would not be my death?  Go dig

     The white-grape vineyard where the oil-press stood,

     Drop water gently till the surface sink,

     And if ye find . . . Ah God, I know not, I! . . .

     Bedded in store of rotten fig-leaves soft,                 40

     And corded up in a tight olive-frail,

     Some lump, ah God, of [lapis lazuli],

     Big as a Jew's head cut off at the nape,

     Blue as a vein o'er the Madonna's breast . . .

     Sons, all have I bequeathed you, villas, all,

     That brave Frascati villa with its bath,

     So, let the blue lump poise between my knees,

     Like God the Father's globe on both his hands

     Ye worship in the Jesu Church so gay,

     For Gandolf shall not choose but see and burst!            50

     Swift as a weaver's shuttle fleet our years:

     Man goeth to the grave, and where is he?

     Did I say basalt for my slab, sons?  Black—

     'T  was ever antique-black I meant!  How else

     Shall ye contrast my frieze to come beneath?

     The bas-relief in bronze ye promised me,

     Those Pans and Nymphs ye wot of, and perchance

     Some tripod, thyrsus, with a vase or so,

     The Saviour at his sermon on the mount,

     Saint Praxed in a glory, and one Pan                       60

     Ready to twitch the Nymph's last garment off,

     And Moses with the tables . . . but I know

     Ye mark me not!  What do they whisper thee,

     Child of my bowels, Anselm?  Ah, ye hope

     To revel down my  villas while I gasp

     Bricked o'er with beggar's mouldy travertine

     Which Gandolf from his tomb-top chuckles at!

     Nay, boys, ye love me—all of jasper, then!

     'T is jasper ye stand pledged to, lest I grieve.

     My bath must needs be left behind, alas!                   70

     One block, pure green as a pistachio-nut,

     There's plenty jasper somewhere in the world—

     And have I not Saint Praxed's ear to pray

     Horses for ye, and brown Greek manuscripts,

     And mistresses with great smooth marbly limbs?

     —That's if ye carve my epitaph aright,

     Choice Latin, picked phrase, Tully's every word,

     No gaudy ware like Gandolf's second line—

     Tully, my masters?  Ulpian serves his need!

     And then how I shall lie through centuries,                80

     And hear the blessed mutter of the mass,

     And see God made and eaten all day long,

     And feel the steady candle-flame, and taste

     Good strong thick stupefying incense-smoke!

     For as I lie here, hours of the dead night,

     Dying in state and by such slow degrees,

     I fold my arms as if they clasped a crook,

     And stretch my feet forth straight as stone can point,

     And let the bedclothes, for a mortcloth, drop

     Into great laps and folds of sculptor's-work:              90

     And as yon tapers dwindle, and strange thoughts

     Grow, with a certain humming in my ears,

     About the life before I lived this life,

     And this life too, popes, cardinals and priests,

     Saint Praxed at his sermon on the mount,

     Your tall pale mother with her talking eyes,

     And new-found agate urns as fresh as day,

     And marble's language, Latin pure, discreet,

     —Aha, ELUCESCEBAT quoth our friend?

     No Tully, said I, Ulpian at the best!                     100

     Evil and brief hath been my pilgrimage.

     All lapis, all, sons! Else I give the Pope

     My villas!  Will ye ever eat my heart?

     Ever your eyes were as a lizard's quick,

     They glitter like your mother's for my soul,

     Or ye would heighten my impoverished frieze,

     Piece out its starved design, and fill my vase

     With grapes, and add a vizor and a Term,

     And to the tripod ye would tie a lynx

     That in his struggle throws the thyrsus down,             110

     To comfort me on my entablature

     Whereon I am to lie till I must ask

     "Do I live, am I dead?"  There, leave me, there!

     For ye have stabbed me with ingratitude

     To death—ye wish it—God, ye wish it! Stone—

     Gritstone, a-crumble!  Clammy squares which sweat

     As if the corpse they keep were oozing through—

     And no more lapis to delight the world!

