strain for happiness at the vision of that golden-haired child,

-Gli atti, le parole, il viso, i panni—

at the fond thought of her sash, and frock, and bonnet, her frank eyes and confiding words, and nobleness of nature, and high holy simplicity, and how I loved her.

XXV These experiences, however (which, although with hesitation, I think it more courageous not to suppress), belong in the main to the years immediately succeeding boyish life. Returning finally to that period of the pilgrimage, why have I omitted here any reference to actual journeys taken, to the marvels of Art and of Nature? Blind to much, was I blind then to such beauty? did I suffer for scorn of Wordsworth by wandering over mountains without awe, or through forests without pleasure? Not so; but the narrow and perverse judgment already noticed when I spoke of youthful studies, a quality that exists throughout the character where it exists at all, barred me from the humility of heart and self-surrender, without which, however far and delightedly we travel, we are still in the outskirts of Nature,-not endenizened at least within her kingdom, or initiated into the true and eternal Eleusis. So far as such boyish reference of all things to self was conscious, I call it perverse and narrow; yet, looking back now to the studies and experiences of early youth, I see that this mode of judgment arose in part from the first activity of the mind, from the concentrated individuality which to any child, and a thoughtful child especially, is the inevitable starting-point of thought. Wordsworth alluded perhaps to a purer, a more imaginative form of this feeling, in the

Obstinate questionings

Of sense and outward things,

D

ascribed to the spiritual eye of boyhood. And from not only mountains and the sea, stars and sunris every tree of the wayside or forest, every single rock or let, weed or pebble, even the furniture of a room, book curtains, had a real existence to me: a mysterious li flected from my own; a personal identity. I seemed in them, or they in me . . . I cannot explain these t further; and you, who smile at them? . . . .

But this phase of soul, however we judge of i suredly is accompanied by certain narrowing and unrea dencies, withdrawing the mind from the true study and prehension of Art and Nature. Thus I now saw the of men, but without seeking more than the pleasure o eye: the woods, hills, and rivers of Ireland, France. Italy, but with exultation rather than reverencereveller, not as a disciple. The Being that is in 'clouds and air' was hidden from me; the stars of South veiled their secrets; the Mediterranean drew t into golden arabesques on its moving surface, but I no lesson in the deep. Rather, by a new and far diffe spiritualising process of the mind, in the plenitude of sion, myself I seemed powerful to endow Nature with other being; to animate her with a diviner image. the arbutus-feathered rocks which are doubled in Killar upon the dark summit of Alpine passes, in the spectral solation of the Forum Romanum, by the waves that b between olive and myrtle at Spezzia, or glassed the c son breath of Vesuvius beneath Pausilippo on the M gellina-everywhere I walked and shouted Désirée ! the solitude as a spell and invocation. I stood still wait till rocks, and waves, and winds, star and sun, or t Presence we feel hidden behind the veil of the when most dazzling, should answer, Désirée. . . . Fol

d from this, sunrise, but

ock or rivu, books and ious life reemed to be hese things

= of it, asunreal tenand com- the cities ure of the ance, and

ce as a is in the

rs of the rew them

t I read different

e of paswith an

On

gre. illarney, tral det broke

e crime Mar

e! over vaiting r that

e sky Follies

for which the experience of the wise is an unequal ransom ! What mattered it if Nature were silent? The sea might have its pearls, the heaven its stars, but my heart had Darling.

Among the works of men (the ruins of Rome can hardly be so classed) the same spirit haunted me. In the cities she had seen, it was strange and sweet to look on the careless inhabitants and think that they-this portly shopkeeper sitting at his house-door, or that gay-skirted servant-girl by the fountain-had perhaps admired the fair English maiden passing by so blithely. Désirée thus touched common things into beauty, and as I visited each great memorial scene she was the remembrance. In places wanting this dear association the cathedral lost its grace, or the ruin its grandeur; and what was their Past, I thought in my folly, however glorious, compared with my Present? The Past itself did homage to Désirée: Raphael had drawn her for me in the chambers of the Vatican, and Luini in the frescoes of La Pace.

