own thus content. He foreshadowed its despair. He
stood for latter-day Israel, the race that always ran to extremes,
which, having been first in faith, was also first in scepticism,
keenest to pierce to the empty heart of things; like an orphan wind,
homeless, wailing about the lost places of the universe. To know all
to be illusion, cheat--itself the most cheated of races; lured on to a
career of sacrifice and contempt. If he could only keep the hope that
had hallowed its sufferings. But now it was a viper--not a divine
hope--it had nourished in its bosom. He felt so lonely; a great
stretch of blackness, a barren mere, a gaunt cliff on a frozen sea, a
pine on a mountain. To be done with it all--the sighs and the sobs and
the tears, the heart-sinking, the dull dragging days of wretchedness
and the nights of pain. How often he had turned his face to the wall,
willing to die.

Perhaps it was this dead city of stones and the sea that wrought so on
his spirit. Tourgenieff was right; only the young should come here,
not those who had seen with Virgil the tears of things. And then he
recalled the lines of Catullus--the sad, stately plaint of the classic
world, like the suppressed sob of a strong man:

"Soles occidere et redire possunt,
Nobis cum semel occidit brevis lux,
Nox est perpetuo una dormienda."

And then he thought again of Virgil, and called up a Tuscan landscape
that expressed him, and lines of cypresses that moved on majestic like
hexameters. He saw the terrace of an ancient palace, and the grotesque
animals carven on the balustrade; the green flicker of lizards on the
drowsy garden-wall; the old-world sun-dial and the grotto and the
marble fountain, and the cool green gloom of the cypress-grove with
its delicious dapple of shadows. An invisible blackbird fluted
overhead. He walked along the great walk under the stone eyes of
sculptured gods, and looked out upon the hot landscape taking its
siesta under the ardent blue sky--the green sunlit hills, the white
nestling villas, the gray olive-trees. Who had paced these cloistral
terraces? Mediaeval princesses, passionate and scornful, treading
delicately, with trailing silks and faint perfumes. He would make a
poem of it. Oh, the loveliness of life! What was it a local singer
had carolled in that dear soft Venetian dialect?

"Belissimo xe el mondo
perche l' e molto vario.
ne omo ghe xe profondo
che dir possa el contrario."

Yes, th