This like® me more, and this affects me less!"
Wherefore I chose my portion. If at whiles
My heart sinks, as monotonous I paint
These endless cloisters and eternal aisles
With the same series. Virgin, Babe and Saint, 60
With the same cold calm beautiful regard--
At least no merchant traffics in my heart;
The sanctuary's gloom at least shall ward
Vain tongues from where my pictures stand apart;
Only prayer breaks the silence of the shrine
While, blackening in the daily candle-smoke,
They moulder on the damp wall's travertine,
'Mid echoes the light footstep never woke.
So, die my pictures! surely, gently die!
O youth, men praise so--holds their praise its worth? 70
Blown harshly, keeps the trump its golden cry?
Tastes sweet the water with such specks of earth?

NOTES

"Pictor Ignotus" is a reverie characteristic of a monastic painter
of the Renaissance who recognizes, in the genius of a youth whose
pictures are praised, a gift akin to his own, but which he has never
so exercised, spite of the joy such free human expression and
recognition of his power would have given him, because he could not
bear to submit his art to worldly contact. So he has chosen to sink
his name in unknown service to the Church, and to devote his fancy
to pure and beautiful but cold and monotonous repetitions of sacred
themes. His gentle regret that his own pictures will moulder
unvisited is half wonderment that the youth can endure the sullying