dwells--_that_ is a player, too!"

* * *

The instrument on which we histrions play is that strange thing, the
human heart. It looks a little matter to strike its chords of laughter
or of sorrow; but, indeed, to do that aright and rouse a melody which
shall leave all who hear it the better and the braver for the hearing,
that may well take a man's lifetime, and, perhaps, may well repay it.

* * *

Oh, cara mia, when one has run about in one's time with a tinker's
tools, and seen the lives of the poor, and the woe of them, and the
wretchedness of it all, and the utter uselessness of everything, and
the horrible, intolerable, unending pain of all the things that breathe,
one comes to think that in this meaningless mystery which men call life
a little laughter and a little love are the only things which save us
all from madness--the madness that would curse God and die.

* * *

It always seems as if that well-spring of poetry and art which arose in
Italy, to feed and fertilise the world when it was half dead and wholly
barren under the tyrannies of the Church and the lusts of Feudalism; it
would always seem, I say, as though that water of life had so saturated
the Italian soil, that the lowliest hut upon its hills and plains will
ever nourish and put forth some flower of fancy.

The people cannot read, but they can rhyme. They cannot reason, but they
can keep perfect rhythm. They cannot write their own names, but written
on their hearts are the names of those who made their country's
greatness. They believe in the virtues of a red rag tied to a stick
amidst their fields, but they treasure tenderly the heroes and the
prophets of an unforgotten time. They are ignorant of all laws of
science or of sound, but when they go home by moonlight through the
maize yonder alight with lucciole, they will never falsify a note, or
overload a harmony, in their love-songs.

The poetry, the art, in them is sheer instinct; it is not the genius of
isolated accident, but the genius of inalienable heritage.

* * *

Do you ever think of those artist-monks who have strewed Italy with
altar-pieces and missal miniatures till there is not any little lonely
dusky town of hers that is not rich by art? Do you often think of them?
I do.

There must have been a beauty in their lives--a great beauty--though
they missed of much, of more than they ever knew or dreamed o