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80 But now, like doves “with healing on their wings,”
 * Blossom and fruit with gladdening kindness come,

Charming to sleep my murmuring song, that sings
 * Unworthy dirges over ’s tomb:

Welcome the olive-branch their message brings!
 * It bids me wish him not the mouldering doom

Of nameless scribes of “mémoires pour servir,” Dishonest “chroniclers of time’s small-beer.”

No: a born Poet, at his cradle-fire
 * The muses nursed him as their bud unblown,

And gave him as his mind grew high and higher,
 * Their ducal strawberry-leafs enwreathed renown.

Alas! that mightiest masters of the lyre,
 * Whose pens above an eagle’s heart have grown,

In all the proud nobility of wing, Should stoop to dip their points in passion’s poison-spring!

Yet, weary of his youth’s young wife,
 * To her, to king, to church, to law untrue,

Warred for divorce and discord to the knife,
 * And proudest wore his plume of darkest hue:

And, when his Florence, in her strife,
 * Robbed him of office and his temper, threw