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CHAPTER VI.

WAKING, the Faun was silent, and the nightingales, if they were not silent, had all their voices drowned in the loud chorus of all the other birds, which had been sound asleep all night, and now fluttered into joyousness and movement, with the coming of the day, among the myrtle- and the ilex-leaves in the monastic gardens up yonder upon the Golden Hill.

Waking, I woke cramped, of course, and cold, and with the smell of the dying lamp-wick in my nostrils, and the broad rosy flush of the sky like the glory of the last judgment above my head.

Waking, I wondered a moment, then looked up at my own window, where the bean-flowers were, and remembered why I was there, and thus, with Palès crouching in her straw and yawning, and the fountain so near to us both.

Waking, I yawned like Palès, and shook myself, and dipped my head in a pailful of the fountain-water, and looked, as I always look at daybreak, down the beautiful golden surface of the river, where it is all so calm and stirless, and the great black shadows lie so still, and the sails of the boats droop idle, and the ruined temples shine golden in the morning light.

Every one still was sleeping. It was not yet five by the clocks. Sweet clear-toned bells were pealing from the churches down the shores; and they and the call of a fisherman setting his girella in the sweep of the current, and the murmurs of the water rippling and falling, and the song of the thrushes and the woodlarks in the thickets, were the only sounds there were.

The day was still so young that no one was astir. I sat down and stitched at those big boots of the butcher; but very soon I saw Ersilia with a mop in her hand, and a pail: she came to get the fountain-water.

Your precious waif and stray is in high fever," she said to me, with that pleasure in bad news which your true gossip always takes; "begins to say nonsense, and all that; a heavy | | 64 stupid fever. There is nothing to be done; I did not like to send her to hospital without your word, but--

"I will go find an apothecary," said I, and went and found one, seeking an old man, as old as I myself, whom I knew well.

"What little she costs shall be my charge," I told Ersilia, when I returned, and put a new little piece or two of money in her hand, because money is more eloquent than all your poets, preachers, or philosophers, and has the only tongue that, strange to no one, needs no dictionary to explain it to the simplest unlearned soul.

The apothecary said it was not dangerous, but might be long; it was the common fever of the city,--tedious and wearisome rather than very perilous to life. It seemed she was always talking of Rome in a faint delirious way, and had a fancy that she had been brought there for martyrdom; only not martyrdom for Christ's sake, but for the sake of the old dead gods that every one else had abandoned, whilst she herself to them was faithful.

"An odd fancy," said the apothecary, taking snuff.

To me it did not seem so odd; I half believed in them; only it did not do to say so with Canon Silvio's and Padre Trillo's shoes just taken home, and good coins paid me for them.

So she lay sick there, whilst I stitched leather more steadily than ever I had done in all my life, and Palès, who disliked the turn that things had taken, almost split her triangle of a black mouth with yawning.

"You make a rod for your back, Crispin," said my friend Pippo, the cook.

"You make a clog for your hoof, Crispin," said my friend Tino, the tinker.

"You make a fool of yourself, Crispin," said all my neighbors of the Ponte Sisto corner, and the fishers watching their nets in the stream; and, what was worse, the curved mouth of my Hermes said it likewise. Only the Faun in the fountain-water said, "When men are fools, then only are they wise;" and that little voice that lives in us, and must be destined to live after us, I think, said very clearly to me, "What matter being a fool--in others' eyes,--if only thou dost right?"

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I might be doing foolishly. I could not well be doing wrong. As for the rod and as for the clog, he has them both who once admits into him any human affection. But without the rod we are hard and selfish, and without the clog we are idle as feathers on the wind.

Still, a fool I was: that all people around the Ponte Sisto, and in the Quarter of the Tanners, and all the fisher-folk down both banks of the Tiber, were agreed; but they liked me the more because they could laugh at me. To be lowered in your neighbor's estimation is to be heightened in his love.

Such a fool! to turn out of a good chamber, and eat sparsely, and sleep with the dog, and pay a doctor's fees, and stitch, stitch, stitch, to buy ice, and fruit, and so forth, all for a stray girl, come from the Lord knows where, and of no more kin to me (if I were to be believed) than the human dust of the Appian Way, or the long-fleeced goats coming tinkling at dawn through the streets! "Eh, such a fool!" said the men and the women standing about the house-doors, and under the wine-sellers' withered green boughs, and beside the bright water splashing out of the lions' mouths at our own fountain.

I let them say their say, and sat at my stall; and the girl on high, with Hermes and the bean-flowers, meanwhile, was ill, as was only to be looked for after her fatigue, and the hot sun, and the pain that had met her at the close of her weary travel.

"There was the hospital," they said.

Yes, there was, no doubt; and I would speak reverently of all such places; but one would not wish to die in one all the same; and, besides, I had loved women, and lost them; I knew what their fancies are, and how they shrink from things,--quite little things, that men would laugh at, or would altogether disregard, but which to them are as torments of Antinora.

So I sat on at my stall through the fierce summer weather; and she lay ill up yonder behind the scarlet blossoms of my bean-flowers.

It would be foolish to say that it did not cost me a good deal. Everything costs to the poor, and costs twice what the rich would give for it. But I had a little money put away in an old stocking, in that cupboard in the wall where the wine | | 66 was; and then, after all, no man need spend much on himself unless he chooses.

Whose business was it if I smoked but once a day at sunset, or if I troubled Pippo no more to fry for me? Smoking is dry work for the throat in warm weather; and a hunch of bread with a little wine may suffice for any mortal whose paunch is not his god.

Anyhow, she lay ill up there, and I did what I could for her, stitching down below. Ersilia was a good soul, and full of kindliness; but charity is a flower not naturally of earthly growth, and it needs manuring with a promise of profit.

I do not think Ersilia left to herself would have been at all unkind, but she would have been perfectly certain of the excellence of hospitals and the superior chances of life in them, and would have acted on her certainty with perfect honesty of intent; for people are always most honest when they are in any sincere fear for themselves.

The fever was very tedious, and the city grew very hot with the heavy, drowsy, sickly heat of the midsummer-time; and the poor child lay there, parching and weary, and sleeping very little, they told me, with the glaring sun beating all day long at the closed shutters of the room, and getting through the crevices, and burning in upon her.

Once, as I thought was my duty, I betook myself down to the Ghetto, and saw the old man Ben Sulim. He was a tall, gaunt, fierce-eyed man, who had been handsome most likely in his youth, but was hungry-looking as any vulture and savage-looking as any wolf. He was in a miserable attic strewn with rusty dusty odds and ends of things that he had bought from rag-pickers and beggars; they said that was his trade.

