'Twas Eastertide of Eighty-Nine, —
That time of rest for every nation,
When weary legislators pine
For ten brief days of relaxation:
Her finest crown Queen Florence wore,
Produced her fairest April weather,
In welcome to the Travellers four
Who roamed her storied streets together.

We wandered through the glorious fane
Which seems to guard the city sleeping;
Past still St. George, through sun and rain
His steadfast knightly vigil keeping;
Beside the Strozzi walls we strolled,
And grumbled at Palotti's prices,
But somehow found ourselves consoled
By Doney's dejeaners and ices!

We stood where choirs at twilight sang,
We watched the flying Dove's ignition, —
A famous peg on which to hang
A grand discourse on superstition! —
Perhaps those simple souls might teach
Lessons as high as we could set them,
And if they're striving heaven to reach
Their own strange road, — by all means let them!

We drove along, to sound of bells,
Past villa walls and marble fountains,
To where the white Carthusian cells
Peer out towards the snow-capped mountains:
On Fiesole's historic crest
The thrushes sang a Paschal chorus,
While, lighted from the lurid west,
The teeming plain rolled wide before us.

We paced through frescoed council-halls,
Dim with the dust of buried ages;
We lingered near the gorgeous walls
Where winds the train of Eastern Sages:
And thoughtfully the cells we trod
Which held within their narrow border
The Prior who preached the wrath of God, —
Stern Quixote of a Sacred Order!

The echoes of a bygone strife
Seemed surging round the dark Bargello;
Marble and bronze sprang fresh to life
Beneath the wand of Donatello
" Night " seemed to sleep, and " Dawn " to wake
Behind the walls of old St. Lawrence, —
There hung a spell we would not break
About our Eastertide in Florence.

We passed where Rubens' beauties lay, —
Never a rag their buxom limbs on, —
To see our courtly P R A.,
Resplendent in his robes of crimson;
Past canvases, by years undimmed,
From Antwerp, Nuremberg, and Cadiz,
To mark how nobly Titian limned
Grey senators and highborn ladies

From grave Mantegna's glowing reds,
To soft Correggio's milder graces;
From Botticelli's down-cast heads,
To bright Andrea's smiling faces;
And that good Friar, to whom alone
Of mortal men was spirit given
To pierce the veil that shrouds the Throne,
And paint the golden courts of Heaven.

Silent we stood, in deepest awe,
Where Raphael's hand has set for ever
The whirlwind Israel's prophet saw
In vision by the captives' river:
Silent, where sits in loveliest guise
The wistful Virgin Mother, leaning
To watch her wondrous Infant's eyes,
Enkindled with divinest meaning.

Now turn the page, and seek the round
Of daily pleasures, pains and duties; —
It's good to stand on English ground, —
A London summer has its beauties; —
Time mows away at memory's flowers,
He holds their perfume in abhorrence,
Freely we'll yield him most of ours,
But not that Eastertide in Florence!