ll so simple and so foolish there; the war-horses of Taddeo that
bear their lords to eternity as to a joust of arms; the heretic dogs of
Memmi, with their tight wooden collars; the beauteous Fiammetta and her
lover, thronging amongst the saints; the little house, where the Holy
Ghost is sitting, with the purified saints listening at the door, with
strings tied to their heads to lift them into paradise; it is all so
quaint, so childlike, so pathetic, so grotesque,--like a set of wooden
figures from its Noah's Ark that a dying child has set out on its little
bed, and that are so stiff and ludicrous, and yet which no one well can
look at and be unmoved, by reason of the little cold hand that has found
beauty in them.

As the dying child to the wooden figures, so the dead faith gives to the
old frescoes here something that lies too deep for tears; we smile, and
yet all the while we say;--if only we could believe like this; if only
for us the dead could be but sleeping!

* * *

It was past midnight, and the moon had vanished behind her mountain,
withdrawing her little delicate curled golden horn, as if to blow with
it the trumpet-call of morning.

* * *

Such pretty, neat, ready lying as this would stand him in better stead
than all the high spirit in the world; which, after all, only serves to
get a man into hot water in this life and eternal fire in the next.

* * *

In the country of Virgil, life remains pastoral still. The field
labourer of northern countries may be but a hapless hind, hedging and
ditching dolefully, or at best serving a steam-beast with oil and fire;
but in the land of the Georgics there is the poetry of agriculture
still.

Materially it may be an evil and a loss--political economists will say
so; but spiritually it is a gain. A certain peace and light lie on the
people at their toil. The reaper with his hook, the plougher with his
oxen, the girl who gleans amongst the trailing vines, the child that
sees the flowers tossing with the corn, the men that sing to get a
blessing on the grapes--they have all a certain grace and dignity of the
old classic ways left with them. They till the earth still with the
simplicity of old, looking straight to the gods for recompense. Great
Apollo might still come down amidst them and play to them in their
threshing-barns, and guide his milk-white beasts over their
furrows,--and there would be nothing in t