izon. The downs rose like cliffs, and the dead level of the weald
was freckled with brick towns; every hedgerow was visible as the
markings on a chess-board; the distant lands were merged in blue
vapour, and the windmill on its little hill seemed like a bit out of
a young lady's sketch-book.

"How charming it is here!--how delightful! How sorrow seems to
vanish, or to hang far away in one's life like a little cloud! It is
only in moments of contemplation like this, when our wretched
individuality is lost in the benedictive influences of nature, that
true happiness is found. Ah! the wonderful philosophy of the East,
the wisdom of the ancient races! Christianity is but a vulgarization
of Buddhism, an adaptation, an arrangement for family consumption."

They were not a mile from where John had seen Kitty for a last time.
Now the mere recollection of her jarred his joy in the evening, for
he had long since begun to understand that his love of her had been a
kind of accident, even as her death a strange unaccountable
divagation of his true nature. He had grown ashamed of his passion,
and he now thought that, like Parsifal, instead of yielding, he
should have looked down and seen a cross in the sword's hilt, and the
temptation should have passed. That cruel death, never explained, so
mysterious and so involved in horror! In what measure was he to
blame? In what light was he to view this strange death as a symbol,
as a sign? And if she had not been killed? If he had married her? To
escape from these assaults of conscience he buried his mind in his
books and writings, not in his history of Christian Latin, for now
his history of those writers appeared to him sterile, and he
congratulated himself that he had outgrown love of such paradoxes.

Solemn, and with the great curves of palms, the sky arched above
them, and all the coombes filled with all the mystery of evening
shadow, and all around lay the sea--a rim of sea illimitable.

At the end of a long silence Mike spoke of his poem.

"You must have written a good deal of it by this time."

"No, I have written very little;" and then yielding to his desire to
astonish, confessed he was working at a trilogy on the life of
Christ, and had already decided the main lines and incidents of the
three plays. His idea was the disintegration of the legend, which had
united under a godhead certain socialistic aspirations then prevalent
in Judaea. In his first play, _John_, he introduce