The sweetest of the sweetest lives,
Soft flowers and little children's lips;

Yet rather learnt its heavenly smile
From sorrow, God's divinest art,
Sorrow that breaks and breaks the heart,
Yet makes a music all the while.

Ah! what is that within your eyes,
Upon your lips, within your hair,
The sacred art that makes you fair,
The wisdom that hath made you wise?

Tell me your secret, Sphinx,--for mine!--
The mystic word that from afar
God spake and made you rose and star,
The _fiat lux_ that bade you shine.

While Antony read, Beatrice's face grew sadder and sadder. When he had
finished she said:--

"It is very beautiful, Antony--but it is not written for me."

"What can you mean, Beatrice? Who else can it be written for?"

"To the Image of me that you have set up in my place."

"Beatrice, are you going mad?"

"It is quite true, all the same. Time will show. Perhaps you don't know
it yourself as yet, but you will before long."

"But, Beatrice, the poem shows its own origin. Has your image blue eyes,
or curiously coiled hair--"

"Oh, yes, of course, you thought of me. You filled in from me. But the
inspiration, the wish to write it, came from the image--"

"It is certainly true that I love to look at it, as I love to look at a
picture of you--because it is you--"

"As yet, no doubt, but you will soon love it for its own sake. You are
already beginning."

"I love an image! You are too ridiculous, Beatrice."

"Does it really seem so strange, dear? I sometimes think you have never
loved anything else."

Antony had laughed down Beatrice's fancies, yet all the time she had
been talking he was conscious that the idea she had suggested was
appealing to him with a perverse fascination.

To love, not the literal beloved, but the purified stainless image of
her,--surely this would be to ascend into the region of spiritual love,
a love unhampered and untainted by the earth.

As he said this to himself, his mind, ever pitilessly self-conscious,
knew it was but a subterfuge, a fine euphemism for a strange desire
which he had known was already growing within him; for when Beatrice had
spoken of his loving an image, it was no abstract passion he had
conceived, but some fanciful variation of earthly love--a love of
beauty centring itself upon some form midway between life and death,
inanimate and yet alive, human and yet removed from the accidents of
humanity.

To lo