I told her tale and mine with such eloquence, in hope to move him,--though he looked a brute,--as I could command to my usage. He heard in silence, rubbing up an old iron lock red with rust; then showed his teeth as wolves do.

"My daughter was a wanton," he said. "Her daughter--if there be one--may go and be the like, for me. Get you gone, whoever you are. I am poor, very poor, as you see; but were I rich with all the riches of Solomon, the maiden--if she be one--should starve for me. I have spoken."

Then he glowered upon me with his impenetrable eyes, and turned his back, still rubbing at his rusty lock. Brutality, | | 67 poverty, wretchedness, who would not deem her best saved from such a triad? I hurled a few unsavory words at him, and told him his threshold was accursed, and departed: his mercy would have been more cruel than his cruelty.

I went and bathed in the open baths of the Tiber, to be purified after all that beastliness. Come what might to her, anything would be better than life with such a one as he.

It was a hot evening; I splashed and plunged, Palès with me; the water was yellow and scarcely cool; still, it was water, and so allured one. The moon was up when I returned to my corner by the Ponte Sisto. My window above the bridge stood open, of course; Ersilia put her head out of it. "She is much better: she is safe to live," she cried to me.

"What shall we do with her?" I said to Palès. Palès stuck her tail out stiffly; she was not interested: if it had been a cat, indeed --

Palès had been born in a wine-cart, and had at that time a lover in a public letter-writer's dog, and knew the world, and knew that your wise man does not bestir himself about another's fate, unless to lift its burden off his own.

But I have never been a wise man,--or I had not now been stitching boots and shoes for the tired feet of the Roman plebs.

One day as I was working,--it was very early morning, and Palès and I and the Faun in the water were all alone,--two slender hands were laid upon my stall, and, looking up, I saw her, just as I had seen her that day when I dreamed of my Ariadne of Borghese,--clad just the same, and looking just the same, only she had no flowers in her hands, and had the pallor of illness on her face.

Her eyes were wet with tears.

"I have come to thank you," she said, very low. "Only I cannot thank you--ever. You have been so good. I do not know what to say. And I have nothing--"

"There is no need to say," I answered, almost roughly. "And Ersilia was to tell you nothing. I mean--an empty room there doing no good to any one--and you are well now. Should you be out like this? you cannot be very strong!"

"I awoke at daybreak, and I could not rest longer without coming to you; Ersilia would not let me leave the room before; you have been all so good--so good--and I--"

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"There has been but little goodness: had there been less we had been brutes. Are you sure that you are strong enough to stand? Sit here!"

I drew my bench out for her, and she sank down on it. For me, I was stupefied by the loveliness of her, and her likeness to that Borghese bronze.

"You should be with them there in that cool green place,--you and Psyche; only Bacchus should never come near to you, nor Theseus either," I murmured to myself. She lifted her head in surprise, thinking me mad, no doubt, or else not understanding, probably; for indeed how should she have understood?

She had a little tumbled paper in her hand, which she put out to me.

"This is the receipt I had given me: they were to send such few things as I had. Could you ask for me? There is not much, save some busts of my father's: they might sell, and pay what is owing all this time. How long is it that I have been ill? Ersilia would not say."

"Oh, a few weeks. This is midsummer, and you will suffer from the heat," I answered her. "Yes, I will go and ask after your things; but as for payment,--the room was empty, and Ersilia, I am sure, would never wish-- My dear, she lost a daughter of your age."

A certain proud shadow stole over her face.

"And I am grateful. Do not think I want to acquit so great a debt as that. I only hope to pay the money it has cost. That can make no difference in one's heart. I say it very badly; but you know what it is I mean."

"Oh, Yes, I know. Palès, be silent."

"The room is your room; that Ersilia told me," she said, with the color rising up over her brow. "I cannot bear to be so much trouble: I wish to go away. I will try and keep myself. I can make little things in clay. I might help sculptors--"

"My dear, go back to my room, since you will have it that it is mine, and do not pain us all by taking flight like this," I said to her, feeling like a fool, not knowing what to say, and deafened with the jealous noise of Palès. "I will go and get your things when I have done this pair of boots; and do you rest, and then in the evening I will bring them to you, and we | | 69 will talk. But have no fear: the gods love youth: and we are all your friends."

She thanked me once more with the loveliest smile, like sunrise illumining the sadness of her face, then went, with an obedience I could not have looked for, away to the corner of the bridge and into the darkness of Ersilia's doorway.

I had been anxious to have her well away before all the young peasants trooped in from the Janiculan with their market-fruits and greenery, and before two or three students who dwelt upon the bridge should come out on their morning stroll to the academies. There was no harm in any of these lads; but they were lads; and she was the living image of that Ariadne away in the gallery of the Borghese in the shadow of the old green ilex woods.

I stitched on manfully at the boots; they belonged to the blacksmith round the corner.

Why is a blacksmith always a half-heroic and even almost poetic person, and a cobbler always more or less absurd?

Is it viler to shoe men than horses? Or is it that the grim divinity of Hephæstus and Mulciber has given a sort of grandeur forever to the anvil and the forge? Or is it because great Lysippus was a blacksmith? and because it was a cobbler that set the murderers on Cicero? You may make a shoeing-smith a very Odysseus or Hector in your poem, and no one will laugh at you or your picture; but your human shoemaker is always beneath contempt: it is very unjust.

There was a crashing and jingling confusion of sounds, and a clatter of restless horses' hoofs upon uneven stones.

"I turned out of my way to say farewell to you, Crispin," said the sweet melodious voice of Hilarion on my ear. "No, there is nothing the matter, and it is never too warm for me; but the fancy came to us an hour or so ago. I shall be back--ah, who knows when? When they unearth any fresh nymph from my fields. Go up to the villa when you will, and how you will; go and stay there all summer through, as though I were there. But you must be at your corner when I come, or Rome will not be Rome. It could better lose the Faun from the Capitol than the Faun of your fountain."

He leaned downwards and shook my hands. The horses sprang forward, angry at the noise of the water; in a moment he had both come and gone. The black-browed singer, who | | 70 was his latest fancy, was beside him: they swept on and left me there.

Only a. few days before, he had spoken of passing all the summer in his beautiful home under Soracte; had planned a thousand excursions and excavations; it had been ascertained that his villa of Daïla was on the site of what had once been a country-seat of Petronius Arbiter; he had undertaken excavations on a large scale in its vineyards; a few days before they had found a broken but very lovely marble of the nymph Canens, and he was eager to lay bare the earth for more treasures; he had insisted with his charming imperious way that I should spend all the summer and vintage months with him; he had meant to banish women, to be alone, to translate the songs of the Greek of Gadarene, to write a poem upon the necklace of Eriphytê; and now he was gone.

