he curls of Nisias. A great love does not of
necessity imply a great intelligence, but it must spring out of a great
nature, that is certain; and where the heart has spent itself in much
base petty commerce, it has no deep treasury of gold on which to draw;
it is bankrupt from its very over-trading. A noble passion is very rare;
believe me; as rare as any other very noble thing."

* * *

"Do you call him a poet because he has the trick of a sonorous cadence
and of words that fall with the measure of music, so that youths and
maidens recite them for the vain charm of their mere empty sound? It is
a lie--it is a blasphemy. A poet! A poet suffers for the meanest thing
that lives; the feeblest creature dead in the dust is pain to him; his
joy and his sorrow alike outweigh tenfold the joys and the sorrows of
men; he looks on the world as Christ looked on Jerusalem, and weeps; he
loves, and all heaven and all hell are in his love; he is faithful unto
death, because fidelity alone can give to love the grandeur and the
promise of eternity; he is like the martyrs of the church who lay upon
the wheel with their limbs racked, yet held the roses of Paradise in
their hands and heard the angels in the air. That is a poet; that is
what Dante was, and Shelley and Milton and Petrarca. But this man? this
singer of the senses, whose sole lament is that the appetites of the
body are too soon exhausted; this languid and curious analysist who
rends the soul aside with merciless cruelty, and puts away the quivering
nerves with cold indifference, once he has seen their secrets?--this a
poet? Then so was Nero harping! Accursed be the book and all the
polished vileness that his verses ever palmed off on men by their mere
tricks of sound. This a poet! As soon are the swine that rout the
garbage, the lions of the Apocalypse by the throne of God!"

* * *

The glad water sparkles and ripples everywhere; above the broad porphyry
basins butterflies of every colour flutter, and swallows fly; lovers and
children swing balls of flowers, made as only our Romans know how to
make them; the wide lawns under the deep-shadowed avenues are full of
blossoms; the air is full of fragrance; the palms rise against a
cloudless sky; the nights are lustrous; in the cool of the great
galleries the statues seem to smile: so spring had been to me always;
but now the season was without joy, and the scent of the flowers on the
wind