ve no better subject for his
admiration than the pathos of the time. It is bred now of your mud by
the operation of your sun. 'Tis a strange serpent; and the tears of it
are wet.

ANIMA PELLEGRINA!

Every language in the world has its own phrase, fresh for the stranger's
fresh and alien sense of its signal significance; a phrase that is its
own essential possession, and yet is dearer to the speaker of other
tongues. Easily--shall I say cheaply?--spiritual, for example, was the
nation that devised the name _anima pellegrina_, wherewith to crown a
creature admired. "Pilgrim soul" is a phrase for any language, but
"pilgrim soul!" addressed, singly and sweetly to one who cannot be over-
praised, "pilgrim-soul!" is a phrase of fondness, the high homage of a
lover, of one watching, of one who has no more need of common flatteries,
but has admired and gazed while the object of his praises visibly
surpassed them--this is the facile Italian ecstasy, and it rises into an
Italian heaven.

It was by chance, and in an old play, that I came upon this impetuous,
sudden, and single sentence of admiration, as it were a sentence of life
passed upon one charged with inestimable deeds; and the modern editor had
thought it necessary to explain the exclamation by a note. It was, he
said, poetical.

_Anima pellegrina_ seems to be Italian of no later date than
Pergolese's airs, and suits the time as the familiar phrase of the more
modern love-song suited the day of Bellini. But it is only Italian,
bygone Italian, and not a part of the sweet past of any other European
nation, but only of this.

To the same local boundaries and enclosed skies belongs the charm of
those buoyant words:-

Felice chi vi mira,
Ma piu felice chi per voi sospira!

And it is not only a charm of elastic sound or of grace; that would be
but a property of the turn of speech. It is rather the profounder
advantage whereby the rhymes are freighted with such feeling as the very
language keeps in store. In another tongue you may sing, "happy who
looks, happier who sighs"; but in what other tongue shall the little
meaning be so sufficient, and in what other shall you get from so weak an
antithesis the illusion of a lovely intellectual epigram? Yet it is not
worthy of an English reader to call it an illusion; he should rather be
glad to travel into the place of a language where the phrase _is_
intellectual, impassioned, and an epigram; and should