and sensuous, but of man's own heart and mind. The soul of every true artist has sought, through the medium of art, to convey its intuition and aspiration. The higher principles and aims of art are spiritual ideas. And art, through these aims and ideas, is as true an interpreter of the passion and thought of man as philosophy or religion.

Coming to the poems, we shall find the poet's interest in art proved by their number and variety as well as by their value. As a poet interpreting art, he has dealt with painting and sculpture, with poetry and music, and with power and insight in each case.

Of these art-poems we take first a group dealing with Italian painting and painters-studies of artists and types of art, or of art in a more critical way. We begin with "Old Pictures in Florence" (iii. 131). The poet is the speaker, and it gives us part of his mind, but freely and in relation to the circumstances and thoughts of the time, and its style is meant to give its lyric-dramatic quality.

On a March morning, with the spring begun, the poet is gazing through the clear air on Florence. He sees the fair city, but most of all the Campanile of Giotto. It startles him by bringing up Giotto, who has lately seemed to trick over him a picture of his own, that the poet has been hunting for and missed -"a precious little thing that Buonarotti eyed like a lover." And Giotto brings up the early masters and the spring-birth of Italian art. The poet has been studying those masters for months, and the dead

painters have become part of the city's life to him. He has seen them in the churches, standing by their pictures, and felt their pain as they saw those works dropping away. Yet why should they, who are safe in heaven, trouble? Because their work is yet to do. The work of the great masters is done and safe; but the great masters have surely put out these early masters, and taken away their value? They will not think so who know the place and worth of these masters, the value of their impulse and idea.

And what was that impulse and idea? It was they who carried art forward from the point where Greek art had stopped, and indeed failed. Greek art had given the life and meaning of man, so far as the beauty and power of perfect forms animated by clear and active minds could give man. Men saw that serene perfection of Olympian gods, but knew they could never reach it. It put before them a godlike humanity -admirable grace, dignity, strength; but its only lesson was submission to man's limits, not aspiration or effort. Thus soul through body, and bodily perfection, as man's ideal, meant an ideal both limited and unattainable, and brought man's progress to an end. But the end of progress is death in life for man. How, then, was progress to start again with new life for man? The new birth of hope and effort came when, looking inward, man found the ideal of the soul and of a spiritual humanity. It was then seen that the Greek ideal is inadequate as well as impossible. In the soul was felt the power and promise of what is

"eternal." The nature that has this principle and "vision" cannot reach the serene and bounded perfection of antique art and its ideals. But for that very reason it will pass beyond them, and see them abolished. The new ideal requires and promises "eternity." The sense of imperfection and inadequacy that belongs to life now is the result of the greater ideal, and the evidence of the larger attainment. What has come to perfection dies. We cannot find the perfect form, because thought and passion have grown too great for such absolute expression.

It is from this point of view that he regards and values the early masters. Imperfect and crude as they are in so many ways, they went beyond Greek art because they were aware of the spirit, because they first sought to represent man in the light of that, and by that to give the spiritual ideal. They "failed," but they took this great step, and their aim and truth started art on its new and greater course, and are yet to be realized. So he reads the history of art.

And after this flight he feels, as he leans on his villa gate this warm spring morning, as if the great ideal were too much for him. To go on and on and never stop-an evolution of life through an endless series of lives, always progressive-is that the idea that has come into the world as the revelation of the spirit-as the law of man's work and hope? It tires one to think of it, and for the moment he leans to the notion that some time we shall stop and rest. (Instance

again of his sense of the duality, yet unity, of the nature of man.)

With this fancy he ends his "philosophy," and goes back to the early painters, whom he banters for not showing a wiser care for their pictures, by guiding them into the hands of those who know their worthhimself, for instance, who would be pleased with a Gaddi or a Pollajuolo, and does not expect one of the greater names. In his banter he gives a list of these masters, with critical notes of their works, and gets back to Giotto. Then he turns to Florence, and the bell-tower of Giotto, and longs for the days when, in a free Italy, art may revive, and the Campanile be finished-" completing Florence as Florence Italy."

Then come two poems dealing with artists, dramatic studies, and also studies of artistic types and styles, one in the second, and the other in the third and great period of Italian painting. The first of these, "Fra Lippo Lippi," put in "Men and Women" (1855), belongs to the early married years in Florence. The study was suggested by Vasari, though it departs from his story at certain points. Filippo Lippi, born at Florence in 1412, was left an orphan when two years old. He fell to the care of an aunt, and led a hard life until, at the age of eight, he was placed in the Carmelite convent. Here he soon showed a quick eye and a turn for drawing, but no taste for learning. His use for his books was to cover them with sketches of what he had seen in the streets. The prior saw

his bent, and thought it best to use his talent. He set him to learn art. The chapel of the Carmine had been painted by Massaccio, and Lippi went there daily to study. He learned and used for a time the manner of that painter. He soon grew famous, broke away from the convent, and had his travels and adventures. On his return to Florence, he painted the "Coronation of the Virgin" for the nuns of Sant Ambrogio. This got him the patronage of Cosimo de Medici, and for Cosimo's wife he painted a Nativity, with a figure of St. John Baptist. Lippi had a frank love of the world and its pleasures, and a warm, impulsive nature. The story that is the basis of the poem shows this. Once, when the painter was busy with a work for Cosimo, and was confined to his palace, that the work might be done as soon as possible, the painter got so tired of his confinement that he made ropes of his bed-clothes, let himself down into the city, and took his pleasure there for some days. And the story agrees with Lippi's life as we know it. In his life, more than his work, he broke quite away from monkish rule. He loved a novice of one of the convents, and took her from the nuns; and their son was Filippino Lippi, the painter. He had a facile and affluent hand, and Vasari says the beauty of his work atoned for the failings of his life. He died at Spoleto in 1469.

In many points the poet has dramatized Vasari, giving life and character to the old painter and his idea of art. Lippi is out on his escapade from