rersity 
 
 outhern 
 
 Library
 
 
 
 
 THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES
 
 ROSES OF PAESTUM
 
 Nay, ye may not liken dog-roses to the rose, or wind- 
 flowers to the roses of the garden. THEOC. ID. v. 
 
 (LANG'S Trans.)
 
 ROSES OF PAESTUM BY 
 
 EDWARD McCURDY 
 
 PRINTED FOR THOMAS B MOSHER AND 
 PUBLISHED BY HIM AT 43 EXCHANGE 
 STREET PORTLAND MAINE MDCCCCXII
 
 COPYRIGHT 
 
 THOMAS B MOSHER 
 
 1912 
 
 Limited to Seven Hundred 
 Copies Jor Sale in America
 
 ROSES OF PAESTUM 
 
 TO G 
 
 You brought to Paestum roses, 
 And in Poseidon's plain 
 A crttmbling wall encloses, 
 You made them bloom again 
 Abotit his mighty fane. 
 Each temple with your dower 
 Was decked a lovely bower. 
 
 Red roses, yea, you brought them, 
 
 And roses white as snow, 
 
 And like Greek gardeners taught them 
 
 To stand in many a row 
 
 And their sweet scents to throw. 
 
 Virgil, Ausonius, 
 
 Did see and smell them thus. 
 
 From love's most secret places 
 You brought them all with you, 
 That in these wide waste spaces 
 Gardens might spring anew 
 And with pink petals strew 
 The sultry azure floor 
 Thetis' white feet explore. 
 
 Perchance those frowning mountains 
 
 Seeing, shall cease to frown, 
 
 And from their rock-sealed fountains 
 
 Clear crystal streams send down 
 
 To lave that roseate crown, 
 
 And keep those roses fair 
 
 Your love has planted there. 
 
 WILLIAM ASPENWALL BRADLEY 
 
 499279 
 
 UMUKZ
 
 TO THE READER: 
 BY WAY OF PREFACE 
 
 HESE Essays treat of Italy and the medi- 
 eval spirit, and Italy is a wayward 
 I sovereign, and her beauty leads a man far 
 afield. 
 
 Let me say now that the work is done in such 
 measure as I am able that my purpose was to trace 
 the mediceval spirit in deed and dream by considering 
 some of its imaginative activities, its questings of the 
 ideal in art, in faith, in love, and in fantasies of things 
 more visionary than these. 
 
 They were the roses of mediceval beauty that I set out 
 to gather, and therefore the leaves are named of the 
 Paestan roses because these also were of seed of Greece 
 and bloomed in Italy, 
 
 Now that the leaves are all placed together 1 know 
 that they are but wind-flowers. Some day I hope to 
 gather of the roses of the garden.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 TO THE READER : BY WAY OF PREFACE Vll 
 
 FOREWORD XI 
 
 PROEM: ALL' ITALIA 3 
 
 I ROSES OF PAESTUM 7 
 
 II THE VITA NUOVA 33 
 
 III PALMERS, PILGRIMS, AND ROMERS 58 
 
 IV VISION AND MEMORY 95 
 
 V UNDISCOVERED ISLANDS . . . . 123 
 
 VI DEO SOLI INVICTO 142 
 
 VII THE RING OF CANACE .... 162 
 
 VIII THE HORNS OF ELFLAND . . . 180 
 
 IX, ROS ROSARUM 189
 
 FOREWORD 
 
 'HE first and only edition of Roses of 
 Paestum was published twelve years 
 ago x and its reception precisely the 
 same as that accorded Maurice Hewlett's 
 Earthwork out of Tuscany. In other words 
 both books to the English critical mind were 
 regarded as so much literary love's labor lost. 
 Mr. Hewlett has long since recovered from 
 this lack of appreciation and it is our belief 
 that Mr. McCurdy also is in a fair way to 
 come into his own. He has recently made 
 a very complete translation of Leonardo da 
 Vinci's Note Books as well as given separately 
 in a still more accessible shape the thoughts 
 on Life, Nature and Art of the great artist. 2 
 
 ' Roses of Paestum by Edward McCurdy. London: 
 George Allen, 156, Charing Cross Road, 1900. (Fcap 
 8vo. Pp. viii : 1-200.) 
 
 2 Leonardo da Vincfs Note Books arranged and 
 rendered into English with Introduction. (Octavo.) 
 London, 1906 ; and the Thoughts of Leonardo da Vinci 
 as recorded in his " Note Books." (Fcap 8vo.) Lon- 
 don, 1907.
 
 xii Fore-word 
 
 The text of our reissue of Roses of Paestum 
 has been revised and a brief Proem added 
 which, though written at the same time as the 
 other essays, was omitted for reasons of a 
 personal nature that no longer exist. Mr. 
 McCurdy in this new edition again offers a 
 work dealing not only with Paestum and its 
 roses but with mediaeval Italy and its effect 
 upon a singularly receptive mind, and it is a 
 book that will not fail of due recognition. 
 
 The consent of Mr. William Aspenwall 
 Bradley to reprint his poem originally con- 
 tributed to Putnam's Magazine is gratefully 
 acknowledged. 
 
 T. B. M.
 
 ROSES OF PAESTUM
 
 PROEM : ALL' ITALIA 
 
 ||ADY, fair lady, lady of many tears 
 and sighs and many hearts' ravish- 
 ment ! Lo ! thou hast been as a 
 Helen among the nations ; and afire with thy 
 beauty lovers have come from many lands 
 to possess thee ; and they have striven for 
 thee, and their blood has stained thy robes, 
 and they have died; and thou hast passed 
 on heart free despite their endeavours, or if 
 indeed possessed, possessed but as suppli- 
 ants possess the courtyard of princes. For 
 they came of old thinking to win kingdoms, 
 those fair-haired Franks and Longobards ; 
 and thy soft airs killed remembrance, and the 
 languor of contentment unnerved the arm of 
 their endeavour, and the sword that had won 
 them entrance lay idle in its scabbard, and 
 their pause of purpose was as that of those 
 who thought to mate with Circe, but were 
 found pasturing in her plesaunce and listening 
 in tranced expectancy to her singing, witless
 
 4 Proem : AW Italia 
 
 that they had changed and their hopes with 
 them, forgetful even of the desire of attain- 
 ment. 
 
 Now thou art subject unto none, but art 
 sovereign, and thine own children dwell within 
 thy gates, and thou art one of the rulers of the 
 earth. Yet in the councils of princes thou 
 art as one in alien air, for thy kingdom is not 
 as other kingdoms, and they who strove with 
 arms to possess thee knew thee not. 
 
 Thou art sovereign, and thy kingdom is 
 beauty, and as men love beauty so they love 
 thee, and they who love thee are thy children. 
 
 O mother of many children, for all who 
 seek thee thou hast gifts in store. Thou hast 
 taught thy children to catch the blue of heaven 
 and mirror it in the dome of God's house, and 
 to paint the holy mysteries at the altars with 
 such a blending of sense and spirit that to those 
 who look upon them heaven seems nearer and 
 visions float before their eyes, and they win 
 foreknowledge. To some thou hast given to 
 carve marble to such a semblance of life that 
 the thought they have striven to express has 
 been taken captive and lain in toils within the 
 stone.
 
 Proem: AW Italia 5 
 
 To poets thou hast been a mighty mother 
 of inspiration from the days of thy greatest 
 son who sang of love mystical, and was led by 
 her in vision through hell to heaven ; and 
 ever from afar have come the singers of many 
 lands drawn by the fame of thee, with the 
 desire of beholding thy face, and thou hast 
 touched their lips to new utterance. 
 
 Others have come seeking of thee the heal- 
 ing gift of rest ; and to many thou hast given 
 renewal of the energy of life, and they have 
 returned with fresh strength to their purposes, 
 with strength that has been caught from the 
 sunshine of thy face ; to others to look upon 
 thee is as the opening of the last act of life's 
 drama a tragedy of which the storm and 
 stress are past, and thy gift to them is a gift 
 of healing the healing of regret and the 
 gift of peace in renunciation, and they are 
 contented that the flame be stilled, and that 
 thou shouldst hold their embers and their 
 hopes in trust. 
 
 Mother most bounteous, gifts hast thou in 
 store for all who seek. 
 
 Lo 1 I come seeking thee, O give me thy 
 gift.
 
 I 
 
 ROSES OF PAESTUM 
 
 GYPT in her pride had sent thee, 
 Caesar, winter roses as a rare gift. 
 But as the sailor from Memphis came 
 near to thy city he thought scorn of the gar- 
 dens of the Pharaohs, so beautiful was Spring 
 and odorous Flora's grace, and the glory of 
 our Paestan country, so sweetly did the path- 
 way blush with trailing garlands wherever his 
 glance or step might fall in his wandering." 
 
 And Martial asks that Egypt should rather 
 henceforth send grain and take roses, seeing 
 that in these she must yield the palm to the 
 Roman winter. 
 
 The -Roman winter has still its eulogists, 
 it is hard to overstate its perennial beauty ; 
 but the supply of Paestan roses can no longer 
 be accounted in its praise. 
 
 The glory of the Paestan country is still a 
 thing to wonder at. The city is set between 
 the mountains and the sea. Behind it the
 
 8 Roses of Paestum 
 
 wild glens wind steeply to the huge amphi- 
 theatre of the Apennines, whose jagged peaks 
 strain upwards to the deep-blue dome of the 
 Calabrian sky. To the north the Gulf of 
 Salerno is broken in tiny bays, in which nestle 
 Positano and Amalfi, and above the latter 
 Ravello is seen gleaming proudly on its height. 
 A meadow lies between the city and the sea, 
 and across the bay the eye rests on the 
 islands of the Sirens, and Capri. 
 
 The city was founded by Greek colonists 
 from Sybaris in about 600 B. c. It remained 
 practically a Greek city after becoming sub- 
 ject to the native Lucanians, and we are told 
 that the inhabitants were wont to assemble 
 every year to lament their captivity and recall 
 the memory of their greatness. Posidonia 
 became Paestum, and flourished under Roman 
 rule. Her legions took part in the Punic 
 wars, but her famed arts were ever those of 
 peace. Virgil as well as Martial tells of her 
 flowery gardens, and of the roses that bloomed 
 both in spring .and autumn "biferique Rosaria 
 Paesti" ; and whenever Roman poets singing 
 of the rose were minded that she should be 
 known of local habitation, it was for the most
 
 Roses of Paestum 9 
 
 part in Paestan gardens that they gathered 
 her; so that the roses of Paestum became 
 known as emblems of her beauty. Life 
 receded from the city in the latter days of the 
 Empire, and finally the Saracens sacked and 
 devastated it, and the Normans, a century 
 later, under Robert Guiscard carried off all 
 that they could carry of its sculpture to 
 Salerno and Amalfi, there founding cathedrals 
 with marble from its temples. The mouth of 
 the river Silarus meanwhile had silted up, 
 and the plain had become a marsh, stagnant 
 and miasmal. 
 
 The city now is a solitude. A few frag- 
 ments of the ancient walls and the lower part 
 of one of the gates remain ; yet the little 
 that is left of what the Romans built seems 
 new, and, like the few modern houses of 
 Pesto, seems to shrink away in timidity before 
 the three Greek temples whose huge colon- 
 nades tower majestically to the horizon. 
 They lie facing the sea and the sunset robed 
 in the awful beauty of desolation and decay, 
 timeless monuments of an immemorial past. 
 Of the three, the temple of Poseidon is at once 
 the oldest, the largest, and the most complete.
 
 io Roses of Paestum 
 
 "New Gods are crowned in the city" or 
 were in the years before the city became a 
 solitude peopled only by marbles and memories. 
 New temples of strange worship were set 
 beside this temple of Poseidon ; and from 
 these, too, the flame of human veneration has 
 passed, and the altars have been bared of 
 sacrifice and votive offering, and they have 
 passed away with the passing of the life that 
 dwelt beneath their shadow. Immutable, the 
 temple of the sea-god has been witness of 
 their coming and departing, and by its con- 
 trast with their transience it would seem that 
 beneath the surges that murmur to the 
 meadow, the god still lies in power, potent as 
 of old to guard his sanctuary. 
 
 There is a fascination and a sense of con- 
 tent in the scene which is in itself a recognition 
 of the supreme, the inevitable beauty with 
 which nature has encompassed the desolate 
 temples. 
 
 The sunlight is as a wand of enchantment 
 wonder-working; the air quivers golden to 
 the alchemy of its touch ; the smitten facets 
 of the marble gleam and glister with hues 
 iridescent. Wild flowers spring luxuriant
 
 ftoses of Pacstum n 
 
 from the crevices of the columns ; lizards 
 slumber on the stones ; all around is heard 
 incessantly the dry chirp chirp of the cicalas ; 
 and in the meadow to seaward herds of oxen 
 wrench the long coarse grasses. Sun-steeped 
 nature covers the footprints of the past, yet 
 her beauty hides not rather enforces that 
 they are footprints and they are desolate. 
 Cicalas sing where once was the music of 
 many voices ; acanthus now where once grew 
 roses ; and of the rose-gardens whereof the 
 Roman poets sang no vestige remains. 
 
 They are in thought fair to dwell upon, and 
 they call a fair picture before us, the long 
 festoons of roses trailing around balconies or 
 gardens. Nestling amid their fragrance, lovers 
 would sit at nightfall and listen to some 
 singer from Syracuse. Perhaps as the singing 
 ceased they would wander together in the 
 moonlight down the long colonnades and look 
 over the sea to the isles of the Sirens dark 
 and tremulous in the evening air; and stay 
 awhile, silently, hearing the murmur of the 
 stillest wave, the one pitying all those mariners 
 who had been lured to death, the other think- 
 ing of that strange mastering music which had
 
 12 Roses of Paestum 
 
 drawn all men unto it until Ulysses' ship 
 passed by unheedingly and the singers perished 
 and the rocks were silent, wondering, may be, 
 if the sea had memory and in its voice lived 
 their song imperishable ; and then they would 
 turn and wander back among the roses and 
 think no more upon death. 
 
 Fantasies woven of dream! Imaginings 
 of days that are dead to memory ! Yet the 
 Greek city by the bay of Salerno must have 
 witnessed many such scenes in the days of 
 the roses' flowering. 
 
 As the ivy round the oak so legend twines 
 its tendrils around history, clinging to and 
 supported by its strength, yet chapleting it 
 with leaves undying after that its sap has 
 departed, distaining or denying the touch of 
 death. So when legend drawn by the grandeur 
 of their deeds has twined her tendrils around 
 the names of kings and warriors, her contest 
 with death is not for their memory alone, she 
 tells rather that they are not dead but fallen 
 asleep, and that in the fulness of time they 
 will awaken. So Arthur " Rex quondam 
 Rexque futurus " abides in Avilion to be healed 
 of his wound, and "men say that he shall
 
 Roses of Pa e stum 13 
 
 come again and he shall win the holy cross " ; 
 so Charlemagne, and Barbarossa, sleeping in 
 his mountain fastness they will awaken, 
 legends say, in the hour of need. 
 
 As with kings exalted above their compeers 
 in prowess, so with the flower of flowers, 
 
 " Ut Rosa flos florum 
 Sic Arthurus rex regum," 
 
 and the roses of Paestum, the roses of Greek 
 beauty growing on Italian soil, in Virgil "the 
 rose twice-flowering," "biferique Rosaria 
 Paesti," passed not into memory when their 
 gardens were forsaken. They were upgathered 
 of the immortal spirit of beauty, and lay in 
 slumber until the fulness of the time of reflow- 
 ering, when in the valley of the Arno all the 
 arts resurgent were one harmony of joy and 
 thanksgiving. 
 
 To consider the second flowering of the 
 roses we must leave the Greek city, deserted 
 and finally despoiled by the Normans, and 
 pass to Pisa. 
 
 Pisa in the twelfth century was the mistress 
 of the Tyrrhene sea. Her supremacy extended 
 along the coast from Spezia to the port of
 
 14 Roses of Paestum 
 
 Rome. Her grandeur in its zenith is perhaps 
 only comparable in its conditions to that of 
 Venice two centuries later. She took part in 
 the Crusades and had great trade with the 
 East. She had won from the Saracens Sar- 
 dinia and the Balearic Isles, and had defeated 
 their fleets off Tunis and Palermo. 
 
 Ever Ghibelline, ready to fight the Emperor's 
 feuds as well as her own, she warred with all 
 her neighbours and especially with the other 
 maritime republics. " The mad little sea- 
 falcon never caught sight of another water-bird 
 on the wing but she must hawk at it ; " and 
 after the fall of the Hohenstaufen she was at 
 last subdued on the sea by her inveterate and 
 often defeated foe Genoa, at the battle of 
 Meloria. 
 
 Her fleets returning in the days of her 
 triumph, brought back spoil and art treasure: 
 the Pandects of Justinian from Amalfi, earth 
 from Palestine that her dead might rest in her 
 Campo Santo, marble sculpture from the East, 
 from Sicily, and from various parts of the 
 peninsula to adorn her cathedral, which she 
 had built in memory of her victory over the 
 Saracens off Palermo.
 
 Roses of Pacstum 15 
 
 Among this sculpture was a sarcophagus 
 with two scenes in bas-relief from the story of 
 Phaedra and Hippolytus, which for many 
 centuries stood beside one of the doors of the 
 Cathedral. It there served as the tomb of 
 Beatrice of Lorraine, the mother of the 
 Countess Matilda of Tuscany who has been 
 by some identified with the Matelda whom 
 Dante saw beyond the stream of Lethe walk- 
 ing in a meadow singing and gathering flowers, 
 and who became his guide through the 
 Terrestrial Paradise. 
 
 The custom of using these sarcophagi as 
 Christian tombs was not infrequent, and there 
 are similar sculptured sarcophagi in the 
 Cathedrals of Amalfi and Salerno. 
 
 These, together with the numerous marble 
 columns of atrium and campanile, were 
 undoubtedly taken from Paestum ; and it is 
 perhaps permissible theorizing where record 
 can neither substantiate nor confute to 
 assign to the relief of Phaedra and Hippolytus 
 the same place of origin. The Pandects were 
 in all probability not the only trophy which 
 the Pisans carried away after their victory 
 over Amalfi, and we know that sculptured
 
 1 6 Roses of Paestum 
 
 reliefs from Paestum were there ready to their 
 hand. 
 
 The sarcophagus, whether from Paestum 
 or elsewhere, is carved in the classical Greek 
 manner, and Vasari tells us that as it stood 
 by the door of the Cathedral it drew the 
 attention of Niccola Pisano, who was working 
 there under some Byzantine masters. "Nic- 
 cola was attracted by the excellence of this 
 work, in which he greatly delighted, and 
 which he studied diligently, with the many 
 other valuable sculptures of the relics around 
 him, imitating the admirable manner of these 
 works with so much success, that no long time 
 had elapsed before he was esteemed the best 
 sculptor of his time." 
 
 There is nothing sensational about this 
 statement, and its moderation may incline us 
 to accept it without cavil on the much vexed 
 question of Vasari's inaccuracies. 
 
 Niccola Pisano was destined to be the 
 founder of a new school of sculpture, but he 
 was then an apprentice, and like Cimabue in 
 his youth, was studying his art under Byzantine 
 masters, who were then the best exponents of 
 the arts of design ; and this is invariably the
 
 Roses of Paestum 17 
 
 way in which genius prepares itself for active 
 service, there is no rupture in tradition, the 
 old is assimilated and then the step forward 
 is made. 
 
 He saw in the Greek reliefs a precision of 
 touch, a feeling of dignity and beauty which 
 surpassed anything that his Byzantine masters 
 had attained to in their works. 
 
 Still working we presume with the Byzan- 
 tines, he added a new teacher, and served a 
 new apprenticeship to the work of this unknown 
 Greek. Athena issued forth from the head 
 of Zeus fully armed and equipped, but the 
 votaries of her arts know no such perfection 
 of birth for them toil ever precedes achieve- 
 ment. So after studying the reliefs diligently, 
 he began to try to copy bits of them, at first 
 probably with no success at all, still he kept 
 on, for he knew there was something to learn 
 from this carving if he could only learn it; 
 and his attempts at imitation grew a little bit 
 like, and then more like, until finally he found 
 he could carve heads quite like those on the 
 sarcophagus if he wanted to, and vary them a 
 bit if he didn't, although if he varied them 
 the faces were still Greek and not Pisan, and
 
 1 8 Roses of Paestum 
 
 they probably looked altogether nicer than the 
 originals because they were not weather-stained 
 or lacking any hands or noses through the 
 mischances of time and travel. 
 
 When the Pisans saw what Niccola could 
 do they employed him to make a pulpit for 
 the Baptistery, and this he completed in 1260, 
 being then about fifty-five years of age. It is 
 perhaps the most beautiful work of its kind in 
 Italy, and has for rival only Niccola's own 
 subsequent work at Siena. It is hexagonal, 
 built entirely of white marble, the angles 
 resting on Corinthian pillars which alternately 
 descend to the ground or are carried on the 
 backs of lions ; from their capitals spring 
 tref oiled arches, and above these, on five of 
 the sides of the hexagon, are bas-reliefs of the 
 Nativity, the Adoration of the Kings, the 
 Presentation in the Temple, the Crucifixion, 
 and the Last Judgment. 
 
 Dignified in conception, restrained in man- 
 ner, antique in the stateliness of its beauty, it 
 seems rather the work of one on whose ears 
 echoes of the past have fallen so that he seeks 
 to reawaken and recreate her lost delight, 
 than of one whose work was destined to be a
 
 Roses of Paestum 19 
 
 guide and an ensample to future generations; 
 and yet it would be hard to point to any statue 
 or painting executed in the whole extent of 
 Italy, from the Alpine valleys of Piedmont to 
 the sun-steeped plains of Calabria, which can 
 vie with this sculptured pulpit of Niccola 
 Pisano, standing now in the Baptistery of Pisa 
 as it has stood for over six hundred years, in 
 its claim to be considered as the first com- 
 pleted endeavour of renascent Italian art. 
 
 For in these bas-reliefs, five years before 
 the birth of Dante, sixteen years before the 
 birth of Giotto, were exemplified the principles 
 which the genius of both was to illustrate, 
 that the study of the antique was to win back 
 the beauty of its ideal to the service of the 
 present, that fidelity to nature the spirits 
 in the Antepurgatory perceiving from Dante's 
 breath that he was alive, gathering round in 
 wonder as the multitude flock round a herald 
 to hear what news he brings : or the hind in 
 the fresco at Assisi, who on hands and knees 
 and with all the eagerness of thirst is drinking 
 the water that springs from the rock : or the 
 goat scratching his ear, in the bas-relief of 
 the Nativity, that this fidelity to nature,
 
 1O Roses of Paestum 
 
 this truth in common things, was as an open 
 sesame to win for the arts entrance in the 
 minds of men, and that the first fruits were 
 dedicate to the service of God. 
 
 Comparing Niccola's work with his models, 
 we see that the Phaedra of the sarcophagus 
 has suggested the Madonna in the Adoration 
 of the Kings, and that the high priest in the 
 Presentation is the Bacchus of an antique 
 sculptured vase in the Campo Santo. In 
 these metamorphoses we may see a forecast 
 of how the later exuberance of the quest for 
 beauty was to blend unheedingly things incon- 
 gruous, things pertaining to Christ and 
 things pertaining to Diana grouping reliefs 
 of the story of the Fall and of Hercules and 
 the Centaur around the same baptismal font ; 
 and they are a forecast, too, of how, when art 
 was netted in the toils of her own magnifi- 
 cence, and the wings of aspiration no longer 
 strained up to heaven, Phaedra and Bacchus 
 came back as witnesses of her abasement to 
 leer and make revel among the ruins, tempting 
 Josephs and Susannahs on the canvases of 
 Bronzino and Biliverti. 
 
 Were it not for the resemblances and for
 
 Roses of Paestum 21 
 
 the history attaching to them, we should not 
 perhaps linger long to look at the Greek 
 marbles in Pisa. They would be passed by 
 almost unnoticed among the treasures of the 
 Vatican or the Capitoline; but these for the 
 most part the Roman earth still covered. 
 
 Two hundred years and more of unabated 
 effort were to elapse, the impulse given by 
 Niccola Pisano was to animate his successors, 
 and to win new attainment of beauty and 
 truth under Ghiberti and Donatello, and then 
 in the fulness of time, in the dawn of the 
 golden age of the Renaissance, the master 
 works of Greek sculpture which lay buried 
 beneath Rome or in the ruins of the Cam- 
 pagna were uncovered, and to Michael Angelo, 
 studying the Laocoon, the Apollo Belvedere, 
 and the Dying Gladiator, something of their 
 sublime mastery was revealed, even as Niccola 
 Pisano had learnt his simpler lesson from the 
 Phaedra and Hippolytus. 
 
 Like spring's first harbingers, which, bursting 
 the sod too early, are nipped by winter's chill, 
 yet in their brief coming are a token and a 
 promise, so the golden age of Pisa was a 
 precursor of the glory of the Renaissance.
 
 22 Roses of Paestum 
 
 The sceptre of the arts passed from her 
 while her fleets and armies were still potent, 
 and Florence became the heir of her tradi- 
 tions, as at a later period of her sovereignty. 
 
 The immediate followers of Niccola Pisano 
 had no succession among her children, and 
 when the structure of the Campo Santo 
 was completed by Giovanni Pisano in 1283 
 she was constrained to invite artists from 
 Florence and Siena to paint the cloisters in 
 fresco. 
 
 In Niccola's pulpit we see the transplanting 
 of the roses of Greek beauty, the establishing 
 of a rose-garden by the banks of the Arno, the 
 fresh green of leaves budding, but it is in Flor- 
 ence that we must seek the second flowering, 
 the bloom of the perfected rose. 
 
 Entering the gallery of the Uffizi, and pass- 
 ing down the Eastern and Southern Corridors 
 amidst Byzantine and Tuscan Madonnas, an- 
 tique reliefs and busts of Emperors, you reach 
 the hall of Lorenzo Monaco, so named as con- 
 taining the " Coronation of the Virgin " of 
 Don Lorenzo, monk of the Camaldoline mon- 
 astery of the Angeli, and forerunner of Fra 
 Angelico in simplicity and grace.
 
 Roses of Paesium 23 
 
 There are also a tabernacle by Fra Angelico 
 of Madonna and Saints surrounded as by a 
 nimbus by angels playing musical instruments ; 
 a panel of saints by Gentile da Fabriano, 
 and a few Quattrocento Florentine pictures, 
 amongst them two by Botticelli, " The Ado- 
 ration of the Magi," and " The Birth of Venus." 
 The latter of these let us attempt to consider 
 in detail. It represents Venus rising from the 
 sea off the island of Cythera. 
 
