trast, came a farewell such as, in Dante's pathetic phrase, 'leaves the dear one even more endeared'. A fresh storm was gathering over the forest, and whilst on the summit of the pass I awaited the diligence from Pistoia, Désirée drove quickly down. Our parting words had been few: I should have been little happy, and little sad, if I could have 'said how much'. But before the first turn of the roadway had hidden her broad hat and golden hair, from some fancy she stopped the light carriage and looked round. However resolved, who could resist such opportunity? In a moment I stood again beside her; the bond of reserve was broken, and my second farewell was whispered fast in words of tenderness and confession-words unheard amidst the immediate distraction of approaching wheels, and the downrush of a sudden rain. . . . Hastily, as after crime, I ran back to La Collina: another confused and forgotten moment, and I was hurrying down a bare Alpine valley, where a chill mist arched out the sky, and snow glistened on the upper peaks, and the dark torrent Reno was rushing northwards, and away from Désirée. The sound of this youthful noisy companion and monitor was hateful; I heard accents of everlasting farewell in its hoarse under-murmurings. But when, three days later, the road at Malalbergo below desolate Ferrara finally crossed that stream, now slowly straining its waters through the marshes of Comacchio into the Adriatic, I looked on the Reno as a friend, and blessed it for remembrance of its mountain source high over Valdicampo. I saw but one image, and thought but one thought, during the homeward journey. From that visit to Venice the single picture I can recall is a child seated in some palace balcony, its cradle. As my gondola passed, the pure

little hand held out a few green leaves above me; sunbeams touched the blue dress at her shoulder; her delicate features were chequered with warm bars of light, and shadowed by torrents of golden hair that reminded me of Désirée's. At Milan I looked on indeed, but as if in dreams, where, flickering with a thousand pinnacles, the marble wonder of the Duomo went up like a white fire into heaven; but with the real eyes saw only the fresco in which the wedded ecstasy of Joseph, chosen by the miracle of the budding palm-rod for that legendary betrothal, and kneeling before his royal bride, has been represented by Luini with an almost superhuman intensity of passionate abandonment.

XXXIII Many years later, and I am passing what must be, I know, almost the anniversary of the day of La Collina, near a seaside city of Neustrian France. Grey in its depths, pale rose and emerald in its shallows, the sea ripples at my feet with a low sweet murmur, a lisp as when children come close and whisper their secrets. Yielding to the pleasure of an ancient superstition, I count the waves, and fancy the tenth rolls in with a whiter mass, a subdued undertone of power. If there were any spiritual voice from the deep, I should hear it now: for there is no human sound but the measured beat of pile-drivers at the harbour; no human sight to break the spell but a few idle fisher-boats, their brown sails spread indeed, but motionless. The heavy sun, sinking like Adonis into a bed of dense violet, sends a few ruddy rays to the shore; but reserving for his own regions his more especial glory, overweaves the pale heavens above with a golden network, a wide web of living flashes, through which the last arrows of his radiance strike upward into the azure grey of the

zenith skies. Looking round leftwards I see the castle, a crowd of walls and pointed turrets and ancient houses on the rampart's edge, massed in Dürer-like picturesqueness: beyond, white crags, stained with oozings of the red turftopped soil, crumble down over the beach in fragments angular and abrupt, and contrasted with the long horizontal lines of repose which score the chalky bastions. These stretch far west in warm grey, and again my eyes are led back to the darkening sea and that great spectacle of sunset. But the deep pleasure of this vision, a pleasure deeper and purer than in first youth any sight could give, appears arrested now before it reaches me; barred by some mysterious power from alleviating Regret, or from enforcing. One bitter lesson of grief has been to learn the limits of Nature; to know how much she does for her children, and how little: to see the rainbow without hope, and the dawning without exultation: to find no sympathy in the glories of the sunset, and no friendliness in the silences of the night.' I can look no longer to the hills for help, or to the skies for pity. With the one prayer left, I call on Désirée only, only-for a little respite at least for some syllable of mercy, some hint of Heaven, some holy whisper of awakening affection, and love returned. Without any memorial in earth or sky, no purplecleft cloud as that seen by Wordsworth's Matthew, this day brings fresh into my mind the day of so long-lost blessedness at La Collina. I see the rocks, and winding descent, and she who stops, and the eyes that recalled me. I summon her soul within mine with such earnestness of purpose that I think the prayer is heard at last, that, heralded by the breezes pouring now in steady flood landwards, some full-sailed happiness is pressing up beyond the

motionless and torturing horizon. Faith triumphs, the skies brighten, the sun goes higher, salvation is nearing, the Desire cometh. . . . But the wind wailed, and the waves thundered, and the sun sank, and the heaven was darkened above me.

THE PASSIONATE PILGRIM.

BOOK II.

I Residence at one of the British Universities (let me say Oxford) immediately followed the journey which, in a single main element, had raised my thoughts to a level worthier manhood. By the pages preceding, the writer has given proof that he does not hold a child's love in itself merely childish, far less deserving of the ridicule it meets often from critics whose own true capacity for passion, a gift not universal, may be justly doubted. The derision of a whole insulting world, to me at least, would be silenced before remembrance of the lifelong fascination and empire exerted by this phase of feeling (not to seek more distant and romantic examples) over some of Europe's manliest men; of the transports of Dante, of the agonies of Byron. Those who laugh here will be shallow in their best seriousness, and with such I hold no argument. Yet there is a truth in such contempt; this love must lie within the limitations of the immature mind-must partake in what Wordsworth would almost authorize me to call childhood's more perfect, while evanescent, imperfection. There is ignorance in its purity, in its

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