ing.

"It is the typical landscape of the South, and of spring, the
landscape, with only differences in detail, of Theocritus or
Vergil, or the Greek anthologists, those most delicate
singers of nature and the South. From the beginning it has
filled man with the same joy, the same yearning, the
same despair.

"In youth and happiness we _are_ the spring--the young
green--the blossom--the plashing waves. Their life is ours
and one with ours.

"But in age and grief? There is no resentment, I think; no
anger, as though a mourner resented the gayety around him;
but, rather, a deep and melancholy wonder at the chasm that
has now revealed itself between our life and nature. What
does the breach mean?--the incurable dissonance and
alienation? Are we greater than nature, or less? Is the
opposition final, the prophecy of man's ultimate and hopeless
defeat at the hands of nature?--or is it, in the Hegelian
sense, the mere development of a necessary conflict, leading
to a profounder and intenser unity? The old, old
questions--stock possessions of the race, yet burned anew by
life into the blood and brain of the individual.

"I see Diana in the garden with her nurse. She has been
running to and fro, playing with the dog, feeding the goat.
Now I see her sitting still, her chin on her hands, looking
out to sea. She seems to droop; but I am sure she is not
tired. It is an attitude not very natural to a child,
especially to a child so full of physical health and vigor;
yet she often falls into it.

"When I see it I am filled with dread. She knows nothing, yet
the cloud seems to be upon her. Does she already ask herself
questions--about her father--about this solitary life?

"Juliet was not herself--not in her full sane mind--when I
promised her. That I know. But I could no more have refused
the promise than water to her dying lips. One awful evening
of fever and hallucination I had been sitting by her for a
long time. Her thoughts, poor sufferer, had been full of
_blood_--it is hard to write it--but there is the truth--a
physical horror of blood--the blood in which her dress--the
dress they took from her, her first night in prison--was
once steeped. She saw it everywhere, on her hands, the
sheets, the walls; it was a nausea,