And when at Florence, on the last pilgrimage falling within this portion of my story, I walked in fancy with the youthful Dante through the narrow Via Ricciarda to what is now named Casa Portinari, it seemed not Beatrice but Désirée we were seeking... I lingered behind my guide a few steps; I whispered her name; I called on Heaven with such fervency for her presence that, in the firmness of that too youthful and confiding faith which should remove the mountains, I looked round expectant to see questa gentilissima then, as last in London, walking the streets of Florence:

Ella sen va sentendosi laudare

Benignamente d' umiltà vestuta,
E par che sia una cosa venuta
Di cielo in terra a miracol mostrare.

XXVI I quote these lines, some will recognize, fro precious pages in which the youthful Dante has rec the circumstances of that earthly passion he was in years to immortalize with a splendour which seems tru light of Heaven. There is a timid grace in the pictu that little book, a mannered naturalism of sentimen expression (if I may venture the phrase), which rer me now of Perugino's saints, or the rose-garlanded phim who glorified the cell of the visionary Angelico. in those days I regarded it with the uncritical reve due to inspiration. Between the noble poet and mys traced a parallel in the circumstances of passion, v did not then appear presumptuous every song in the terious Canzoniere' seemed oracular with a double s though not that of the commentators: the Vita Nu was a Gospel of Love. What I admired so, I needs imitate; and finding, as was natural, mine far unlike 'style which so honoured' Dante, I endeavoured to con its baldness beneath Latin. Briefly and feebly as I ac plished the task, it could not but lead me, as I read model, to remembrance of the issue of that sad story;even he saw his Desired another's, and yet no word rec that deprivation-a silence, I have since often thought, pathetic! but passes on to the dream when the sun 'darkened, and the stars shone pale with weeping, and 'birds fell dead from heaven, and earth was shaken, a messenger ran in with discoloured face, crying, 66 W "doest thou? Thy darling, who was so fair, is dead!" and Dante awoke and found it not a dream. Then, the happy marriage, the strife and weariness, the forlorn w dering with its dreadful retinue of misunderstood thoug and forced smiles, the ever-haunting image of lost l the deep, deep desideration-Something of all this I

ze, from the as recorded

as in after as truly the pictures of iment and

eh reminds

ded Seraelico. But

reverence

myself I on, which

the mysole sense, Nuova'

eds must ike 'that o conceal

I accom

read my

;-that

records ght, how

sun was

and the

en, and

What

d!"'

he un

n wan

oughts t love,

I felt,

by the circumstances of my own imitative attempt, by the
force of my sympathy, as I read 'Commedia' and 'Vita
'Nuova', for this great sufferer. And although the pages of
my own immature confession contain little more than
childish facts and childish fancies, yet by the presence of a
few words, efforts to think rather than thoughts, and far
more by the earnestness of supplication which closes every
chapter, I can see that, leaving the first stage when Love
to itself was all-sufficient, some hint of possible change in
my early heaven, some misgivings of a creature moving
' about in worlds not realized', were now fast breaking in
on youthful security-signs that a new life, indeed, and
hitherto little thought of, was dawning in storm and glow
over the horizon of manhood. Nor were these intimations
conveyed by reflection only.

XXVII For about this time, and on the point of that leading crisis in life which is in England associated with entrance on one of our Universities, (in England alone places of education not for boys), it chanced that I was with the lady of my love in a retired country-house of Tuscany, and with her, by what I might etymologically at once and absolutely call happiness, for my almost only companion. Some slight occurrence of ill-health or business detained her parents in the city; but I, about to return homewards from Florence on the journey last alluded to through Bologna and Northern Italy, was allowed to spend a day on the road at the 'Tesoretto', a villa they had rented for the summer on the first roots of the ridge which, just above ancient Pistoia, parts the torrent Ombrone from the Bisenzio. That city, my vetturino (for the railway then was not) informed me-wishing, no doubt, to rest there for an hour-had been founded nineteen hundred years