 A pale green sea faintly tremulous with 
 wind-ripples. To the left of the picture, hov- 
 ering in the air with long wings outspread, are 
 two spirits symbolic of the winds. The cheeks 
 of Eolus are distent, and his breath, visible as 
 a pale shaft of light, is impelling Venus to 
 shore. Her feet are resting on the gold-prank'd 
 edge of a scallop shell, and the waves are dan- 
 cing before it as it moves onward. She is tall, 
 fair, virginal, undraped, save for the clinging 
 folds of her long, yellow hair. The mytholog- 
 ical details might lead us to expect a nymph 
 or nereid, soulless, elemental, looking out 
 on mankind with something of that expression, 
 half of mockery, half of delight, which Arnold 
 Bocklin's nymphs possess; but the face is
 
 24 Roses of Paestum 
 
 tender and pensive as ever was that of 
 Madonna. But the tenderness of Madonna is 
 tenderness of love revealed, arms encircling 
 the child and eyes lit with the holy light of 
 motherhood, and this is the tenderness of 
 expectancy, the tenderness of dawn such as 
 must have been upon the face of just-awak- 
 ened Eve, 
 
 "Beneath her Maker* s finger, when the fresh 
 First pulse of life shot brightening the snow" 
 
 for Venus, elemental and a goddess, is like 
 Eve coming to earth and vernal delight. It 
 is the garden of earth where she is landing. 
 The receding line of distance where the sea 
 meets the shore is fretted with tiny bays, and 
 verdant with sloping hills. On the right is a 
 laurel grove, and before it a lady, symbolic of 
 Spring, hastens to meet the goddess, holding 
 in outstretched hands a red robe richly en- 
 wrought with daisies which gleam upon its 
 folds in white emblazonry. The robe is flut- 
 tering in the breath of the wind that wafts the 
 goddess to shore. 
 
 In the foreground to the left a few bulrushes 
 are swaying. The stems of the laurels are
 
 Roses of Pacstum 25 
 
 sparkling with gold, and the sward gleams 
 golden where Venus' feet will tread. Spring 
 is clad in a white robe worked with cornflow- 
 ers, a spray of olive lies lightly on her breast, 
 and her waist is girdled with roses. 
 
 To the left of the picture there are many 
 roses falling. Pale pink roses of hue scarce 
 deeper than the lilied flesh of Venus, some 
 upturned with the heart of the rose laid bare, 
 some the winds have tilted over and they make 
 a Narcissus' mirror of the sea, roses full blown 
 and buds half-opened, they cling to the wings 
 and streaming raiment of the winds, they lie 
 upon their limbs, they flutter softly downwards, 
 they are wafted to the shore, some hurrying 
 joyously, some wantonly dallying with the rip- 
 ples of the air. A rain of roses, and the very 
 air that attends their falling seems to murmur 
 of it. 
 
 They are the roses of Paestum coming back 
 again ; this is the manner of their second flow- 
 ering. For the delight of the antique world in 
 the presentment of loveliness, a delight 
 
 " not yet dead 
 But in old marbles ever beautiful "
 
 26 Roses of Pa e stum 
 
 slept prisoned in marble no longer, but issued 
 forth in newness of life in the Renaissance, and 
 it was in the pictures of Botticelli that it found 
 expression at once most joyous and most com- 
 plete. Mantegna is indeed in a sense more 
 classical, but in Botticelli this delight is a liv- 
 ing reality. For he was the only painter of 
 Italy who, as Ruskin says, " understood the 
 thoughts of Heathens and Christians equally, 
 and could in a measure paint both Aphrodite 
 and the Madonna." And understanding the 
 thoughts of both, there is in him no attempt to 
 blend things incongruous. To each their gifts 
 are rendered unto Caesar and unto God. 
 Myths from Politian by his art made palaces 
 of enchantment of the villas of the Medici, 
 and from Lucian's lines he recreated the " Cal- 
 umny " of Apelles. Sixtus IV sent for him to 
 Rome, and in the Sistine Chapel he painted 
 with Perugino, Pinturicchio, Signorelli, and 
 others of his contemporaries, scenes from the 
 lives of Moses and of Christ. 
 
 As all the greatest of artists, alike in paint- 
 ing and in poetry, when of an age he was of 
 his own age, when local, then of his own 
 city, Florence, when he needed bystanders,
 
 Roses of Paestum 27 
 
 then these, as in the "Adoration of the Magi," 
 Florentines, his contemporaries and himself 
 among them; but the Madonna of the " Mag- 
 nificat " and alike sea-born Venus are neither 
 Jewish nor Greek nor yet Florentine, but time- 
 less according to the measure of his ability to 
 paint the faiths that were in him, and to us in 
 the measure of our faiths they are realities. 
 
 In the later years of his life he gave up paint- 
 ing Venus and the Spring, and finally gave up 
 the use of the brush altogether, though still for 
 a time, as we shall see, drawing roses. After 
 completing his work in the Sistine Chapel he 
 returned to Florence, and there, says Vasari, 
 " being whimsical and eccentric, he occupied 
 himself with commenting on a certain part of 
 Dante, illustrating the ' Inferno,' and execut- 
 ing prints over which he wasted much time, 
 and, neglecting his proper occupation, he did 
 no work, and thereby caused infinite disorder 
 in his affairs. Yet despite Vasari not alto- 
 gether idle, nor assuredly the less great of 
 spirit in that he thus stood outside his art's 
 achievement and would fain " put to proof art 
 alien to the artist's " in utterance of his thought. 
 Even so " Rafael made a century of sonnets,"
 
 28 Roses of Paestum 
 
 and " Dante once prepared to paint an angel." 
 His rarer utterance is as theirs extinguished. 
 He was taunted, Vasari tells us, with his unfit- 
 ness, in that he " without a grain of learning, 
 scarcely knowing how to read, had undertaken 
 to make a commentary on Dante." Yet we 
 would gladly, if we could, barter with time the 
 writings of a good many of Dante's commen- 
 tators in exchange for this same volume. 
 
 We are told that he afterwards became one 
 of the followers of Savonarola, and as such 
 totally abandoned the practice of his art and 
 became a Piagnone (a mourning brother), and 
 in his old age in poverty and a cripple he 
 lived on the charity of Lorenzo de' Medici, 
 and of others who had known him in the days 
 of his prosperity. 
 
 Time, while robbing us of his commentary 
 on Dante, has dealt with us more kindly as 
 regards the illustrations. They relate not only 
 to the " Inferno," as Vasari would lead one to 
 suppose, but to the whole of the " Divine Com- 
 edy " with the exception of a few cantos, and 
 have a unique interest as being the only sur- 
 viving illustrations of Dante by an artist of 
 the Renaissance. Michael Angelo is said to
 
 Noses of Pa e stum 29 
 
 have made a similar book of drawings, which 
 was lost at sea in a storm in the Gulf of Lyons. 
 
 One of these drawings, seems reminiscent in 
 certain likenesses and contrasts of the picture 
 in the Uffizi. 
 
 The subject is Beatrice appearing to Dante 
 in Canto XXX of the " Purgatorio." 
 
 Dante and Statius have reached the Ter- 
 restrial Paradise, and are walking beside the 
 stream of Lethe conversing with Matelda in 
 the meadow beyond. The mystical Proces- 
 sion of the Church, approaching amid the 
 forest, heralded by gleaming light and melody, 
 has unfolded before them. The triumphal car 
 of the Church drawn by the Gryphon has 
 halted. The twenty-four elders have turned to 
 face it. They are crowned with lilies and are 
 bearing aloft the books of their testimony. One 
 of them, Dante tells us, chants " Veni Sponsa 
 de Libano" and the rest take up the strain, 
 and a hundred angels' voices are heard sing- 
 ing " Benedictus qui venis" and "Manibus o 
 date Hlia plenis" as they scatter flowers about 
 the car. Behind the elders are the bearers of 
 the seven candlesticks, and the long tongues 
 of flame lie in the air as bands of light, and
 
 30 Roses of Paestum 
 
 between them rise the upward sweeping wings 
 of the Gryphon. Around the car the seven 
 virtues are as maidens dancing, and behind it 
 walk seven elders, their temples crowned with 
 roses, among whom walks St. John in the 
 ecstasy of sleep. In the car stands Beatrice, 
 
 " In white veil with olive wreathed 
 A virgin in my view appeared, beneath 
 Green mantle, robed in hue of living flame" 
 
 The car is the scallop shell ; the elders and 
 the virtues are the attendant spirits, and they 
 too are ministrant upon a lady of love ; but 
 her brows are touched by the fadeless olive 
 emblem of wisdom and of peace. 
 
 The scallop shell is wafted by the winds to 
 shore, but here the river divides, and it is we 
 who must make the passage. Dante is stand- 
 ing with hands clasped together and eyes down- 
 cast. He has looked down in the depths of 
 the river, but from thence his eyes recoil in 
 shame seeing his own image, and seek rather 
 the grasses at his feet ; for it is the river of the 
 forgetting of sin, and his eyes are heavy and 
 laden with memories, and cannot as yet endure 
 to meet the vision of the radiance. Beyond the
 
 Roses of Paestum 31 
 
 river all around the car, flowers are falling. 
 "Manibus o date lilia pkn is," (scatter ye lil- 
 ies with hands unsparing) by a strange but 
 beautiful transition the words uttered by An- 
 chises over the bier of the young Marcellus 
 are sung by angels' voices as they scatter flow- 
 ers upon the car of Beatrice. Not death this 
 but life, says Botticelli in his drawing, nor alone 
 the pale white of purity, but the fervour of love 
 divine and eternal, and the flowers which the 
 angels are scattering are not lilies alone, but 
 also roses, roses not of Paestum but of 
 Paradise. 
 
 Of the falling roses in the picture in the 
 Uffizi of the " Birth of Venus " some will flut- 
 ter to shore, and as they die the seed of beauty 
 will break from the heart of the rose, and the 
 wind will bear it to a soil where it may live. 
 So the roses that were blown to shore on Eolus' 
 breath have given the seeds of many roses ; 
 and changed a little by change of environment, 
 they flowered for long in Italy, and some who 
 have visited the garden of their second flower- 
 ing have gathered the seed and carried it, so 
 that it has flowered in Northern climes and is 
 still flowering. Yet withal, their beauty seems
 
 32 Roses of Pacstum 
 
 never so supreme as in this the first season of 
 their second flowering in that perfect freshness 
 of the just-awakened rose, and so Botticelli 
 has painted them as spirits in attendance on 
 Love, so that coming to earth she may be 
 reconciled.
 
 II 
 
 THE VITA NUOVA 
 
 >N Boccaccio's life of Dante he says 
 that it was customary in Florence, in 
 the spring of the year when the earth 
 was all aflower with beauty, for the citizens to 
 gather together in festival ; and so it happened 
 that on the ist of May Folco Portinari, a man 
 of considerable position, invited his neighbours 
 to his house to a banquet, and amongst them 
 his neighbour Alighieri, Dante's father, and as 
 even small children accompanied their parents 
 to these festivals Dante went with him, although 
 he was only nine years old. There he met a 
 number of other children of about his own age, 
 and they had the first few courses of the ban- 
 quet and then played games together. Amongst 
 the others was Folco's daughter Beatrice, 
 or, as she was always called, Bice a graceful 
 little child of about eight years old, full of ten- 
 derness and winsome ways, perhaps a little 
 more demure and serious in speech than one
 
 34 The Vita Nuova 
 
 would have expected at her age : her features 
 were refined and regular : beautiful, but so 
 touched with grace and charm that to many 
 thinking of her it seemed as though she were 
 almost one of the angels. 
 
 "Even so or how much fairer than I can 
 tell did she seem to Dante's eyes at this 
 banquet, perhaps not then beheld for the first 
 time, but then first potent to awaken love ; and 
 although she was still a child, he took her fair 
 image to his heart with such affection that from 
 that day onwards it never departed all the days 
 of his life." 
 
 1 Z 373> more than fifty years after Dante's 
 death, the Florentines established a public 
 lectureship on the " Divina Commedia," and 
 Boccaccio held the office until his death two 
 years later. His lectures were a commentary 
 on the " Inferno," and in a note on the first 
 mention of Beatrice he says and the state- 
 ment is confirmed in another commentary sup- 
 posed to be by Dante's son Pietro : " This lady, 
 I know from some one in whom I place implicit 
 confidence, who knew her personally, and was 
 in fact a very near relative, was the daughter 
 of the esteemed Folco Portinari. . She
 
 The Vita Ntiova 35 
 
 married a cavalier of the house of Bardi, named 
 Simon, and in the twenty-fourth year of her age 
 she passed from this life, in the year of our 
 Lord 1290." 
 
 These two passages contain all that is known 
 on the subject of Beatrice apart from Dante's 
 own writings ; they are the only evidence to 
 connect her with Beatrice Portinari, and they 
 have not been deemed sufficiently conclusive 
 to stay conjecture. Boccaccio did not speak 
 from personal knowledge. He was a child of 
 eight years old at the time of Dante's death. 
 His statements may be accepted with the 
 degree of reservation which always attaches 
 to the utterances of a writer of romance who 
 ventures upon the domain of fact ; moreover, 
 as the positive nature of the assurance in the 
 latter passage savours of too much protesta- 
 tion, we may infer from it that a statement in 
 support of which Boccaccio felt it necessary to 
 invoke the authority of a near relative, cannot 
 have been a matter of common knowledge, 
 and consequently that fifty years after Dante's 
 death, when his fame was already so firmly 
 established that his works were the subject of a 
 public lectureship, it was not generally known
 
 36 The Vita Nuova 
 
 in Florence who Beatrice was, or whether she 
 had any real existence at all. Und so welter! 
 But enough of these inferences which at most 
 lead only to the land of Weiss Nicht Wo, and 
 more probably end in a state of bemused con- 
 jecture as to whether we have arrived there ! 
 Boccaccio made a positive statement in a pub- 
 lic lecture. He mentioned two families both 
 then prominent in Florence. There is no rec- 
 ord of his statement ever having heen disputed 
 by them. It is in the highest degree improb- 
 able that the statement would have been made 
 unless Boccaccio had been in possession of evi- 
 dence, or that, if contradicted, the statement 
 should have survived without there being any 
 trace whatsoever of the contradiction. We 
 may assume that what he said was at the time 
 accepted as true by the members of both fam- 
 ilies, and consequently it is not undue credu- 
 lity on our part to accept it. 
 
 So Beatrice was the daughter of a neighbour 
 of the Alighieri, and Dante saw her when they 
 were both children, and as a child he loved 
 her, and when she grew up to womanhood he 
 loved her, and after her death this love was 
 still for him the greatest of realities. Of his
 
 The Vita Nuova 37 
 
 new life as created by this love from the time 
 of his first meeting with Beatrice until about 
 his twenty-seventh year the "Vita Nuova" 
 tells the story. It ends with a promise ; for a 
 new perception born of grieving love is guid- 
 ing his thoughts upward among untrodden 
 ways, and he has beheld a vision about which 
 he will say nothing until he can discourse 
 more worthily, and his hope is then "to write 
 concerning her what hath not before been 
 written of any woman." 
 
 The book is the substance of such things as 
 are written in his memory under the rubric 
 "Incipit Vita Nova" and there are collected 
 there sonnets and canzoni, and they are inter- 
 woven with an account of the occasion upon 
 which each was written the vision of or 
 meeting with Beatrice or his thoughts of her, 
 or self-reproaches, and each poem is followed 
 by an analysis in order that its meaning may 
 be more clearly seen ; consequently it not 
 infrequently occurs that the same incident is 
 told three times over, and yet for such reit- 
 eration its fervour suffices. 
 
 The manner of the telling of the first meet- 
 ing with Beatrice differs from that of Boccaccio,
 
 38 The Vita Nuvoa 
 
 no gathering of neighbours and banquet- 
 ing, not that these things did not happen, 
 but that it is immaterial whether they hap- 
 pened or no ; for we are at once led by the 
 lover into the solitude of love's imaginings. 
 Such facts, however, as recur are not at vari- 
 ance. "Nine times already since my birth" 
 (I quote here as always from Rossetti's trans- 
 lation) " had the heaven of light returned to 
 the self -same point almost as concerns its own 
 revolution, when first the glorious Lady of my 
 mind was made manifest to mine eyes. . . . 
 She had already been in this life for so long 
 as that, within her time, the starry heaven had 
 moved towards the Eastern quarter one of the 
 twelve parts of a degree ; so that she appeared 
 to me at the beginning of her ninth year 
 almost. ... At that moment, I say most 
 truly, that the spirit of life, which hath its dwell- 
 ing in the secretest chamber of the heart 
 began to tremble so violently that the least 
 pulses of my body shook therewith; and in 
 trembling it said these words: Ecco Dcus 
 fottior me, qui vauau domtnabitur miU," 
 
 From that time forward Love governed 
 his soul. Nine years later he met Beatrice
 
 The Vita Nuova 39 
 
 walking with two ladies, and she saluted him. 
 After this there appeared to him a vision 
 the figure of a lord of terrible aspect holding 
 in his arms a lady sleeping, and showing him 
 a heart burning in flames, and saying " Vide 
 cor tuum" and making a sonnet concerning 
 this vision he sent it to his friends, and they 
 in sonnets conjectured as to its meaning, but 
 perceived it not. Given up now wholly to 
 thinking of Beatrice, the* timidity of his love 
 made him conceal from all, by whose help it 
 was that love had gained this mastery over 
 him ; and once as he sat watching Beatrice in 
 church, a lady who was sitting in a direct line 
 between them looked at him many times, for 
 it seemed as though upon her his glances were 
 fixed, and so his friends perceiving this deemed 
 that this was the lady who had brought him 
 to such a pass of love. Dante, hearing this, 
 was reassured that his secret had not become 
 known, and wrote rhymes in honour of this 
 lady that so she might be a screen for his love. 
 After she had left the city Love came to him 
 in a vision in the light habit of a traveller, and 
 bade him take another lady to be a screen for 
 his love for Beatrice, that it might not be
 
 40 The Vita Nuova 
 
 revealed. This he did with such success that 
 many talked of it, and Beatrice heard of it, 
 and on meeting him in the street passed by 
 without greeting him. Then being for the first 
 time denied her salutation, he was filled with 
 such grief that he wept and prayed in his 
 chamber in solitude ; and there, suddenly fall- 
 ing asleep like a beaten sobbing child, again 
 Love came to him in a vision and bade him 
 tell her all things in*a poem, and how he had 
 been hers even from childhood, and to have 
 the words fitted with a pleasant music and 
 played where she might chance to hear them, 
 and into the music Love himself would pass 
 whensoever it was needful. He awoke and 
 wrote as Love had bidden him, with what issue 
 may be inferred from the fact that one of the 
 thoughts which then troubled him was that 
 " the lady whom Love hath chosen out to 
 govern me, is not as other ladies whose hearts 
 are easily moved." After this it chanced that 
 a friend took him to a gathering of ladies 
 among whom was Beatrice, and he found on 
 arriving that it was a wedding, and he was 
 persuaded to stay, but being seized with faint- 
 ness and trembling he leant against a picture
 
 The Vita Nuova 41 
 
 in the room ; and there raising his eyes he 
 saw Beatrice, and was filled with such confu- 
 sion that she and her friends whispered of it 
 to each other, and it seemed that they mocked 
 him. He went away sorrowfully, and in his 
 solitude tried to express in verse which might 
 come into her hearing why it was that he was 
 dumb and confused in her sight, and why, 
 although a mark for scorn in her company, he 
 yet sought to behold her. 
 
 After this the secret of his heart being 
 understood of many, he was one day asked 
 by certain ladies, " To what end lovest thou 
 this lady, seeing that thou canst not support 
 her presence ? " And he told them that the 
 end and aim of his love was but the salutation 
 of that lady, wherein he found that beatitude 
 which was the goal of desire. 
 
 The thought came to him that some day 
 Beatrice would die. To realize this was to 
 suffer the bitterness of death. In phantasy 
 he beheld a throng of ladies who went hither 
 and thither, weeping, and the sun went out 
 so that the stars showed themselves, and they 
 were of such a colour that he knew they must 
 be weeping ; and it seemed that the birds fell
 
 42 The Vita Nuova 
 
 dead out of the sky, and there were great 
 earthquakes. And looking towards Heaven 
 he beheld a multitude of angels returning up- 
 wards singing " Osanna in Excelsis" and it 
 seemed that he went to look upon the body 
 wherein her spirit had had its abiding place, 
 and that he beheld Beatrice in death. Certain 
 ladies seemed to be covering her head with a 
 white veil, and she was so humble of aspect 
 that it was as though she had said, " I have 
 attained to look on the beginning of peace ; " 
 and he cried out to Death, " Now come unto 
 me, and be not bitter against me any longer : 
 surely where thou hast been thou hast learnt 
 gentleness. Wherefore come now unto me 
 who do greatly desire thee." 
 
 The phantasy so possessed him that he cried 
 aloud on Death, so that certain ladies hearing 
 his cry came and wakened him, and tried to 
 comfort him. The phantasy was presage of 
 fact which soon followed it. Once more 
 he met Beatrice. He was full of gladness and 
 we may infer that sh'e saluted him ; and then 
 one day as he sat trying to express in verse 
 what indeed her influence on him was, the news 
 came of her death ;
 
 The Vita Nuova 43 
 
 " The Lord God of Justice called my most 
 excellent lady unto Himself, that she might 
 be glorious under the banner of that blessed 
 Queen Mary whose name had always a deep 
 reverence in the words of holy Beatrice." 
 
 To speak of the manner of her departure 
 is not necessary, nor would his pen suffice 
 to do it fitly, and he would then be con- 
 strained to say somewhat in his own praise ; 
 but he tells how after that his eyes were so 
 weary of weeping that he could no longer 
 thereby give ease to sorrow, he bethought him 
 of a few words of lamentation to stand him in 
 stead of tears, and herein speaks of her ; for 
 
 " Beatrice is gone up into high Heaven, 
 The kingdom where the angels are at peace ; 
 And lives with them : and to her friends is dead;" 
 
 and he wrote a second time in her memory at 
 the request of one of her kinsmen, who came 
 asking him to write something on a lady who 
 had died, but feigning to speak of some other 
 lady; and Dante perceiving that he spoke of 
 Beatrice gave utterance to his own grief in 
 such words as might be spoken by her kins- 
 man.
 
 44 The Vita Nuova 
 
 On the anniversary of her death, filled with 
 the remembrance of her, he sat drawing the 
 figure of an angel upon certain tablets, and 
 so sitting, becoming sorrowful and changing 
 countenance, and then being in dread lest 
 any one had seen him, he raised his eyes and 
 saw a lady young and beautiful looking down 
 with pity upon him from a window ; and seeing 
 her pity, his eyes were the more inclined to 
 tears, so that he withdrew from her sight. But 
 whenever the lady saw him afterwards she 
 became pale and of a piteous countenance, as 
 though she had been in love, reminding him 
 indeed of Beatrice, who was wont to be of a like 
 pallor. And he began to be gladdened by 
 the constant sight of this lady, and then had 
 unrest and rebuked himself, cursing the un- 
 steadfastness of his eyes, in that they had 
 forgotten their condition of weeping, at the 
 glance of a lady who had merely had compas- 
 sion for the grief they had shown for his own 
 blessed lady. And then he began to consider 
 that this lady was young and beautiful, and 
 gentle, and that it was perhaps Love himself 
 who had set her in his path that his life might 
 find peace. While thus wavering he saw in
 
 The Vita Nuova 45 
 
 phantasy Beatrice appearing as a child, clad 
 in the crimson raiment she had worn when he 
 had first seen her, and then his memory began 
 to recall one by one all the occasions on which 
 he had met her, and his heart repented of its 
 wandering desire, and from that hour he 
 thought constantly of Beatrice in humility and 
 shame. The lady at the window, gentle and 
 full of pity, has been supposed to be Gemma 
 Donati, whom he married about a year after 
 the death of Beatrice, or to be a personifica- 
 tion of philosophy, wherein he sought, and to 
 some extent found, consolation, or to refer 
 to some lady otherwise unknown, and Dante 
 in mentioning her has not shrunk from the 
 recording of some wandering fancy and the 
 subsequent bitterness of remorse. 
 
 This much is common to conjecture, that 
 at some period after the death of Beatrice 
 he wavered in the constancy of his love, 
 that then the cloud that had veiled her 
 image from his sight was dispelled, and his 
 thoughts were ever fixed upon her in humil- 
 ity. She who in life had been to him almost 
 as a spirit, became something more ; " a new 
 perception born of grieving love" guided
 
 46 The Vita Nuova 
 
 his thought upward, and of this he will write 
 further. 
 
 It is one of the earliest, and it shares with 
 " Aucassin and Nicolete " the claim to be 
 regarded as the tenderest love-story in mediae- 
 val literature. But by contrast how virile the 
 song story, how dreamlike the book of the 
 new life ! For in " Aucassin and Nicolete," 
 the minstrel sings of the love that " many 
 waters cannot quench," love more potent than 
 desire to be dubbed knight or follow tourneys, 
 more potent too than " threats of hell and 
 hopes of paradise," enduring captivity and the 
 fear of death, fleeing from the castle to a lodge 
 of boughs in the meadows, and ending in 
 happiness " by God's will who loveth lovers." 
 
 In the " Vita Nuova " the lover is pale and 
 protesting, prone alike to verse and tears, 
 to hold colloquies with love, and to call on 
 passers-by for pity, but shrinking from rather 
 than seeking contact with the lady ; and the 
 lady she is gentle, pitiful, but a shadow, 
 she glides silently across our path of vision, 
 she is robed in red or in white, she is attended 
 by one or more other ladies ; a word, a gen- 
 tle look, and she has passed by, and we only
 
 The Vita Nuova 47 
 
 see the lover repining in solitude, or writing 
 verses to other ladies in order to veil the 
 identity of his love. 
 
 Dreamlike and fantastic, it seems a scene 
 from some faded arras, fresh and lifelike only 
 in its dim-lit corridor, where all colour is 
 attuned, and where the sun is a thing forgot- 
 ten, a pageant in some Provengal Court of 
 Love, and this the mask of love unattainable, 
 although by the rules of the Court the verses 
 ought to move pity and something more. 
 
