est, and my whistle of the
Befana, and all the salt and sport of a war of wits such as old Rome has
always heard in midwinter since the seven nights of the Saturnalia.

Dear Lord! to think that twice a thousand years ago and more, along
these banks of Tiber, and down in the Velabrum and up the Sacred Way,
men and women and children were leaping, and dancing, and shouting, and
electing their festal king, and exchanging their new-year gifts of wax
candles and little clay figures: and that now-a-days we are doing just
the same thing in the same season, in the same places, only with all the
real faunic joyfulness gone out of it with the old slain Saturn, and a
great deal of empty and luxurious show come in instead! It makes one
sad, mankind looks such a fool.

Better be Heine's fool on the seashore, who asks the winds their
"wherefore" and their "whence." You remember Heine's poem--that one in
the "North Sea" series, that speaks of the man by the shore, and asks
what is Man, and what shall become of him, and who lives on high in the
stars? and tells how the waves keep on murmuring and the winds rising,
the clouds scudding before the breeze, and the planets shining so cold
and so far, and how on the shore a fool waits for an answer, and waits
in vain. It is a terrible poem, and terrible because it is true.

Every one of us stands on the brink of the endless sea that is Time and
is Death; and all the blind, beautiful, mute, majestic forces of
creation move around us and yet tell us nothing.

It is wonderful that, with this awful mystery always about us, we can go
on on our little lives as cheerfully as we do; that on the edge of that
mystical shore we yet can think so much about the crab in the
lobster-pot, the eel in the sand, the sail in the distance, the child's
face at home.

Well, no doubt it is heaven's mercy that we can do so; it saves from
madness such thinking souls as are amongst us.

* * *

"My dear, of love there is very little in the world. There are many
things that take its likeness: fierce unstable passions and poor
egotisms of all sorts, vanities too, and many other follies--Apate and
Philotes in a thousand masquerading characters that gain great Love
discredit. The loves of men, and women too, my dear, are hardly better
very often than Minos' love for Skylla; you remember how he threw her
down from the stern of his vessel when he had made the use of her he
wished, and she had cut t