to a dark greenish band,
scarcely visible, which separated the land from the sea: "those are the
pine woods of Viareggio. It was into their sand and weeds that the sea
washed Shelley's body. Do you think we should be any the better off if
he had taken to practical work which he could not do, and declared that
poetry was a sort of French cookery?"

Baldwin tied the reins to the stem of a cypress, and threw himself down
on the warm sere grass on the brow of the hill, overlooking the tangle
of olive and vine and fig-trees of the slopes below.

"In Shelley's time," answered Cyril, leaning his head and shoulders
against one of the cypresses, and looking up into its dark branches,
compact in the centre, but delicate like feather and sparkling like
jet where their extremities stood out against the pale blue sky--"in
Shelley's time, things were rather different from what they are now.
There was a religion of progress to preach and be stoned for; there was
a cause of liberty to fight for--there were Bourbons and Lord Eldons,
and there was Greece and Spain and Italy. There was Italy still when
Mrs. Browning wrote: had she looked out of Casa Guidi windows now, on
to the hum-drum, shoulder-shrugging, penny-haggling, professorial,
municipal-councillorish Italy of to-day she could scarcely have felt in
the vein. The heroic has been done--"

"There is Servia and Montenegro, and there are Nihilists and Democrats,"
answered Baldwin.

"I know--but we can't sing about barbarous ruffians, nor about
half-besotten, half-knavish regicides; we can't be Democrats
now-a-days--at least I can't. Would you have a man sing parliamentary
debates, or High Church squabbles, or Disestablishment, or Woman's
rights, or anti-communism? sing the superb conquests of man over nature,
&c., like your Italian friends, your steam-engine and mammoth poet
Zanella? The wonders of science!--six or seven thousand dogs and cats
being flayed, roasted, baked, disembowelled, artificially ulcerated,
galvanized on ripped-up nerves, at Government expense, in all the
laboratories of Christendom, in order to discover the soul-secreting
apparatus, and how to cure old maids of liver complaint! Thank you. My
muse aspires not thereunto. What then? Progress? But it is assured. Why,
man, we can't even sing of despair, like the good people of the year
'20, since we all know that (bating a few myriads of sufferers and a
few centuries of agony) all is going to come quite right, to