 Dreamlike and mystic, hard to translate to 
 a world of human endeavour and human love, 
 and the sense of this may in some degree lend 
 weight to the supposition that Beatrice is from 
 the first only a symbol, a symbol of divine 
 philosophy, that Dante was not in love with 
 flesh and blood at all, that he was either a 
 dreamer in love with dreams, or a scholar in 
 love with knowledge, turning aside from the 
 divine to the pride of the knowledge of the 
 earth, and then groping his way back in abase- 
 ment. Such supposition, however, Dante's 
 own testimony overrides. Love-language is 
 not used by him in metaphor. When he wrote 
 of love he was of love inspired ; witness his
 
 48 The Vita Nuova 
 
 reply to the question put to him in Purgatory 
 by Bonagiunta of Lucca : 
 
 " But say if here his face I scan 
 Who those new rimes drew forth, that ran, 
 ' Ye ladies in whose sense 
 Is love's intelligence ? ' 
 I answered, ' I am one who hark 
 To love's inspiring, and I mark 
 As he within doth teach 
 To litter forth my speech. ' " ' 
 
 And Bonagiunta confessed that for this reason 
 Dante's love-poems had surpassed his own 
 and those of Jacopo da Lentino and Guittone 
 d'Arezzo, for they had often feigned the love 
 they wrote of. 
 
 This is explete and positive. Love in the 
 "Vita Nuova" is not a synonym or symbol, 
 but a reality; dreamlike, ethereal, ever 
 fluttering on visionary wings, but so far a 
 reality as to find a temporary casement in 
 flesh and blood, " seeking in a mortal image 
 the likeness of what is perhaps eternal." 
 Such then as he has portrayed was Dante in 
 his new life. 
 
 i " Purgatorio," XXIV, 49 seq. (Shadwell's Trans.).
 
 The Vita Nuova 49 
 
 This lover, tearful and shrinking, hardly 
 tallies with the picture which contemporary 
 records would lead us to form of Dante dur- 
 ing his life in Florence. It need not tally ! 
 
 " God be thanked, the meanest of His creatures 
 Boasts two soul-sides, one to face the world with, 
 One to show a woman when he loves her /" 
 
 And the soul-side revealed in the " Vita 
 Nuova " is not that that faced the world. 
 
 For he did face the world ; he was no re- 
 cluse who would fain flee from life's turmoil. 
 A student too proud and reserved for popu- 
 larity, he was one of the leading Florentine 
 poets, the friend as such of Guido Cavalcanti 
 and Cino da Pistoia ; the singer of the charms 
 of the sixty fairest ladies in Florence in a 
 scrventese, and to compile such a list was 
 only possible for one who to some extent had 
 mingled in social pleasures. There is evi- 
 dence tending to show that he had already 
 visited Paris, that he had studied at Padua 
 and Bologna, that he had taken part in the 
 victory of the Guelphs over the Ghibellines at 
 the battle of Campaldino. He had married 
 Gemma Donati, a member of a prominent
 
 50 The Vita Nuova 
 
 Florentine family. He had begun to take a 
 part in public affairs. His name appears in 
 1299 as one of an embassy to St. Gemignano, 
 and in the following year he was appointed 
 one of the priors of the city. Life was open- 
 ing before him varied fields of activity and 
 honourable service. Suddenly this prospect 
 was dispelled. The Guelphs had been rent 
 into the factions of the Whites and Blacks. 
 The latter, in alliance with the Papacy, brought 
 Charles of Valois to Florence, and in 1301 the 
 leaders of the Whites were banished, among 
 them being Dante. 
 
 His exile was lifelong. Twenty years of 
 wandering to and fro over Italy. Welcomed 
 and tarrying for a time at some noble's court 
 the Scalas or the Polentas but learning 
 
 " come sa di sale 
 
 Lo pane altrui, e com'e duro calle 
 Lo scendere <?'/ salir per V altrui scale" 
 
 Wandering to and fro, all cities open to him 
 except Florence, under sentence to be burnt 
 if he returns there. Hoping for a time for 
 recall through a change in government, and 
 then wearying of the futile plots and hopes of
 
 The Vita Nuova 51 
 
 exiles and the perpetual strife of factions, see- 
 ing peace and prosperity for Italy only in the 
 vision of the coming of a ruler who should 
 heal all factions and this a dim, dim vision. 
 
 The soul-side that faced the world grew grim 
 and furrowed ; his letters on public affairs 
 are filled with bitterness and indignation. 
 
 And what of the other soul-side ? that 
 revealed in the " Vita Nuova," and as yet re- 
 vealed there only scarce known to Beatrice 
 in life, timorous in her presence, silent from 
 a sense of the sanctity of love, eloquent only 
 in solitude. It is still turned towards her and 
 to the regions where she dwells, turned 
 more openly, for there is no fear now that she 
 will misconceive. Turned more steadfastly, 
 thanks to Florence and her sentence of ban- 
 ishment ; and the city claims our gratitude in 
 that she thus dealt unjustly, and like wisdom 
 she is of her children justified, for the path to 
 life's achievement for the many is civic con- 
 tentment, but not for the writer of the " Divine 
 Comedy." 
 
 Thus turned steadfastly to her image, he 
 makes his own soul pilgrimage from sight to 
 insight. Still bitter the manner of the losing,
 
 52 The Vita Nuova 
 
 and yet what a Barmecide's feast this 
 these factions, this Florence, transient and 
 lost by exile in contrast with that new life 
 which awoke within him in boyhood at sight 
 of Beatrice, the life which time and exile 
 changed not, only established I Dreamlike 
 and fantastic in utterance, but it is the utter- 
 ance of the ideal, of the imperishable, of the 
 eternal element in mutable things, 
 
 " For life with all its yield of joy and woe, 
 
 Of hope and fear, 
 
 /f just our chance of the prize of learning love, 
 ffow love hath been, may be indeed, and is." 
 
 Beatrice dead his thoughts are linked with 
 the unseen, his life is a witness of her mem- 
 ory. After that, being led in vision through 
 hell and purgatory, he has attained to her 
 presence, her memory is lost in what that 
 memory has revealed in the radiance which 
 is about the throne. 
 
 In contrast with other records of mediaeval 
 love the " Vita Nuova " seems at once more 
 mystic and more personal. 
 
 Every singer sang of love, of the praise 
 of some lady from whose eyes arrows were
 
 The Vita Nuova 53 
 
 flying arrows of disdain piercing as ser- 
 pent's tooth, and arrows of tenderness and 
 pity that on a sudden transfixed the heart 
 with imperishable hope, and they sang alike 
 her cruelty and her grace, and how she alone 
 could heal the wounds that she imparted. 
 
 The love whereof they sang varied with the 
 singer. It was Platonic or of a more earthly 
 essence ; it was romantic or homely. 
 
 Cecco loved Becchina and sang how, when 
 he saw her in a rage, he stood like a little 
 trembing lad. 
 
 Jaufre Rudel sang his love for the Countess 
 of Tripoli, never indeed having seen her, hear- 
 ing only of her virtues from pilgrims coming 
 from the East, and his life is the greatest of 
 his poems : 
 
 " There lived a singer in France of old 
 By the tideless dolorous midland sea. 
 
 In a land of sand and ruin and gold 
 
 There shone one woman, and none but she. 
 
 " And finding life for her love's sake fail, 
 Being fain to see her, he bade set sail, 
 Touched land, and saw her as life grew cold, 
 And praised God, seeing; and so died he."
 
 54 The Vita Nuova 
 
 Selvaggia, Fiammetta, Joan they live in the 
 pages of their poets ; a shadowy existence, yet 
 as shadows they are beautiful and the laments 
 for their deaths speak a reality of sorrow. 
 Singer and ladies they are a part of the 
 mask of mediaevalism. 
 
 A distinctive, we may almost say a dominat- 
 ing feature of that pre-Renaissance life, 
 severing it alike from the life of the ages pre- 
 ceding and following is the reverence shown 
 to woman, at times a worship half idolatrous, 
 at times the pursuit of a distant ideal. The 
 singer sang of the lady ; the knight fought for 
 her; the supreme aim of each was to be 
 thought worthy in her sight, to live and die 
 in her service. This reverence was in origin 
 religious. The Madonna had imparted some- 
 thing of her mystic purity to all her sex. She 
 was enthroned above all saints and kings, and 
 something of her glory was reflected upon all 
 womanhood, and the lover's privilege was 
 service. 
 
 The history of mediaeval love is a record 
 of the deviations from this ideal, but in trac- 
 ing them the ideal is still perceptible. Love 
 might be, often was, in essence a transgression
 
 The Vita Nuova 55 
 
 against honour and faith, yet even as such 
 it had whatever palliation may spring from 
 the fact that it was abiding, "that it changed 
 not for weal or woe all the days of their 
 life." 
 
 Devotion to his lady was the duty of every 
 knight of the Round Table, and yet in consid- 
 ering the book of their deeds we are minded 
 of the message of La Beale Isoud to the 
 Queen; "that there be within the land but 
 four lovers, that is Sir Launcelot du Lake and 
 queen Guenever and Sir Tristram de Liones 
 and queen Isoud ; " and as in contrast with 
 these two histories other records of knightly 
 love are dimmed in lustre, so of all the loves 
 which found utterance in song four names find 
 imperishable testimony Dante and Beatrice, 
 and Petrarch and Laura. 
 
 Much more of Laura is revealed in 
 Petrarch's sonnets than Dante ever reveals 
 of Beatrice. We may picture her fair, tall, 
 flaxen-haired, gentle and comely as is the 
 figure in Simon Memmi's fresco in the Span- 
 ish Chapel at Florence, which Vasari says 
 to be Madonna Laura, and the lover's 
 long devotion must touch with sympathy and
 
 56 The Vita Nuova 
 
 interest, and the beauty of the presentment 
 is a charm perennial. 
 
 The sonnets are the work of Petrarch's 
 mature age, and in contrasting them with the 
 " Vita Nuova " we are contrasting strength 
 with immaturity, the chiselled, flawless grace 
 of lyric adoration and regret of the scholar 
 and diplomat with the timorous imaginings 
 and self-communings of youth. 
 
 Yet for this reason, for this reticence, the 
 "Vita Nuova" is at once more mystic and 
 more personal. 
 
 The love is a reality and yet this 
 vision dimly seen, this embodiment of the 
 whisperings of hope, is not mediaeval is 
 not Florentine. It is unfettered by age or 
 habitation. 
 
 We know that Laura died five hundred 
 years ago and more, although her name lives 
 on the living lips of her poet; of this vision 
 something lives other than the memory, some- 
 thing that gathers to itself the dreams of whoso 
 reads it, and touches and transfigures them 
 into new and fairer semblance, and is in turn 
 by them transfigured and puts on new name 
 and lineage.
 
 The Vita Nuo-va 57 
 
 The love that here found language was a 
 love which gave all and asked for nothing, 
 nothing save only her salutation, a love 
 supreme alike in passion and in purity.
 
 Ill 
 
 PALMERS, PILGRIMS, AND ROMERS - 
 
 JY a certain innate faculty of sym- 
 bolism, colours are suggestive of 
 conditions or qualities. Violet has 
 been said by Mendelssohn to be the supreme 
 colour of music as being the faint hue which 
 the air takes in vibrating to its harmony ; and 
 the first violet, legend tells, was born of melody, 
 for it grew on the spot of earth where the lyre 
 of Orpheus rested when he fell asleep after 
 playing to the woods and mountains. Red is 
 the colour of love ; green is at times a pledge 
 of hope or peace at times a witness of envy ; 
 white is the emblem of purity. Such symbol- 
 ism is, for the most part, of general acceptance, 
 and the connection of thought is either instinc- 
 tive, or, when realized, is abiding. Certain 
 colours may, however, have for each of us a 
 several and distinct sphere of suggestion.
 
 Palmers, Pilgrims^ and Romers 59 
 
 Some particular hue when it meets the eye 
 has the power to touch certain chords of 
 memory so that it speaks from the past, 
 recalling the associations of some place 
 visited, or awakening some mood of thought. 
 In certain of the French and Italian cathe- 
 drals, wandering amid the grey light of nave 
 and transept, you may see some window 
 suffused with a rich warmth of colour. It 
 will probably be one of the older windows 
 fourteeth or fifteenth century at latest and 
 the colour of the glass is richer and softer than 
 that of any in the windows more recent. The 
 subject represented there a scene from the 
 life of Christ or from the Old Testament is 
 perhaps indistinct and not easily recognizable. 
 The blue and purple of the raiments are dark- 
 ened and scarce distinguishable from the silt 
 left by rain and wind without and the dust of 
 centuries within. But while blackening the 
 darker colours the lapse of time has mellowed 
 and deepened those that are paler, blending 
 them in a soft rich harmony of rose and yellow, 
 so that whether the window face east or west, 
 whether it be in choir, aisle, or transept, it 
 would seem all day long as though the sky
 
 60 Palmers, Pilgrims, and Romers 
 
 beyond it were glowing with sunlight, and 
 that the window but catches and transmits its 
 radiance red as gold and pale as amber 
 flame. 
 
 This glow of soft light of early stained-glass 
 is one of art's lost secrets, and like the Cathe- 
 drals Gothic or Romanesque wherein we find 
 it, is at once a peculiar creation and testimony 
 of the Mediaeval Age, and looking upon it 
 in lifted window of quiet fane, the gleam of 
 colour becomes a symbol, for it seems to 
 enshrine something of the fervour of mediae- 
 val faith. 
 
 Of some of the characteristics of this faith 
 and of its fervour let us attempt to consider. 
 
 In this quest, in attempting to touch with 
 words " the substance of things hoped for, the 
 evidence of things not seen," one must needs 
 walk humbly, and gladly at times tread in worn 
 footsteps. 
 
 "Before the twelfth century the nations 
 were too savage to be Christian, and after the 
 fifteenth too carnal to be Christian." Let us 
 assume that in the Mediaeval Age men were 
 neither preeminently savage, nor preeminently 
 carnal, or as in the form of the sentence I
 
 Palmers, Pilgrims, and Romers 61 
 
 have quoted from " Val d'Arno " the last 
 epithet applies to our own age we may 
 perhaps soften it into saying that they were 
 not preeminently luxurious or occupied with 
 material interests. We are not as yet much 
 nearer to seeing what the condition of this 
 Mediaeval Age was, only we have agreed 
 that it was neither of these two conditions 
 of barbarism or luxury either of which was 
 incompatible with fervour of faith. The one 
 state had not yet arisen, the other had passed 
 away, and in passing left the condition of the 
 western nations a peculiarly receptive one, 
 and tidings of things unseen fell upon willing 
 ears. The more primitive is man's condition, 
 the more human effort is, perforce, spent in 
 immediate contact with nature, and the more 
 the instinct is susceptible to its influence. 
 
 In the earliest literature of the dwellers 
 on the western sea-board, the influence of 
 natural environments is seen to have certain 
 common characteristics, the more apparent 
 when the more remote and exempt from rival 
 influences of Central and Southern Europe. 
 The Celts faced the expanse of an unknown 
 sea, and the Atlantic was to them ever a nurse
 
 62 Palmers, Pilgrims, and Romcrs 
 
 of the imagination. When the sea rose up to 
 the sky-line, calm and peaceful, the track of 
 the sunlight seemed a pathway over the waves 
 to some other world of tradition. When the 
 sea rose up to the sky-line in the fierce fury 
 of tempest, the beating of the surf and the 
 crying of the wind were alike voices from 
 the unknown. With scents of the unknown 
 the wind was laden, and when the mist 
 veiled the grey sky and lay thick upon the 
 shore, the unknown came nearer. So the 
 Atlantic became a supreme teller of stories, 
 and such as heard them tried to sing them 
 again to their fellows, and their utterance was 
 mystic and dreamlike, and as a broken frag- 
 ment, for something in the voices of the sea 
 had eluded memory, and they strove in vain 
 to recapture it. Christianity radiating from 
 Rome, touched the sea-board and the western 
 isles coming neither iconoclastic nor pro- 
 testing not to destroy but to fulfil. 
 
 The Atlantic was still a mother of inspira- 
 tion a supreme teller of stories but her 
 whisperings of the infinite were touched with 
 new meaning, and of the union " du natural- 
 isme celtique avec le spiritualisme chre'tien "
 
 Palmers, Pilgrims, and Romers 63 
 
 came the imaginative fervour of early Celtic 
 idealism. 
 
 More than ever now in vision wanderers, 
 they seek not the fulfilment of the hopes of 
 things material, but the complete attainment 
 of their renunciation. The isle of the amor- 
 ous queens had awaited the coming of Bran 
 the son of Febal, the joys of combat had 
 alternated with the joys of love as incentives 
 for the earlier voyagers; but now the bourn 
 of endeavour has changed, the voyagers find 
 islands where hermits dwell in solitude, and 
 birds bring food for them, islands where the 
 birds sing canticles daily at matins, lauds, and 
 prime, and as they travel they make fastings 
 and prayers, and they come at last to the 
 earthly paradise. 
 
 This idealism mystic yet adventurous 
 found in some measure in the earlier writings 
 of all Celtic nations, reached supreme beauty 
 of utterance in Ireland ; there growing in 
 isolation and without influence on the rest of 
 Europe until after the landing of the Normans 
 in Britain. The conquerors were subdued by 
 its beauty, and in great measure assimilating its 
 spirit they retold the legends of the voyages
 
 64 Palmers, Pilgrims, and Romers 
 
 and visions of St. Brendan, St. Patrick, 
 Tundal and others in their own language, 
 and so France was in turn invaded by Celtic 
 poetry. There had entered also another 
 stream of influence coming from the East ; 
 I cannot say how or when it entered but 
 the life of St. Alexis, which dates from the 
 eleventh century, and which is the earliest 
 surviving work of any magnitude and literary 
 value written in mediaeval French, is charged 
 with marks of eastern origin. 
 
 The difference between these two streams 
 of influence the early mystic idealisms of 
 the West and of the East is the difference 
 of natural environment. The quickenings of 
 thought in solitude by the western ocean are 
 imaginative and adventurous dreams of 
 unknown worlds, visions of hell, and hopes 
 of paradise. The ocean of the eastern mystic 
 is the wilderness not unknown the wilder- 
 ness where Christ had fasted for forty days, 
 and where the Devil had been empowered to 
 tempt Him ; and so the quickenings of thought 
 of those who fled from the world to dwell in 
 the deserts of Syria and Egypt were not 
 imaginative but ascetic. They knew what lay
 
 Palmers, Pilgrims, and Romers 65 
 
 in wait in the solitude. They were going as 
 outposts in the country of the great enemy to 
 wrestle with the principle of sin. The contest 
 would be lifelong, ever warring against sedi- 
 tion within the citadel of the flesh, and attacks 
 from evil from without, and the weapons 
 of their faith were scourgings, fastings, and 
 prayer. 
 
 The excesses of the ascetics are a strange 
 chapter in the history of fanaticism. Pitiful 
 self-torture this constant warfare of sense 
 and spirit, men dwelling as beasts in caves, 
 naked treating their humanity as a vile 
 thing to be scourged into submission to 
 hunger and cold. So rigorous was the regi- 
 men that often reason failed and hence the 
 eastern reverence for the insane. 
 
 The fairer side of ascetic life, and some of 
 its shadow, may be seen reproduced in Pietro 
 Lorenzetti's fresco of the " Hermits of the 
 Thebaid " in the Campo Santo at Pisa. 
 There, for the most part, they are reading or 
 meditating, or are engaged in rural pursuits. 
 There are also incidents from the lives of 
 certain of the hermits the temptation of 
 St. Anthony, and Christ appearing to him in
 
 66 Palmers, Pilgrims, and Romers 
 
 vision, St. Hilarion subduing a dragon by the 
 sign of the Cross, and the visit of St. Anthony 
 to St. Paul, the patriarch of the hermits, who 
 had dwelt in the wilderness for over ninety 
 years. 
 
 In the life by St. Jerome, the old hermit says 
 to St. Anthony : " Thou beholdest me still alive 
 indeed, but about to become dust. Yet since 
 love sustains the universe, tell me, I beseech 
 you, how it fares with the human race, 
 whether new buildings are rising in old cities, 
 under whose empire the world is now gov- 
 erned, and whether any survive of those who 
 were deluded by the error of devils ? " 
 
 The exquisite humanity and tenderness of 
 this may perhaps be weighed against some 
 of the grosser realities of demoniacal torment 
 and the posturings of St. Simeon Stylites, and 
 asceticism not be judged entirely by its 
 excesses. 
 
 In the adjacent fresco of the " Triumph of 
 Death " the contrast between the contempla- 
 tive life of the hermits and that of wordly vanity 
 is vividly shown in the figure of St. Macarius 
 who stands before a party of knights and 
 ladies who are riding back from the chase,
 
 Palmers, Pilgrims, and Romers 67 
 
 and points them to three open coffins. The 
 horses' nostrils are dilated with fear, one lady 
 seems touched with pity, Uguccione is holding 
 his nose at the sight, and the cavalcade rides 
 on unheedingly. 
 
 Perhaps the earliest instance of the influ- 
 ence of this eastern asceticism in the national 
 as apart from the devotional literature of 
 western Europe is the French poem on the 
 life of St. Alexis written in the eleventh 
 century. The details are softened, but the 
 principles are unchanged. It tells how Alexis, 
 the only son of Euphemian, a rich Roman 
 lord, leaves his father's house on the evening 
 of his marriage, bidding his wife take Christ 
 alone for her husband, for in this world there 
 is no perfect love, and all joy is turned to 
 sorrow; and how he goes to Edessa, gives 
 away all the money he has and lives as a 
 beggar, and as such is given alms by two of 
 his father's servants who have been sent to 
 seek him. After seventeen years he returns 
 to Rome, and meeting his father, appeals to 
 him for succour in the name of his lost son, 
 and is allowed to sit beneath the steps of his 
 palace. There he remains for seventeen years,
 
 68 Palmers, Pilgrims, and Romers 
 
 fed on the waste from his father's table, a mark 
 for the rough jests of his slaves, daily seeing 
 his wife and parents enter and depart, and 
 hearing them weep because of his absence. 
 At last, when dying, he asks for writing mate- 
 rials to be brought to him, and writes the story 
 of his life. Meanwhile a miraculous voice is 
 heard in the city bidding men seek the man 
 of God who is in the house of Euphemian ; 
 and the Pope and a great multitude come, and 
 the scroll is taken from the hand of the beggar 
 as he dies, and then all know his history and 
 honour him as a saint. The church of St. 
 Alessio now covers the spot where the palace 
 stood, and the staircase is still preserved as a 
 holy relic. 
 
 Against the cruelty involved in this ideal of 
 the renunciation of all earthly happiness, the 
 humanity of the poet breaks out in protest in 
 the reproaches which the parents utter when 
 they learn that the son whose absence they 
 have mourned is the dead beggar at their gate. 
 Euphemian, lamenting that he is left childless, 
 bewailing his own blindness in not recognizing 
 his son, admits his sanctity and self-sacrifice, 
 yet exclaims : " Helmet and hauberk thou
 
 Palmers, Pilgrims, and Romcrs 69 
 
 shouldst have worn, and been girt with the 
 sword as were thy equals : thine it was to 
 govern well thy mighty retinue, and to bear 
 the emperor's standard even as did I and thy 
 ancestors." The mother, kissing and embrac- 
 ing the body, asks him why he has had no 
 pity for them, why he has never spoken to her 
 if only once; and his wife joining her tears to 
 theirs, contrasts the emaciated form with the 
 youthful beauty of the husband she had loved. 
 The poet's protest is more than the mourn- 
 ers' utterance of grief, for the faith of Alexis 
 is not only pitiless but sterile, and the ideal of 
 eastern asceticism failed to satisfy the dawn- 
 ing conception of mediaeval Christianity. 
 
 ii 
 
 Before the twelfth century the nations were 
 too savage to be Christian ; something of the 
 savage in the ascetic ; and in the Celtic vista 
 more of the unknown of terror than of joy; 
 visions of hell and reality of torments in 
 Dante's precursors, but only searchings for 
 paradise. These two streams of influence 
 the mystic idealism of the West, the mystic 
 asceticism of the East each born of the
 
 70 Palmers, Pilgrims, and Romers 
 
 communings of faith with nature with the 
 ocean and the wilderness were perfected in 
 union. In the life-endeavour of those whose 
 memory makes mediaeval faith seem to us 
 fervid, these two principles are underlying 
 the fleeing to the wilderness, the renunciation 
 of earthly self-seeking, and the voices of the 
 western wonder-world calling not to tarry, but 
 to go forth into the unknown, to win the Holy 
 Graal, to win paradise rousing the soul thus 
 purified by renunciation to an ecstasy of effort. 
 "And they confessed that they were strangers 
 and pilgrims on the earth, and they wandered 
 too and fro in pilgrimage": palmers, pil- 
 grims, and romers. For, as Dante says in 
 the " Vita Nuova " (I quote from Rossetti's 
 translations), " there are three separate 
 denominations proper unto those who under- 
 take journeys to the glory of God. They are 
 called Palmers who go beyond the seas east- 
 ward, whence often they bring palm-branches ; 
 and Pilgrims are they who journey unto the 
 holy House of Galicia ; seeing that no other 
 apostle was buried so far from his birthplace 
 as was the blessed St. James. And there is 
 a third sort who are called Romers ; in that
 
 Palmers, Pilgrims > and Romers 71 
 
 they go unto Rome." As pilgrims they would 
 fain win pardon for sin by % prayer in some 
 shrine sacred with the memory of saints ; and 
 they told strange stories when they returned 
 from wandering, for the world seemed to them 
 a thing mysterious. The Dark Ages were over, 
 and their eyes were indeed fixed on the Light ; 
 but the darkness was not so long passed by as 
 that shadows had lost their terror, and as they 
 wandered the enchantments of evil were man- 
 ifest to them and perils lay in wait about their 
 path. Yet must there be earnest of their faith 
 other than pilgrimage and prayer. Renuncia- 
 tion yes, and something other than this ; for 
 although strangers they are here for a purpose, 
 and they must be doing while they wait, and 
 leave something behind them that shall testify. 
 As yet no continuing city but in the cities 
 of their tarrying they build temples of praise, 
 and the arts are the handmaids of faith to do 
 her purposes and make beautiful her dwelling- 
 places. Write, build, paint, fight they must 
 do something, however visionary, if only the 
 endeavour be to the glory of God ; retire apart 
 from the world may be, and as at Alvernia and 
 Clairvaux make the wilderness fertile in His
 
 72 Palmers, Pilgrims, and Romers 
 
 praise ; but not sit beneath the steps as a 
 beggar if the brain have purpose or the hand 
 have strength. For " the two arras wherewith 
 we ought to embrace God are firm faith and 
 good works ; both are necessary if we would 
 hold fast unto God, for the one without the 
 other is worth nothing." This is a part of the 
 Credo of the Sire de Joinville the Seneschal, 
 who went crusading with St. Louis and wrote 
 his biography. 
 
