experience, and rarely,—how rarely! involving as principal elements in their course the larger modes of passion. Such, therefore, must not be sought here. Nor again, with similar scant exceptions, is the fugitive drama of conversations, so vivid perhaps and delightful, that they seemed almost to eternalize the passing hour, even during the next -far less when years have gone by-recoverable. Like the fair vision in the heavens Wordsworth has somewhere recorded, these moments were rapture as they went: but we felt the while We should forget them: they were of the 'sky, And from our earthly memory fade away'. If we tell them, we recreate what we seem to remember. And yet, 'the place, the day, the sunshine', all things pertaining to those meetings come back at times: I think if I describe one such occasion more, some part, however small, of the favours of the hour may revive in that revocation; some echo from the far off: some fragrancy from the lost Eden, like that which breathed once from Paradise

XXXIII

que

-able to drive

All sadness but despair.

Plus on aime, moins on se fie au sentiment l'on inspire: Peut-être est il dans la nature d'un amour profond et vrai de redouter un moment solennel, quelque désiré qu'il soit, et de ne changer qu'en tremblant l'espérance contre le bonheur même'. These words of a highly gifted woman may serve as an introduction, only too charming, to the narrative of an autumn day, spent at the close of the six-years period before alluded to with Désirée once more, as at the beginning of my college life, in a foreign land. This was to be but a brief uninvited visit, and then return it was delightful to think I should give twenty

days to travelling, that I might gain two with her. Inwardly secure of welcome, through a blinding rainstorm I had crossed the sea: had ascended the great romantic river of the North, passed between the Dragon's Rock and the castle arch of the too faithful Toggenburg, dark against the pale azure of a sky that seemed to have wept out its tears, while an orange sunset burned above the violet hills, and the long water-swathes of our course followed the keel like intertwisting serpents of gold and malachite. Thence by cliffs and vines, cities and towers, another broad stream and banks heavy with forests, to a capital lying far within a quiet valley, where the red rock withdrew its ramparts four miles asunder, and between them lay a plain which seemed snatched from Lombardy, squared with vine-ranks and poplar, and fretted now into furrowed network by battalions of yoked and patient oxen. Without the walls I traversed a long walnut avenue; to the left, the towers and vast roofs of the Cathedral rose above mediaeval battlements; a lofty bank on the right, thick with trees, and vines, and villas, and intersected midway by a line like the Offa Dyke of Wales,— the wide limit of the Roman city. Vineyard and garden ran far within this line; and as in Rome itself, the crumbling arches and vaults of the Baths marked the extreme verge of modern inhabitation. Vestiges such as these, in which we trace an ebb of human life, suggest always thoughts of transitoriness and deathlike repose: but my road was alive with counter-signs-the walnut harvest in full activity. From ladders set halfway in the golden green branches children with long poles were beating the leaves, which filled the air with a myrtle fragrance as they fell, preceded by the drop of heavy fruits, dancing and bursting the green

cover as they touched the roadway, or bedded themselves in silence within a litter of strewn leaves and broken boughfragments. Boys and women in blue skirts, jackets, and pale braided hair, caught and harvested the crop with blackened fingers into rough baskets. Thus about each trunk a picturesque group was formed: they reminded me of the Fairies who in Germany or Ireland danced of old round the mythic almond-tree beneath which the Sungod, slain in his childhood, lay buried, and legend added, to rise again. These peasants were neither gay nor sullen: just employed. As I looked and walked on, I did not feel as generally when one enters a distant city and sees the crowd at work, these are utter strangers. There was a bond of human sympathy they little thought of: the heart-reviving knowledge, Désirée was there within, established already a silent friendship between us.

XXXIV Yet this was an error; all but a younger sister had left the house for a long day's excursion; they would return from Igel fatigued, she said; I had best visit them next morning-the one day left before my fixed and expected return to England. The sky lost its blue, the trees their greenness; there was no longer glory in the grass, or beauty in the vineyards. But I must waste the hours, a few moments before so precious, somewhere. It would be like defeat, I felt, to retraverse the road just passed in expectation of immediate triumph; I crossed the river by a ferry, and on the opposite bank examined the town from a natural belvedere, a ledge of the shaly rock. Then the spirit of Antiquity, the great voices of the Past, rebuking my petty discouragement, carried me out of self by the human interest of that landscape. Though hidden, as I

have said, and seemingly world-sequestered far within the heart of a pastoral valley, yet lofty fragments, ' ruins full ' of Fate' in darkened stone and grey brickwork, scattered here and there over an area of which not one-fourth part was now occupied, showed that in Roman times this city had been the capital of some powerful province; metropolis, in fact, of Gaul in the Napoleonic sense, of Spain, and of Britain-Augusta Trevirorum. Here Germanicus during an hour of trial had sheltered his noble wife; this was the centre of the so-long successful revolt maintained by the barbarian Civilis against Vespasian. Here Ambrose was born, he who shut the church-gates against an Emperor in his pride and here, too, Constantine, Julian, and Theodosius held the orientalized court of the gorgeous Second Empire. There is an emanation of majesty and of glory inseparable from relics of Roman workmanship, or from places associated even by name with the strange fascination of that history. Trèves unites both conditions. The vast arches of the Black Gate seemed built for eternity; they had sustained and survived a hermitage, a sanctuary, and a church, constructed and ruined within them. Like the Alban Mount, like the rock platform of Jerusalem, I thought they appeared almost contemptuously impassive to the cyclical growth, splendour, and decay of human religions. But elsewhere farther on, in the grey cathedral, I could see a living relic of the first temporal triumph of Christianity; the walls of a Caesar's palace, the columns raised by imperial Helena, enshrining the seamless coat which but yesterday rent asunder German Catholicismthat spurious but priceless banner (so myriads thought it) of a Faith-and the later history of this fair region, morę

than most, has testified to the fact—which may reckon her martyrs by thousands, and her victims by tens of thousands. Looking northward, past the Church of the Virgin, ' Go'thic lighter than a fire', I saw the vast ruin, half Roman, half romantic, where the rude orgies of a Prussian soldiery have supplanted the splendid harem of the Prince Bishops and Electors of the ill-named Holy Empire; farther yet, but beyond the contracted circuit of the present city, that amphitheatre where Constantine the new convert twice gratified his faith or his paganism, letting loose lion, bear, and wolf to the carnage of many thousand heathen and barbarian captives. . . . Enough: I pass over the majority; but how rich the web of remembrances spread, to an imaginative spectator, over any one of the greater of our European cities! Not the legend-inwoven robe worn on high festivals by the Patriarch of Rome, not that earlier work of a poet's loom, variegated with all the histories of the heroic age for the marriage of Thetis and Peleus,Ariadna desolate by the seaside, and Prometheus chained to the Scythian precipice, images typical of man's and of woman's destiny-rival the soul-enthralling splendour, the majestic significance of that spectacle; it is, at least in my judgment, the one absolutely unalloyed compensation for existence in the fret and frequent littleness of these later centuries.

XXXV In some noble verses Lord Byron, looking on the ancient mistress of Trèves, expressed the conviction that before such sights the voice of personal sorrow should be silenced. From a man so sincere and so great a sufferer, the judgment is remarkable; it is however but half a truth; there are sorrows beyond the control of the re