urrounded by masterworks of art,--statues, pictures,
matchless specimens of ceramics, chased works by Benvenuto. Eyes
feast on nature, feast on art, and do not know where to dwell
longest,--unless it be on the splendid pagan, the mistress of all
these splendors, and whose only religion is beauty.

But is it quite just to call her a pagan? because, I say again,
whether sincere or not, she shares my sorrows and tries to soothe
them. We talk for hours about my father, and I have often seen tears
in her eyes. Since she found out that music acts soothingly upon my
mind, she plays for hours, and often until late at night. Sometimes
I sit in my room in the dark, look absently at the sea riddled by a
silver network, and listen to the sounds of her music mingling with
the splashing of the waves. I listen until I feel half distracted,
half sleepy,--until in sleep I forget the real life, with all its
sorrows.

29 March.

I do not even feel inclined to write every day. We are reading
together the Divina Commedia,--or rather, its last part. There was
a time when I felt more attracted by the awful plasticity of the
Inferno. Now I like to plunge into the luminous mist, peopled with
still more luminous spirits, of the Dantesque heaven. At times it
seems as if amid all that radiance I see the dear, familiar features,
and my sorrow becomes almost sweet to me. I never before understood
the exceeding beauty of heaven. Never has human mind taken such a
lofty flight, encompassed such greatness, or borrowed such a slice
from infinity as in this sublime, immortal poem. The day before
yesterday and the two days following, we read it together in the boat.
We usually go out a long distance, and when the sea is quite still I
furl the sail; and we read, rocked by the waves,--or rather, she reads
and I listen. Surrounded by the glories of the sunset, far from the
shore, with the most beautiful woman reading to me Dante, I was under
a delusion, that I had been transferred to another world.

30 March.

At times the sorrow that seemed to be lulled to sleep wakes up with
renewed force. I feel then as if I wanted to fly hence.

VILLA LAURA, 31 March.

To-day I thought a great deal about Aniela. I have a strange feeling,
as if lands and seas divided us. It seems to me as if Ploszow were a
Hyperborean island somewhere at the confines of the world. We have
delusions of that kind when personal impression takes the place of
tangible reality. I