PART I.

I built myself a lordly picture-place Wherein to play a Leo's part. I said, "Let others cricket, row, or race, I will go in for Art!"

Full of great rooms and small my Palace stood, With porphyry columns faced, Hung round with pictures such as I thought good, Being a man of taste.

The pictures--for the most part they were such As more behold than buy-- The quaint, the queer, the mystic over-much, The dismal, and the dry.

One seemed all black and grey--a tract of mud, One gas-jet glimmering there alone; Above, all fog; below, all inky flood; For subject--it had none.

One showed blue chaos flecked with falling gold. Like Danaë's tower in dark; A painter's splash-board might more meaning hold Than this æsthetic lark.

And one, a phantom form with limbs most lank, Adumbrated in ink and soot; The Genius of Smudge, with spectral shank And unsubstantial boot.

Nor these alone, but many a canvas bare, Fit for each vacuous mood of mind, The gray and gravelike, vague and void, were there Most dismally designed.

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Or two wan lovers in a curious fix, Wreathed in one scarf by some queer charm, Upon the margin of a caverned Styx Stood shivering arm-in-arm.

Or by a garden-prop, posed all askew 'Neath apples bronze, with brazen hair, A chalk-limb'd Eve and snake of porcelain blue Exchanged a stony stare.

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Nor these alone, but all such legends fair As the vagarious Wagner mind Would pick from Mythus' shadowy realm, were there, With ample space assigned.

To women weird and wondrous, long of jaw, And lank of limb, and greenish as with mould, And full-red lips and shocks of fulvous hair, And raiments strange of fold.

No raven so delighteth in its song, Of sad and sullen monotone, As I to watch those ladies lean and long, And angular of bone.

And to myself I said, "All these are mine. Let the dull world take Nature's part, 'Tis one to me; I hold no thing divine Save this Brown-Jonesian Art,

"Wherein no ROBINSON shall dare to plant His Philistinish hoof, Who feels no mystic mediæval want, But paints in truth's behoof!

"O Mediæval Mystery, be it mine To clasp thee, faint and fain; Sniffing serene at low souls that decline, On sense and meanings plain."

Then my eyes filled, my talk waxed large and dim Of BOTTICELLI'S deathless fame: "Quaint immaturity to reach with him," I cried, "is Art's true aim.

"To plunge, self-blinded, in the mystic past, That makes the present small: If eyes artistic be not backward cast, Why have we eyes at all?"

_Punch_, July 7, 1877.