 So the fervour of faith becomes action, and, 
 girt still in mystic garment, she walks upon 
 the earth, and her footprints are visible. The 
 saints of this age are no longer for us types, 
 myths or abstractions, but men and women 
 who led holy lives. We may indeed consider 
 as the day-dream of a monk's fantasy the 
 legend of St. Ursula, the daughter of King 
 Maurus, sailing over the sea in pilgrimage 
 with her eleven thousand maidens and suffer- 
 ing martyrdom at Cologne, and deem that the 
 princess never had life other than that she has 
 to-day in the pictures of Carpaccio and Hans 
 Memling ; we may consider the legend of St. 
 Barbara shut in a tower by her father that she 
 might not be seen of men, to be a re-telling of
 
 Palmers, Pilgrims, and Romers 73 
 
 the story of Danae and of the vain attempt of 
 King Acrisius to avert the decree of the Gods ; 
 and disbelieving now in dragons, St. George 
 being left as a hero without an antagonist 
 maybe relegated with the princess Cleodolinda 
 to the domain of mythology as a variant of 
 Perseus and Andromeda ; but however ration- 
 alistic our point of view, we can hardly doubt 
 the reality of the existence of St. Catherine 
 of Siena, or of her interview with Gregory 
 VI, and the return of the Papal court from 
 Avignon ; or that Jeanne, the village maiden 
 of Domre'my, thought she heard a voice from 
 heaven telling her that her king should be 
 crowned in Rheims, and the English should 
 be driven back, and that she followed the 
 thought or the voice which you will and 
 the king won back his kingdom ; or that St. 
 Louis, ninth king of France of that name, went 
 crusading. The imaginative piety potent in 
 literature becomes potent in life and they 
 who are touched by it in spirit, dead to the 
 world, are yet in it a mighty moving force. 
 
 The mystic ideals of the Celt and of the 
 hermit are seen transfigured by a new love of 
 humanity in the ideals of court and cloister.
 
 74 Palmers, Pilgrims, and Romers 
 
 It is in the pages of their earliest biographers 
 that we may best learn something of the spirit 
 of those whose lives were of these ideals the 
 highest measure of attainment; for they in 
 writing of them are uncritical, expect not 
 questioning, are neither apologetic to disarm 
 it nor circumstantial to confute, being touched 
 in some measure with the same simple and 
 childlike faith. So instancing St. Francis of 
 Assisi as type of the monastic ideal " arising 
 as a sun upon the world " we must look to the 
 life by St. Bonaventura, who as a child had 
 been healed by him, or to the scenes from this 
 life painted by Giotto in the Upper Church 
 at Assisi, or to the Fioretti "the flowers, 
 miracles and devout examples " of St. Francis 
 and his followers. Yet the extreme sanctity of 
 St. Francis had so impressed itself upon his 
 contemporaries that he moved as a saint 
 among men, and as such, filled with love for 
 all men and all created things, he appears in 
 the pages of his earliest biographers. Of no 
 age, of no group of his contemporaries can it 
 be claimed that of them he was typical. 
 
 As type of the monastic ideal choosing 
 retirement in order the more completely to
 
 Palmers, Pilgrims, and Romers 75 
 
 consecrate the talents to the service of God, 
 we may instance Fra Angelico ; and his life 
 gentle, spiritual, imaginative, may be seen 
 mirrored in his art in tabernacle and altar- 
 piece and in the frescoes in the cells of the 
 convent of St. Marco ; and for other proof of 
 the holiness whereby he came to be named 
 of the angels which he painted, we may read 
 in the life by Vasari : " He laboured continu- 
 ally at his paintings, but would do nothing 
 that was not connected with things holy. He 
 might have been rich, but for riches he took 
 no care ; on the contrary he was accustomed to 
 say that the only true riches was contentment 
 with little. ... In fine, this never sufficiently 
 to be lauded father was most humble, modest 
 and excellent in all his words and werks ; in 
 his painting he gave evidence of piety and 
 devotion, as well as of ability, and the saints 
 that he painted have more of the air and 
 expression of sanctity than have those of any 
 other master." 
 
 In the Mediaeval Age the realization of the 
 monastic ideal attained to the extreme of 
 sanctity ; and yet it belongs to it less exclu- 
 sively than does the ideal chivalrous. The
 
 76 Palmers, Pilgrims, and Romers 
 
 monk's faith is ever apt to seem rather a thing 
 apart from his age than a witness of it. Love 
 divine and love human have been planted 
 together in the hearts of men, and they were 
 marrying and giving in marriage and the 
 immortal tenderness of human relationship 
 was ever recurrent, and they were wandering 
 to and fro over the earth and fighting and 
 trading and marking out kingdoms ; and some 
 taking their share in all this, yet follow the 
 spirit of an inner dream, and to its bidding 
 they are ministrant, and it tells them that 
 nothing that is pure is too lowly to be done or 
 too great to be attempted, and walking in its 
 guidance they are in the forefront of endeavour. 
 To some it will appear that they can more 
 truly serve their purpose in the cloister than 
 in the world, and by the fact of this withdrawal 
 from life's turmoil they cannot be typical of their 
 age, and that they seem not to be at variance 
 with it is witness of the faith of their fellows. 
 The type of mediaeval imaginative piety is 
 not monastic is neither the saint in poverty, 
 nor the monk in his cloister, but rather the 
 knight-errant riding forth to meet adventure 
 in the name of God and his lady.
 
 Palmers, Pilgrims, and Romers 77 
 
 The Celtic restlessness is thus transformed 
 into a rule of conduct. The knight's vow is 
 as much a consecration as the vow of priest- 
 hood, and the quest on which he enters is 
 lifelong : to succour the weak, to war against 
 wrong and unfaith. Many adventures lay 
 about his path, and the sword never rusted in 
 the scabbard. It was an age of conflict : 
 much of it against unfaith, notably in Spain 
 and Sicily ; for there the knight might win 
 fame akin to that of the Paladins of history 
 and romance, who had fought at Roncesvalles 
 and Aliscans. 
 
 The whole literature of chivalry, the 
 chansons de geste, the legends of Arthur, alike 
 full of the memory of heroic deeds, had 
 been a call to action ; and the appeal of 
 Urban II at the Council of Clermont fell upon 
 eager ears. There should be no peace while 
 Christ's sepulchre was in the hands of the 
 Saracens. He came not to send peace until 
 all things were fulfilled. The host of warrior 
 pilgrims depart, and most of them return no 
 more. But for nigh two hundred years the 
 call is on occasion heard again. Votary suc- 
 ceeds to votary, St. Bernard to Peter the
 
 78 Palmers, Pilgrims, and Romers 
 
 Hermit. Dead are those who had preached 
 before and those who went crusading, and 
 their conquests if haply they conquered 
 aught are lost ; still the same response is 
 made, private feuds are abandoned, and the 
 host sets out to recover the Holy Sepulchre, 
 and St. Bernard tears his robe in pieces to 
 make crosses for his hearers, and the wave of 
 the knighthood of Christendom foams itself 
 away upon the shore of Syria or of Egypt, or 
 is spent in foam before ever it reaches the soil 
 of the unbeliever. In the chronicling of the 
 quest we may see the fervour of the knight's 
 imaginings, and the falterings of his footsteps 
 and his purpose, for this quest is for the 
 knights of Christendom even as that of the 
 San Graal for the knights of Arthur's Round 
 Table, in that it cannot be achieved by 
 prowess in arms alone. 
 
 Alike in a measure is the manner of the 
 avowing of the quest the vision splendid of 
 endeavour beckoning the assembly at Clermont 
 forth from their accustomed selves, and the 
 mystic vision apparent to the knights at 
 Camelot. As they sat at meat together there 
 entered within the hall the Holy Graal covered
 
 Palmers, Pilgrims, and Romers 79 
 
 with white samite, but none might see it nor 
 who bore it, and when it had been borne 
 through the hall, then the holy vessel departed 
 suddenly so that they wist not whither. The 
 crying of thunder and a radiant light had 
 heralded its coming, and all in silence had 
 looked each at other, and each in this light 
 had seemed fairer than ever before. And after 
 its departing they had found speech, and Sir 
 Gawaine first and then the rest had made a 
 vow that on the morrow without longer abid- 
 ing, they would labour in the quest of the San 
 Graal for a year and a day or more if need 
 be, and that they would return again no more 
 to the Court until they had seen it more 
 openly. 
 
 So they set out on their quest : but to the 
 holy knights alone success was given, and 
 two of these were buried in the city of Sarras, 
 and Sir Bors alone returned' to tell of it. The 
 others Sir Launcelot, " that had no peer of 
 any earthly sinful man," Sir Gawaine and 
 the rest their travail availed not. 
 
 We are considering an historical event and 
 the memory of the lives of men, and we have 
 no wish to idealize the scene; yet it is only
 
 8o Palmers, Pilgrims, and Romers 
 
 thus in legend that we can parallel the 
 imaginative ecstasy of the invocation and 
 response of Christian chivalry, and each man 
 as he took the cross must have seemed to his 
 fellows as seemed the knights at Camelot, 
 "fairer than ever before." The ecstasy is of 
 the inception of purpose. As the knights 
 of the San Graal digressed, and the memory of 
 old deeds and old desires was still potent, 
 so also the knights Crusaders. " Whoever," 
 was the decree, " through devotion, and neither 
 to gain honours nor wealth, shall set out for 
 Jerusalem to deliver the Holy Sepulchre, his 
 journey shall be counted to him for full 
 penance ; " and there were few if any who 
 after the journey's ending must look not still 
 to win pardon of mercy, and not as due. Not 
 many for long served God for nought. In the 
 first Crusade Jerusalem was captured, and 
 Godfrey was made Defender of the Holy 
 Sepulchre, refusing to wear a kingly crown in 
 the city where Christ had worn a crown of 
 thorns ; and then many deeming that the quest 
 was ended returned to their own lands, taking 
 no thought for the maintaining of what they had 
 won ; and others remained to found kingdoms
 
 Palmers, Pilgrims, and Romers 81 
 
 and principalities, and they had forgotten their 
 vow and were at variance, and fell before the 
 Saracens. 
 
 Their successors never reached the holy 
 city. Much digression of purpose, and for 
 the most part voluntary: but Venetians must 
 be paid for their ferrying Shylocks to 
 their bond and with result for them more 
 prosperous. Although incidentally there was 
 shedding of Christian blood at Zara, and more 
 later on at Constantinople, and the conquest 
 for a time of the Byzantine Empire, with 
 result to weaken it and leave it incapable of 
 withstanding the attacks of the very foes 
 against whom they had gone forth to do battle. 
 There was conquest also of Cyprus, and the 
 turning aside of another expedition to Tunis 
 so that Charles of Anjou might get his tribute 
 from the Sultan, and jealousy and strife in 
 council, and even a leaguing with the Saracens 
 against each other, and all this done by 
 those who had vowed to strive with single 
 purpose for the recovery of the Holy Sepulchre. 
 
 The Crusades are the quest of an ideal ; 
 they failed of their purpose, but their failure is 
 the record of its abandonment.
 
 82 Palmers, Pilgrims, and Romers 
 
 Of each alike is true what Joinville frankly 
 confesses of the seventh Crusade " that God 
 may say of them as He did of the Israelites, 
 *et pro nichilo habuerunt terram desidera- 
 bilem,' " for they had forgotten Him. Yet 
 there were holy knights in this quest as in 
 that of the San Graal, and the portrait of one 
 who strove therein without reproach may be 
 seen in Joinville's Life of St. Louis. 
 
 Not a writer of books, Jehan, Sire de Join- 
 ville, Seneschal of Champaigne ! Once indeed 
 in his youth he had summed up in a few pages 
 the articles of his faith. As a man of thirty 
 after six years of crusading he had settled 
 down on his estate, and lived there quietly 
 and somewhat uneventfully except for an 
 occasional visit to Court. Fifty years later, 
 when King Louis IX had long been dead and 
 canonized, he undertook, at the request of 
 Jeanne, Queen of Navarre, " that he would 
 make" a book of the devout "sayings and 
 good works of the king St. Louis," and as the 
 Queen died during the four years he took to 
 complete it, the work is dedicated to her son, 
 the king's namesake and great-grandson, after- 
 wards Louis X.
 
 Palmers, Pilgrims, and Romers 83 
 
 Simple, sincere, at times garrulous, but 
 always kindly and cheerful is the old octoge- 
 narian's account of the days of his youth. The 
 Crusade has receded into history ; his memory 
 fails him a little in the matter of dates ; the 
 plan of the campaign is rather involved and 
 perhaps was not much clearer at the time. But 
 memory awakes in delight, and details begin 
 to crowd upon his recollection as he describes 
 the fighting, the sieges, the dangers and 
 escapes, and how at the battle of Mansourah 
 he, together with the Count of Soissons and 
 Pierre de Neville, had kept the bridge that 
 covered the flank of the army against the Sar- 
 acens, and how they were all wounded by 
 their arrows, and how the Count of Soissons 
 had jested, saying they would make speech of 
 that day together in ladies' bowers ; and how 
 once being forced to surrender he saved him- 
 self and all his followers from massacre by 
 pretending that he was the king's cousin, and 
 how the cellarer had given his vote that they 
 should not surrender either to the galleys or 
 to the land forces, but should all die and go 
 to paradise. Very vivid also the memory of 
 their sufferings, of the fevers and diseases
 
 84 Palmers, Pilgrims , and Romers 
 
 which attacked the army, and how as prison- 
 ers they lived in constant expectation that they 
 would all be massacred. 
 
 He had told it all doubtless many a time, 
 and must soon make an end of telling it, but 
 he is now putting together all he had known 
 about the king ; and it is a very pleasant task, 
 and lest in the course of the narrative he 
 should forget to introduce some of the talks 
 which the king had with him, or to make men- 
 tion of some of his acts of piety, he describes 
 these at the outset and then tells the story of 
 the Crusade. The character of St. Louis as 
 thus portrayed is perhaps the most complete 
 embodiment of the ideal of Christian chivalry 
 which we may find in a record of life. 
 
 He is gentle, full of solicitude for his peo- 
 ple wherever he may be so in consistency with 
 his vow, modest, yet inflexible in purpose, 
 
 asking advice of his council, but not defer- 
 ring to it against his own judgment, very brave 
 
 not pursuing danger but never flinching from 
 it, when a prisoner, unmoved by threats of 
 torture, taking his share of all the perils that 
 befell his army, refusing to leave the ship in 
 which he was returning after she had struck
 
 Palmers, Pilgrims, and Romers 85 
 
 on a rock and was considered unseaworthy, so 
 that by his presence he might give the others 
 courage to remain in her. Unquestioning in 
 faith, undoubting of God's purposes but full 
 of natural affection, he replies to the Provost 
 of the Knights Hospitallers who had congrat- 
 ulated him on the victory of Mansourah that 
 God is indeed to be worshipped in all His 
 ways, but big tears roll down his cheeks as he 
 speaks, for his brother the Count of Artois has 
 been slain in the battle. 
 
 Somewhat hasty in condemning the weak- 
 ness of others, and then regretting his impa- 
 tience, he is himself humble in receiving 
 reproof, and in the rules of conduct which he 
 wrote for the guidance of his son, he bade him 
 so to bear himself that his friends should not 
 fear to tell him of his faults. Humble also in 
 his failure when the possibility of success has 
 passed away, and even as King Richard when 
 they would fain show him Jerusalem covered 
 his eyes and prayed that he might not look 
 upon the holy city since he could not deliver 
 it from the hands of the enemy, so when the 
 Sultan offered to give sureties that he might 
 go there on pilgrimage, he takes advice of his
 
 86 Palmers, Pilgrims, and Romers 
 
 council and refuses, because if he, the first 
 king in Christendom, did this, others might be 
 content to thus fulfil their pilgrimage without 
 delivering the holy city. 
 
 The failure of the Crusade was apparent to 
 all after the capture of the king, and the ces- 
 sion of their solitary conquest, Damietta, in 
 order to obtain his release. The chief lords 
 of the council advised that they all return 
 forthwith to France ; and one by one they gave 
 their advice, and Joinville, when it came to 
 his turn, urged the king to remain, because if 
 he departed the other prisoners would never 
 obtain their freedom, and the king said he 
 would announce his decision in eight days. 
 And Joinville says that after the council was 
 ended, all either reproached or shunned him 
 because he had differed from them. And as 
 he stood sadly apart looking out of the win- 
 dow, some one came behind him and leant on 
 his shoulder, and put his two hands on his 
 head. He had just told him to go away and 
 leave him in peace, when he recognized by a 
 ring on the finger that it was the king ; and 
 the king asked how he, who was only a young 
 man, had had the daring to urge him to
 
 Palmers, Pilgrims, and Romers 87 
 
 remain, in opposition to the advice of all his 
 chief lords, and he answered that he had urged 
 what he believed was right, and he would have 
 been dishonest if he had done otherwise. " If 
 I stay shall you stay too ? " said the king, and 
 he answered " Yes " if he could find means to 
 live upon, and the king told him to be of good 
 comfort for he was very grateful for his advice ; 
 and on the eight day the king announced that 
 he would remain, and held Joinville to his 
 promise. 
 
 Fortitude, humility, gentleness, are all embod- 
 ied in the king's conduct in this scene, and it 
 is in the recording of such incidents that Join- 
 ville's Life of St. Louis has its unique and 
 enduring value, as the portrait of a knight 
 without reproach, who, alike armoured or unar- 
 moured, did nothing base. As king, he ruled 
 with justice, clemency, and wise ordinance. 
 As son, as husband, as father he was alike 
 loving and loved. He walked uprightly in the 
 allotted path of human duty ; yet still withal a 
 stranger and a pilgrim. Still for him the inner 
 dream and the quest of its fulfilment, still 
 hope unconquerable. He would fain again go 
 crusading, and thirteen years later did set out
 
 88 Palmer S, Pilgrims, and Romers 
 
 with a smaller army than before, and died at 
 Tunis, far from the city he might not enter, 
 yet seeking it, nor from attainment so remote 
 but that some Pisgah-sight of promise passed 
 before his eyes in dying. 
 
 This was the last Crusade, and after the 
 death of the king the army all came back 
 again, or rather such of them as the plague 
 had spared ; and there was soon enough to do 
 in fighting Saracens in Europe, without seek- 
 ing them in Palestine. 
 
 Many of those who had gone with St. Louis 
 on his first Crusade were unwilling to accom- 
 pany him again, and among the number of 
 these was Joinville, for he had found that 
 while absent in the service of God and the 
 king, his lands had been harried, his people 
 impoverished and oppressed, and he was of 
 opinion that he would be best doing God's will 
 by remaining to help and defend them, and by 
 going no more on pilgrimage. His purpose 
 being only to write of such things as he knew 
 he will make no account of the expedition to 
 Tunis, for he thanks God he was not there ; 
 and so the book closes, briefly telling of the 
 king's death and canonization and appearance
 
 Palmers, Pilgrims, and Romers 89 
 
 to him in a dream, and leaving us in no uncer- 
 tainty as to Joinville's views about crusading. 
 
 in 
 
 In the changed temper of the old Seneschal 
 we may discern something of the changing 
 spirit of the age. In the years ensuing there 
 was much difference of opinion as to how best 
 to do God's will, or whether to do it at all, 
 differences only to be settled by the sword, 
 but unanimity among the knights about 
 going no more on pilgrimage. Less also of a 
 childlike inconsequence in the actions of faith, 
 in other words less imaginative piety manifest 
 in them ; and a gradual perception that they 
 were not so much strangers upon the earth 
 but that it might be made a very comfortable 
 place to tarry in, and much effort to this 
 end. Journeyings more practical for conquest 
 or commerce ; and other work for the sword 
 , and issues more immediate than the delivery 
 of the Holy Sepulchre. So the knight having 
 given up his ideal quest, and Abana and Phar- 
 par being deemed good enough to wash in for 
 any process of purgation that is at present
 
 go Palmers, Pilgrims, and ffomers 
 
 necessary, the seeker of Jordan is no longer 
 looked upon very seriously by his fellows. 
 
 Palmer, pilgrim, or romer still remained a 
 familiar figure. Indeed on the stage of life 
 the path seemed a pleasant enough one for 
 a time for an actor of leisure and of a rov- 
 ing fancy, and served either as one of love's 
 disguises or as a help to its forgetting ; and 
 as such, picturesque and interesting, with coc- 
 kle-hat and staff and sandal shoon, for long 
 he wanders in and out of the romances and 
 plays of the succeeding ages, a foil to graver 
 parts, a mark for laughter kindly or contemp- 
 tuous, tricked out in antique garb and more of 
 a mummer than his fellows, yet at times meet- 
 ing with a careless glance of sympathy for 
 memory's sake. 
 
 Aucassin in the dungeon singing of the 
 beauty of Nicolete tells how a palmer from 
 Limousin lay tossing upon his bed in pain 
 and at sight of her passing by was healed of 
 his sickness and went back to his own place 
 comforted. We are not told whether the 
 palmer was setting out or returning, whether 
 his quest was completed or abandoned. To 
 the old minstrel the quest seems immaterial.
 
 Palmers, Pilgrims, and Romers 91 
 
 Perhaps some Nicolete of Limousin had been 
 the cause of all his trouble and of his departing, 
 and he was healed by the vision of Nicolete, 
 and it did not matter much what he was look- 
 ing for in the meantime. In this indifference 
 to the purport of the palmer's journey the 
 minstrel of the twelfth century song-story curi- 
 ously anticipates the attitude of those who 
 came after the age of questing and pilgrimage. 
 It is a touch of the same spirit when Helena 
 in "All 's Well that Ends Well " puts on the 
 garb of a St. Jacques' pilgrim, but rather as a 
 travelling costume than with any intention of 
 visiting the saint's shrine ; for from Rousillon 
 she goes to Florence, a very devious route 
 to Compostella, but one which led straight to 
 Bertram, the husband who had spurned her, 
 and there she found means to win his love, 
 and so finally 
 
 "Journeys end in lovers meeting" 
 
 and it seemed indeed a fit and proper way of 
 ending all journeys, the pilgrim's journey 
 among the rest, if he would only be a wise 
 man and take happiness when it offered.
 
 92 Palmers, Pilgrims, and Romers 
 
 So gradually the age put away from itself 
 unpractical journeyings; turned from its vi- 
 sionaries of faith or deed, left them on the 
 hillsides telling "Aves" in their cloisters, or 
 tilting at windmills in the plain, forgot about 
 them or jested with their memory, or when 
 regarding them most seriously did so with a 
 grave compassion, as men who had put away 
 childish things might look upon others who 
 had played as children all their lives, and had 
 been childlike in faith also. 
 
 " I cannot laugh at," says Sir Thomas 
 Browne, " but rather pity the fruitless jour- 
 neys of Pilgrims, or contemn the miserable 
 condition of Fryars, for though misplaced in 
 circumstances there is something in it of 
 devotion." 
 
 To cross Europe afoot to pray before a 
 shrine, to encamp in fever swamps for the 
 possession of a sepulchre, laugh at, pity, 
 contemn, what we will, effort so unpractical, so 
 misplaced, but "there is something in it of 
 devotion." 
 
 The flame light of cathedral windows led us 
 to attempt to conjecture something of the fer- 
 vour of mediaeval faith, and the conjecture
 
 Palmers, Pilgrims, and Romers 93 
 
 leads us back to a little chapel in the cathe- 
 dral at Siena, the chapel of St. Giovanni. 
 
 It is scarce eight yards across, low and 
 round, the dome blue and starred with gold, 
 which all looks very soft and rich in the dim, 
 gradual light. There is a font there carved 
 by Jacopo della Quercia, a statue of St. John 
 by Donatello, and also some small frescoes by 
 Pinturricchio, which were commissioned by a 
 knight of St. John of Rhodes, Alberto Arrin- 
 ghieri. In one of these the knight is represented 
 as a young man in the habit of his order kneel- 
 ing in prayer. 
 
 He is kneeling in a flowery meadow. In 
 the background there is a typical mediaeval 
 landscape, full of life and movement, hills and 
 castles with turrets and battlements, a wooded 
 vale and a lake beyond it winding amid the 
 hills, and men are hurrying to and fro, and 
 one on horseback rides with speed. " Helmet 
 and hauberk thou shouldst have worn, and 
 been girt with the sword as were thy fellows," 
 such was Euphemian's lament over his son 
 Alexis who had chosen the sanctity of poverty. 
 This knight is in full armour, and his sword is 
 girt to his side ; but he has doffed his helmet
 
 94 Palmers, Pilgrims, and Romcrs 
 
 and his gauntlets and is kneeling with bared 
 head and hands uplifted. Not the refusal of 
 life's turmoil this, but a pause before action, 
 and the gathering of strength which should 
 endure questing and pilgrimage.
 
 IV 
 
 VISION AND MEMORY 
 
 'N a wild glen in Devon the water 
 leaps in riot down the crags and 
 swirls with deep murmur over the 
 pools. The thickets of gnarled oak and beech 
 and ash start from the water's brim, and bend- 
 ing shadow it, and then wind steeply up the 
 hillsides. The verdure is the deep full green 
 of late summer scarred by the crimson clusters 
 of the ash berries. On the moor above are 
 long belts of bracken and the purple glory of 
 heather. 
 
 The wind stirs gently in the glen, swaying 
 with soft undulation the ferns and grasses that 
 cluster in rock-crevices. 
 
 The soft temperate air breathes a solitude 
 and supreme content. Only the music of the 
 moving water breaks the stillness with its eter- 
 nal note of sadness. The fascination of its
 
 96 Vision and Memory 
 
 melody lures from the perfect pleasure of the 
 present to memories. Memories called from 
 the past by some unlooked-for turn of the 
 wheel of remembrance ; memories of other 
 scenes in other lands ; of hillsides thick with 
 olives gleaming silver to the sun, or shrinking, 
 scorched by its embrace ; of mossy under- 
 growth where the air is odorous with violets ; 
 of groves of palm and cypress ; of plains of 
 miles on miles of sun-steeped vineyards and 
 all the rich-hued pageantry of the South. And 
 in the scene of sylvan English loveliness the 
 wonder of the beauty of Italy seems to take a 
 unity and meaning the more vivid by the sense 
 of contrast. For memory sleeps but lightly, 
 and the touch alike of pleasure and of sorrow 
 is quick to awaken, and the light sleeper rises 
 and hurries away, her eyes mist-wreathed with 
 the visions of sleep, a pilgrim to the present, 
 " wandering between two worlds," and bound 
 for a goal of far-endeavour. 
 
 What is this restlessness which thus draws 
 to the South the fantasies of memory or of 
 dream ? 
 
 Heine has given it perfect expression in his 
 lyric of the pine and the palm the pine stand-
 
 Vision and Memory 97 
 
 ing lonely on a northern height, and sighing 
 for the warm splendour of the palm-clad South, 
 and the palm parched beneath a southern sky 
 dreaming of the gentler coolness of the North. 
 
