legends being utterly
forgotten, the poets of the race played freely with its rich
material. Who cares to be told that Achilles was the sun, when the
child of Thetis and the lover of Patroclus has been sung for us by
Homer? Are the human agonies of the doomed house of Thebes made less
appalling by tracing back the tale of OEdipus to some prosaic
source in old astronomy? The incest of Jocasta is the subject of
supreme tragic art. It does not improve the matter, or whitewash the
imagination of the Greeks, as some have fondly fancied, to unravel
the fabric wrought by Homer and by Sophocles, into its raw material
in Aryan dialects. Indeed, this new method of criticism bids fair to
destroy for young minds the human lessons of pathos and heroism in
Greek poetry, and to create an obscure conviction that the greatest
race of artists the world has ever produced were but dotards,
helplessly dreaming over distorted forms of speech and obsolete
phraseology.

Let us bid farewell to Etna from Taormina. All along the coast
between Aci and Giardini the mountain towers distinct against a
sunset sky--divested of its robe of cloud, translucent and blue as
some dark sea-built crystal. The Val del Bove is shown to be a
circular crater in which the lava has boiled and bubbled over to the
fertile land beneath. As we reach Giardini, the young moon is
shining, and the night is alive with stars so large and bright that
they seem leaning down to whisper in the ears of our soul. The sea
is calm, touched here and there on the fringes of the bays and
headlands with silvery light; and impendent crags loom black and
sombre against the feeble azure of the moonlit sky. _Quale per
incertam lunam et sub luce maligna_: such is our journey, with Etna,
a grey ghost, behind our path, and the reflections of stars upon the
sea, and glow-worms in the hedges, and the mystical still splendour
of the night, that, like Death, liberates the soul, raising it above
all common things, simplifying the outlines of the earth as well as
our own thoughts to one twilight hush of aerial tranquillity. It is
a strange compliment to such a landscape to say that it recalls a
scene from an opera. Yet so it is. What the arts of the
scene-painter and the musician strive to suggest is here realised in
fact; the mood of the soul created by music and by passion is
natural here, spontaneous, prepared by the divine artists of earth,
air, and sea.

Was there ever such another theatre a