For myself, I was sorrowful: Hilarion to me was both a solace and delight. Looking up at the bean-flowers above the bridge, I was glad. For she, up yonder, was fairer than that nymph Canens whom he had unearthed from his fields beneath Soracte; and he----

It was many years since I had first met Hilarion. When I had seen him first he had been only a most lovely boy,--beautiful as any whom Mennirmus and Theognis delighted to sing of in their odes.

It was in an earlier time, just before I had ceased wandering about, and, being smitten with that homesickness at sight of the Madonnina of old Mino, had come to set up my stall to Crispin-Crispianus.

It happened thus.

There was a plague in the city of Paris; the cholera killed its thousands and tens of thousands. The gay spring and midsummer months were made ghastly by it, and in the open-air theatre, where the comedians I then belonged to were acting and singing merrily enough for the meagerest pittance, night after night some workman or student or sewing-girl would be seized with the pangs of the dire disease as they sat and laughed there, chewing a peach, or smelling a knot of jasmine, and would be carried out of the place, neither to laugh nor to weep any more.

There were burning drought and hideous sickness and people talked wildly of poisoned wells, and suspected foul faith | | 71 everywhere, as they will in the fear of contagion and in the contagion of fear. I did what I could: it was not much: the silence of death made itself felt everywhere; one used to look in a sort of infuriated despair down the Seine--that had shrunk from its yellow banks--and think of Tiber and our Sacred Island, and wonder where the old fair days had gone, when in this kind of misery the cities could pray to Zeus, and believe that they beheld him bring health and mercy as the golden serpent crept from sea to shore.

One night in the height of the plague going along as the moon had risen, where the street was solitary, I met a man carrying a woman in his arms.

He cried aloud to me, and I went to him.

"It seized her a little while ago," he said to me. "We were in the opera-house; my horses and servants had not come; no one would touch her. Help me to get her home,--if you have no fear."

I had no fear. I helped him to carry her. She was perhaps twenty years of age; not more. She was already livid and unconscious, though she writhed and moaned. She was a very pretty pink and white thing, and the jewels on her sparkled and seemed to laugh horribly in the moonlight.

He was a youth, not more than twenty himself, if so much; tall, and fair, and beautiful, with something imperious and tired on his face already.

The streets were empty, though a few folks like him were of the Decamerone temper, and went to song and feast in the midst of the universal death; yet these were few, and carriages were rarely met, because so many had fled out of the doomed city.

We bore her between us as best we might to where she lived,--it was not very far,--a great place, in which she had several rooms, luxurious, and full of scattered, useless riches, such as young men lavish on such women as she was. The chambers were decorated in the taste of Paris, light and white, silver and golden.

We laid her down upon her delicate bed. I remember it was all curtained with white satin embroidered with pale roses, and above it hung a little Love--laughing. There were lamps burning, and a heavy sweet smell upon the air from jars of lilies and of hothouse flowers.

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I left him with her, and ran for aid. When I found a doctor, and took him up the stairs, with one glance he saw death written there. He tried his remedies, but without any hope in their power. He, like all men in that season, had grown used to seeing human bodies drop like swarms of stifled bees. In less than an hour the girl lay dead, gray and dusky and swollen under her blossoming roses and her laughing Love. She died horribly, in short but mortal agony, and rather like a poisoned rat than like a human creature.

All the while her young lover watched her with little emotion: he seemed rather curious than pained. He was a beautiful boy,--hardly more than eighteen; but no cynic of eighty years could have been colder before that death-bed than he was.

There was no farewell even between them in her intervals of consciousness. She had only muttered curses on her pain, and he had only said, "Poor Lilas!" as carelessly almost as a heartless man might say a word passing a dying horse by the wayside.

When she was quite dead, he rose and offered me his hand.

"You have been so good! How can I thank you? To bear such a scene, and for a stranger. In your place, I think, I should have refused. She is dead, you see. Poor Lilas!--an hour ago laughing at the theatre, and counting on having a big emerald she had screamed for in the morning. It is droll, you know: no religion of any kind could explain that. If ever one doubted that death is an end of all things, one would know it seeing such women as these die. Think of heaven or hell for Lilas! it is making a midge a giant. She was munching sweetmeats an hour ago, and teasing me for emeralds,--and there she is now, 'an immortal soul' in their jargon. Look, Love laughs; well he may. Her eternity must be about as good a jest as his."

He spoke rather with indifference than levity. A diamond flower-spray had fallen off her bosom on the bed. He took it up and tossed it in his hand.

"That was the price of the soul. Let it be buried with her, as the Etruscans buried toys with their children. Come away. The surgeon will send the women, and she has no beauty to show us now----"

"You will leave her here alone!" I said, in disgust at this boy, so beautiful and so brutal.

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"Why not?" he said, dreamily. "It is only a dead butterfly. There was no harm in her, and no good. She was a pretty animal, with a sleek skin and an insatiable appetite. Nature made her,--which was a pity, perhaps; and Nature has unmade her,--which is no pity whatever, though you seem to think so. What is she to me? I only saw her first three months since, here in Paris. Her own Love laughs: why should any one weep? Come away: there are the women, and she is ugly to look on,--all in an hour, you see!"

He took me with him through various rooms into one which looked down on a garden: we saw the stars through the lace-hung windows; there was a rich supper on the table, and lights were burning.

He poured out wine and pushed it to me, and sat down and drank himself.

I refused it. I thought he gave it me because I seemed a low fellow to him, and the kind of man to be paid for service.

"Why do you not drink?" he said, impatiently. "It is good wine,--my wine,-if you are doubting that."

"Death and wine do not go together, though the Etruscans thought they did," I answered him, bluntly. "And I will take my leave of you. I cannot see a woman die, and laugh,--if you can."