 It is the more definite expression of the 
 sense of world strangeness : the conjecture of 
 something other than the immediate which 
 should more satisfy the sensibilities ; and in 
 northern art and song this feeling has found 
 expression in praise of Italy and the rich-hued 
 glory of the South. 
 
 Praise of a visioned Italy, an eidolon of 
 thought, vague as fantasy, fashioned of the 
 desire of the spirit, seen only in dream 
 its ramparts as though set in sheer space, and 
 girt by the mist of the unattainable, the land 
 long sought of the wanderer, to whose repeated 
 questioning the answer was alone : 
 
 " Dort wo du nicht bist dort ist das 
 Gliick ; " but for whom the vision existed so 
 long as his quest was unfaltering. 
 
 Praise of an Italy real and remembered 
 seen in dream, but there fettered by memory. 
 It will then lose something of the infinite pos- 
 sibilities of the conjectural, but will gain in 
 vividness and dearness of recollection, for the
 
 98 Vision and Memory 
 
 memory of happiness will touch the chords of 
 the soul more tenderly than they can ever be 
 stirred by its expectation. 
 
 If essaying to realize the dream you visit 
 visioned Italy, you make her the real, the 
 remembered, then indubitably something is 
 lost in the transformation. Some aspects of 
 the vision must be modified under the pitiless 
 logic of facts ; somewhere a cold insensibility 
 will be shown to the peculiar charm of what 
 has drawn you in reverence and awe ; some- 
 thing that should be Roman will be found Sar- 
 dinian ; some monastery that you have imaged 
 as a sleeping phantasm of a vanished world 
 will be used as an artillery barrack ; some 
 fresco dim and faded in colour but change- 
 less in purity and simplicity will be found 
 cleft asunder by the gaunt protruding arch of 
 some pretentious modern tomb, or completely 
 ruined alike in colour and outline by ill-judged 
 restoration. Nor is the disillusionmemt the 
 less poignant although you may realize that 
 this is inevitable in a land so rich in monu- 
 ments as Italy, and that in truth there is man- 
 ifest in the acts of the municipio of every city 
 in Tuscany a loving reverence for the past,
 
 Vision and Memory 99 
 
 and an attempt to preserve its art treasures 
 and the memory of lives of good endeavour. 
 
 The sense of contrast of the reality to your 
 half-formed visions may be such that you are 
 like to decide as Heine did when he wrote to 
 Theophile Gautier, " And have you been to 
 Spain, and can you still write about it ? " that 
 there are certain countries of the heart which 
 are known better without seeing what mas- 
 querades as reality, which "sleep brings close 
 and waking drives away." 
 
 This is true of some cities and lands which 
 have for an age flashed as beacon-lights on the 
 pathway of human progress, and then on a 
 sudden the flame has grown ineffectual and 
 quiescent, and the spent light has quivered 
 and flickered away, and the embers have 
 grown cold and been scattered, and only their 
 memories abide ; or if life still clings to the 
 spot it is as the young phoenix posthumous, 
 born amid the ashes of life already departed, 
 seeming as it were a stranger trespassing on 
 and violating the sanctity of a tomb. 
 
 Tunis may hold the dust of Carthage in 
 pledge, but it would be hard to part it from 
 the sand of the desert.
 
 loo Vision and Memory 
 
 Persepolis too, it is better not to visit. I 
 have never been there and am not in the 
 least likely to go, and my entry into the 
 capital will always remain an entirely poetic 
 rhapsody 
 
 " // is a glorious thing to be a king 
 And ride in triumph to Persepolis" 
 
 and Marlowe's mighty line governs the cere- 
 mony. I enter riding in triumph. I am for 
 the nonce a king. It is inconceivable that 
 any actual visit would have other result than 
 to blur this vision and shatter the fabric of the 
 glory of Tamerlane. 
 
 But I cannot feel that it is better not to 
 visit Spain in order to leave dreams intact, 
 and even the most elegiac of those who travel 
 there are neither tongue-tied by the sense of 
 contrast nor yet is their utterance a lament 
 that the past has been swept away. Rather 
 would it seem that the hand of Time has 
 touched the mediaeval glory of Granada and 
 Castile very gently and reverently, mellowing 
 it in radiance and sustaining it in sleep. And 
 assuredly it is without question better to visit 
 Italy and get visions modified as may be, for
 
 Vision and Memory 101 
 
 Italy of to-day is more beautiful than all 
 dreams of it, and it will be the source of new 
 visions manifold arising on the ashes of the 
 old. 
 
 ii 
 
 Yet disillusionments there will be. Per- 
 haps the entry into Rome will be one. I 
 forget what my chosen form of entry used to 
 be, but I am sure it was not by train. Now, 
 however, having had experience of that method 
 of entry I can imagine no other, and if I 
 speculate at all about the matter it is as to 
 whether it will be the diretto or the direttissimo 
 next time or whether I shall ever take a seat 
 in the train de luxe. In the day of stage 
 coaches at the end of a long drive you came 
 suddenly to a turn in the road where the eter- 
 nal city was spread out before you, pasture to 
 your gaze, and the driver at the psychological 
 moment cracked his whip and remarked " Ecco 
 Roma 1 " Now the railway station and the 
 painful newness of the Via Venti Settembre 
 hardly offer the same facilities for poetic im- 
 pressions. Nor will the sense of incongruity 
 end here. The evidence of two civilizations
 
 IO2 Vision and Memory 
 
 in the Colosseum inspired Gibbon to write the 
 " Decline and Fall," as it had previously been 
 witness of the resolve of Villani that he would 
 put on record the history of his native city. 
 Perhaps you have indulged the fancy that the 
 same spectacle may awaken in you some com- 
 paratively noteworthy thoughts or resolutions, 
 and visiting it by moonlight for the heighten- 
 ing of picturesque effect you have found your- 
 self playing involuntarily hide and seek with 
 a multitude of tourists whose existence you 
 would fain forget, and by day you have been 
 an unwilling listener to peripatetic lecturers. 
 You abstract yourself from these adventitious 
 aids : the immensity, the magnificence is and 
 must be awe-impelling as long as the stones 
 remain, but the girdle of beauty, the wreath- 
 ings of fern and grasses, with which each 
 recurring spring seeks to pay its tribute to the 
 enduring grandeur of the fabric, all are torn 
 ruthlessly away by its conservators, and the 
 arena is freshly sanded, smooth to tread upon, 
 and the result is rather archaeological than 
 picturesque. 
 
 The same is in a measure true of all the 
 relics of ancient Rome. They seem huge
 
 Vision and Memory 103 
 
 open-air museums, impressive alike by their 
 immensity and antiquity, but surpassed in the 
 haunting suggestiveness of beauty by an ivy- 
 mantled English belfry tower. 
 
 Shelley in the preface to " Prometheus Un- 
 bound " states that : " The poem was chiefly 
 written upon the mountainous ruins of the 
 Baths of Caracalla, among the flowery glades 
 and thickets of odoriferous blossoming trees, 
 which are extended in ever-winding labyrinths 
 upon its immense platforms and dizzy arches 
 suspended in the air." 
 
 Glades and thickets are there no longer. 
 No glint of colour in the arches. Their dull 
 red is arid and bare as the sand beneath them. 
 There is nothing to abstract the attention from 
 the crumbling masonry or to hinder the real- 
 ization of the fact that these were once baths 
 and are dust baths still. 
 
 Nature is the most fitting guardian of the 
 monuments which a vanished race have en- 
 trusted to her keeping, and conservation such 
 as this is in very deed a defilement. 
 
 Rome has disillusionments, and yet Rome 
 is assuredly of all museums the most fascinat- 
 ing.
 
 104 Vision and Memory 
 
 The eternal city! time's enigma in its 
 perodic newness of life. The eternal cities ! 
 city built upon city Rome of the Caesars, 
 Rome of the Papacy, Rome in her tireless ac- 
 tivity the capital of Italy. Coming to Rome 
 you are not a stranger, you have followed the 
 path immemorial and inevitable, you have 
 come to your heritage, for it is a part of the 
 destiny of things, of your destiny and hers, 
 that you should come and that she should 
 teach. You have come even as your fathers 
 have come, as all nations have come, captives 
 for a witness of her triumph, conquering Goths 
 to be conquered by her unarmed strength, 
 Emperors and Kings to do obeisance to 
 Christ's Vicar, pilgrims from far lands bare- 
 footed and travel-stained to offer prayers 
 before some shrine that they might win par- 
 don for sin, lovers of art to gaze upon her 
 treasuries and win the thoughts that lie pris- 
 oned in her marbles. And long as is the roll 
 of her visitants the eternal city has been justi- 
 fied of them and they have learnt in the 
 measure of their seeking, if they have sought 
 humbly and waited : the dried rod blossomed 
 in token that Tannhauser might be saved, but
 
 Vision and Memory 105 
 
 he had stayed not within the gates and knew 
 it not. 
 
 So for centuries the human tide, changeless 
 and ever changing as the sea, has surged 
 within her gates, bringing to her its needs, its 
 doubts and aspirations, to learn of her forti- 
 tude to bear, of her energy to create, of her 
 faith to suffer and to hope. Drifting on the 
 tide, coming to your heritage, you wander 
 amid her streets, and piece by piece, and stone 
 by stone you make her memories your own, 
 and unravel and remember and recreate her 
 history and yours ; and by the sorcery of 
 dreams, temples and palaces are recaptured 
 from the past, and " cloud-capt " the struc- 
 tures of Imperial Rome float before the eye 
 in pristine grandeur. 
 
 Then a vision no less wonderful, the 
 mighty dome and gleaming cross of St, Peter's 
 dwarfing the seven hills, the mass of lesser 
 domes and campaniles innumerable, and all 
 around treading on the dust of Caesars a city 
 joyous with life, a life bizarre and cosmopoli- 
 tan, revelling in the sunshine of the Roman 
 winter, streaming through art galleries, dust- 
 ing sacristies with dainty dresses in the search
 
 io6 Vision and Memory 
 
 for pictures, marching with candles through 
 the Catacombs, crowding into the Sistine to 
 see the Pope at High Mass, shopping in the 
 Corso and getting the news at Piale's in 
 the morning, and after lunch making a Rotten 
 Row of the Pincio, enjoying to the uttermost 
 everything there is to be enjoyed, the con- 
 certs, the balls at the Quirinal, the opera, and 
 the Carnival. 
 
 Wandering between these two visions you 
 forgive much that is alien to expectation, 
 you will forgive the conservators of classic 
 Rome their archaeological trend, you will for- 
 give the newness of new Rome, the huge 
 monument to Victor Emmanuel, the unfin- 
 ished Palace of Justice and the bare embank- 
 ment of the Tiber, for the city still is sacrosanct 
 of memory, inviolate alike to testify and to 
 teach, and these changes are a token that the 
 measure of her years is as yet unspanned. 
 
 in 
 
 Whatever the vision of Venice which imagi- 
 nation has bodied forth, the reality cannot fail 
 of picturesqueness, and if the city be entered
 
 Vision and Memory 107 
 
 at dusk, the first impression is likely to sur- 
 pass all conjecture. After the long railway 
 journey the contrast is fascinating. To step 
 into a gondola and glide through narrow 
 waterways under low bridges the lamps of 
 which are reflected as stars in the still depth, 
 hearing the slow swirl of the water round the 
 keel, and the murmur of the ripples receding 
 from the oar faint as retreating footsteps. To 
 listen to the boatman's melancholy, deep- 
 throated cry in passing canals on either hand 
 that thread their way amid mouldering palaces 
 dim and mysterious in the dusk. Then to 
 emerge suddenly in the grand canal, to be- 
 come one among other gondolas, gliding on 
 the still water over the quivering shadows of 
 churches and palaces, and on to the Lion and 
 minarets of St. Mark and the brilliant gleam 
 of the Piazza. This is surely the closest sub- 
 stitute to a visit to fairyland which can fall to 
 the lot of ordinary mortals. 
 
 Morning brings reflection. Some of the 
 palaces are dingy in decay, and like stage 
 scenery lose their impressiveness in the light 
 of day. But nothing can efface the memory of 
 the wonder and delight of the first impression,
 
 io8 Vision and Memory 
 
 and knowledge more minute adds to one 
 detail the charm it takes from another. When 
 you have settled down to see the city, and 
 wander through churches to look at Bellinis 
 and Tintorettos, at times gliding through the 
 silent waterways you pass by a coign of re- 
 pose so perfect, where so little of change has 
 marked the passage of centuries, that it seems 
 that the touch of time has ceased utterly, and 
 that you are wafted as by -some stroke of an 
 enchanter's wand back to when the Doges 
 "used to wed the sea with rings," for the 
 water is dappling the palace steps, and the 
 sunlight is flushing the veins of the marble 
 portico now as in the days of the Dandolos. 
 
 The house of Othello has nothing save tra- 
 dition to distinguish it from other palaces on 
 the Riva, and yet the fact destroys no illusion. 
 
 Shakespeare's Italy is of local habitation 
 too unsubstantial for the traveller to realize its 
 landmarks, nor is it fashioned of the desire 
 of dreams which recur to haunt in rivalry 
 with the reality. For Shakespeare cannot be 
 classed among the lovers of Italy in the sense 
 in which some English and German poets 
 have been. He adopted it as the accepted
 
 Vision and Memory 109 
 
 setting of tragedy and romance, a shadowy 
 background, faintly outlined in the light of 
 Bandello and Boccaccio, but merely a back- 
 ground, and with nothing introduced in it 
 which might divert the attention from the 
 swift action of life. Local colour in plenty 
 where he knew it of London and Windsor 
 breaths of the English woodland whether 
 the forest be Arden or a wood near Athens. 
 But hardly any attempt to imagine local 
 colour. Palaces and taverns were to him like 
 enough all the world over, inasmuch as nobles 
 and roysterers tarried in them, for they were 
 the heart of the matter. 
 
 Whatever the story called for there were 
 good sound models at Hampton or Eastcheap. 
 A thick coat of local colour is apt to clog the 
 wheel of action, and there is food enough for 
 all moralizing in the common interests of life. 
 
 An attempt to generalize as to the con- 
 ception of Italy held by the Elizabethan 
 dramatists must rather have reference to the 
 characters than the cities where the scenes 
 are laid. We may say that they looked upon 
 Italy as a land of quick moving human pas- 
 sion and infinite caprice of fate, but that Italy
 
 no Vision and Memory 
 
 was hardly a geographical expression, that 
 amongst the outlying parts of it must be num- 
 bered Sicily and Illyria, and Vienna as being 
 the scene of " Measure for Measure," and also 
 surely, by the fitness of things, sea-girt Bo- 
 hemia. In short as a local habitation it is 
 " airy nothing," but the life of it is common to 
 all humanity. 
 
 Hence if memories be wakeful at Amalfi 
 set amid the golden orange groves on the Bay 
 of Salerno they dwell rather upon the vicis- 
 situdes of the little republic mistress of the 
 sea before the mighty days of Pisa's power 
 than upon the sad fate of the duchess in 
 Webster's great tragedy ; and at Padua, so 
 fascinating were Giotto's frescoes in the Arena 
 Chapel, and those from the Apocalypse by 
 Giusto Padovano in the Baptistery, that I 
 confess I gave no thought to ascertain the 
 possibility of seeing the house of Petruccio ; 
 and if Verona be the inevitable exception and 
 call up thoughts of the Montagues and the 
 Capulets, and if Juliet's balcony be a disap- 
 pointment, probably the illusion so dispelled 
 was derived as much from the Lyceum as from 
 Shakespeare.
 
 Vision and Memory 1 1 1 
 
 IV 
 
 The words of the tablet on Casa Guidi in 
 memory of Elizabeth Barrett Browning are 
 true of other poets also. They have made 
 golden links between Italy and England. 
 
 Impelled by the desire of dream, they have 
 wandered from city to city, and the arts and 
 memories there enthroned and the beauty of 
 earth and sky have been as draughts from 
 some Pierian spring of inspiration. 
 
 Milton's lines on Vallombrosa have led 
 many a traveller there, and will do until the 
 forests are all cut down. And the wanderings 
 of " Childe Harold " to how many have they 
 been a pilgrimage ? a dear pilgrimage of 
 thought ? And when following on the paths 
 of vision you are face to face, the stanzas have 
 a trick of recurring, for there is that about 
 them that will endure to meet the reality, and 
 their stately chiselled beauty becomes the more 
 apparent. 
 
 Rich in memories of Byron, of Shelley, and 
 of the Brownings, is the whole expanse of 
 Italy, from Asolo to Naples, from Venice to 
 Lerici, and it is in the valley of the Arno
 
 ii2 Vision and Memory 
 
 river of poets that their memories cluster 
 most thickly. By years of wandering they 
 gained to know Italy in the infinite variety of 
 her beauty. The more familiar details of this 
 knowledge are revealed rather in letters than 
 in song. Therein they would fain reveal the 
 spirit. 
 
 Thus to wander is indeed to know Italy 
 a knowledge not to be won in Rome or Flor- 
 ence. There the past is side by side with the 
 present. In the old-world cities of Umbria 
 and Tuscany you are the sole intruder. All 
 else is steeped in the sleep of centuries. Sen- 
 tinels of a vanished past, silently they testify 
 for the stones speak if you read of their 
 carving testify of the ambitions and beliefs 
 of the builders, of a national life, strong and 
 self-reliant. 
 
 Cities of the mountain and cities of the 
 river. 
 
 Cities of the mountain perched on eyrie 
 fastnesses amid the tumbling hills, established 
 in Etruscan strength that dug deep into the 
 living rock before ever the Roman legions 
 came, and whereof the grip still holds un- 
 changed of aspect, save that above the walls
 
 Vision and Memory 113 
 
 rise domes and slender campaniles, and in 
 the old temples of strange worship the Ma- 
 donna reigns, and now the altar and the 
 crucifix have put on age like a garment, and 
 are in concord with the past. 
 
 Of the cities of the river, Pisa may serve as 
 a type. 
 
 There is something of the lover's devotion 
 to his mistress in the worship by the city of 
 the river. The stateliest palaces were set by 
 her side that they might gaze upon her. The 
 span of the bridges seem as circling arms 
 that would fain embrace her. The lamps that 
 deck her are as a gleaming carcanet of gems. 
 She was girdled with gates to seaward. She 
 watched the galleys go forth to battle, and 
 welcomed the victors home. It was in her 
 chapel to "Our Lady of the Thorn," that the 
 sailors' votive offerings to the Virgin were laid. 
 
 A little distance apart in a quiet grassy 
 space by the city wall lies the frescoed cloister 
 of the sacred field of death, and beside it 
 are the chief monuments of Pisan art, the 
 baptistery, the cathedral, and the campanile 
 bending graciously. A place of reverie, and a 
 solitude.
 
 114 Vision and Memory 
 
 The roads that lead to it are grass-grown, 
 and it seems that the city has turned away 
 and clings rather to the lady of life, the river, 
 to gaze upon her and listen to the music of 
 her voice. 
 
 They have grown old together, the lover 
 and the lady, old, wrinkled and quiescent. 
 There are no Pisan galleys now to take the 
 sea. The still surface of the river is unruffled, 
 and asleep in its silent depth lie the trembling 
 images of palaces and mouldering towers. 
 The city too is asleep, dreaming of the past, 
 and the song of the river is the quiet music of 
 memories. But when the storm rages in the 
 Apennines and the streams sweep in torrent 
 to the plain, the Arno rises hooded in her 
 might, and in the dark swirl of the rushing 
 river the wrinkled image is as a dream dis- 
 solved, and the city trembles and seems as 
 though it would wake, and waking, die. 
 
 Pisa has many memories of deeds and 
 thoughts that live : the site of the Tower of 
 Famine, the lamp which Galileo watched 
 swinging, the relief from which Niccola Pisano 
 learnt something of the old Greek manner of 
 carving, the convent of St. Anne, where was
 
 Vision and Memory 115 
 
 imprisoned Emilia Viviani immortalized in 
 " Epipsychidion." 
 
 One may wander through the pinewoods to 
 Gombo, where the sea gave up the body of 
 Shelley, or on a long spring morning, farther 
 afield to Lucca, crossing the brow of Monte 
 St. Giuliano which hides it from the Pisan, or 
 following the winding valley round its base ; 
 and all along the path the meadows are paven 
 with flowers, and their arrowy odours mingle 
 in the fresh spring air, steeping the senses in 
 an ecstasy of delight. 
 
 Of the beauty of these old-world cities, as 
 of that of hillside and valley, vision is no 
 forerunner. For vision wins not nature to her 
 aid, and cannot tell her secrets.* Her dream 
 may dim the reality in its conjecture of the 
 master-works of man the builder, of "cloud- 
 capt towers and gorgeous palaces," but she 
 cannot image the beauty seen in autumn and 
 spring wanderings in the garden of Italy, the 
 glory of the Umbrian sunset, the silver belt of 
 Como winding among the beech-clad hills, 
 the first pink flush of the peach-blossom in the 
 Tuscan valleys. So whether it is that con- 
 jecture has hardly dwelt upon the lesser cities,
 
 1 1 6 Vision and Memory 
 
 or that the immobility of their life has made 
 them seem a part of nature, the sight of the 
 many towers of Albenga or San Gemignano 
 is a delight unmingled by the sense of contrast. 
 
 Art is the utterance of beauty, and in art 
 the beauty of Italy has rendered to the Giver 
 its tribute of wonder and praise. It is the 
 utterance of things by the wayside, of things 
 lowly and familiar and therefore chosen of 
 beauty to be her ministrants. The stone from 
 the quarry becomes a gargoyle in the church, 
 or frets the sky in pinnacles. 
 
 Pigments from earth and sea are prepared 
 and blent in the semblance of the Madonna 
 an altar-piece to which the eye turned restfully, 
 Mary Mother, august to intercede, divine 
 and pitiful. Yet withal a girl tender with the 
 grace of human loveliness, and the type Flor- 
 entine or Lombard, for the fairest maiden in 
 the village had sat to the painter, and it is her 
 beauty which still lives in his picture, as type 
 of the Maiden of Bethlehem, and the attend- 
 ant saints were her family and friends, and 
 they or rather their children's children are by 
 the roadside or in the Piazza to-day, and the 
 painter's art as here revealed has been " the
 
 Vision and Memory 117 
 
 touches of things common, till they rose to 
 touch the spheres." 
 
 It is a well-known story how Cimabue saw 
 Giotto on the hillside drawing sheep, and asked 
 his father to let him take the boy to Florence 
 and teach him to be a painter. Without 
 under-estimating Giotto's indebtedness to 
 Cimabue, let us not forget the early years 
 when he drew sheep on the hillside. Giotto 
 himself seems never to have forgotten them, 
 and the memory is at the root of his naturalism. 
 He continued all his life to draw sheep and 
 sheep dogs, and shepherds whenever the sub- 
 ject of a fresco admitted of his doing so. In 
 the Arena Chapel at Padua, there being forty- 
 eight spaces in which to paint scenes from the 
 lives of the Virgin and of Christ, he fills six 
 spaces before painting the birth of the Virgin, 
 and three of these are scenes in the desert 
 introducing sheep and shepherds. 
 
 Of other painters learning not only in the 
 studio but on the hillside and in the valley, 
 we must know the footsteps before we can in 
 a measure estimate or appraise. 
 
 Fra Angelico in his cloister at Fiesole or 
 San Marco who is said to have always
 
 n8 Vision and Memory 
 
 prayed before taking up his brush painted 
 men as angels, and his are the pale pure 
 colours of the sky at dawn. 
 
 Perugino's pictures breathe the gracious 
 silence of the sunset in the Umbrian hills, and 
 there too, amid the vine and olive, are the 
 sylph-like aspen poplars of his backgrounds. 
 
 This gracious silence Raphael knew, and 
 added to it tenderness, and in Rome grew 
 his later manner, the mastery of form and 
 luxuriance of beauty of " the School of Athens" 
 and "Attila." 
 
 So to wander over valley and hillside, high 
 in the Apennines on Falterona's ridge, or 
 following the pathways of her waters down to 
 the pine-fringed shores, to Pisa and Ravenna, 
 so to wander is to learn something of the 
 footsteps of Italy's greatest sons, wanderers 
 alike in vision and in life. 
 
 Vision and memory they are the two 
 books of all our panderings. The one is a 
 winged flight of imaginings, the other a tread- 
 ing in the pathway of experience. And in 
 the pathway are set stones of stumbling,
 
 Vision and Memory 119 
 
 while in the winged flight there are no unfore- 
 seen discomfitures, and yet after all our 
 visioned wanderings we come back no wiser 
 than we went ; we have seen what we took 
 with us to see, neither more nor less, without 
 let or hindrance. The book of memory is 
 rather a record of changing purposes and 
 changed impressions, and a recognition of the 
 measure of our dependence upon things as 
 mundane as hotels, and as variable as weather. 
 And indeed of the things which are written 
 under this latter rubric there is often a wide 
 discrepancy between the two books, for in 
 visioned wanderings it never rains at incon- 
 venient seasons, and the record of memory 
 witnesses that even in Italy the climate is 
 uncertain, and that our purposes vary with it. 
 At one time we have put about the helm and 
 run before the storm ; at another seeing what 
 we went out to see, we have nevertheless not 
 seen it, for we have seen only, a rain- washed 
 travesty of that which is itself only in sunlight. 
 It dies hard but of many deaths at last 
 dies the belief that the sky is always blue. 
 Venice and Capri were the only places in Italy 
 whereof in the book of memory it was written
 
 I2O Vision and Memory 
 
 that there was always halcyon weather. And 
 alas for Venice recently revisited ! I am 
 almost minded to go no more to Capri. 
 
 And yet who would wish, having seen it, 
 that the sky of Italy should be always blue ? 
 Bewitching in its very uncertainties, in spring 
 at its loveliest it is as changeful of expression 
 as ever a face may be. Overcast, doubting, 
 pouting, and then breaking into smiles sweet 
 as fugitive, and to the chasing away of the 
 smiles follows the radiance of calm. Such is 
 April sunshine, shower, gloom and beauty 
 all commingled, like an English April, laughing 
 and weeping, only in contrast more abrupt, 
 more southern, more passionate. 
 
 It is this Italy of which Tennyson sang in 
 " The Daisy," perhaps the most realistic of all 
 descriptions of Italian travel. 
 
 All the way across the plain of Lombardy 
 it was raining, and he chronicles the fact 
 unflinchingly : 
 
 " Rain at Reggio, rain at Parma ; 
 At Lodi, rain, Piacenza, rain" 
 
 There is something about the lines which 
 seems to impart a vague comfort in the
 
 Vision and Memory 121 
 
 experience of similar weather elsewhere in 
 Italy. 
 
