cheerful, so "brave,"
all the banal things that are so comfortable to be. My mother knows me
only as "such a tranquil child, but so strong-willed." A tranquil
child!' And she writes again, with deeper significance: 'I too have
learnt the subtle philosophy of living from moment to moment. Yes, it is
a subtle philosophy though it appears merely an epicurean doctrine:
"Eat, drink, and be merry, for to-morrow we die." I have gone through so
many yesterdays when I strove with Death that I have realised to its
full the wisdom of that sentence; and it is to me not merely a figure of
speech, but a literal fact. Any to-morrow I might die. It is scarcely
two months since I came back from the grave: is it worth while to be
anything but radiantly glad? Of all things that life or perhaps my
temperament has given me I prize the gift of laughter as beyond price.'

Her desire, always, was to be 'a wild free thing of the air like the
birds, with a song in my heart.' A spirit of too much fire in too frail
a body, it was rarely that her desire was fully granted. But in Italy
she found what she could not find in England, and from Italy her letters
are radiant. 'This Italy is made of gold,' she writes from Florence,
'the gold of dawn and daylight, the gold of the stars, and, now dancing
in weird enchanting rhythms through this magic month of May, the gold of
fireflies in the perfumed darkness--"aerial gold." I long to catch the
subtle music of their fairy dances and make a poem with a rhythm like
the quick irregular wild flash of their sudden movements. Would it not
be wonderful? One black night I stood in a garden with fireflies in my
hair like darting restless stars caught in a mesh of darkness. It gave
me a strange sensation, as if I were not human at all, but an elfin
spirit. I wonder why these little things move me so deeply? It is
because I have a most "unbalanced intellect," I suppose.' Then, looking
out on Florence, she cries, 'God! how beautiful it is, and how glad I am
that I am alive to-day!' And she tells me that she is drinking in the
beauty like wine, 'wine, golden and scented, and shining, fit for the
gods; and the gods have drunk it, the dead gods of Etruria, two thousand
years ago. Did I say dead? No, for the gods are immortal, and one might
still find them loitering in some solitary dell on the grey hillsides of
Fiesole. Have I seen them? Yes, looking with dreaming eyes, I have found
them sitting under the olives, in their