ll her loveliness, melting, as it were, into his embrace,
and see her mouth meet his.

If I had not broken the steel!----

I rose from the stones and cursed them, and departed from the place as
the moon rose.

* * *

He was silent; the moonlight poured down between us white and wide;
there lay a little dead bird on the stones, I remember, a redbreast,
stiff and cold. The people traffic in such things here, in the square of
Agrippa; it had fallen, doubtless, off some market stall.

Poor little robin! All the innocent sweet woodland singing-life of it
was over, over in agony, and not a soul in all the wide earth was the
better for its pain; not even the huckster who had missed making his
copper coin by it. Woe is me; the sorrow of the world is great.

I pointed to it where it lay, poor little soft huddled heap of bright
feathers; there is no sadder sight than a dead bird, for what lovelier
life can there be than a bird's life, free in the sun and the rain, in
the blossom and foliage?

"Make the little cold throat sing at sunrise," I said to him. "When you
can do that, then think to undo what you have done."

"She will forget:--"

"You know she never will forget. There is your crime."

"She will have her art----"

"Will the dead bird sing?"

* * *

Here, if anywhere in the "divine city of the Vatican"--for in truth a
city and divine it is, and well has it been called so--here, if
anywhere, will wake the soul of the artist; here, where the very
pavement bears the story of Odysseus, and each passage-way is a Via
Sacra, and every stone is old with years whose tale is told by hundreds
or by thousands, and the wounded Adonis can be adored beside the tempted
Christ of Sistine, and the serious beauty of the Erythean Sibyl lives
beside the laughing grace of ivy-crowned Thalia, and the Jupiter
Maximus frowns on the mortals made of earth's dust, and the Jehovah who
has called forth woman meets the first smile of Eve. A Divine City
indeed, holding in its innumerable chambers and its courts of granite
and of porphyry all that man has ever dreamed of, in his hope and in his
terror, of the Unknown God.

* * *

The days of joyous, foolish mumming came--the carnival mumming that as a
boy I had loved so well, and that, ever since I had come and stitched
under my Apollo and Crispin, I had never been loth to meddle and mix in,
going mad with my lit taper, like the r