 Of course it rains, and of course there are 
 disappointments and discomforts in travel, 
 and experience is a consciousness of things 
 trivial. 
 
 Sunshine and shower, and the abiding 
 memory is not of the shower : 
 
 " O love, what hours were thine and mine, 
 In lands of palm and southern pine." 
 
 Ruit hora, hours of the palm and pine 
 yes ! and hours of the myrtle as well. And 
 passing leave us a little older, a little wiser 
 perhaps, probably a little sadder, and the 
 richer in the infinite treasure of what is written 
 in a few pages of the book of memory. 
 Ruit hora and yet the writing is so fresh 
 that it is hard even to believe that it was 
 written yesterday. 
 
 Memory is a regret, and as such is some- 
 thing dearer, and more intimate than vistas of 
 the unknown : 
 
 " O love, we too shall go no longer 
 To lands of summer across the sea."
 
 122 Vision and Memory 
 
 Vision and memory two names serve as 
 types of the variance of their gifts. Rossetti, 
 in spirit a mediaeval Italian, a contemporary 
 almost in art of Fra Filippo, in poetry of 
 Guido Cavalcanti, and as such a dweller all 
 his life in the Italy of vision, although he 
 never set foot within the gates of her present- 
 day reality. 
 
 Browning, knowing Italy by years of wander- 
 ing her mountains and valleys, her churches 
 and art treasuries and yet no Italian at all, 
 but only a lover a lover of beauty drawn in 
 wonder to the South as a pilgrim might journey 
 to the East an Englishman loving Italy. 
 See how he loved her : 
 
 " Italy, my Italy ! 
 
 Queen Jlfary's saying serves for me 
 
 ( When fortune 's malice 
 
 Lost her Calais) 
 Open my heart and you will see 
 Graved inside of it, ' Italy.' 
 Such lovers old are I and she, 
 So it always was, so shall ever be."
 
 UNDISCOVERED ISLANDS 
 
 T would perhaps be possible to 
 estimate how in each of the seven 
 ages of man the thought of a small 
 island has a several and distinct fascination ; 
 but without differentiating so minutely let us 
 consider its attractiveness in childhood, youth, 
 and age. 
 
 It is the bourn whither are tending innum- 
 erable voyagers on rafts improvised in the 
 nursery or on the garden pool. Later on the 
 narrow confines of nursery and pool are more 
 clearly seen, and attempts to reach it are not 
 made so lightly. But it is thought about and 
 read of. It always has a treasure ; if of 
 precious stones or ingots it is guarded by 
 genii ; but a good store of gold pieces and fights 
 with pirates are in general preferable as afford- 
 ing a fairer scope for the exercise of those 
 qualities which lead to kicking goals and
 
 124 Undiscovered Islands 
 
 bringing off hard catches in the long-field ; 
 and in the night, in the silence of the dormi- 
 tory, when sleep has parted the curtains of 
 the matter-of-fact, a boat puts out from the 
 port of dreams, and inky fingers grasp the 
 tiller, and flushed arms toss and grapple with 
 the counterpane as with pirates for the treasure. 
 
 The struggle is over, the buccaneers have 
 retreated with their wounded, the treasure has 
 vanished, and only the blurred outline of a 
 dream remains, when the bell has roused the 
 dreamer to the daily routine of work and 
 play ; which he follows with thoughts distracted 
 by a desire to know what the next chapter 
 holds in store. 
 
 The intrusion of a petticoated being into 
 these romances of pirates and treasure causes 
 an immediate and just feeling of indignation. 
 The hero will probably become mawkish and 
 sentimental. He will cease to court adventure 
 with abandon, and the upshot will be as tame 
 as that of a love tale. Whether or no this 
 falling away actually takes place is immaterial. 
 The spell is broken ; the reader imagines the 
 worst. He cannot trust the hero, whom no 
 thunderbolts of Mars could daunt, to pass
 
 Undiscovered Islands 125 
 
 unscathed through the fire of soft glances, 
 any more than he could trust himself to stand 
 firm under a like assault. A fellow-feeling 
 might lead him to judge with a standard less 
 severe, and yet granted the inconsistency 
 this instinctive recognition of the incompati- 
 bility of the two sources of interest does credit 
 to his critical judgment. 
 
 Love is a taskmaster all absorbing, the 
 fans et origo of its own episodes of adventure 
 and when the sails are set on a course that 
 love directs, the pirates' hoard is passed lightly 
 by, though the gold gleam never so ruddily. 
 
 Yet the difference is only a choice of islands. 
 Palm-clad homes of treasure lie mirrored in 
 the wide expanse of the Caribbean Sea. 
 Cythera in the ^Egean saw Aphrodite first 
 step from sea to sand and from sand to shore ; 
 and now that her visits have grown rare in 
 cities busy with new forms of piracy, less 
 romantic and more profitable than those of 
 old, her votaries turn to seek her in islands 
 where the woodland still savours of her 
 presence, where "a light of laughing flowers 
 along the grass is spread," as in the days 
 when she first broke forth flower-fashion, 
 
 I
 
 1 26 Undiscovered Islands 
 
 where the waves along the shores still murmur, 
 in broken melody, of the infinite mystery and 
 wonder of her ways. 
 
 The voyage is long, and amid unknown 
 waters, and unless love be with us at the start 
 we shall never make the passage. 
 
 I remember seeing in the Louvre Watteau's 
 picture of the " Embarkation for Cythera." 
 The colour is soft and pleasing ; the grouping 
 is rhythmical, almost operatic ; but it is obvious 
 at a glance that the voyagers will never reach 
 the island. 
 
 When in the morning of life two set out 
 together, whose hearts are lit with the sun- 
 shine of a single purpose, the journey is 
 withal a hard one. The gay Court bevy are 
 in no mood for such a hazard. They will 
 float down the river to St. Cloud, and make 
 believe that amid the lawns and fountains of 
 the park lies Arcadia; or is it Dresden- 
 China land ? Gallantry and persiflage will 
 flourish freely, and a return to Court is easy 
 when ennui supervenes. 
 
 They pass with their pleasuring; but 
 Cythera abides and will still abide, a "far 
 Eden of the purple East," the eidolon of
 
 Undiscovered Islands 127 
 
 lover's thought ; and when Shelley in the 
 highest ecstasy of love pours out to Emilia 
 Viviani the vision of a future when their souls 
 shall mingle and be transfigured, 
 
 "It is an isle under Ionian skies" 
 to which his thought flies over-sea. 
 
 " The blue ^.gean girds this chosen home, 
 With ever-changing sound, and light and foam, 
 Kissing the sifted sands and caverns hoar; 
 And all the winds wandering along the shore 
 Undulate with the undulating tide" 
 
 There a pleasure-house built by an Ocean 
 King in the world's young prime awaits them, 
 and thus he pictures what their life shall 
 be:- 
 
 " We two will rise, and sit, and walk together, 
 
 Under the roof of blue Ionian weather, 
 
 And wander in the meadows, or ascend 
 
 The mossy mountains, where the blue heavens 
 
 bend 
 
 With lightest winds, to touch their paramour ; 
 Or linger, where the pebble-paven shore, 
 Under the quick faint kisses of the sea, 
 Trembles and sparkles as with ecstasy,
 
 128 Undiscovered Islands 
 
 Possessing and posse st by all that is 
 Within that calm circumference of bliss, 
 And by each other, till to love and live 
 Be one." 
 
 Love impels to visions, solitude and the 
 dreaming of dreams ; and nowhere can dreams 
 find fairer haven or solitude seem more of a 
 reunion with primal nature, than when the 
 bourn is girt round as with Love's own cestus 
 by the gracious inviolate sea. 
 
 If the vision thus portrayed in " Epipsy- 
 chidion " were suddenly realized, and we were 
 carried as by Fortunatus' wishing-cap to a 
 desert island, the result might be with us as 
 it is in "Foul Play," that most delightful of 
 all Charles Reade's romances, where the hero 
 is perplexed between an intense enjoyment of 
 the charm of the situation, and an uphill 
 struggle to preserve the conventionalities. 
 
 In " Foul Play " the lovers return eventually 
 to England, and the curtain falls upon a pros- 
 pect of uneventful domestic felicity which 
 promises little of island adventure. 
 
 This is, in general, true when the process 
 of settling down takes place. There shall be
 
 Un discovered Islan ds 129 
 
 no more dallying in Scyros with Deidamia ; 
 neither must Achilles linger in his tent. The 
 course is then straight sailing and delays are 
 of greater import. There is a cargo in the 
 hold, and the time and profits of each venture 
 have to be calculated before it is undertaken. 
 
 A month in summer in the Hebrides, or a 
 yachting cruise round Scilly, may perhaps be 
 given as hostages to the never-to-be-fulfilled 
 fantasies of the past; but it is a tribute to 
 the memory of the dead. The barrister or 
 merchant can never make believe as would 
 children that he is doing other than having a 
 holiday. The routine of activities is but sus- 
 pended. Letters are waiting for him ; arrears 
 of work are growing in his absence. The 
 trumpet-call for him is not to the unknown of 
 adventure, to the pursuit of an ideal that 
 mocks yet allures, but to the sterner virtues 
 of practical life. 
 
 When back in town the tan of the sun and 
 the sea-breezes will be noticed and envied for 
 a few weeks, and then this will fade, and all 
 will be as before. We seem made to follow 
 some plough. Habit is the surest antidote to 
 inordinate fancy. Maybe that the potter's
 
 130 Undiscovered Islands 
 
 vessels are awry, but when all have wrinkled 
 lips it is better to curl and be content. Wings 
 of Daedalus! No! There are no Icarian 
 flights. It is too late to be ambitious. Bow 
 the knee in the temple 1 They are all bowing : 
 few remember even that they once stood 
 upright. 
 
 As years pass, and steps begin to go down- 
 hill, on an incline at first scarce perceptible, 
 but growing steeper as it proceeds, pleasure 
 lies more in reminiscence, and youth may have 
 a dearer store of memories connected with it 
 than has riper age. Grandfather and grand- 
 son have often more in common with each 
 other than with the generation that intervenes. 
 The elder man may be more tolerant of those 
 differences of opinion which naturally accom- 
 pany the stages of life's journey. He is the 
 more prone to make allowance in that he sees 
 his own youth in clearer perspective. Castles 
 in Spain are rare of attainment, but he sees 
 now that they may form beacons of endeavour 
 more ennobling than do mansions in Park 
 Lane. 
 
 Maybe he has been successful in life ; 
 maybe he has frequently been passed in the
 
 Undiscovered Islands 131 
 
 race by those of greater powers of intellect or 
 application ; in either case he is weary of the 
 struggle. He is still a seeker ; with some- 
 thing of a rejuvenescence of fancy his thoughts 
 may again fly over-sea. But he would fain 
 cherish no illusions now. The days of treasure- 
 hoards and knight-errantry are over ; he seeks 
 only for rest. 
 
 Garibaldi having won for Italy the king- 
 doms of Naples and Sicily, refused all prof- 
 fered titles and aggrandizement, asking only 
 to return to his island home in Caprera. 
 
 As rest is a fit crown for the greatest of the 
 triumphs of life's action, even so is it a solace 
 for discomfiture and defeat. This sundering 
 of ourselves from the scene of our activities, 
 our fathers have told us, is as the setting out 
 upon a voyage. 
 
 Peace lies beyond the waters. So Arthur, 
 when his wound was deep, was borne 
 
 " To the island-valley of Avilion, 
 
 Where falls not hail or rain or any snow, 
 
 Nor ever wind blows loudly" 
 
 that there he might find healing.
 
 132 Undiscovered Islands 
 
 So too a Viking when smitten unto death 
 would be laid restfully in his galley and 
 wafted over the viewless deep, and lost to 
 sight of man would be numbered among those 
 who had entered Valhalla. Where time is not 
 nor any change at all ; only that on entry the 
 ravage of years shall be undone, and the ichor 
 of youth shall again pulsate in the veins. 
 
 Essentials these of rest ; and rest holds in 
 it the vision of a fairer excellence than ever 
 action can compass, and, as Ruskin has said, 
 man's longing for it is at once evidence of his 
 origin, and a promise of that reunion when 
 the " I become " of the created shall merge 
 and be transfigured in the Creator's " I Am." 
 
 Peace lies beyond the waters. Are the 
 waters always those of death ? 
 
 Our fathers thought not so in the days 
 when in the desert places of the sea lay 
 islands virginal and untrod. When credulity 
 had in it no savour of reproach, and tradition 
 was as a harper voicing the sea-stories and 
 wind-stories that now float round our ears 
 intangible and unheeded. Somewhere in the 
 unknown, was the message of the harper's 
 song, east of the sun and west of the moon,
 
 Undiscovered Islands 133 
 
 or buttressed by the surges of the Atlantic, or 
 far as " ultimate dim Thule " lay an island 
 where the years pass and men wax not old. 
 Seers dowered the island in thought with 
 virtues elsewhere broken and inconsequent. 
 Poets sang of the land where there is no death. 
 
 The belief was common to many mythol- 
 ogies Norse, Celtic and Greek and it 
 survived after Christianity had spread over 
 Western Europe. 
 
 The story of St. Brendan, the Navigator, 
 who sought for seven years for the Land of 
 Promise, took rank as the Christian " Odyssey," 
 and the recital of the perils and wonders of 
 his voyage charmed alike court and cloister; 
 monks lovingly transcribed the legend in a 
 hundred monasteries, and a Trouvere sang of 
 it at the bidding of Adelais of Louvain, the 
 Queen of Henry Beauclerc. 
 
 The paradise for which St. Brendan sought 
 was an island in the West. He may have 
 passed near where the fabled Atlantis sank 
 beneath the waves. 
 
 The abbot and his monks reached the same 
 islands every year in time for the four Chris- 
 tian festivals, as was foretold by a messenger
 
 134 Undiscovered Islands 
 
 in the Paradise of Birds ; fallen angels 
 these, who sang on earth to the praise of 
 God until such time as they should return to 
 the skies. 
 
 They saw Judas chained in Promethean 
 fashion to a lonely rock, and there allowed 
 relief from the torments of hell on each re- 
 curring Sabbath and on holy feast-days. They 
 suffered perils from icebergs and monsters of 
 the air and of the deep ; and at length, when 
 the seven years of their pilgrimage were com- 
 pleted, it was given unto them to enter within 
 the darkness which lay about the land of 
 promise of the saints, a land where there 
 was no night at all. They wandered for forty 
 days amid the fair expanse of verdure, coming 
 at last to the banks of a great river ; there a 
 youth of great beauty appeared, and told them 
 that they might not cross, bidding them return 
 to their own country. 
 
 They obeyed and returned to their ship, 
 and three months after leaving Paradise, 
 sighted the Irish coast. 
 
 Was America the paradise of St. Brendan ? 
 And the great river the Mississippi? And 
 the islands those of the West Indies ?
 
 Undiscovered Islands 135 
 
 A tradition among the Indians in Florida 
 told of white men who had come over the sea 
 in times far remote, and the first settlers sent 
 out by Admiral Coligny found the same belief 
 among the natives of Brazil. These places 
 are far to the south of the recorded limits of 
 the voyages of Leif and Biarne and the later 
 Norse discoverers. 
 
 St. Brendan was born in A. D. 484, and be- 
 tween the possible date of the voyage and of 
 the earliest existent record, centuries inter- 
 vene. We may weave fantasies, but we cannot 
 build, the fabric is as gossamer. The nar- 
 rative may be only a monkish adaptation of 
 the Celtic legend of the voyage of Maeldune, 
 from which some of the incidents are derived. 
 The details are doubtless imaginative ; but 
 that St. Brendan did make voyages to the 
 West is confirmed by Adamnan in his life of 
 St. Columba, where he speaks of his visit to 
 Hinba near lona. 
 
 Is it permissible to accept the legends of the 
 early Church for the spiritual truths which 
 they convey ? Or when an abbot after years 
 of pilgrimage finds the land of promise of the 
 saints, must we gazetteer in hand identify
 
 136 Undiscovered Islands 
 
 it with a local habitation and a name, or else 
 refuse all credence? If so, reason has itself 
 become a fetish. 
 
 Or was it some island in the West that 
 St. Brendan found, primitive, inviolate, and 
 therefore a paradise ? The Spaniards inter- 
 preted the legend in this way, and cherished 
 hopes of finding again St. Brendan's isle. A 
 king of Portugal even made cession of it in 
 the treaty of Evora, " s'il la de'couvrait." 
 
 In the popular belief it lay to the west of 
 the Canaries, and had on rare occasions been 
 seen from the isle of Palma ; as on the Aran 
 Isles the peasants have seen the meads and 
 palaces of Hy Brasil far away over the west- 
 ern sea. But the eyes of the city-bred are 
 misty or filled with other visions, and see 
 them not. 
 
 These legends, St. Brendan's and the like, 
 if they have no basis of historic fact to win 
 for them credence, originate in the instinct 
 and abide in the imagination of those who 
 live within sight and sound of the sea ; who, 
 faring over great waters, and learning of their 
 changeful magic, of the elemental fury of the 
 tempest, and the divine soft-moving calm,
 
 Undiscovered Islands 137 
 
 think in their simplicity that an island, such 
 as the mind of men has been able to conceive 
 and the winds to whisper of, may not be a 
 wonder too great to lie hidden in some unfur- 
 rowed coign in the bosom of the pathless 
 mysterious ocean. 
 
 The breath of tradition made audible held 
 the ear, and guided human purpose : thus fit- 
 ful attempts were made to reach St. Brendan's 
 isle, the last being in the year 1723. 
 
 Juan Ponce de Leon also, giving faith to an 
 Indian legend, put out on the deep to seek 
 the isle of youth's renewing ; and of his quest 
 and of its ending Heine sings. After a life 
 of adventure he had been made governor of 
 Cuba, and there his thoughts turned bitterly 
 to the days of youth, recalling how as page in 
 the court of Don Gomez he had borne the 
 train of the Alcade's daughter; how when a 
 courtier, the ladies of Seville had flocked to 
 the windows on hearing the tramp of his steed ; 
 how he had wrought deeds of knightly valour 
 against the Moors ; had accompanied Colum- 
 bus in his second voyage to carry the power 
 of the Cross and of Spain across the sea ; had 
 sailed and fought under Ojeda and Bilbao ;
 
 138 Undiscovered Islands 
 
 had been with Cortez when he had conquered 
 Mexico, and in that venture, though stricken 
 with fever in the swamp, had gained much 
 treasure of gold and pearls. 
 
 Thus waking the memories of the past, all 
 riches, all honours that he had won seemed to 
 him as nothing as compared with the fact that 
 the vigour of youth had fled ; and he prayed 
 to the Blessed Virgin to shake wintry age from 
 his limbs, to bid the sun fire his veins and the 
 spring his breast, to touch with roses his 
 cheeks and his hair with golden flame, and to 
 give him back his youth again. 
 
 Now Kaka, the old Indian nurse who tended 
 the knight's hammock, was wont in rocking it 
 to sing a song of her people about the isle of 
 Bimini. " Fly on, little birds ! Swim on, little 
 fishes ! " it ran, " be our guides to the isle of 
 Bimini ; we follow with barque all-garlanded. 
 In Bimini the delight of spring abides contin- 
 ually, and the lark is ever warbling in the 
 azure. Fair flowers grow there as herbage, 
 and tall palms stretch their fan-like leaves 
 above them, making soft, cool shade. There 
 springs the loveliest of all fountains, whence 
 flows the water that makes all things young.
 
 Undiscovered Islands 139 
 
 A withered flower touched with this water 
 blooms with fresh beauty, and a dried rod 
 bears leaves; and the old when they drink of 
 it become young, shedding the mantle of age 
 as a chafer sheds his shell ; and they remain 
 there always, for happiness and spring hold 
 them enthralled. This land of eternal youth 
 is the goal of my longing and desire. Fare- 
 well ! farewell ! dear friends of my homestead. 
 We return no more from Bimini." 
 
 The knight heard ever this song between 
 waking and slumber, and the strain would 
 mingle with his dreams, so that he murmured 
 in sleep of Bimini ; and by-and-by he decided 
 to go in search of this Bimini that he might 
 drink of the promised water. Many, hearing 
 of his purpose, were minded to go with him, 
 so that a fleet of five sail was fitted out. 
 Others who remained behind through fear of 
 the perils of the voyage besought them that 
 having found Bimini, they would return and 
 give them to drink of the water, that they too 
 might be young again. 
 
 So with banners flying and the salute of 
 many cannon, they sailed away on their 
 quest.
 
 140 Undiscovered Islands 
 
 The chroniclers who tell of the expedition 
 of Ponce de Leon, say that he failed to find 
 Bimini, but discovered Florida ; and that there 
 the old days of fighting as under Cortez were 
 renewed, and that after gaming fresh treasure 
 and renown, he was wounded by the Indians, 
 and returned to Cuba to die. 
 
 It would seem that the thirst for adventure 
 was still uppermost, and the fountain of youth 
 was only desired as a means to indulge it. 
 His hand still itched for the pommel of the 
 sword, by which he had lived and by which 
 he died. It may have been that he regarded 
 the fighting in Florida merely as an interlude, 
 and even as death found him he was in thought 
 preparing to resume his quest. Ideals once 
 formed are hardly ever quite abandoned, how- 
 ever action may digress. They will issue 
 forth on a sudden from some disused thought- 
 chamber and startle us with their strangeness; 
 and seeing the vision of our past endeavour 
 we turn to follow it. Complete disillusion or 
 attainment are alike rare, and it is merciful 
 that our imaginings abide, and that we travel 
 on to the grave dreaming of things we know 
 not of.
 
 Undiscovered Islands 141 
 
 Heine has more of the truth than the 
 chroniclers in his description of the ending of 
 Ponce de Leon's voyage : 
 
 " And he sought for youth's renewal 
 Ever daily growing older, 
 And all wrinkled, worn, and wasted, 
 Came at last unto that land, 
 
 " To that silent land, where chilly 
 Under shadowy cypresses 
 Plows a stream, whereof the water 
 Hath a wondrous power of healing. 
 
 " Lethe is the water named, 
 Drink of it and thou forgettest 
 AH thy sorrows : yea ! forgotten 
 Wilt be thou and all thy troubles. 
 
 " Blessed water I blessed land! 
 He who reaches it forsakes it 
 Never more : the land of Lethe 
 Is the real Bimini."
 
 VI 
 DEO SOLI INVICTO 
 
 " Who doth ambition shun, 
 And loves to live i ' the sun. . . . 
 Come hither, come hither, come hither" 
 
 AY, but you shall keep pact in com- 
 ing, exile of the greenwood ! Though 
 you would still palter with the in- 
 firmity here the air is alien and it shall find 
 no nurture. Corn and wine for you the 
 lotos in Lotos-land. You shall shun ambition 
 in forgetting, and it shall wither parched in 
 the sunshine. Sun-steeped the days of your 
 tarrying wave and woodland smitten through 
 with sunlight glowing and trembling in 
 ecstasy. You too, of mood ecstatic. For you 
 shall " live i' the sun " I warrant you, and 
 worship him with every fibre of your being. 
 If Arden of the greenwood this, an island 
 Arden, and therein the meeter for exile, and
 
 Deo Soli Invicto 143 
 
 for the sway of the sun-god to work wonder- 
 ment. See his domain more closely ! 
 
 It is an island about five miles long and two 
 miles wide. The coast rock-precipice for the 
 most part ; with two landing-places, Marinas 
 little and big though neither big enough for 
 anything more than a fishing-boat to come to 
 shore. A welcome there if not an anchorage, 
 and on landing at such port as the isle affords, 
 you are met by a crowd of eager islanders 
 eager not to know what news you bring, but 
 only that you stay and dwell among them. 
 
 Rough paths strike up the hillside, and wind- 
 ing steeply amid orange groves and the mossed 
 walls of vineyards, soon arrive at the capital. 
 
 From the big Marina a carriage-road starts 
 on the same journey, and wanders more devi- 
 ously and deliberately in the pretence that 
 there is really hardly any hill at all. In about 
 half-an-hour it also arrives at the capital look- 
 ing quite as hot and much more dusty than 
 the paths, and enters the gate with a rather 
 dejected air, seeming to say that had it known 
 before starting what a tumble-down irregular 
 unkempt sort of village the capital would 
 prove to be, it would never have taken the
 
 144 Deo Soli Invicto 
 
 trouble to come to it from the big Marina and 
 the fishing-boats and the daily steamer, and 
 so indirectly from the ocean-highways from 
 numerous points all over the earth's surface. 
 Being there, however, it wanders about to 
 see any sights that may be worth seeing ; and 
 having to stoop under low arches, and be 
 wedged in between houses which ignore its 
 existence and try to meet above it, and only 
 finding a breathing-space in the market-place, 
 it finally turns away and climbs with some dif- 
 ficulty the side of the taller of the two hills 
 between which the capital lies ensconced. On 
 reaching a city on the hillside, it stops alto- 
 gether, lost in an ecstasy of contemplation, 
 and indeed the view over-sea is so varied, so 
 infinite, so beautiful, that there would be the 
 rather cause for wonder if it ever came away 
 and after looking there partook again of things 
 less lovely. For to be always going on is surely 
 only the settled indolence of habit, and it is 
 quite as useful, and infinitely more pleasing 
 for those who travel on them that some roads 
 should, as the end of their activities, contem- 
 plate Naples, and not all crowd unnecessarily 
 towards Rome.
 
 Deo Soli Invicto 145 
 
 Leave it contemplating 1 And let us glance 
 at a few characteristics of the island's story. 
 They are as tapestry silk-woven, shot through 
 and through with sunlight. Warp and woof 
 they glitter, they change hue as you mark 
 them. Fact turns fantasy. It must surely be 
 undiscovered, for they touch the fantastic. 
 
 The beauty of its women folk is manifest 
 and historic, and as such exceeds description. 
 Emperors and kings have built palaces there. 
 Pirates have enriched it with their presence. 
 They are said to have contributed indirectly 
 in suggesting the present site of the capital by 
 demonstrating how inadvisable it was that it 
 should be any nearer to the landing-places. 
 The buccaneers would doubtless have come 
 if it had been a real isle of fantasy, but their 
 absence can hardly have been remarked by 
 the islanders, so effective were they who came 
 in their stead. More romantic perhaps, more 
 alluringly inexplicable, the buccaneers of the 
 Caribbean but for consistency in piratical en- 
 deavour match who can the Barbary Corsairs ! 
 
 Another chapter dealing of combats, the 
 writers of the island's story derive pleasantly 
 enough from the open book of games.
 
