impregnation with supernal fire
Of young ideal love, transformed desire,
Whose passion is but worship of that Best
Taught by the many-mingled creed of each young breast?

’Twas gentle Lisa, of no noble line,
Child of Bernardo, a rich Florentine,
Who from his merchant-city hither came
To trade in drugs; yet kept an honest fame,

And had the virtue not to try and sell
Drugs that had none.  He loved his riches well,
But loved them chiefly for his Lisa’s sake,
Whom with a father’s care he sought to make
The bride of some true honorable man,—
Of Perdicone (so the rumor ran),
Whose birth was higher than his fortunes were,
For still your trader likes a mixture fair
Of blood that hurries to some higher strain
Than reckoning money’s loss and money’s gain.
And of such mixture good may surely come:
Lord’s scions so may learn to cast a sum,
A trader’s grandson bear a well-set head,
And have less conscious manners, better bred;
Nor, when he tries to be polite, be rude instead.

’Twas Perdicone’s friends made overtures
To good Bernardo; so one dame assures
Her neighbor dame, who notices the youth

Fixing his eyes on Lisa; and, in truth,
Eyes that could see her on this summer day
Might find it hard to turn another way.
She had a pensive beauty, yet not sad;
Rather like minor cadences that glad
The hearts of little birds amid spring boughs:
And oft the trumpet or the joust would rouse
Pulses that gave her cheek a finer glow,
Parting her lips that seemed a mimic bow
By chiselling Love for play in coral wrought,
Then quickened by him with the passionate thought,
The soul that trembled in the lustrous night
Of slow long eyes.  Her body was so slight,
It seemed she could have floated in the sky,
And with the angelic choir made symphony;
But in her cheek’s rich tinge, and in the dark
Of darkest hair and eyes, she bore a mark

Of kinship to her generous mother-earth,
The fervid land that gives the plumy palm-trees birth.

She saw not Perdicone; her young mind
Dreamed not that any man had ever pined
For such a little simple maid as she:
She had but dreamed how heavenly it would be
To love some hero noble, beauteous, great,
Who would live stories worthy to narrate,
Like Roland, or the warriors of Troy,
The Cid, or Amadis, or that fair boy
Who conquered every thing beneath the sun,
And somehow, some time, died at Babylon
Fighting the Moors.  For heroes all were good
And fair as that archangel who withstood
The Evil One, the author of all wrong,—
That Evil One who made the French so strong;

And now the flower of heroes must he be
Who drove those tyrants from dear Sicily,
So that her maids might walk to vespers tranquilly.

Young Lisa saw this hero in the king;
And as wood-lilies that sweet odors bring
Might dream the light that opes their modest eyne
Was lily-odored; and as rites divine,
Round turf-laid altars, or ’neath roofs of stone,
Draw sanctity from out the heart alone
That loves and worships: so the miniature
Perplexed of her soul’s world, all virgin pure,
Filled with heroic virtues that bright form,
Raona’s royalty, the finished norm
Of horsemanship, the half of