with spires of faintest rose, and narcissus dreams of his own
beauty, loading the air with fragrance sweet as some love-music of
Mozart. These fields want only the white figure of Persephone to make
them poems: and in this twilight one might fancy that the queen had
left her throne by Pluto's side, to mourn for her dead youth among the
flowers uplifted between earth and heaven. Nay, they are poems now,
these fields; with that unchanging background of history, romance,
and human life--the Lombard plain, against whose violet breadth the
blossoms bend their faint heads to the evening air. Downward we
hurry, on pathways where the beeches meet, by silent farms, by meadows
honey-scented, deep in dew. The columbine stands tall and still on
those green slopes of shadowy grass. The nightingale sings now, and
now is hushed again. Streams murmur through the darkness, where the
growth of trees, heavy with honeysuckle and wild rose, is thickest.
Fireflies begin to flit above the growing corn. At last the plain is
reached, and all the skies are tremulous with starlight. Alas, that
we should vibrate so obscurely to these harmonies of earth and
heaven! The inner finer sense of them seems somehow unattainable--that
spiritual touch of soul evoking soul from nature, which should
transfigure our dull mood of self into impersonal delight. Man needs
to be a mytho-poet at some moments, or, better still, to be a mystic
steeped through half-unconsciousness in the vast wonder of the world.
Gold and untouched to poetry or piety by scenes that ought to blend
the spirit in ourselves with spirit in the world without, we can but
wonder how this phantom show of mystery and beauty will pass away from
us--how soon--and we be where, see what, use all our sensibilities on
aught or nought?

SIC GENIUS

In the picture-gallery at Modena there is a masterpiece of Dosso
Dossi. The frame is old and richly carved; and the painting, bordered
by its beautiful dull gold, shines with the lustre of an emerald. In
his happy moods Dosso set colour upon canvas, as no other painter out
of Venice ever did; and here he is at his happiest. The picture is the
portrait of a jester, dressed in courtly clothes and with a feathered
cap upon his head. He holds a lamb in his arms, and carries the
legend, _Sic Genius_. Behind him is a landscape of exquisite
brilliancy and depth. His face is young and handsome. Dosso has made
it one most wonderful laugh. Even so perhaps laughed Y