"Have I laughed? I think not. As for a woman,--Lilas was not a woman. She was a pretty cat, a little sleek beast of prey, a ball of soft wool with a needle hidden in it,--anything you like; but not a woman. I suppose there are women somewhere,--creatures that love men, and bear their young, and are faithful. I suppose they did not all die with Andromache and the rest. But these things we play with are not women. They have as many blood-suckers as the fish octopus, only they are pretty to look at, and suck you softly as a cooing dove. Can you read Shakspeare? You think Dante greater. Of course you do, being an Italian. But you are wrong. Dante never got out of his own narrow world. He filled the great blank of Hereafter with his own spites and despites. He marred his finest verse with false imagery to rail at a foe or flaunt a polemic. His Eternity was only a mill-pond in which he should be able to drown the dogs he hated. A great man!--oh, yes!--but never by a league near Shakspeare. Sympathy is the hall-mark of the poet. Genius should be | | 74 wide as the heavens and deep as the sea in infinite comprehension. To understand intuitively,--that is the breath of its life. Whose understanding was ever as boundless as Shakspeare's? From the woes of the mind diseased, to the coy joys of the yielding virgin; from the ambitions of the king and the conqueror, to the clumsy glee of the clown and the milkmaid; from the highest heights of human life, to the lowest follies of it,--he comprehended all. That is the wonder of Shakspeare. No other writer was ever so miraculously impersonal. And if one thinks of his manner of life it is the more utterly surprising. With everything in his birth, in his career, in his temper, to make him cynic and revolutionist, he has never a taint of either pessimism or revolt. For Shakspeare to have to bow as a mere mime in Leicester's house,--it would have given any other man the gall of a thousand Marats. With that divinity in him, to sit content under the mulberry-trees and see the Squires Lucy ride by in state,--one would say it would have poisoned the very soul of Saint John himself. Yet never a drop of spleen or envy came in him: he had only a witty smile at false dignities, and a matchless universality of compassion that pitied the tyrant as well as the serf, and the loneliness of royalty as well as the loneliness of poverty. That is where Shakspeare is unapproachable. He is as absolutely impartial as a Greek chorus. And, thinking of the manner of his life, it is marvelous that it should have bent him to no bias, warped him to no prejudice. If it were the impartiality of coldness, it would be easy to imitate; but it is the impartiality of sympathy boundless and generous as the sun which 'shines upon the meanest thing that lives as liberally as on the summer rose.' That is where Shakspeare is as far higher from your Dante as one of Dante's angels from the earth."

He spoke with grace, and animation, and sincerity; he had a sweet voice, and a sort of eloquence which, when I came to know him well, I knew was a matter of natural impulse with him, and neither studied nor assumed. But at that moment for a minute I thought him mad, and for another he filled me with disgust. He drank more of his light wine when he had ceased to speak; for me, I threw the glass that he had filled me out of the window into the moonlight.

"You talk very well, no doubt," I said to him, bluntly, | | 75 "and about your Shakspeare you may be right. The Germans always told me the same thing, only they say, some of them, that he was Lord Bacon,--which, if true, upsets your theories. But when your light o' love lies dead ten seconds ago, and you heed her no more than if she were a poisoned rat, it is an odd time to take to preach in praise of sympathy, or say pretty things about a poet."

He smiled, in no wise provoked.

"I am a poet, too, or think so; that is why. We break our hearts in verse."

"Break it in solitude, then," said I, roughly. "You do not want me; you must have troops of friends; for you must be rich, or you never had been favored by that poor dead wretch. The less I hear you talk the less bitter my mouth will taste for the next month. Good-night to you."

I turned my back on him, surlily I dare say, for he was nothing to me except a base-souled, cynical-tongued youth, and that breed I hated, having known the true wants and woes and the real mirthful joys of life, as poor men do perhaps oftener than the rich,--that is, if they be not peevish with their poverty, which spoils everything, as sour cheese spoils the best macaroni. But when I had crossed the room half-way he crossed it too, and overtook-me.

"No; stay with me," he said, pleadingly, as a woman might. "I like your face, and you were kind to-night. My friends will not come for two hours and more. The supper was fixed ,for late, and I do not care to be alone,--with that thing dead so near."

I looked at him in surprise: there was emotion in his voice and in his face. I wondered which was real,--the levity or the feeling; now I think that each was, turn by turn.

"What is that dead thing to you?" I said, echoing his own words. "She is so ugly to look at,--just in an hour,--and she had no soul, you know."

He looked at me with a look of curious bewildered pain, and contempt, and passion, all together.

"No; she had no soul. She is like a dead rat. That is just the horror of it. It is so with us all, of course; oh, yes. But still it sickens one, in spite of reason."

He threw himself into a chair, and a dark shadow came upon his face, that took all its youth away, and made it weary. | | 76 He covered his eyes with his hand some minutes; then he looked up, and rose, and pushed more wine to me, saying, "Drink." I saw on his fair cheeks two great slow coursing tears. I drank his wine.

From that night Hilarion and I had often been together. We had been friends so far as two men could be, sundered by different age and different tempers and most utter difference in all outward circumstances of life. I had learned to love him, he being one of those who compel your liking against your judgment; and Hilarion, with his strange liking in turn for me, his fancies, his riches, his grace, his charming talk, his wanton wanderings through all the realms of all the arts and the philosophies, gave me many a bright hour in my life, for which I was his debtor in many a year that brought him to that great white villa under the shadow of Soracte, which it had been his whim to buy that he might as nearly as possible lead the life of Catullus and of Horace in this age of prose.

When Hilarion was not in Rome, or near it, I myself lost much; yet now I was glad that he was going,--going far away for any indefinite space of time that his caprice might dictate.

"It is best so. Be quiet," I said to Palès; but Palès was howling after him, because she adored him, as did all female things. Yet he would strike her,--when he was in the mood, or she was in the way.

He killed a dog with a blow once,--a careless blow of mere impatience. He gave the dog a marble tomb amidst the flowers, and wrote a poem on it that made the whole wide world weep. But that could not make the dog alive again,--poor brute!

Palès howled after him: she had seen the tomb, and doubt less heard the story from other dogs, but that wrought no difference in her, she being a female thing.

For me, I was glad, as I say, for Hilarion would at times climb up into my room upon the bridge, to gaze at the Hermes, and send his many dreamy fancies out over the bean-flowers, and down the reaches of the river with the pale rings of the smoke; and he was not one whom it was easy to baffle about anything, or send on any false scent at any time.

When he told me his name that night, it was one that the world had heard of, very young though he was.

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He was only a boy, indeed, but within the year then past he had leaped into that kind of sudden and lurid fame which is the most perilous stuff that can test the strong sense of a man or a woman. It is a tarantula-bite to most; few can have been bitten with it without craving forever the music of applause, or losing their brain giddily and dying in dizzy gyrations.

Hilarion had as much strong sense as lies in a strong scorn, and this preserves the head cool, since nothing in all the world is so cold as is contempt; but he had no other strength: so his fame hurt him, because it increased his egotism and rendered effort needless. With different fortunes, and tossed on a sea of endeavor in a dark night of adversity, he would have been a great man. As it was, he was only a clever idler, despite his fame.

