THE GOOD GUALDERALDA.

By Arno, on the Tuscan side,

The matchless Gualderalda grew,

Where many a farm and meadow wide

Her father's domination knew.

He moved in dark and sullen strength;

She grew a lovely flower apart,

With virtues cloistered round her soul,

Like leaflets round the lily's heart.

And now great news the castle stirs : The King, in hunting, takes this way,

And of your hospitable walls

Will ask his welcome for a day.

"Sir Count, the world accords your house

A daughter marvellously fair:

If I accept your loyal vows,

To see her face shall be my prayer."

Then from her turret near the sky
Came she in blushing maidenhood;

Then first unveiled before the eye
Of eager admiration stood.

"Sire, you shall touch my daughter's lips
If so your royal pleasure deign;"
Then paled, in wan and strange eclipse,
Her beauty, with a sudden pain.

"No man shall touch my lips," she saith, "Save he who claims my wedded hand : Rather will I resign my breath,

And yield my pulses where I stand."

"How? dost thou mock me, froward girl?"

"Nay, count," the wiser king replies,

"Thou wert a worse than peasant churl

Such unflecked virtue to despise.

Go, Gualderalda, fair indeed!
I'll wed thee proudly in the land:
The noblest knight that crosses steed
Shall claim thy dowry at my hand."

Men note not where her bones repose
In some old crypt, forgotten long;
But Dante keeps her virgin rose
Bright in the chaplet of his song.

1830 AND 1853.

AN old man mazed and wild
Bearing a blond-haired child,
A woman blind with tears,
The mournful train sweeps on;

And the monarchy is gone

For all the coming years.

They would have lingered slow, For their hearts beat faint and low, Their lives were a feeble spoil;

But the power that's new and strong Cries, "Hasten them along,

Away from their native soil!"

But I can stop, and sigh

At this grief of years gone by,

An old man's fault and fall,

And say that the exile's woe

Is a piteous thing to know,

Is the heaviest weird of all.

In a palace bare and old
That a royal race left cold,
These children of the sun

Shall moulder in faded state,
Till the sentence, soon or late,

Remove them every one.

Perhaps the shade of her,

For whom brave blood doth stir

To this day in gallant breasts, Moved through the dusky pile,

And welcomed with sad smile

The old ancestral crests.