ing to
have shown that the stigma of slavery and disgrace attaching to his
name has no solid historical justification, and something to have
suggested plausible reasons for conjecturing that his worship had a
genuine spiritual basis. Yet the sincere critic, at the end of the
whole inquiry, will confess that he has only cast a plummet into the
unfathomable sea of ignorance. What remains, immortal,
indestructible, victorious, is Antinous in art. Against the gloomy
background of doubt, calumny, contention, terrible surmise, his
statues are illuminated with the dying glory of the classic
genius--even as the towers and domes of a marble city shine forth
from the purple banks of a thunder-cloud in sunset light. Here and
here only does reality emerge from the chaos of conflicting
phantoms. Front to front with them, it is allowed us to forget all
else but the beauty of one who died young because the gods loved
him. But when we question those wonderful mute features and beg them
for their secret, they return no answer. There is not even a smile
upon the parted lips. So profound is the mystery, so insoluble the
enigma, that from its most importunate interrogation we derive
nothing but an attitude of deeper reverence. This in itself,
however, is worth the pains of study.[1]

[1] I must here express my indebtedness to my friend H.F.
Brown for a large portion of the materials used by me in
this essay on Antinous, which I had no means at Davos
Platz of accumulating for myself, and which he unearthed
from the libraries of Florence in the course of his own
work, and generously placed at my disposal.

_SPRING WANDERINGS_

Ana-Capri

The storm-clouds at this season, though it is the bloom of May, are
daily piled in sulky or menacing masses over Vesuvius and the
Abruzzi, frothing out their curls of moulded mist across the bay,
and climbing the heavens with toppling castle towers and domes of
alabaster.

We made the most of a tranquil afternoon, when there was an
armistice of storm, to climb the bluff of Mount Solaro. A ruined
fort caps that limestone bulwark; and there we lay together,
drinking the influences of sea, sun, and wind. Immeasurably deep
beneath us plunged the precipices, deep, deep descending to a bay
where fisher boats were rocking, diminished to a scale that made the
fishermen in them invisible. Low down above the waters wheeled white
gulls, and higher up the hawks and ospreys of the