That night when the poor wretch of a Lilas died he had been only a brilliant boy; but as the years had rolled on he had done mightier things, and became more celebrated. But to be celebrated is still far off from being great.

He had the temper of Heine and the muse of Musset. Talent like that, when given with it many other gifts that command fortune, easily passes with the world for genius. And, in a sense, genius it was: only it was genius without immortality in it; it was a rose that had a stinging insect at its core; instead of the morning dew.

Life had been always smooth for Hilarion, and though the sadness in him was real and not assumed, it was that more selfish sadness which takes its rise from fatigue at the insufficiency of any pleasure or passion to long enchant or reign.

He came of two opposing races: his father had been a German noble, his mother a Greek princess; his whole education had been in Paris; he had considerable wealth, and large estates that he scarcely ever visited; he had been his own master from very early years; and in mind and person Nature had been most prodigal to him. Yet, despite all this, none could have said that he was satisfied with life: one ought to say, perhaps, because of all this.

Half his sadness was discontent, and the other satiety; but this kind of sadness is widely different from the noble and passionate grief which protests against the illimitable torture of all creation and the terrible silence of the Creator.

It is a melancholy that is morbid rather than majestic,-- | | 78 the morbidness that has eaten into the whole tenor of modern life. Men have forgotten the virile Pyrrhic dance, and have become incapable of the grace of the Ionian: their only dance is a Danse Macabre, and they are always hand in hand with a skeleton.

This age of yours is, in sooth, perhaps the saddest-tempered that the races of men have ever known; but this is the cause of its sadness,--that it has lost the faculty to enjoy.

Hilarion, and such men as Hilarion, are its chosen prophets; and their curse is forever on the barrenness of the land.

The old poets knew the fruitfulness of life, and sang of it. But Hilarion and his brethren only see that Demeter has passed over the earth, and that all is sicklied and sear. And their passionate protest of pain would be grand in its very hopelessness, only that it is spoiled by being too often rather querulousness than despair.

From the night Lilas died to the day he drove past me now with his Roman singing woman, the life of Hilarion had been eventful, but quite shadowless, except for that faint, gray, unchanging shadow of satiety,--a shadow like death, which stretched across all his written pages,--the shadow of that universal incredulity which is the note of this generation.

Horace believed as little as Hilarion; but Horace, in whose time the world yet was young, said, "Let us eat and drink and enjoy, for to-morrow we die," and found pleasure in the carpe diem. But the school of Hilarion says, rather, "Of what use to eat, and how shall we enjoy? All beauty is unlovely, once possessed, and so soon we sleep the dreamless death-sleep with the worms."

Between Horace and Hilarion there is a bottomless gulf, filled with the dull deep waters of satiety; and in that gulf so much of manhood lies drowned.

An age is like a climate: the hardier may escape its influence in much, but the hardiest will not escape its influence entirely.

Now, the poetic temperament is never robust,--no more than the mimosa is, or the nightingale. The soul of the poet is like a mirror of an astrologer: it bears the reflection of the past and of the future, and can show the secrets of men and gods, but all the same it is dimmed by the breath of those who stand by and gaze into it.

When Hilarion came past me in this early morning he was | | 79 many years older than when he had seen Lilas die; he was very celebrated; he had a genius that was facile and never failed him more than a good lute does a good player; women loved, men sought, and enemies feared him; he did as he chose, and wandered where he liked, and failed in nothing that he wished. And yet I would not have changed places with him,--I, Crispino, shaping leather for my bread, with a cabbage-leaf on my skull, between me and the hot Roman sunshine.

For the world is beautiful to me, and its past scenes full of wonder; and the joys and pangs of the people thrill me like music. And when I go up and down the streets I see faces lighten at sight of me, and I care for that: that is, you see, because I am an ignorant man, and soon content. Content is ignorance.

Hilarion, who has everything and knows everything, and sees ten thousand people turn to look at him if he goes through a strange city,--Hilarion is restless and dissatisfied. The parable of Paradise is a very just one. The tree of knowledge may have its roots in wisdom and its branches in action, perhaps; but its fruit is forever unrest.

Well, he was gone, and gone far away. I sighed a little for my own sake, and stitched on in the lovely light warmth of the forenoon.

My blacksmith was a drunken, dissolute fellow, and, being often idle,--for blacksmiths are at a discount on our Seven Hills,--as often as not used his hammers to split open a neighbor's brain-pan. But we do not think much of these trifles, and he paid well, and I did honor to his boots,--brave boots for feast-days, that were alike his misery and glory. When they were done I left them at his place, and went on in search of the girl's things.

After much difficulty and delay,--as there happen always in such matters,--I found them, and had them given over to me, and trundled them home upon a friendly bagarino's barrow, and sent them up to her,--poor small sad burdens, smelling, of the sea, and of the rosemary of the shores whence they had come.

When evening fell and coolness came, I went up as I had promised her, to my own room, where Hermes was, and the carnations, and the bean-flowers.

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Ersilia had shoved the little low bedstead decorously within a recess, and made no opposition to my entrance. The girl was in the old wooden balcony, which at that time of the year, and indeed at almost every other, was brimming over with flowers. There were some small busts, new to me, standing about,--two in marble, a few in clay, a few more carved in wood.

She did not hear me enter.

She was leaning over the wooden rail, with her forehead against the bean-flowers, and her feet amidst the tufts of sweet-smelling thyme; and indeed, when the stars are coming out, but the sunset warmth is still upon the skies, and the river of Midas is stealing silently by to lose itself among the dense grass and tangled lilies of the marshes, there are many less lovely things to do in this world than to stand thus before a window and look down through the heads of the flowers over the million roofs of Rome.

Before disturbing her, I glanced at the busts upon the table: they were graceful things, but sadly weak. There was elegance of fancy and of outline in them, but no strength and no originality. One could well believe them the work of a man who had been a recluse and a dreamer and had refused to do any battle with the world. There was a bust of Faunus, that was pretty,--dear god Faunus, the most despised of all the gods in this day. But, then, sculpture should have so much more than prettiness. Canova's prettiness cursed him; it is almost barrenness.

"They are my father's," she said, coming in from the balcony.

She did not say, "Are they not beautiful?" Perhaps some truer, stronger artistic sense in her made her conscious where they were deficient. But she looked on then with tender eyes of lingering affection; and I could see that to part with them was hurting her.

"He was a classic scholar, I see by them," I said, evasively; and indeed the choice of themes was far out of the common.

