ried the grass to the cow, and the obscure martyrdom of
maternity and widowhood that the old woman had gone through who sat
spinning on the top of the stairs, he would have found that his little
borgo that he hated so for its dulness had all the comedies and
tragedies of life lying under the sound of its tolling bells. He would
not have been less sorrowful, for the greater the soul the sadder it is
for the unutterable waste, the unending pain of life. But he would never
have been dull: he would never have despised, and despising missed, the
stories and the poems that were round him in the millet fields and the
olive orchards. There is only one lamp which we can carry in our hand,
and which will burn through the darkest night, and make the light of a
home for us in a desert place: it is sympathy with everything that
breathes.

* * *

Into other lands I wandered, then, and sought full half the world. When
one wants but little, and has a useful tongue, and knows how to be merry
with the young folk, and sorrowful with the old, and can take the fair
weather with the foul, and wear one's philosophy like an easy boot,
treading with it on no man's toe, and no dog's tail; why, if one be of
this sort, I say, one is, in a great manner, independent of fortune; and
the very little that one needs one can usually obtain. Many years I
strayed about, seeing many cities and many minds, like Odysseus; being
no saint, but, at the same time, being no thief and no liar.

* * *

Art was dear to me. Wandering through many lands, I had come to know the
charm of quiet cloisters; the delight of a strange, rare volume; the
interest of a quaint bit of pottery; the unutterable loveliness of some
perfect painter's vision, making a glory in some dusky, world-forgotten
church: and so my life was full of gladness here in Rome, where the
ass's hoof ringing on a stone may show you that Vitruvius was right,
where you had doubted him; or the sun shining down upon a cabbage
garden, or a coppersmith's shreds of metal, may gleam on a signet ring
of the Flavian women, or a broken vase that may have served vile Tullia
for drink.

* * *

Art is, after nature, the only consolation that one has at all for
living.

* * *

I have been all my life blown on by all sorts of weather, and I know
there is nothing so good as the sun and the wind for driving ill-nature
and selfishness out