, sounds, and
thoughts, as in a sense, holy.

XVIII.

Yesterday morning, riding towards the cypress woods, I had the first
impression of spring; and, in fact, to-day the first almond-tree had
come out in blossom on our hillside.

A cool morning; loose, quickly moving clouds, and every now and then a
gust of rain swept down from the mountains. The path followed a brook,
descending in long, steep steps from the hillside; water perfectly
clear, bubbling along the yellow stones between the grassy banks and
making now and then a little leap into a lower basin; along the stream
great screens of reeds, sere, pale, with barely a pennon of leaves,
rustling ready for the sickle; and behind, beneath the watery sky,
rainy but somehow peaceful, the russet oak-scrub of the hill. Of
spring there was indeed visible only the green of the young wheat
beneath the olives; not a bud as yet had moved. And still, it is
spring. The world is renewing itself. One feels it in the gusts of
cool, wet wind, the songs of the reeds, the bubble of the brook; one
feels it, above all, in oneself. All things are braced, elastic, ready
for life.

THE ART AND THE COUNTRY.

TUSCAN NOTES.

"... all these are inhabitants of truly mountain cities, Florence
being as completely among the hills as Innsbruck is, only the
hills have softer outlines."--_Modern Painters_, iv., chap. xx.

I.

Sitting in the January sunshine on the side of this Fiesole hill,
overlooking the opposite quarries (a few long-stalked daisies at my
feet in the gravel, still soft from the night's frost), my thoughts
took the colour and breath of the place. They circled, as these paths
circle round the hill, about those ancient Greek and old Italian
cities, where the cyclopean walls, the carefully-terraced olives,
followed the tracks made first by the shepherd's and the goat's foot,
even as we see them now on the stony hills all round. What
civilisations were those, thus sowed on the rock like the wild mint
and grey myrrh-scented herbs, and grown under the scorch of sun upon
stone, and the eddy of winds down the valleys! They are gone,
disappeared, and their existence would be impossible in our days. But
they have left us their art, the essence they distilled from their
surroundings. And that is as good for our souls as the sunshine and
the wind, as the aromatic scent of the herbs of their mountains.

II.

I am tempted to think that the worst place for g