grave, strong, antique
beauty--Etruscan gods!'

In Italy she watches the faces of the monks, and at one moment longs to
attain to their peace by renunciation, longs for Nirvana; 'then, when
one comes out again into the hot sunshine that warms one's blood, and
sees the eager hurrying faces of men and women in the street, dramatic
faces over which the disturbing experiences of life have passed and
left their symbols, one's heart thrills up into one's throat. No, no,
no, a thousand times no! how can one deliberately renounce this
coloured, unquiet, fiery human life of the earth?' And, all the time,
her subtle criticism is alert, and this woman of the East marvels at the
women of the West, 'the beautiful worldly women of the West,' whom she
sees walking in the Cascine, 'taking the air so consciously attractive
in their brilliant toilettes, in the brilliant coquetry of their
manner!' She finds them 'a little incomprehensible,' 'profound artists
in all the subtle intricacies of fascination,' and asks if these
'incalculable frivolities and vanities and coquetries and caprices' are,
to us, an essential part of their charm? And she watches them with
amusement as they flutter about her, petting her as if she were a nice
child, a child or a toy, not dreaming that she is saying to herself
sorrowfully: 'How utterly empty their lives must be of all spiritual
beauty _if_ they are nothing more than they appear to be.'

She sat in our midst, and judged us, and few knew what was passing
behind that face 'like an awakening soul,' to use one of her own
epithets. Her eyes were like deep pools, and you seemed to fall through
them into depths below depths.

1905.

WELSH POETRY

There is certainly a reason for at least suggesting to those who concern
themselves, for good or evil, with Celtic literature, what Celtic
literature really is when it is finest; what a 'reaction against the
despotism of fact' really means; what 'natural magic' really means, and
why the phrase 'Celtic glamour' is perhaps the most unfortunate that
could well have been chosen to express the character of a literature
which is above all things precise, concrete, definite.

Lamartine, in the preface to the _Meditations_, describes the
characteristics of Ossian, very justly, as _le vague, la reverie,
l'aneantissement dans la contemplation, le regard fixe sur des
apparitions confuses dans le lointain_; and it is those very qualities,
still looked upon by so m