hurt me as it smote my nostrils.

For a great darkness seemed always between me and the sun, and I
wondered that the birds could sing, and the children run amongst the
blossoms--the world being so vile.

* * *

Women hope that the dead love may revive; but men know that of all dead
things none are so past recall as a dead passion.

The courtesan may scourge it with a whip of nettles back into life; but
the innocent woman may wet it for ever with her tears, she will find no
resurrection.

* * *

Art is an angel of God, but when Love has entered the soul, the angel
unfolds its plumes and takes flight, and the wind of its wings withers
as it passes. He whom it has left misses the angel at his ear, but he is
alone for ever. Sometimes it will seem to him then that it had been no
angel ever, but a fiend that lied, making him waste his years in a
barren toil, and his nights in a joyless passion; for there are two
things beside which all Art is but a mockery and a curse: they are a
child that is dying and a love that is lost.

* * *

Love art alone, forsaking all other loves, and she will make you happy,
with a happiness that shall defy the seasons and the sorrows of time,
the pains of the vulgar and the changes of fortune, and be with you day
and night, a light that is never dim. But mingle with it any human
love--and art will look for ever at you with the eyes of Christ when he
looked at the faithless follower as the cock crew.

* * *

The little garden of the Rospigliosi seems to have all mediaeval Rome
shut in it, as you go up the winding stairs with all their lichens and
water-plants and broken marbles, into the garden itself, with its smooth
emerald turf and spreading magnolias, and broad fish-ponds, and orange
and citron trees, and the frescoed building at the end where Guido's
Aurora floats in unchanging youth, and the buoyant Hours run before the
sun.

Myself I own I care not very much for that Aurora; she is no incarnation
of the morning, and though she floats wonderfully and does truly seem to
move, yet is she in nowise ethereal nor suggestive of the dawn either of
day or life. When he painted her, he must have been in love with some
lusty taverner's buxom wife busked in her holiday attire.

But whatever one may think of the famed Aurora, of the loveliness of her
quiet garden home, safe in the shelter of the stately palace wall