 146 Deo Soli Invicto 
 
 It tells how two travelling companies played 
 together at French and English. They had all 
 the stock accessories, and played just as the 
 game always is played on an island with 
 intercepted convoys of provisions, and a 
 beleaguered garrison, hungry and finally capit- 
 ulating and with an unguarded pathway up 
 the cliff for the attacking company, up which 
 they scrambled by night and had a big can- 
 nonade. There was even a fleet in an offing 
 becalmed there of course, and consequently 
 unable to come and relieve the beleaguered 
 garrison ; but it was a happy thought to put it 
 there and add to the possibilities of conjecture. 
 The breeze might spring up ; the fleet might 
 move ; in a few hours it might be in action 
 and place the besiegers between two fires. 
 And so they knew that it was not a time to 
 spare powder. 
 
 The issue of the contest was regrettable, 
 and quite contrary to the best traditions of 
 the game. The breeze grew interested and 
 tried to help both sides. It brought the fleet 
 quite near and then turned round suddenly 
 and drove it away, and on coming back with 
 it after a few days, found that it had over-esti-
 
 Deo Soli Invicto 147 
 
 mated the staying power of the garrison and 
 that the game was ended. The English were 
 the garrison and the French were the besieg- 
 ers and consequently the ending was incorrect. 
 This proves that it is merely a record of fact 
 and of righting. The wind that blows around 
 the isles of fantasy would have surely blown 
 otherwise. But personally I do n't much regret 
 that the ending was incorrect. English garri- 
 sons have a habit of remaining, and but for 
 the issue of this contest they might have dis- 
 covered that the island was indeed on the road 
 to Nowhere, but that Nowhere was a far port 
 to steam to, and that it would be well to have 
 a coaling-station on the road. And then they 
 or their successors would be there still, and 
 the island would be nothing like so picturesque 
 or peaceful as it is at present. 
 
 No ! I do n't in the least regret their depar- 
 ture. Who could regret it at sight of the island 
 now trembling and glowing in the sunlight ? 
 Who could regret the fighting either or anything 
 that has ever happened there ? For all these 
 doings dark or fantastic have been but the pre- 
 cursors of this present, and as such become fair 
 in reminiscence in the wonder of the sunlight.
 
 148 Deo Soli Invicto 
 
 The turbid waters have settled now in calm. 
 The records of the island's story tell no more 
 of fighting. The militia even look peaceful 
 when they meet. They meet so rarely that 
 the swords must surely ere this have been 
 turned into pruning-hooks, and so it is in 
 the vineyards that they have prepared for the 
 invader, and he for his part has come with 
 like friendliness. 
 
 Amid the runnels of the hills are olives and 
 cytisus, and almonds pale and radiant in blos- 
 som as sun-flushed snow. Round and about 
 are tumbling ruins and towers dismantled and 
 the rubble of old-time masonry. Here is a 
 roofless crumbling shepherd's hut, there the 
 fragments of a Roman watch-tower. Alike 
 they moulder in the sunlight, and the brown 
 lizards wriggle among the flat stones of either 
 impartially or lie burnishing their backs in the 
 heat. 
 
 A deep dark blue of sea and sky scarce 
 varying in hue the one limitless, quiescent, 
 changing imperceptibly from night to day, the 
 other ever moving and murmuring, touched in 
 iridescence by sun and star. And the sea on 
 the rocks has worn grottoes with roofs and
 
 Deo Soli Invicto 149 
 
 walls of strange colouring of agate and red 
 sea-lichen. But of these, the blue grotto sur- 
 passes in beauty all the rest, for the sea and 
 sky have combined to give it of their colour, 
 filling the misty cave with quivering phosphor- 
 escent light. 
 
 The mention of the blue grotto surely places 
 the identity of the island beyond cavil or ques- 
 tioning. 
 
 Sirens, palaces, pirates and fighting these 
 are the accessories of numberless islands, some 
 in either hemisphere, others in the seas delec- 
 table "cast beyond the moon," to be found or 
 no, as the wind may list, but assuredly to be 
 sought for ; but seek how you will, there is only 
 one blue grotto, and the island is quite easy to 
 be discovered, because of course it is Capri. 
 
 Capri is quite as real as the Isle of Thanet. 
 And the Sirens dwelt there and sang to Ulys- 
 ses. It was either there they sang or else on 
 the rocks that lie to the south of the headland 
 facing Capri, and Ulysses must have heard 
 their singing as he passed through the strait. 
 His wanderings are about as historic as the 
 landing of Hengist and Horsa, and as of Ulys- 
 ses it is not claimed that he landed, we may
 
 150 Deo Soli Invicto 
 
 fairly be content with less proof of his pres- 
 ence. However, admitting the Sirens to be 
 mythical, there is no doubt about the reality 
 of Tiberius and the palaces, or of Barbarossa's 
 castle and the visits of the Saracen pirates, 
 and the French and English did certainly 
 fight there, and the English were undoubtedly 
 defeated. They were commanded by Sir Hud- 
 son Lowe of St. Helena fame, and they held 
 the island for Ferdinand IV, the Bourbon 
 King of Naples, after the French had already 
 started Italy as a group of republics with fan- 
 ciful nomenclature, and were carving it up 
 again into kingdoms. The French captured 
 the island through a night attack almost as 
 brilliant as the storming of the heights of 
 Abraham, and at the critical juncture the Brit- 
 ish fleet lay becalmed off Ponza. 
 
 So the carriage road which we followed from 
 the Marina up to Ana Capri and there left 
 contemplating, did indeed look on the real 
 Naples. Real and yet too fair for reality as 
 seen far away over miles of gracious silent 
 sea a water-lily resting on the marge the 
 fairest of the flowers that girdle the bay with 
 beauty. For the cities there all seem as flow-
 
 Deo Soli Invicto 151 
 
 ers : Massa, the little sea-pink on the rocks, 
 Sorrento, cool and muffled in orange groves, 
 Torre del Greco and Torre Annunziata, roses 
 lying on Vesuvius' mantle, happy, forgetful of 
 Pompeii, as the rose forgetful of the rose of 
 yester-year, and the lily's bud Posilipo, and 
 Pozzuoli, a marsh-flower on the waste where 
 the Mantuan found Avernus. They seem as 
 flowers up-tilted to the sun. And Capri, the 
 centre flower, cupped with green, up-tilted, 
 up-straining more than a flower a sanctu- 
 ary. What wonder if its story be the record 
 of things fantastic ! 
 
 There are temples there, of faiths passed 
 over. Tiberius built twelve during the years 
 of his retirement ; to his gods presumably 
 dedicate, or in inception merely palaces of 
 pleasure such as that in Xanadu. Tiberius's 
 doings in them were certainly not calculated 
 to propitiate any deities whomsoever. Some 
 fragments remain, notably the huge ruins 
 of the Villa Jovis a mass of crumbling walls 
 and arches, luxuriant in broken marbles and 
 mosaics. And nature has encompassed it with 
 a perennial veil of beauty, and it has lain there 
 for nigh two thousand years crumbling and
 
 152 Deo Soli Invicto 
 
 mellowing, and yet withal it seems an 
 exotic. 
 
 Whether it be palace or temple it is alien 
 to the inner history of the island, as alien as 
 Tiberius and all the Emperors. And Jove as a 
 tutelary deity is of power more finite than the 
 builder. For Tiberius is still a little bit alive, 
 and being more discriminating now than in the 
 days of vanity, is only a terror to evildoers. 
 They know of Timberio. Just as the Arab 
 children, years after the Crusades were ended, 
 knew that King Richard still rode in Pales- 
 tine, and trembled at night to think of it. But 
 evildoers are so rare in Capri that Timberio's 
 appearance must needs be infrequent. It was 
 this Tiberius Caesar whose friend Pilate had 
 preferred to be ; and to the Villa Jovis had 
 been brought the news of the Crucifixion, and 
 he had willed to enrol the Galilean among 
 the Gods. 
 
 Gods outworn ! Emperors dead and phan- 
 tasmal 1 Temples ruined and forsaken ! Yet 
 is the island still a sanctuary. 
 
 There is a cave on the eastern hill. A tem- 
 ple alike rifled and bare of sacrifice, but daily 
 the god still visits it, daily walks over the water
 
 Deo Soli Invicto 153 
 
 golden-footed, and fills the cave with his pres- 
 ence, and touches the site of his altar with 
 flame. Daily even as he has come for oh ! 
 how many thousand years before ever men built 
 altars of sacrifice ! He knew the cave before 
 ever his shrine was there, and he knows the 
 whole island, and daily traverses it tutelary and 
 benignant, and he gives to the vine its fruit 
 and to the hills their verdure, and to the 
 islanders harvest of their works and content- 
 ment in the measure of their days. At his 
 touch cobwebs glitter in caprice of light, and 
 in his presence the facts of the island's story, 
 the memories of the doings of dead men, of 
 their comings and goings and fightings, be- 
 come fair in retrospect, take on the glamour 
 of dream as deeds done only in some visionary 
 day. To-day seems a vision in the wonder of 
 the sunlight, and to-morrow a mist of the sun 
 re-risen, and yesterday a mist or vision of some 
 extinguished sun. 
 
 Mithras ! Mithras ! Lord and giver of light, 
 the giver of all the gifts of light ! Mithras ! 
 The unconquered God of the Sun ! And this 
 is his temple, this cavern in the eastern cliff, 
 outpost of the Persian's faith. Built perhaps
 
 154 Deo Soli Invicto 
 
 by wanderers from the East before the days of 
 the Caesars, before ever Rome, world-weary, 
 and weary of her own gods, had stooped 
 to learn of her tributaries and to gather of 
 their faiths, and thus learning had wavered 
 between Mithras and Christ. 
 
 The fiat had gone forth. Even the Apostate 
 testified to the conquest of the Galilean, and 
 Rome put away the hesitance of Constantine, 
 and in His service resumed her strength. But 
 Rome was ever in the forefront. There are 
 scenes where time touches more softly, where 
 old customs abide and old faiths linger, and 
 change is gradual, almost imperceptible, truth 
 to truth added, radiance upon radiance revealed. 
 
 There are eyes, would-be eyes of faith 
 which despite all their straining see as yet no 
 farther than the sun. 
 
 Mithras may wander regretful as Pan in the 
 woodland, gods forgotten of worship and 
 yet in Capri he is not an exile. They who 
 served him of old served him with penance 
 and oblation, and the worshippers gathered in 
 his temple waited while the priests made sac- 
 rifice, and together they watched and waited 
 for the coming of the light.
 
 Deo Soli Invicto 155 
 
 And the light came, and looking down the 
 scarp of the cliff over the pathway of the light 
 across the whitening sea, to where the sun had 
 just risen above the Calabrian hills, they would 
 see the marbles of Paestum gleaming white on 
 the shore. 
 
 We may stand in the entrance to the cav- 
 ern to-day and look from the one to the other 
 
 the temple of the Sun-god of the Persians 
 and the temples of the gods of Greece. And 
 "both were faiths and both are gone," and the 
 sea between seems not to sever but to unite 
 them by its murmur, linking together in mem- 
 ory things forsaken. 
 
 The works done in their faiths survive them. 
 The seed of beauty broke from the heart of 
 the rose and passed immortal from one frail 
 dwelling to another. Greek roses bloomed in 
 Italian soil long after that the Paestan marbles 
 were forsaken and they grew no more beneath 
 their shadow. Persian roses, the murmur 
 of their leaves in falling was ever of transience 
 
 of the transience of things beautiful and the 
 passing of the sun-lit revel of life. And to-day 
 the roses are blooming at Naishapur on Omar's 
 grave, and Omar's own rose grafted on an
 
 156 Deo Soli Invicto 
 
 English stem, after nigh a thousand years, 
 seem to have just this summer's fragrance and 
 to mock his questioning. 
 
 Mithras's temple is deserted and the wor- 
 ship of all these things has passed. Yet for the 
 Sun-god's daily beneficence, surely it is meet 
 that we should praise him ! Not with myste- 
 ries as of old ; the time of sacrifice was and is 
 not. The hilltop, not the grotto ! The hill- 
 top of his own island presence chamber of 
 the unconquered God of the Sun ! 
 
 There look down from the crest of Monte 
 Solaro to the south the island drops majes- 
 tically to the sea, and lies on its surface 
 mirrored and motionless, the sea beneath it 
 treasuring in translucent pools infinite wealth 
 of colour and of form, and all around else the 
 island slopes away in ripple and wave of ver- 
 dure down to the silver presence of the olives 
 and the white and grey of the towns, and 
 beyond is the still sea, and beyond the circlets 
 of the bays, white with cities and green with 
 promise of the vine and over all the gracious 
 presence of the sun. 
 
 " The earth and ocean seem 
 To sleep in one another's arms and dream
 
 Deo Soli Invicto 157 
 
 Of waves, flowers, clouds, woods, rocks, and all 
 
 that we 
 Read in their smiles, and call reality" 
 
 Is it all a moment's fantasy, this beauty, this 
 tremor, this ecstasy, the mirage of our vision 
 real only in that we behold it ? Or are we 
 alone momentary shadows questioning sun- 
 light and to-morrow the same sunlight, the 
 same beauty of earth and ocean, to-morrow 
 and all the to-morrows all unchanged, save 
 that other shadows thrown by the sun in his 
 pathway will be trembling at first at the 
 strangeness as shadows do, and then turning 
 to follow him. 
 
 Our strength is of his strength : our moods 
 of pleasure are of his radiance. Surely it is 
 meet that we should praise him ! 
 
 Clots of sun-illumined clay ! fanned by sun- 
 beams to a brief rapture of life, to a moment's 
 seeming of being and begetting. Breathed 
 upon by the wind so that we live. In the fact 
 of our existence a sum of the sacrifices which 
 all created things have made and are ever 
 making for us. 
 
 And withal life is a thing pitifully fragile. 
 Even a watch has more self-reliance, for when
 
 158 Deo Soli Invicto 
 
 wound up it runs its course with composure 
 for twenty-four hours, quietly and steadily and 
 with accuracy sufficient even for purposes of 
 business. How many helps we have to have 
 to-day to enable us to take our turn to-morrow 
 in equal freshness ! How many hours of sleep- 
 ing and eating and resting disconnect the brief 
 periods of life when we are actually doing ! 
 As with one day so with all ; a third of life is 
 spent motionless in the counterfeit semblance 
 of death, the brain fluttered by strange visions, 
 the body, wearied with a few hours of action, 
 seeking in sleep refreshment for the next stage 
 of the journey. A very disconnected under- 
 taking, and one requiring stimulus more than 
 commensurate with result. 
 
 He is not a jealous god, the God of the Sun. 
 We huddle together in cities and serve Baal, 
 and the smoke of our abominations is as a 
 cloud veiling us from his sight, and by the 
 works of our own hands we are shut from his 
 presence. In his presence alone is strength, 
 and the huddled life is a poor, a half-extin- 
 guished thing. And we repent, and go out 
 humbly and seek him in his courts, and he for- 
 gives us and heals us. And we go back to the
 
 Deo Soli Invicto 159 
 
 smoke of our works. And again we seek him 
 and again he forgives us, and the flame of life 
 burns brightly as before, or the spent flame 
 flickers with something of its old brightness. 
 
 Surely it is meet that we should praise him, 
 for whomsoever we praise it is to the music of 
 his pipings, and we should have but short 
 shrift if he ceased to shine. 
 
 How nearly this once did happen, Leopardi 
 is our authority for describing. The first hour 
 of the day went to waken the sun as usual, 
 and the sun declined to rise. He was in per- 
 fect health, but was weary of always going to 
 and fro to make light for animalculae, and 
 they might shift for themselves. The dire 
 consequences which this resolve would occa- 
 sion were urged upon him quite unavailingly. 
 He took no interest in the existence or non- 
 existence of humanity. If they wanted his 
 light, they must come and get it. The morn- 
 ing hour pointed out that the earth was not in 
 the least likely to feel any more energetic 
 about the matter than his Excellency, and that 
 after many years of inactivity she would 
 require much persuasion before consenting to 
 move, and perhaps a poet or philosopher
 
 160 Deo Soli Invicto 
 
 might be of service in persuading her. The 
 sun thought a philosopher would be of more 
 use than a poet, but it would be hard to say 
 why the earth should allow herself to be per- 
 suaded by either. So the last hour of the 
 night went to Copernicus, who was on his 
 terrace looking for the sunrise, and explained 
 the predicament, and brought him back to 
 discuss the matter. 
 
 Very reluctantly he undertook to do what 
 he could, expecting to be burnt for his inter- 
 ference, but this the sun said he might avoid 
 by dedicating his suggestions to the Pope. 
 
 There the dialogue ends. But the sunlight 
 in my room tells me that some working agree- 
 ment was arrived at, and the same sunlight 
 makes me hope that it will be a long time 
 before the agreement again comes up for 
 revision. 
 
 And oh ! despite all the musings of poets 
 and philosophers upon the inconsequence of 
 life, if we, dreaming in the sunlight, came to 
 believe what of course we never shall believe 
 that the whole matter had been on the verge 
 of ending, that we and all our dreams had lain 
 but as a feather in the balance, outweighed
 
 Deo Soli In-victo 161 
 
 by the momentary reluctance of the sun, then 
 life being a thing pleasurable even in the 
 continuity of complaining, and our hold upon 
 it being no whit the less firm in intention as 
 the horizon becomes more limited and the 
 tenure more frail, perhaps we should even 
 turn again to penance and oblation, perhaps 
 who knows ? Mithras coming to his temple 
 at dawn would find it swept and garnished 
 and tenanted.
 
 VII 
 THE RING OF CANACE 
 
 IEGFRIED by tasting dragon's 
 blood became endued with the knowl- 
 edge of the speech of birds, and at 
 once the wood became a wood of voices warn- 
 ing him of the treachery of Mime the Smith. 
 
 We are no longer credulous of secrets won 
 by tasting the dragon's blood, and the under- 
 standing of bird-speech has been put away 
 with the dragons among outworn fantasies. 
 
 Girt about by brambles more impassable, 
 wrapped in slumber more timeless, more invio- 
 late, than ever lay sleeping beauty in enchanted 
 thicket, are the beliefs and superstitions of 
 the age that is past and that we call mediaeval. 
 We cannot enter, we cannot waken, but as we 
 may to make questioning let us consider what 
 impelled some of those who wandered in the 
 wood of voices, and the talismans they bore, 
 and the manner of singing that they heard.
 
 The Ring of Canace 163 
 
 The wood now seems to the infrequent 
 passer-by a wood of brambles, a maze path- 
 less and thickly overgrown, where cobwebs 
 have made a mist of the sunlight, and if he 
 has strayed within, the burs have clung to 
 him, and the brambles have caught his foot- 
 steps, and the mouldering leaves have seemed 
 dank and noisome, and he has wearied of 
 dead decaying things, and boskage shade, and 
 has gone back to the highway. 
 
 When the leaves that now moulder were 
 green the wood had many pathways, and 
 those who wandered there told strange stories 
 of how the paths converged on a gateway, 
 and within were glades where were heard the 
 sounds of strange music, for the singing of 
 birds and the speech of beasts, and the 
 murmur of plants were all in a tongue which 
 the visitant might hear and answer, and thus 
 communing with nature's many voices they 
 shared in the knowledge of her mystery in the 
 days when the woods had pathways. 
 
 Movement and rest, sound and silence, a 
 gathering in strength to the meridian, and a 
 decline to sunset they are common to all 
 the forms of life, varying only in the time of
 
 164 The Ring of Canace 
 
 gathering strength or combating decay, and 
 the manner of movement or of sound. 
 
 So instinct revealed to man his kinship 
 with all created things that in the space 
 between their birth and death revel and wax 
 strong in the sunlight and tremble before the 
 fury of the tempest, and are alike resolved 
 into dust when the life-principle passes in 
 mystery away. 
 
 So there was fashioned forth in primitive 
 traditions a golden age in which the speech of 
 all living creatures had been plain, for as we 
 read in an Esthonian folk-tale, "at first not 
 only men but even beasts enjoyed the gift of 
 speech ; nowadays there are but few people 
 who understand beast-language, or hearken to 
 their communications." 
 
 Legends the day-dreams of the age of 
 instinct told of some who in time past had 
 gained this knowledge, of others gifted with 
 the power from birth; and in these legends 
 the understanding of the songs of birds 
 took preeminence by the fascination of their 
 beauty. 
 
 Belief in its possibility found expression in 
 folk-tales, in the Eddas, and in beast-fables.
 
 The Ring of Canace 165 
 
 The Koran attributes to Solomon a knowl- 
 edge of bird-language, and Balkis, Queen of 
 Sheba, made her lapwing her messenger to 
 tell him of her love. The car of Alexander is 
 represented in legend as attended by magicians 
 who, possessing this knowledge, revealed the 
 future. Melampus's ears were licked by 
 serpents' tongues, and thus cleansed they 
 understood bird-language, and by this power 
 of divination he was a soothsayer of high 
 repute in all Argos. From this source the 
 oracle Tiresias prophesied, and Cassandra 
 drew her unregarded lore. 
 
 The knowledge thus revealed on occasion 
 to priests and kings was shared by them with 
 children, and as type of these legends we may 
 select that of the boy who became Pope. 
 
 A man hears a nightingale singing and is 
 filled with desire to know the meaning of its 
 song. His son says he knows, but is afraid 
 to tell. He is compelled to say, and it is that 
 he shall be served by his parents, that his 
 father shall bring water for him, and his mother 
 shall wash his feet. The father orders his ser- 
 vants to slay him, or in some versions of the 
 story he is thrown into the sea in an oak chest.
 
 1 66 The Ring of Canace 
 
 He is saved, travels into a distant country, 
 interprets the predictions of some ravens and 
 is elected Pope. There are Breton, Basque, 
 Slavonic and other versions of the story. In 
 some versions the ravens do not predict that the 
 boy shall be Pope, but are busy with a dispute, 
 and by interpreting it to the king he is 
 advanced to a high position in the court. 
 What all the versions have in common is the 
 fulfilment of the prediction of the nightingale 
 that the father and mother shall do acts of 
 service for their son. 
 
 Passing from legend wherein the interest 
 still centres entirely with things human, and 
 bird-utterance is somewhat similar to the utter- 
 ance of the chorus in Greek tragedy, the 
 attitude being that of sympathetic spectators 
 prophesying obscurely of the development of 
 the drama they are watching, but telling 
 nothing of themselves and their loves and 
 hates, let us consider the secrets of the 
 bird-kingdom which the magic ring revealed 
 to Canace when she walked with her ladies in 
 the park at daybreak. And to this end let us 
 
 " Call up him who left half-told 
 The story of Cambuscan bold,
 
 The Ring of Canace 167 
 
 Of Camball and of Algarsife, 
 
 And who had Canace to wife, 
 
 That owned the virtuous ring and glass ; 
 
 And of the wondrous horse of brass 
 
 On which the Tartar king did ride." 
 
 In " The Squieres Tale " Chaucer tells how 
 Cambuscan, king of Tartary, when he had 
 reigned for twenty years held a feast at Sarra, 
 and after the third course, as the king sat 
 surrounded by his nobles hearing his minstrels, 
 there entered a strange knight bringing 
 presents from the king of Araby. For the king 
 he brought a horse of brass, which in the space 
 of a day should bear him wherever he pleased, 
 or should soar high in the air as an eagle, 
 and a sword, which could cut through armour 
 "thick as a branched oak," and the wound 
 it made could only be healed by being stroked 
 by the flat of the blade, and for the lady 
 Canace, the king's daughter, a Magic Mirror 
 which should foretell adversity, and whether 
 a lover were true or false, and a Ring of which 
 the virtue 
 
 " Is this, that if hire list it for to were 
 Upon hire thombe, or in hire purse it bere,
 
 1 68 The Ring of Canace 
 
 Ther is no foule that fleeth imder heven 
 That she ne shal wel understand his steven, 
 And know his mening openly and plaine, 
 And answere him in his langage again" 
 
 And all the nobles marvelled at the strange 
 gifts. The horse they likened to winged 
 Pegasus or the horse of Troy, and the sword 
 to the spear of Achilles which could both 
 wound and heal, and the Ring seemed to 
 them to surpass in sorcery all others save 
 only the rings of Moses and Solomon. And 
 they continued in revelry and dancing until it 
 was near the dawn. 
 
 Now the lady Canace had taken her Ring 
 and Mirror and had early retired to her 
 chamber, but her sleep was light and restless, 
 for the phantasies of dream were woven around 
 the gifts of Araby, and the space in the Mirror 
 was in vision tenanted, and she awoke at day- 
 break and roused her maidens, and wandered 
 out in the park just as the fresh ruddy light of 
 the sun was dispelling the morning mist. She 
 heard the birds joyously welcoming the dawn, 
 and by virtue of the Ring which she bore on 
 her finger she understood all their songs.
 
 The Ring of Canace 169 
 
 Presently in her walk she came to where the 
 woods resounded with a piteous cry, and on a 
 tree there sat a falcon which had beaten her- 
 self with her wings until the blood had started, 
 and had torn herself with her beak and made 
 ever continual lament, and seemed like to 
 swoon and fall. Canace stopped filled with 
 pity, and held her lap to catch the falcon if 
 she fell, and asked her why she lamented. 
 
 " Is this for sorwe of deth or losse of love ? 
 For as I know thise be the causes two 
 That causen most a gentil herte woe" 
 
 And the falcon swooned and fell, and she 
 tended it in her bosom, and presently the 
 falcon told her that she had been loved by a 
 tercelet and afterwards forsaken, and for this 
 reason she was heart-broken and wished to 
 die. 
 
 Canace carried the falcon to the palace and 
 made a salve of herbs for it and ministered to 
 all its needs, glad to have found some sorrow 
 that she might comfort. 
 
 So the hawk is left in Canace's keeping: 
 the poet promising that after telling of the 
 other gifts he will speak again of the Ring
 
 170 The Ring of Canace 
 
 and of how the falcon got her love again. 
 But " The Squieres Tale " breaks off provok- 
 ingly in mid career, leaving vistas of adventures 
 .unpursued, of wonderlands unvisited. The 
 Ring alone of the magic gifts has as yet served 
 its purpose in giving to Canace understanding 
 of the falcon's sorrow ; but the fulfilment of 
 the promise of the happy ending, and the 
 secrets of bird-language to which in the course 
 of the story the Ring might have been an open 
 sesame these we can but follow with dim 
 conjecture. 
 
 It is her own sorrow that the falcon tells, 
 her own life history, impact of love and grief. 
 The pity of the blending is so after the man- 
 ner of lives human as to suggest the thought 
 that it is indeed the tale of woman's love that 
 is "being told, that the falcon was a maiden 
 loved and forsaken, and by sorcery transformed 
 into a bird, plaintive with the memory of her 
 wrongs, like the swallow in her morning lay 
 
 " Forse a memoria de 1 suoi primi guai" 
 
 and that in getting back her love again she 
 shall be free from the spell of enchantment 
 and resume her natural shape.
 