"A great scholar," she said, with the warmth of love upon her face. "He taught me all I know. He lived in his Greek and Latin books. The books and these are all he had to leave me."

"You know Latin and Greek?"

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"Oh, yes," she answered in a sort of surprise, as at so simple a question, as though I had asked her had she learned to read.

"He would wish me to sell them," she said, with that look of strongly-repressed pain which gave her young face so much force. "If they ought all to go, take them all. I must owe Ersilia so much. And should I have enough to get a little chamber for myself near this, and buy some clay to work in----?"

"You cannot owe much," said I, lying, as the best of us do lie on occasion. "And one of these busts, or two at most, should bring enough to pay it all and keep you for weeks afterwards, if that be what you are thinking. You wish to stay in Rome?"

"I know no one anywhere. I have no friend," she said, with a simplicity of desolation that wounded one more than all the eloquence of woe.

"You have me, my dear," I said, huskily; for I felt like a fool, and was cross with myself for being no better and no mightier than I was, to be of use to her. "I am an old man, as you see, and of no account, and work for my daily bread; but you may count on me; I will be true to you. I can do little; but what I can do----"

"You are good, and I was ungrateful and forgot," she answered, and laid her hand in mine.

I let it lie there, and bent my head over it. I felt as any old cordwainer of Venice might have felt to Catherine of Cyprus: her youth compelled my age to loyalty.

Then I put on a sheepish look.

"Now you want a room, you say. Why not keep mine, paying me something? It would suit me very well," I said; "because, you see, my dear, I am a poor man, and even the little you would pay I should be glad of. And so we should do one another mutual service, as poor people should; and I have another place to sleep in, because, you know, I keep late, unseemly hours; and Ersilia is angry if one knocks her up, and sees so quickly if one be the worse for wine; not that a Roman ever is, you know, except sometimes in October, out of remembrance of Anne Parenna, who was not Dido's sister, you know, though the scholars tried to make her so when this Hellenism became the rage, and the Julii would have it they | | 82 were Trojans. We Trasteveres all say we are to this day; and indeed the story of Ennius is so pretty, one would be loath to lose it, and the thirty little white pigs, and the old white-haired shepherd-king of Arcadia. Will you please me, and keep the room?"

She looked at me with her clear, pathetic eyes.

"Will it really suit you? Are you sure you do not speak against yourself from kindness?"

And--may the gods forgive me!--I swore by all of them that not only would it suit, but be the making of me; and I persuaded her I spoke the truth. My marble Hermes seemed to me to smile: I suppose he was thinking how many millions of lies men have been telling for woman's sake since first he made her out of sport that day.

But there was no other way that I could so well have served her, for there was no room empty in Ersilia's house, nor had there been one could I have been sure that I could always be able to pay for it; but I knew that I could always lend my own and sleep with Palès, or anywhere about, on bench or under porch, as poor men do. I might get madness from the moon, or death from the bad air; but who is sure that he is wholly sane? And better company has gone before us to the tomb than any that lives now!

"We understand one another, then," I said, after a pause, for I do not like the sadder side of life, and would always turn away from it were it possible. "I am only Cristie the cobbler, a queer fellow, as you will hear, and an old man, and poor, but very well contented; and how much that is to say! I am so glad you will keep this room. It is no use to me; my business lies in the street from night to morning, and Hermes here must be so glad to see your face instead of mine."

I asked her if there was nothing that she had moulded herself which she could show me. She said that they were very little things, not worth the looking at, but fetched them. I found them fully worth,--graceful, yet strong; little naked figures of fish-children, full of spirit; and some heads and figures of classic themes, treated with far more strength than was in any of her father's. One wingless Love of the early Greek poets seemed to me wonderful from such a child. I told her so.

"How can you look at them after my father's?" she said, | | 83 almost in reproof. "And indeed, you know, the working was insomuch his: the idea was mine, and he helped me to put it into shape."

"The idea is the art," I said, angry with her that she should so depreciate herself for that dead and useless man, whom I myself could have kicked almost in his coffin.

However, I did not say that, but took two busts,--the one of Heliodora and the other of the boy Zagreus looking in the fatal mirror; and I prayed her to accept hospitality of me for a day longer at the least, and left her looking out through the red flowers at the deep-blue skies of the night, with the stars shining on the moss-grown roof of the little temple of Vesta, and in the sleepy, brown waters of Tiber.

"You are not unhappy now?" I said to her in farewell.

She looked at me with a smile.

"You have given me hope; and I am in Rome, and I am young."

She was right. Rome may be only a ruin, and Hope but another name for deception and disappointment; but youth is supreme happiness in itself, because all possibilities lie in it, and nothing in it is as yet irrevocable.

Ersilia hurried in at that moment, angry because the casement was open, the wind cool, the river dangerous, and all the trouble she had taken in the fever imperiled by so much imprudence. Ersilia was a grand old Roman woman, majestic and imposing; but she was furious of tongue and violent about small things, and much given to driving other people hither and thither with her will and fiery word. Of men she had always the most miserable opinion. Pippo was the only good one of all his worthless set,--Pippo, who had been her lover once and her lodger always, and who, having sung his passion to her on a lute fifty years before, now showed it in a less poetic but as palatable a manner, by frying her many a purple artichoke and golden little fish, and cooking for everybody in her hive-like house.

The busts I did sell at a shop I knew in the Spanish square. I got a small sum for each; I quadrupled it with that money in the jar in the wall, and took it to her.

"I had double this, but I have paid all you owe Ersilia," I said to her. I thought and wished it so. "Also I have taken a month's rent for my room, as you desired. Ersilia | | 84 will see to you. It will cost little; and she is a good woman, honest and true: you will not mind her tongue. Let it run on as we let the wind blow. Yes; those busts sold well. When you have done this money we can sell two others. You think the money too much? Ough! Dealers know their own business. It is not for us to teach it to them."

Now, of course, all this was pure lying. But then it soothed her and set her heart at rest. She never would have taken money from me; she would have gone out and wandered in the streets till she fell senseless with homelessness and hunger, and then they would have taken her to some public hospital, and so the end would have come. Therefore I lied.

I was thankful then I had had that little store put by in case of my own sickness or of some street-accident. It was but very little; but it served its turn.

So she settled down in my chamber, nothing doubting, with a weary sort of peacefulness such as a wounded bird might feel sinking under fresh leaves after a heavy storm. She was not happy,--how should she have been?--but she was at rest. It was the best thing for her.

