Did Guido and his fellows find their fate, (360)
All Rome for witness, and—my writer adds—
Remonstrant in its universal grief,
Since Guido had the suffrage of all Rome.
The untempered gold, the fact untampered with,
The mere ring- metal ere the ring be made!
And what has hitherto come of it? Who preserves
The memory of this Guido, and his wife
Pompilia, more than Ademollo’s name,
The etcher of those prints, two crazie each, (370)
Saved by a stone from snowing broad the Square
With scenic backgrounds? Was this truth of force?
Able to take its own part as truth should,
Sufficient, self-sustaining? Why, if so—
Yonder’s a fire, into it goes my book,
As who shall say me nay, and what the loss?
You know the tale already: I may ask,
Rather than think to tell you, more thereof,—
Ask you not merely who were he and she,
Husband and wife, what manner of mankind, (380)
But how you hold concerning this and that
Other yet-unnamed actor in the piece.
The young frank handsome courtly Canon, now,
The priest, declared the lover of the wife,
He who, no question, did elope with her,
For certain bring the tragedy about,
Giuseppe Caponsacchi;—his strange course
I’ the matter, was it right or wrong or both?
Then the old couple, slaughtered with the wife
By the husband as accomplices in crime, (390)
Those Comparini, Pietro and his spouse,—
What say you to the right or wrong of that,
When, at a known name whispered through the door
Of a lone villa on a Christmas night,
It opened that the joyous hearts inside
Might welcome as it were an angel-guest
Come in Christ’s name to knock and enter, sup
And satisfy the loving ones he saved;
And so did welcome devils and their death?
I have been silent on that circumstance (400)
Although the couple passed for close of kin
To wife and husband, were by some accounts
Pompilia’s very parents: you know best.
Also that infant the great joy was for,
That Gaetano, the wife’s two-weeks’ babe,
The husband’s first-born child, his son and heir,
Whose birth and being turned his night to day—
Why must the father kill the mother thus
Because she bore his son and saved himself?
(God love you!) and will have your proper laugh
At the dark question, laugh it! I laugh first.
Truth must prevail, the proverb vows; and truth
—Here is it all i’ the book at last, as first
There it was all i’ the heads and hearts of Rome
Gentle and simple, never to fall nor fade
Nor be forgotten. Yet, a little while,
The passage of a century or so,
Decads thrice five, and here’s time paid his tax,
Oblivion gone home with her harvesting, (420)
And left all smooth again as scythe could shave.
Far from beginning with you London folk,
I took my book to Rome first, tried truth’s power
On likely people. “Have you met such names?
“Is a tradition extant of such facts?
“Your law-courts stand, your records frown a-row:
“What if I rove and rummage?” “—Why, you’ll waste
“Your pains and end as wise as you began!”
Every one snickered: “names and facts thus old
“Are newer much than Europe news we find (430)
“Down in to-day’s Diario. Records, quotha?
“Why, the French burned them, what else do the French?
“The rap-and-rending nation! And it tells
“Against the Church, no doubt,—another gird
“At the Temporality, your Trial, of course?”
“—Quite otherwise this time,” submitted I;
“Clean for the Church and dead against the world,
“The flesh and the devil, does it tell for once.”
“—The rarer and the happier! All the same,
“Content you with your treasure of a book, (440)
“And waive what’s wanting! Take a friend’s advice!
“It’s not the custom of the country. Mend
“Your ways indeed and we may stretch a point:
“Go get you manned by Manning and new-manned
“By Newman and, mayhap, wise-manned to boot
“By Wiseman, and we’ll see or else we won’t!
“Thanks meantime for the story, long and strong,
“A pretty piece of narrative enough,
“Which scarce ought so to drop out, one would think,
“From the more curious annals of our kind. (450)
“Do you tell the story, now, in off-hand style,
“Straight from the book? Or simply here and there,
“(The while you vault it through the loose and large)
“Hang to a hint? Or is there book at all,
“And don’t you deal in.poetry, make-believe,
“And the white lies it sounds like?”
From the book, yes; thence bit by bit I dug
The lingot truth, that memorable day,
Assayed and knew my piecemeal gain was gold,— (460)
Yes; but from something else surpassing that,
Something of mine which, mixed up with the mass,
Made it bear hammer and be firm to file.
Fancy with fact is just one fact the more;
To-wit, that fancy has informed, transpierced,
Thridded and so thrown fast the facts else free,
As right through ring and ring runs the djereed
And binds the loose, one bar without a break.
I fused my live soul and that inert stuff,
Before attempting smithcraft, on the night (470)
After the day when,—truth thus grasped and gained,—
The book was shut and done with and laid by
On the cream-coloured
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