of waving summer grass beneath our feet.

It is now late afternoon, and when evening comes the train will take us
back to Milan. There is yet a little while to rest tired eyes and
strained spirits among the willows and the poplars by the monastery
wall. Through that gray-green leafage, young with early spring, the
pinnacles of the Certosa leap like flames into the sky. The rice-fields
are under water, far and wide, shining like burnished gold beneath the
level light now near to sun-down. Frogs are croaking; those persistent
frogs whom the muses have ordained to sing for aye, in spite of Bion and
all tuneful poets dead. We sit and watch the water-snakes, the busy
rats, the hundred creatures swarming in the fat, well-watered soil.
Nightingales here and there, new-comers, tune their timid April song.
But, strangest of all sounds in such a place, my comrade from the
Grisons jodels forth an Alpine cowherd's melody--_Auf den Alpen droben
ist ein herrliches Leben!_

Did the echoes of Gian Galeazzo's convent ever wake to such a tune as
this before?

SAN MAURIZIO.

The student of art in Italy, after mastering the characters of different
styles and epochs, finds a final satisfaction in the contemplation of
buildings designed and decorated by one master, or by groups of artists
interpreting the spirit of a single period. Such supreme monuments of
the national genius are not very common, and they are therefore the more
precious. Giotto's chapel at Padua; the Villa Farnesina at Rome, built
by Peruzzi and painted in fresco by Raphael and Sodoma; the Palazzo del
Te at Mantua, Giulio Romano's masterpiece; the Scuola di San Rocco,
illustrating the Venetian Renaissance at its climax, might be cited
among the most splendid of these achievements. In the church of the
Monastero Maggiore at Milan, dedicated to San Maurizio, Lombard
architecture and fresco-painting may be studied in this rare
combination. The monastery itself, one of the oldest in Milan, formed a
retreat for cloistered virgins following the rule of St. Benedict. It
may have been founded as early as the tenth century; but its church was
rebuilt in the first two decades of the sixteenth, between 1503 and
1519, and was immediately afterwards decorated with frescos by Luini and
his pupils. Gian Giacomo Dolcebono, architect and sculptor, called by
his fellow-craftsmen _magistro di taliare pietre_, gave the design, at
once simple and harmonious, which was carried out with ha