 The Ring of Canace 171 
 
 However, the Ring of Canace does not 
 guide us so far. The bridge connecting the 
 story with the traditions of India and Arabia, 
 wherein the belief in metempsychosis has 
 found expression, is a bridge spun of gossamer 
 imaginings. Reason is too sure-footed to 
 leave the highway. To cross it we must be 
 buoyed up on the wings of fantasy. Guided 
 thus we may perceive the influence of the 
 Buddhist conception of the soul of man at his 
 death inhabiting the bodies of different animals 
 until the days of its sojourn on earth were 
 completed. So all creatures were man's com- 
 peers, the dwelling-places of his forerunners 
 in the mystery of existence, the abodes where- 
 in for a brief space a portion of the eternal 
 has deigned to dwell. Eastern romance drank 
 deep of this conception and told of human 
 beings transformed into birds or beasts by 
 sorcery, the human life only being suspended 
 to be resumed on release from enchantment, 
 but who while so transformed were condemned 
 to silence or to the use of a language known 
 but infrequently ; Beder, prince of Persia, in 
 the "Arabian Nights," is transformed into a 
 white bird, and as such is dumb, but recovers
 
 172 The Ring of Canace 
 
 his shape on being sprinkled with magic 
 water. 
 
 Inarticulate, unless magic ring or serpent's 
 tongue should be an open sesame to the curious 
 listener, bird-melody seemed nevertheless to 
 be a striving after the expression of things 
 human. They seemed spirits, Peris at the 
 gate, who would fain pierce the barrier by 
 song, and early myth fashioned forth the 
 legends which each was striving to tell. No 
 book has done more to perpetuate and give 
 literary expression to such myths than Ovid's 
 "Metamorphoses," which in the mediaeval age 
 was the favourite text-book of those who 
 sought by study to re-create the past in 
 legend. 
 
 Significant not alone for their beauty and 
 wealth of detail are these legends of men 
 changing into birds and trees and flowers. 
 They express the sense of kinship with nature 
 as opposed to the modern study of it. We 
 watch the phenomena of nature, her outlines, 
 colours, murmurings and scents, and see a 
 little perhaps of her methods, but in the ages 
 of myth and legend men saw " more in nature 
 that was theirs." The laurel turning her
 
 The Ring of Canace 173 
 
 twisted leaves to the sun was Daphne shrink- 
 ing from the forceful embraces of Apollo. 
 Procne and Philomela retold their woes in 
 song, and Alcyone hovered above the wave 
 where Ceyx died. The handiwork of nature 
 had a meaning more familiar, for all her 
 children were moulded of like passions. 
 
 There was another glade in the wood of 
 voices apart from the glades Eastern or 
 Classic a glade situate in a far recess, dewy 
 and odorous, and visitants to it, though rare, 
 were not unknown in the days when the wood 
 had pathways. 
 
 Barefooted they wandered, travel-stained, 
 worn by vigils and fasting, yet of purpose 
 unwearied. Nothing recked they of myth or 
 art of necromancy, spurning dragon's blood 
 as fetish of the idolater. They may have 
 borne Canace's Ring when they passed within 
 the portal, but they bore it not as talisman but 
 as emblem emblem of purity and renuncia- 
 tion of all worldly self-seeking, mystic emblem 
 of union with what is holiest, even as the ring 
 is emblem in the union of St. Francis with 
 the lady Poverty, or in the marriage of St. 
 Catherine of Siena with the infant Christ.
 
 174 The Ring of Canace 
 
 Not touched their ears as those of Melampus 
 by serpents' tongues : they gained not fore- 
 knowledge of fate, they won no fame in 
 divination : touched rather it seemed by God's 
 own finger, touched to the cleansing away of 
 all dulness and grossness of earthly purpose, 
 and when they entered within the portal the 
 songs that they heard were canticles of praise. 
 
 There is a beautiful Breton legend of a 
 plant called Golden Herb which shines from 
 afar like gold, which causes whoever touches 
 it with bare foot to fall asleep immediately 
 and understand the language of birds. It is 
 seldom found, for it can only be seen at early 
 dawn by such as are unsullied by aught that 
 is evil. 
 
 For them not only in Brittany is Golden 
 Herb growing. 
 
 Surely it grew on the hillside above Asolo, 
 and Pippa wandering bare-footed touched it 
 unknowingly ; and so she passed, singing, 
 
 " Overhead the tree-tops meet, 
 Flowers and grass spring ''neath one's feet ; 
 There was nought above me, nought below, 
 My childhood had not learned to know :
 
 The Ring of Canace 175 
 
 For what are the voices of birds 
 
 Ay, and of beasts, but words, our words, 
 
 Only so much more sweet? " 
 
 What need of talismans for such as she ? 
 
 A pure heart, this was the Canace's ring 
 which opened the portals to this band of pil- 
 grims as they wandered in the dawn of faith, 
 which made the grass gleam golden beneath 
 their feet, the dew on it glistening with a radi- 
 ance caught from Heaven, which made them 
 to be asleep to much that it is better to be 
 asleep to, and tuned their ears to have under- 
 standing of things that lie apart from common 
 hearing. For these were such of the saints 
 and fathers as bore themselves as exiles and 
 pilgrims, seeking in solitude and contempla- 
 tion to attain to knowledge, fulfilling by their 
 lives the saying in the " De Imitatione " that 
 " in silence and in stillness the religious soul 
 grows and learns the mysteries of Holy Writ ; 
 then she finds rivers of tears, wherein she may 
 wash and cleanse herself night after night ; 
 that she may be the more familiar with her 
 Creator." 
 
 This attaining of knowledge more familiar
 
 176 The Ring of Can ace 
 
 was a link that drew them closer with all 
 created things alike children of one father, 
 and to the hermits wherever they wandered 
 it seemed they were in the hollow of His 
 hand and the birds and the beasts were their 
 brethren. In the lives of many of the saints, 
 of St. Guthlac of Croyland, of St. Columbanus 
 in the solitude of the Apennines, it is recorded 
 that birds ministered to their wants, and that 
 they had understanding of their speech. So 
 in the mountain fastnesses around the monas- 
 tery of Alvernia the birds of the air were all 
 friends of St. Francis ; they flew around him 
 and sang to him unceasingly, and he under- 
 stood them and answered them in their lan- 
 guage. 
 
 In one of Giotto's frescoes in the upper 
 church of St. Francis at Assisi he is repre- 
 sented preaching to them. They are sitting 
 all around on the ground and on the branches 
 of trees, and the saint is standing talking to 
 them very quietly and earnestly with head 
 rather bent forward and forefinger raised in 
 emphasis. 
 
 The sermon itself as given in " The Little 
 Flowers of St. Francis " has a simplicity and
 
 The Ring of Canace 177 
 
 a beauty so mediaeval, so unique, if we except 
 the sermon of St. Anthony of Padua to the 
 fishes, that I cannot forbear to transcribe it. 
 I quote from Mr. W. T. Arnold's translation. 
 " My little sisters, the birds, much bounden 
 are ye unto God, your Creator, and alway in 
 every place ought ye to praise Him, for that 
 He hath given you liberty to fly about every- 
 where, and hath also given you double and 
 triple raiment ; moreover He preserved your 
 seed in the ark of Noah, that your race might 
 not perish out of the world ; still more are ye 
 beholden to Him for the element of the air 
 which He hath appointed for you ; beyond all 
 this, ye sow not, neither do you reap ; and 
 God feedeth you, and giveth you the streams 
 and fountains for your drink ; the mountains 
 and the valleys for your refuge and the high 
 trees whereon to make your nests ; and because 
 ye know not how to spin or sow, God clotheth 
 you, you and your children ; wherefore your 
 Creator loveth you much seeing that He hath 
 bestowed on you so many benefits ; and there- 
 fore, my little sisters, beware of the sin of 
 ingratitude, and study always to give praises 
 unto God."
 
 178 The Ring of Canace 
 
 So St. Francis's exhortation to the birds 
 was that their songs should be always songs 
 of praise. But what the birds told St. Francis 
 when they sang to him in the woods at Alver- 
 nia, of that we know not save in so far as it 
 is written in the actions of a holy life. And 
 before leaving the legends of the early Church 
 let us consider what the life of St. Francis was. 
 His life was one long benison to his fellow- 
 men. He wooed Poverty as a mistress 
 with more single-heartedness and concentra- 
 tion than we can muster in any of our wooings. 
 His nights were spent in vigil and prayer. 
 His sanctity and zeal in self-sacrifice were 
 potent to draw many to give up their lives in 
 following his precepts. We must believe that 
 by faith followed with single purpose he had 
 drawn nearer to God ; that his eyes in spirit- 
 ual vision saw perhaps farther than do our 
 own. 
 
 We, when we hear the voices of God's 
 earthly choristers upraised in woods and mead- 
 ows, are as they who hear singing in strange 
 unknown numbers and can but conjecture the 
 meaning of the strain, but to him the portals 
 of that kingdom without which we stand may
 
 The Ring of Canace 179 
 
 have been opened, for him the songs of birds 
 may have had meaning even as we believe 
 they have for their Creator, whose praises 
 they are ever singing.
 
 VIII 
 
 ARK to the horns of Elfland, blow- 
 ing, blowing ! Bonne vieille, you re- 
 member their melody, and your 
 heart-strings thrill with it still" thus wrote 
 Thackeray in the Roundabout Paper " On a 
 Peal of Bells," and the phrase like the horns 
 seemed to murmur in my ears, and lay un- 
 dimmed upon the tablets of memory until I 
 met it again in the Bugle Song in " The Prin- 
 cess." 
 
 " O hark, O hear I how thin and clear, 
 And thinner, clearer, farther going ! 
 
 O sweet and far from cliff and scar 
 
 The horns of Elfland faintly blowing ! 
 
 Blow, let us hear the purple glens replying: 
 
 Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying" 
 
 Tennyson wrote this lyric while at Killar- 
 ney, and we may assume that the heathery
 
 The Horns of Elfland 181 
 
 hills and greenest of all valleys suggested the 
 cliff and scar, although perhaps unconsciously, 
 his presence among them being an influence 
 in moving the poet's mind. And so the hills 
 wherein the horns of Elfland blow are not 
 entirely the hills of dream. 
 
 Perhaps the melody may seem something 
 akin to the half-heard whisper of the Celtic 
 spirit, lamenting in its own wild glens upon 
 the vision of a fair and unattainable past, a 
 thing impact of the lapping of lake water and 
 the soughing of wind and rain. 
 
 Yet fair as is Glengarriff, fair inexpressibly 
 fair as is the valley of Gweedore with the 
 Gweebara winding slowly round the base of 
 the glittering cone of Errigal, a green glade 
 couched amid a wild expanse of billowy moor 
 and peat-morass, fair as are the fastnesses 
 of Galway and Connemara, the hills and val- 
 leys of Elfland are something fairer, if only in 
 that they are too elemental to have local hab- 
 itation, and so are fairer even as dreams are 
 fairer than reality, or as hope's vista is fairer 
 than the compass of endeavour. And even 
 as Elfland is fairer, so the blowing of the 
 magic horns is softer yet more compelling than
 
 182 The Horns of Elftand 
 
 the music of the Celtic and alike of all other 
 lyres. 
 
 Now before reading farther of these horns 
 of Elfland consider have you ever heard their 
 melody. It is better perhaps for your comfort 
 in this workaday world if you have not ; for 
 the fatal love of the Gods has more than one 
 gift in its dower, and there are some who have 
 seemed to their fellows as dead when that they 
 have heard earth-music and wandered afield 
 with eyes dream-laden. Other melodies may 
 have seemed to you as fairy music ; they have 
 stirred you strangely from that accustomed 
 creature of self, and their burden has rung for 
 a time so insistent in your ears that you have 
 in imagination given yourself up to its dictates, 
 and followed on the path it seemed to point 
 out, armed cap-a-pie, and impetuous for what- 
 ever adventure might befall. A pictured 
 Ferdinand for the moment treading to mystic 
 guidance the sward of the isle of enchantment. 
 
 But the music that drew you on was not 
 Ariel's ; it led you to no Miranda ; it rifted 
 suddenly to silence amid the interstices of the 
 wood, and left you loitering alone, stumbling 
 amid the brambles with starved lips and weary
 
 The Horns of Elfland 183 
 
 feet, striving for a while to recapture the lost 
 melody, and then you have abandoned the 
 quest, petulant that fancy has lured your foot- 
 steps, have gone back to the highway, have 
 heard again the speech of your fellows and 
 solaced your ears that were still an-hungering. 
 It was not the blowing of the bugle that led 
 you on, not Ariel's music, or if the sprite 
 were indeed present the tune of the catch was 
 as though " played by the picture of nobody," 
 and you followed in bewilderment, a Trinculo 
 buffeted by unseen powers. A fantasy, a trick 
 of the ear, it called you to something apart 
 from yourself, and you could not make the 
 passage. 
 
 List to the blowing of the magic horn I 
 Faintly, faintly revealed it may be, and yet the 
 faintest of its receding echoes you will not 
 mistake, for it sounds the dream that is within 
 you. You may not hearken to it, and if ever 
 unheeded its melody will become fainter, it 
 will be a rarer visitant than when it first broke 
 upon your ears, but it calls you to the highest 
 that is in you to accomplish, it reveals your 
 ultimate self. Primal nature in some mysteri- 
 ous unfathomable communion with that part
 
 184 The Horns of Elfland 
 
 of itself which is within you, has weighed your 
 capacities and perplexities, has outlined forth 
 what may be the result of endeavour, and the 
 vision thus foreshadowed to which hope as- 
 pires, and which, though you may not as yet 
 attain, you may keep undimmed, a glittering 
 lodestar of your quest, this it is to which the 
 bugle calls you. 
 
 If you heed not the call, if you abandon 
 that self unseen and eternal for the self 
 ephemeral, you have so far as in you lies made 
 the great refusal, and if the light of dawn 
 ever parts again the curtain behind which you 
 counterfeit sleeping and waking, and shines 
 upon you so that you really wake, for a mo- 
 ment you will seem to realize, 
 
 " O God! O God! that it were possible 
 
 To undo things done ; to call back yesterday /" 
 
 and then the vision will pass from you, 
 you will be spared the shame of seeing what 
 you might have been. 
 
 List to the blowing of the magic horn ! 
 Other melodies serve as preludes. For as 
 music is the most passionate, the most sense- 
 compelling, and the most ethereal of all the
 
 The Horns of Elfiand 185 
 
 arts, so its pathway to the mind is the most 
 intuitive and the most direct. Ear-gate is a 
 citadel ever harder to defend than Eye-gate. 
 Ulysses left them both unguarded : he saw the 
 Sirens, and he heard their song, and in inten- 
 tion he was subjugate. If his companions 
 had had their eyes bandaged instead of their 
 ears being rilled with wax, if Ear-gate had 
 been left unguarded so that they had heard the 
 Sirens' song, then they would never have 
 rowed away. 
 
 Music by this power of dominating the 
 senses is a prelude of thought and of melodies 
 which the ear cannot hear. 
 
 The song or the orchestra has ceased. It 
 has stirred you, and ceasing has left you in 
 a tranced expectancy. Your ear strives to 
 re-create it, to pierce the intangible web of 
 silence and follow its echoes. But, quick 
 as conceived, your purpose is abandoned, for 
 there is no more silence, only the interval is 
 over. Maybe the opera has ceased, the cur- 
 tain has fallen, the singers have been called 
 before it, and now the orchestra have gone 
 away to their homes, and you are walking 
 home in the cool night air. But of silence
 
 i86 The Horns of Elfland 
 
 has been formed a melody which floats around 
 you, steeping your ears and senses with a 
 new rich significance. For you alone is the 
 melody. The lyre of Orpheus was never so 
 compelling, and yet the trees around your 
 path tower straightly up to heaven. They hear 
 it not, or they would crouch in tremulous 
 wonder. For you alone is the melody, for it 
 is a part of yourself. 
 
 Not only music of man's making, but that 
 of all nature is a prelude to the blowing of 
 the magic horn. 
 
 The songs of birds, the cadence of moving 
 waters, the wind lifting the leaves of trees 
 alike reveal it. If you are where all these 
 have ceased utterly, still there is not silence 
 with your ear to the ground you may hear 
 the faint murmur of the brown earth in travail 
 in the quickening of life innumerable. 
 
 Nature is perpetually in a condition of 
 music ; it is an ever-changing symphony, a 
 harmony of form and sound. 
 " Thou canst not wave thy staff in air, 
 Or dip thy paddle in the lake, 
 But it carves the bow of beauty there, 
 And the ripples in rhyme the oar forsake ; "
 
 The Horns of Elfland 187 
 
 and when the receding ripples have won to 
 shore, and it seems again as though keel had 
 never furrowed the surface of the lake, still 
 there is not silence, the moving waters have 
 resumed their eternal melody. Eternal yet 
 ever changing, at times tempest-driven to 
 the crescendos of exultation or despair, and 
 anon dropping to the faintest whisperings of 
 motion. The ripple of the river ever running 
 seaward, the beating of the waves upon the 
 shore, the lapping of lake water, all are the 
 recurrence of a rhythm that has been from 
 the beginning, that has murmured in the ears 
 of those before us, and will murmur when we 
 have passed away like shadows, and as we in 
 our transitory day meet the symbol of this 
 eternity, its note wakes the chord responsive 
 in our being and calls into action that within 
 us which is most unfettered by the things of 
 time. 
 
 Water seen far beneath has also an inevi- 
 table suggestion of music. From the summit 
 of the pine-clad hill the lake lies apparent, 
 motionless in argent ecstasy. The trees on 
 its banks, dark against the gleaming water, 
 bend down and jealously shut in the sound of
 
 1 88 The Horns of Elfland 
 
 its whisperings that they may not reach my 
 ear. The air is silent, trembling to the sun, 
 and downward gazing I am drawn Narcissus- 
 like to the mirror of imaginings, and the tremor 
 of the air is as the faint beat of wings made 
 audible, and it gathers to a cadence that seems 
 
 " Like an sEolian harp that wakes 
 
 No certain air, but overtakes 
 
 far thought with music that it makes ; " 
 
 and the far thought is in part a memory, in 
 part an expectation, and the memory is of a 
 dream, and the expectation is of the dream's 
 fulfilment, and the music takes me a willing 
 captive, for my heart-strings are ever thrilling 
 with its melody. 
 
 Oh to dream ever, if this be dreaming, for 
 thus to dream is to know more truly than 
 waking ears may hear or eyes may see !
 
 IX 
 ROS ROSARUM 
 
 >T was in Prospero's enchanted island 
 that Gonzalo told about that com- 
 monwealth of his and its Utopian 
 virtues. " Had he plantation of the isle," 
 and then he fell to thinking what he would 
 do. " Full of noises, sounds, and sweet airs " 
 the island, yet for Gonzalo it was but an 
 old fancy that they recaptured, and the com- 
 monwealth was not a dream first heralded by 
 Ariel's music, but a tale oft repeated. One 
 judges this to be the case because Gonzalo 
 was an old man, and old men are more prone 
 to recur to the dreams of youth than to have 
 new fancies, and because obviously the other 
 lords in attendance on the king had heard him 
 tell the tale before. Their comments antici- 
 pate the text. They knew just the point at 
 which the thread would be riven by the gusts 
 of conflicting excellences and the latter end of
 
 190 Ros Rosarum 
 
 the commonwealth would forget its beginning. 
 Moreover, this very attempt to combine in- 
 congruous virtues, to load the body politic 
 with more than its due equipment of members, 
 shows that the would-be maker of the consti- 
 tution owed no debt to Ariel's music, which 
 however fleeting is yet at harmony with it- 
 self, and lo ! here are the incompatibilities. 
 
 " No sovereignty, " 
 
 " Yet he would be king orft" 
 
 No wonder Gonzalo's commonwealth never 
 grew unwieldy, but remained eminently port- 
 able, so that he was able to carry it about 
 with him all his life, from Naples to the island 
 and from the island back to Naples, and I 
 know not to how many cities and islands else. 
 And he the maker was cicerone to whoever 
 would enter, and like the Ancient Mariner 
 constrained the guests, yet made no long 
 narration, for the listener soon pointed out 
 that the ship of state was unseaworthy in dry 
 dock, and could not even take the water. 
 Dear to the maker its every beam, seaworthy 
 or no, and he left the listener turned critic. 
 He would not have much else to do with the
 
 Ros Rosarum 191 
 
 commonwealth beyond finding listeners to hear 
 about it, until he had taken heart to discard 
 one of its incongruous virtues. Bitter the 
 parting belike, but we must give up something 
 in compromise to the actual. No ship of 
 dreams ever came to the immortal port with 
 all her cargo in the hold. Not purposefully 
 abandoned maybe, only left until the ensuing 
 voyage at some port of call that we think to 
 revisit, and the next voyage is in waters 
 unfamiliar, and the dream borne a little way 
 and then left is carried on by another 
 mariner. 
 
 Even in an isle of fantasy we may not hope 
 to unite all the republican virtues, and yet 
 have kings and queens. In this particular 
 choice I should never share the hesitance of 
 Gonzalo, for I would give up all the distinc- 
 tively republican virtues twenty times over for 
 real kings and queens, if only in order that 
 there might be no incongruity in the presence 
 of princesses and the usages of chivalry. 
 This only serves to show that the incompati- 
 bilities in my island are not Gonzalo's. There 
 are hesitations there too enough and to 
 spare.
 
 192 Ros Rosarum 
 
 For alas 1 we are all the Gonzalos of our 
 own isles of fantasy. Our entry would pro- 
 duce chaos. Our purposes are irreconcilable. 
 No sovereignty and yet we would be kings. 
 This it is that makes lives come to nothing 
 halting ever on the brink of achievement. 
 
 This and not that the endeavour is 
 visionary. Follow the vision follow the fair 
 vision and the more fugitive the farther 
 belike your course. For one life lost in the 
 far sea where the lone star beacons, how many 
 thousands have beaten the surge 'twixt sea 
 and shore with ineffectual hands ! 
 
 " The desire of the moth for the star " 
 useless striving emblem of vain endeavour, 
 and yet it flies higher than do other moths, 
 far above the smoke and flame of the candle. 
 
 Seekers of things visionary star-struck 
 moths they discern the highest and seek it 
 in the measure of their strength. 
 
 And oh ! the stars are so far away, and the 
 measure of strength at best so halting and 
 frail, that there must be no falterings of pur- 
 pose in the flight. 
 
 For many one star, and on each seeker one 
 ray falling, and this the predestined pathway
 
 Ros Rosarum 193 
 
 of the flight. They who have soared the 
 highest are they who have kept the pathway. 
 Single the vision seen. Single the thought 
 attending. Strength has been theirs to 
 renounce all else. 
 
 " Other heights in other lives, God willing, 
 All the gifts from all the lives, your own, Love" 
 
 As yet one oblation for this life is all too 
 brief for the fashioning of one gift meet of 
 sen-ice. 
 
 Seekers of the ideal ! We look with curious 
 eyes at the pathways wherein they sought, in 
 quest of things immaterial, of honour in deeds, 
 of love, of faith, of things than these more 
 visionary, " things impossible and cast beyond 
 the moon." Single the vision seen yet ever 
 the manner of the seeking has been but in the 
 measure of their strength, halting and frail. 
 If happiness has attended them in the quest 
 it has come as a gift unexpected, unsought. 
 Peace they have known but only the peace 
 following long endeavour, peace too deep for 
 conjecture. And withal to aspire and ever to 
 aspire nor conscious know attainment And 
 yet of this what know we ?
 
 194 R s Rosarum 
 
 Whatever is loveliest in the memories of 
 deed, whatever is loveliest in the treasures 
 of art and song, whatever in the beholding 
 brings us nearer than aught else to the 
 
 " Dim vision of the far immortal Face, 
 
 Divinely fugitive, that haunts the world, 
 
 And lifts man 's spiral thought to lovelier dreams, ' ' 
 
 these all these are but the broken endeav- 
 ours, the stammerings of the tongues, the 
 fumbling of the hands of such as have striven 
 of single purpose to behold. Only the gifts 
 that they would fain fashion when near to the 
 presence. And we are led in dream of their 
 offerings. And in their lives they have wrought 
 so wondrously. What of their thought unex- 
 pressed ? How may we conjecture of their 
 dreams ? How of the vision that their eyes 
 have looked upon ? 
 
 Of some of these quests we make no longer 
 manner of following. They are meet only for 
 the days of mediaeval enchantments, and such 
 enchantments are all outworn, all except 
 the last enchantment of their memory. The 
 wiser now in refusal wise only in despite. 
 " Alles ist gleich, es lohnt sich Nichts es
 
 Ros Rosarum 195 
 
 hielft kein Suchen, es giebt auch keine gliick- 
 seligen Inseln mehr." 
 
 Gonzalo never found location for his isle, 
 but Prospero found an " isle fortunate " in his 
 isle of banishment. These followers of the 
 vision are like the rather to Prospero. Single 
 purpose is as potent as magic art. 
 
 The quest of the beautiful is eternal. " For 
 ever wilt thou love, and she be fair." The ideal 
 was before you sought. 
 
 It drew forth the soul of Faustus to its lips, 
 and men shall dream of Helen in ages yet 
 unborn. No pursuit is ever abandoned. No 
 ideals are ever as though they had never been. 
 No quest but shall have ending upon some 
 visionary shore. 
 
 "But each man murmurs, ' O my Queen, 
 I follow, till I make thee mine. 1 " 
 
 Of their ivorks : Deep in the deep heart's 
 core of all the roses is the mystic incommuni- 
 cable essence, which vibrates through each 
 petal, charging it with form and colour and 
 fragrance, so that the rose is impact of all
 
 196 Ros Rosarum 
 
 these qualities and they become symbols of 
 its presence. 
 
 Paradise in Dante's " Vision " is shaped as 
 a pure white rose, and the centre far within is 
 a sun of light that makes radiant the whole, 
 and the petals circling outward leaf by leaf 
 are the courts wherein dwell the assembly of 
 the saints. The white rose this of leaves 
 eternal. 
 
 There are roses upturned towards it roses 
 of man's making that live long after they who 
 have fashioned them, and in fading fade not 
 wholly. 
 
 Some of these are the roses of mediaeval 
 beauty. The scattered leaves are still fragrant. 
 
 Some are white and untroubled of years, 
 some red as though they who had spent their 
 lives in growing had watered them with their 
 own heart's blood. Yet of such watering 
 cometh not their fragrance. These are the 
 roses on which the dew has fallen.
 
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