She was tired and confused and feverish still, and the great close heats of Rome, the heat that has no wind to stir, no rain to freshen it, tried her, reared as she had been all her short life on the high cliffs among the breeze-swept rosemary and arbutus above the blue Ligurean sea. But this she never would allow, because she would let no complaint of anything of Rome escape her.

And there was Hilarion's beautiful cool marble-paved villa among the flowers and the fountains, in the shadow of the hills, standing empty for all but a few idle servants, and its master meanwhile away heaven knew where,--in deep Danubian woods, or beside blue Northern lakes, or on wind-freshened Western seas, in coolness and in calm, going wherever the current of his fancy drifted him.

The contrast made me irritable, as I never had been at such contrasts for my own sake; for it is contrast that gives the color to life, and communism is but a poor short-sighted creed, and would make the world a blank were it reducible to practice.

For me, I have no prejudices of that kind, or of any other: | | 85 when one comes of the gens Quintilii, and is a cobbler by trade, one may be said to be bound to the two uttermost extremes of the social scale, and so may sit in judgment in the middle fairly, and survey both with equal impartiality. Where there is hatred of one or of the other, true judgment is possible of neither: that is quite certain.

One could not do better for her; and at least she was safe, body and soul. That is much for a girl, friendless and homeless and beautiful to look upon as any jewel-like flower of the sea.

So she became settled in our midst, and all the people of the Rione got to say she was my daughter whom I did not like fairly to own. It was absurd; but they might have said worse things, and it did no harm. Indeed, in a measure, it seemed to protect her. I was thought to be very close and unpleasant because I never would talk of her; but when you know nothing it is always best to say nothing,--everybody thinks you know so much. And, indeed, there was always something in her that escaped me. Her mind seemed to be always far away.

I got her some clay, and she worked upon it; it passed the time for her, and she really had lovely fancies, and greater skill in giving them shape than could have been looked for in one so young.

Of course they were only small things; but as she made them I set them up upon my stall, and sometimes people bought them, and that pleased her. It served to beguile her out of that intense, unspoken, heavy sadness which had fallen on her with her pain at the ruin of Rome.

To see her work upon the clay was like seeing young Callisto herself; her close, white linen dress hung almost like the tunic of Virgil's Lycoris; her arms were bare to the shoulder because of the great heat; her hair of that rich dusky golden bronze was like a sun-bathed cloud over her forehead; her lustrous, intense eyes were grave and brilliant with meditation and with teeming fancy. If Hilarion could see her, I used to think, and was thankful he was far away.

With all artists that are artists indeed and not artisans, the conception is always immeasurably superior to the power of execution; the visible form which they can give their ideas always is to them utterly inferior to the wonders and the | | 86 beauties that they dream of: with her, of course, it was necessarily so in the very largest measure, she herself being so young and her art the most difficult of any. She saw things beautiful and perfect as all the buried treasures of Phidias, but Phidias himself could hardly have given them an embodiment that would have contented her.

Meanwhile, her brain dreamed conjured visions; and her hands modeled in the gray clay and the red earth little heads of children and shapes of animals and of birds and of leaves that were pretty to see and drew many an idler to them. They sold for only a few copper pieces, indeed, because the people were all poor that came near, and for the matter of that the works cost as much as the little things brought; but it kept her quiet and contented to believe that she earned her own bread and bed, and it made it easy for me to cheat her into that belief. Indeed, a baby could have cheated her: those large brilliant eyes of hers, that saw so far into the past ages and were always looking for things not to be found upon earth, saw but a very little way into the disguises of men and women and the cobwebs their words weave. It is always so the far sight that can discern the eagle flying in the rarefied air above the distant mountain-snows will not see the mosquitoes that are hissing within the distance of an inch, or the dust, that lies close at hand up the corner.

The only thing I ever said to them was,--

"I am the cobbler of the Forum, you know this; but this girl was the daughter of Virginius, and before that she was Ariadne."

And that, of course, they knew was nonsense; but they laughed, and they left her alone, and the crew on my estate used to learn to call out Ariadne.

"I do not like Ariadne," she said, herself. "I am sorry I am like that bronze of hers. She was so faithless----"

"Faithless! She was deserted herself. Have you forgotten Naxos?"

"Oh, no. It is Naxos I mean. Why did she let Bacchus come near her?"

"But she was cruelly abandoned."

"She should have been faithful herself."

"That is saying very much."

She looked at me with a little contempt.

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"She could not have helped being faithful had she been worth anything."

"That is your idea of love, then?"

"Yes."

"How should you know of it, child? What should you know of love?" I said to her.

"I have thought about it," she answered, gravely, then added, after a pause, "It must be very terrible to have no life any longer of your own; only to live through the eyes and the breath and the heart of another."

"Who told you it was all that?"

"Oh, the poets; and something in one's self. It must be terrible."

"My dear, there are not many who feel love at all in that sort of way."

"There can be no other way," she said, with that soft, calm resoluteness which was so inflexible in her. There were things, one felt, in which one never could change her.

And she was right. Truly, there is no other way: the plaything which the chief number of men and women call love is no more that sacred thing, that imperishable and unutterable passion, than fireflies upon the summer night are Aldebaran and Orion.

The girl sat thoughtful, with her level brows a little drawn together, and her eyes looking at the Tiber swirling round the piles of the Quattro Cassi and lapping the marshy ground of the Velalerum,--great Tiber, that far away yonder in the dusky oak woods of Umbria--of that Umbria which is older than Etruria--runs a little rill among the mountain-mosses; Tiber, a brook that a baby can wade and a rabbit skip across; Tiber, a mere thread of water, where lovers mirror their smiling eyes, and charcoal-burners dip their birch-bark cups; Tiber, that comes down from the oak woods to roll like molten bronze towards the setting sun, big with the mightiest memories of the world; Tiber, that has engulfed the statues of Etruria, and the osier figures of the Vestals, and the treasures of Hadrian, and the golden toys of the Agrippines, and the spoils of Jerusalem, and the corpses of the Spolarium, and holds them all fast and only yields them to the sea.

I did not like to see her so thoughtful.

"Let us go for a walk," I said to her: "the evening is | | 88 beautiful. Let us go on the same pilgrimage that Ovid sent his manuscript,--from the laurels that grew before the door of his tyrant, past the Danaïds, whose labors were not more fruitless than his prayers, on to the library of Pollion in the Atrium of Liberty,--you remember? Oh, yes, I can show you every step of the way. Poor little book! Knocking at all the library doors and everywhere refused !

