nd by fettered
and mute, and cry out to heaven that in this conflict the angels
themselves should descend to wrestle for us, and yet know that all the
while the very stars in their courses shall sooner stand still than this
reign of sin be ended:--this is the greatest woe that the world holds.

Beaten, we shake in vain the adamant gates of a brazen iniquity; we may
bruise our breasts there till we die; there is no entrance possible. For
that which is vile is stronger than all love, all faith, all pure
desire, all passionate pain; that which is vile has all the forces that
men have called the powers of hell.

* * *

To him the world was like the dark fathomless waste of waters shelving
away to nameless shapeless perils such as the old Greek mariners drew
upon their charts as compassing the shores they knew.

He had no light of knowledge by which to pursue in hope or fancy the
younger life that would be launched into the untried realms. To him such
separation was as death.

He could not write; he could not even read what was written. He could
only trust to others that all was well with the boy.

He could have none of that mental solace which supports the scholar;
none of that sense of natural loveliness which consoles the poet; his
mind could not travel beyond the narrow circlet of its own pain; his
eyes could not see beauty everywhere from the green fly at his foot to
the sapphire mountains above his head; he only noticed the sunset to
tell the weather; he only looked across the plain to see if the
rain-fall would cross the river. When the autumn crocus sank under his
share, to him it was only a weed best withered; in hell he believed, and
for heaven he hoped, but only dully, as things certain that the priests
knew; but all consolations of the mind or the fancy were denied to him.
Superstitions, indeed, he had, but these were all;--sad-coloured fungi
in the stead of flowers.

The Italian has not strong imagination.

His grace is an instinct; his love is a frenzy; his gaiety is rather joy
than jest; his melancholy is from temperament, not meditation; nature is
little to him; and his religion and his passions alike must have
physical indulgence and perpetual nearness, or they are nothing.

He lived in almost absolute solitude. Sometimes it grew dreary, and the
weeks seemed long.

Two years went by--slowly.

Signa did not come home. The travel to and fro took too much money, and
he was engro