p de Comines, and to the poets and
dramatists that immediately succeeded them.

These books opened a new world to me; and, having daily access to two
fine public libraries, I plunged at once into a course of new and
delightful reading, ranging over all that fertile tract of song and
history that begins far away in the morning land of mediaeval romance,
and leads on, century after century, to the new era that began with the
Revolution.

With what avidity I devoured those picturesque old chronicles--those
autobiographies--those poems, and satires, and plays that I now read for
the first time! What evenings I spent with St. Simon, and De Thou, and
Charlotte de Baviere! How I relished Voltaire! How I laughed over
Moliere! How I revelled in Montaigne! Most of all, however, I loved the
quaint lore of the earlier literature:--

"Old legends of the monkish page,
Traditions of the saint and sage,
Tales that have the rime of age,
And Chronicles of Eld."

Nor was this all. I had hitherto loved art as a child or a savage might
love it, ignorantly, half-blindly, without any knowledge of its
principles, its purposes, or its history. But Madame de Courcelles put
into my hands certain books that opened my eyes to a thousand wonders
unseen before. The works of Vasari, Nibby, Winkelman and Lessing, the
aesthetic writings of Goethe and the Schlegels, awakened in me, one
after the other, fresher and deeper revelations of beauty.

I wandered through the galleries of the Louvre like one newly gifted
with sight. I haunted the Venus of Milo and the Diane Chasseresse like
another Pygmalion. The more I admired, the more I found to admire. The
more I comprehended, the more I found there remained for me to
comprehend. I recognised in art the Sphinx whose enigma is never solved.
I learned, for the first time, that poetry may be committed to
imperishable marble, and steeped in unfading colors. By degrees, as I
followed in the footsteps of great thinkers, my insight became keener
and my perceptions more refined. The symbolism of art evolved itself, as
it were, from below the surface; and instead of beholding in paintings
and statues mere studies of outward beauty, I came to know them as
exponents of thought--as efforts after ideal truth--as aspirations
which, because of their divineness, can never be wholly expressed; but
whose suggestiveness is more eloquent than all the eloquence of words.

Thus a great change came u