"'Why do I send you my songs only that I may be in some manner with you,' he wrote: how the whole nature of him is painted in those words! Ovid adored Rome. But he would have been happier in the Athens of Pericles or the Paris of our day. The smell of blood must have spoiled the moonlit nights for him when he sat by his open window looking out on the Capitol: it was all ablaze with gold then, but Freedom cannot dwell with too much gold; it chokes her as rich food does the dog. Will you not come, my dear?"

She came, and willingly. We had many such walks together when the sun had set and my work was done and the Fauns were all piping in the fountains.

She was not easily tired: the fleet young feet that had waded all their few years in the clear blue shallows of the Maremma shores were as enduring as Atalanta's. Nor was she tired of my rambling talk, because all the memories and legends of the city were vivid in her own mind, and for me, I have all the crooks and turns of the streets at my toes' ends, and had puzzled out all the old Rome that lay beneath them,--Cæsarean, Latin, Etrurian, Sabine, and Pelasgic.

For myself, I confess, I cared most for the Cæsarean. Not for the Cæsars themselves; who can care? but for the men who lived in all those terrible days, so terrible even at their best, the men whose books are household words to-day.

The Satires and the Eclogues, the Odes and the Georgics, have proved more lasting powers than the Conscriptions and the Conquests.

I had always loved to wander about and think of them, and I was glad that she would go so often with me in that black muffling which Ersilia made her wear to escape notice, and only showing out of it her delicate head, with the lustrous hair bound close above it, but always tumbling over her eyes because of its abundance. Ersilia wished her to be veiled also; but that she would not have: she wanted all the air | | 89 here, where the scented winds that come through orange-blooms and cedars still seem to bring some scent of murdered millions.

We would go together to the old book-stalls and hunt for quaint black-letter folios and little old out-of-the-way volumes of classics; we would try and find out the very spot where Martial's garret was in the Quarter of the Pear-tree by the temple of Quirinius, so high up that he could look right downwards and see the laurels by the house of Agrippa near the Flaminian way: we would sit on the steps of the Pincian hill, under the palm, by what was once the palace of Belisarius, and talk of the conquests, and of the cherry-trees of Lucullus, and think of that awful night in these, of old, his gardens where Messalina lay on the turf among her bacchantes and Vettius climbing the trees and looking seaward said, "I see a great storm that comes from Ostia,"--the storm whose wind was death: we would go up the Sacred Way and picture the great Roman dames getting their strenæ for the January visits as they get them in Paris now, and buying their false golden tresses "at the Portico of Philip in front of the temple of Hercules:" we would go out at the gates and talk of the Palilia, and the Vinalia, and of Tibullus, and of the spring-time when he used to leap over the fires and sprinkle the flocks from a bough of laurel with his shepherds at Pedum.

We would wander up among the vines and cabbage-gardens of the Esquiline, and fancy that we found the spot where Virgil lived (though no one ever well knew it), and where Propertius sighed to that red and white Cynthia whose mules seemed to trot still with their tied-up tails along the Appian Way.

Do you remember the day Propertius lost his tablets and bewailed them,--the tablets that he wrote his prayers on to her, and on which she in return would write back, "Come"? was there ever another lost trifle whose advertisement has been read two thousand years by all the world? Cynthia was a good-for-naught--and what a temper!--she boxed his ears, and flew on Phyllis and Teia like a fury, though the ground was strewn deep with white roses, and there was sweet flute-playing; she did not even affect to be so much as faithful; she found the rich money-lender from Illyria more solid prey than her poet, who perhaps may have been a little too scholarly for her; she | | 90 painted her face, she had false hair, she drank, she gambled, she did everything she ought not to have done, that beautiful Cynthia, all lilies and roses; indeed, she was just like your women of the present day in everything; and yet she has been sung of by her lover in such a fashion that the world will never forget her,--no more than it will forget its Cæsars. Such is justice; and so kind is Venus Volgivaga.

One wonders if they gave Propertius the tomb he asked her for, underneath the shelter of the leaves, unseen and unknown by all, "for crowds insult the grave of love." Perhaps they did; at least, no one can ever find it now.

These were the things I thought of most; it may be contemptible, it no doubt is, but when I go about the Forum it is not half so much of Cicero or of Virginius that I think as it is of Horace going into that one of his bookseller's shops that was hard by the statue of the Etruscan Vertumnus; or of the copyists writing in the offices of Atrectus, with the titles of the new books pasted at the doors for the lazy people of pleasure to see as they passed on their evening drive; or of Ovid--dear, hapless Ovid--applauding above all others the statue of Aphrodite as the procession of the gods passed by, brushing the dust from the white roses of his fair friend, fanning her with the flabellum, or telling her who would win in the circus, who were the captive kings in the triumph, and what the conquered countries,--" yonder Euphrates with his crown of reeds, and here with azure hair great Tigris."

Ah, dear me! Ovid died in exile, and yet you call Augustus great! But Ovid has his desire in death.

"So long as Rome shall look down from her mountains on the universe, I shall be there;" and he is here. He was weak in his life; but no hero ever spoke greater words than those last words of his.

All the might of Cæsar cannot outlaw or dethrone him now. He has conquered Augustus.

So she and I went about the old ways together, companioned with the shades. Only she would think more of Scipio and his one word Zara, of the Horatii, of the Antonines; more of the old Etrurian and Sabine Rome; more of Virgil and of his Æneas lying down at night upon the bearskins in the tent, of the old shepherd king in the shadow of the Sacred Woods upon the Palatine. It was all true and real to her. So best. | | 91 Scholars, and sciolists, maybe, even more than scholars, strip the past too bare.

There never was Æneas; there never was a Numa: well, what the better are we? We only lose the Trojan ship gliding into Tiber's mouth when the rose-thickets that bloomed by Ostia were reddening with the first warmth of the day's sun; we only lose the Sabine lover going by the Sacred Way at night, and sweet Egeria weeping in the woods of Nemi; and are--by their loss--how much the poorer!

Perhaps all these things never were.

The little stone of truth rolling through the many ages of the world has gathered and grown gray with the thick mosses of romance and superstition. But tradition must always have that little stone of truth as its kernel; and perhaps he who rejects all is likelier to be wrong than even foolish folk like myself who love to believe all and tread the new paths, thinking ever of the ancient stories. Will painting ever have a lovelier origin than that fair daughter of Demaratus tracing the beloved shadow on the wall? And whilst one mother's heart still beats among women, who shall coldly dissect and deny the sorrows of great Demeter?

It is all fable. It is all metaphor. It never was. You are a fool.

Well, say so if you choose, you wise generations. who have made your god of a yelling steam-engine and dwell in herds under a pall of soot.