time the
sovereign purifier to which the world must have recourse whenever that
precipitate of baser instincts, which thickened like slime the love
poetry of Antiquity, shall rise again and sully the purity of the love
poetry of to-day.

EPILOGUE.

More than a year has elapsed since the moment when, fancying that this
series of studies must be well-nigh complete, I attempted to explain in
an introductory chapter what the nature of this book of mine is, or
would fain be. I had hoped that each of these studies would complete its
companions; and that, without need for explicit explanation, my whole
idea would have become more plain to others than it was at that time
even to myself. But instead, it has become obvious that the more
carefully I had sought to reduce each question to unity, the more that
question-subdivided and connected itself with other questions; and that,
with the solution of each separate problem, had arisen a new set of
problems which infinitely complicated the main lessons to be deduced
from a study of that many-sided civilization to which, remembering the
brilliant and mysterious offspring of Faustus and Helena, I have given
the name of Euphorion. Hence, as it seems, the necessity for a few
further words of explanation.

In those introductory pages written some fifteen months ago, I tried to
bring home to the reader a sense which has haunted me throughout the
writing of this volume; namely, that instead of having deliberately made
up my mind to study the Renaissance, as one makes up one's mind to visit
Greece or Egypt or the Holy Land; I have, on the contrary, quite
accidentally and unconsciously, found myself wandering about in spirit
among the monuments of this particular historic region, even as I might
wander about in the streets of Siena where I wrote last year, of
Florence whence I write at present; wandering about among these things,
and little by little feeling a particular interest in one, then in
another, according as each happened to catch my fancy or to recall some
already known thing. Now these, which for want of a better word I have
just called monuments, and just now, less clearly, but also less
foolishly, merely _things_--these things were in reality not merely
individual and really existing buildings, books, pictures, or statues,
individual and really registered men, women, and events; they were the
mental conceptions which I had extracted out of these realities; the
intelle