Beautiful Evelyn Hope is dead!

Sit and watch by her side an hour.

poem, is in the Church of St. Augustine at Fano, a town on the Adriatic. It was painted by Guercino and "represented an angel standing with outstretched wings by a little child. The child is half kneeling on a kind of pedestal, while the angel joins its hands in prayer: its gaze is directed upwards towards the sky, from which cherubs are looking down." I have omitted the last three verses, which are on a less exalted level and seem to add little to the poem.

Fix his own time, accept too his own price,
And shut the money into this small hand
When next it takes mine. Will it? tenderly?
Oh, I'll content him,-but to-morrow, Love! 10
I often am much wearier than you think,
This evening more than usual, and it seems
As if-forgive now-should you let me sit
Here by the window with your hand in mine
And look a half hour forth on Fiesole,2
Both of one mind, as married people use,
Quietly, quietly the evening through,
I might get up to-morrow to my work
Cheerful and fresh as ever. Let us try.
To-morrow, how you shall be glad for this!
Your soft hand is a woman of itself,

15

20

1 Andrea, called "del sarto."-or, as we would say, the tailor's son, was born at Florence in 1487. After working at goldsmithing, wood-carving, and drawing. and studying under several painters, he executed some frescoes for the Church of the Annunciation at Florence, with such accuracy and skill that he gained the name of "the faultless painter." At twenty-three he is said to have had no superior in Central Italy in technique. In 1512 he married Lucrezia, "a beautiful widow." "But," says Vasari, "he destroyed his own peace, as well as estranged his friends, by this act, seeing that he soon became jealous, and found that he had fallen into the hands of an artful woman, who made him do as she pleased in all things." In 1518 he went to Paris without Lucrezia, at the invitation of Francis I. This is the period of adulation and substantial rewards that he looks back upon in the poem as his long festal year, when he could sometimes leave the ground." But Lucrezia wrote urging his return. The king granted him a brief leave of absence, and commissioned him to buy certain works of art in Italy. Andres, beguiled by his wife, used the money which Francis had entrusted to him, to build a house for himself at Florence. His career in France being thus miserably interrupted, he remained in Florence, where he died of the plague in 1531.

A small town on a hill-top about three mires to the west of Florence. Browning apparently makes Andres build his house on the outskirts of Florence immediately facing the Convent of San Domenico, with Fiesole in the distant background.