Earthwork out of Tuscany eBook

It is the hour of Ave Maria.  But only two cracked bells ring it in.

ENVOY:  TO ALL YOU LADIES

Lovely and honourable ladies, it is, as I hold, no mean favour you have accorded me, to sit still and smiling while I have sung to your very faces a stave verging here and there on the familiar.  You have sat thus enduring me, because, being wrought for the most part out of stone or painter’s stuff, your necessities have indeed forbidden retirement.  Yet my obligations should not on that account be lighter.  He would be a thin spirit who should gain a lady’s friendly regard, and then vilipend because she knew no better, or could not choose.  I hope indeed that I have done you no wrong, gentildonne, I protest that I have meant none; but have loved you all as a man may, who has, at most, but a bowing acquaintance with your ladyships.  As I recall your starry names, no blush hinting unmannerliness suspect and unconfessed hits me on the cheek:—­ Simonetta, Ilaria, Nenciozza, Bettina; you too, candid Mariota of Prato; you, flinching little Imola; and you, snuff-taking, wool-carding ancient lady of the omnibus—­scorner of monks, I have kissed your hands, I have at least given our whole commerce frankly to the world; and I know not how any shall say we have been closer acquainted than we should.  You, tall Ligurian Simonetta, loved of Sandro, mourned by Giuliano and, for a seasons by his twisted brother and lord, have done well to utter but one side of your wild humour?  The side a man would take, struck, as your Sandro was, by a nympholepsy, or, as Lorenzo was, by the rhymer’s appetite for wherewithal to sonnetteer?  If I understand you, it was never pique or a young girl’s petulance drove you to Phryne’s one justifiable act of self-assertion.  It was honesty.  Madonna, or I have read your grey eyes in vain; it was enthusiasm—­that flame of our fire so sacred that though it play the incendiary there shall be no crime—­or where would be now the “Vas d’elezione"?—­nor though it reveal a bystander’s grin, any shame at all.  I shall live to tell that story of thine, Lady Simonetta, to thy honour and my own respect; for, as a poet says,

“There is no holier flame
Than flatters torchwise in a stripling heart,
... a fire from Heaven
To ash the clay of us, and wing the God.”

I have seen all memorials of you left behind to be pondered by him who played Dante to your Beatrice, Sandro the painting poet,—­the proud clearness of you as at the marriage feast of Nastagio degli Onesti; the melting of the sorrow that wells from you in a tide, where you hold the book of your overmastering honour and read Magnificat Anima Mea with a sob in your throat; your acquaintance, too, with that grief which was your own hardening; your sojourn, wan and woebegone as would become the wife of Moses (maker of jealous gods); all these guises of you, as well as the presentments of your innocent youth, I