     Well go!  I bless ye.  Fewer tapers there,

     But in a row: and, going, turn your backs                 120

     —Ay, like departing altar-ministrants,

     And leave me in my  church, the church for peace,

     That I may  watch at leisure if he leers—

     Old Gandolf, at me, from his onion-stone,

     As still he envied me, so fair she was!

     NOTES

     "The Bishop orders his Tomb" This half-delirious pleading of the

     dying prelate for a tomb which shall gratify his luxurious artistic

     tastes and personal rivalries, presents dramatically not merely the

     special scene of the worldly old bishop's petulant struggle against

     his failing power, and his collapse, finally, beneath the will of

     his so-called nephews, it also illustrates a characteristic gross

     form of the Renaissance spirit encumbered with Pagan survivals,

     fleshly appetites, and selfish monopolizings which hampered its

     development.— "It is nearly all that I said of the Central

     Renaissance—its worldliness, inconsistency, pride, hypocrisy,

     ignorance of itself, love of art, of luxury, and of good Latin—in

     thirty pages of the 'Stones of Venice,' put into as many lines,

     Browning's being also the antecedent work" (Ruskin).  The Church of

     St.Praxed is notable for the beauty of its stone-work and mosaics,

     one of its chapels being so extraordinarily rich that it was called

     [Orto del Paradiso], or the Garden of Paradise; and so, although the

     bishop and his tomb there are imaginary, it supplies an appropriate

     setting for the poetic scene.

     1.  Vanity, saith the preacher: Ecclesiastes 1.2.

     21.  Epistle-side: the right-hand side facing the altar, where the

     epistle is read by the priest acting as celebrant, the gospel being

     read from the other side by the priest acting as assistant.

     25.  Basalt: trap-rock, leaden or black in color.

     31.  Onion stone: for the Italian [cipollino], a kind of

     greenish-white marble splitting into coats like an onion, [cipolla];

     hence so called.

     41.  Olive-frail: a basket made of rushes, used for packing olives.

     42. Lapis lazuli: a bright blue stone.

     46. Frascati: near Rome, on the Alban hills.

     48. God the Father's globe: in the group of the Trinity adorning the

     altar of Saint Ignatius at the church of Il Gesu in Rome.

     51. Weaver's shuttle: Job 7.6.

     54. Antique-black: Nero antico.  Browning gives the English

     equivalent for the name of this stone.

     58. Tripod: the seat with three feet on which the priestess of

     Apollo sat to prophesy, an emblem of the Delphic oracle.

     Thyrsus: the ivy-coiled staffer spear stuck in a pine-cone, symbol

     of Bacchic orgy.  These, with the other Pagan tokens and pictures,

     mingle oddly but significantly with the references to the Saviour,

     Saint Praxed, and Moses.  See also line 92, where Saint Praxed is

     confused with the Saviour, in the mind of the dying priest.  Saint

     Praxed, the virgin daughter of a Roman Senator and friend of Saint

     Paul, in whose honor the Bishop's Church is named, is again brought

     forward in lines 73-75 in a queer capacity which pointedly

     illustrates the speaker and his time.

     66. Travertine: see note "Pictor Ignotus," 67.

     68. jasper: a dark green stone with blood-red spots, susceptible of

     high polish.

     77. Tully's: Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-46 B. C.).

     79. Ulpian: a Roman jurist (170-228 A. D.), belonging to the

     degenerate age of Roman literature.

     99. [Elucescebat]: he was illustrious; formed from [elucesco], an

     inceptive verb from [eluceo]: in post classic Latin.

     102. Else I give the Pope my villas: perhaps a threat founded on the

     custom of Julius II and other popes, according to Burckhardt, of

     enlarging their power "by making themselves heirs of the cardinals

     and clergy . . .  Hence the splendor of tile tombs of the prelates

     . . . a part of the plunder being in this way saved from the hands

     of the Pope."

     108. A vizor and a Term: a mask, and a bust springing from a square

     pillar, representing the Roman god Terminus, who presided over

     boundaries.