er the angels sent them on the breeze, or the birds brought them,
or the dead men came and sang them to him, he could not tell. Indeed,
who can tell?

Where did Guido see the golden hair of St. Michael gleam upon the wind?
Where did Mozart hear the awful cries of the risen dead come to
judgment? What voice was in the fountain of Vaucluse? Under what nodding
oxlip did Shakespeare find Titania asleep? When did the Mother of Love
come down, chaster in her unclothed loveliness than vestal in her veil,
and with such vision of her make obscure Cleomenes immortal?

Who can tell?

Signa sat dreaming, with his chin upon his hands, and his eyes wandering
over all the silent place, from the closed flowers at his feet to the
moon in her circles of mist.

Who walks in these paths now may go back four hundred years. They are
changed in nothing. Through their high hedges of rhododendron and of
jessamine that grow like woodland trees it would still seem but natural
to see Raffaelle with his court-train of students, or Signorelli
splendid in those apparellings which were the comment of his age; and on
these broad stone terraces with the lizards basking on their steps and
the trees opening to show a vine-covered hill with the white oxen
creeping down it and the blue mountains farther still behind, it would
be but fitting to see a dark figure sitting and painting lilies upon a
golden ground, or cherubs' heads upon a panel of cypress wood, and to
hear that this painter was the monk Angelico.

The deepest charm of these old gardens, as of their country, is, after
all, that in them it is possible to forget the present age.

In the full, drowsy, voluptuous noon, when they are a gorgeous blaze of
colour and a very intoxication of fragrance, as in the ethereal white
moonlight of midnight, when, with the silver beams and the white
blossoms and the pale marbles, they are like a world of snow, their
charm is one of rest, silence, leisure, dreams, and passion all in one;
they belong to the days when art was a living power, when love was a
thing of heaven or of hell, and when men had the faith of children and
the force of gods.

Those days are dead, but in these old gardens you can believe still that
you live in them.

* * *

"Pippa!" echoed Istriel. His memories were wakened by the name, and went
back to the days of his youth, when he had gone through the fields at
evening, when the purple beanflower was in bloom.

"