is all that is best in you, the very gift of God; and then to know
that all this may be lost eternally, killed, stifled, buried, just for
want of men's faith and a little gold! I do not think there can be any
loss like it, nor any suffering like it, anywhere else in the world. Oh,
if only it would do any good, I would fling my body into the grave
to-morrow, happy, quite happy; if only afterwards, they would sing my
songs, all over the earth, and just say, "God spoke to him; and he has
told men what He said."

* * *

No one can make much music with the mandoline, but there is no other
music, perhaps, which sounds so fittingly to time and place, as do its
simple sonorous tender chords when heard through the thickets of
rose-laurel or the festoons of the vines, vibrating on the stillness of
the night under the Tuscan moon. It would suit the serenade of Romeo;
Desdemona should sing the willow song to it, and not to the harp; Paolo
pleaded by it, be sure, many a time to Francesca; and Stradella sang to
it the passion whose end was death; it is of all music the most Italian,
and it fills the pauses of the love-songs softly, like a sigh or like a
kiss.

Its very charm is, that it says so little. Love wants so little said.

And the mandoline, though so mournful and full of languor as Love is,
yet can be gay with that caressing joy born of beautiful nothings, which
makes the laughter of lovers the lightest-hearted laughter that ever
gives silver wings to time.

* * *

It was a quaint, vivid, pretty procession, full of grace and of
movement--classic and homely, pagan and mediaeval, both at once--bright
in hue, rustic in garb, poetic in feeling.

Teniers might have painted the brown girls and boys leaping and singing
on the turf, with their brandishing boughs, their flaring torches, their
bare feet, their tossing arms; but Leonardo or Guercino would have been
wanted for the face of the young singer whom they carried, with the
crown of the leaves and of the roses on his drooped head, like the
lotus flowers on the young Antinous.

Piero di Cosimo, perhaps, in one of his greatest moments of brilliant
caprice, might best have painted the whole, with the background of the
dusky hillside; and he would have set it round with strange arabesques
in gold, and illumined amongst them in emblem the pipe of the shepherd,
and the harp of the muse, and the river-rush that the gods would cut
down an