A Group of Poets and Their Haunts  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

Related e

Wikipedia Wiktionary Shop Featured: Rhombicuboctahedron by Leonardo da Vinci

A Group of Poets and Their Haunts by James Albert Harrison.

Full text

BY JAMES ALBERT HARRISON. IL NEW YORK : PUBLISHED BY HURD AND HOUGHTON. BOSTON : H. O. HOUGHTON AND COMPANY. Cambridge : Che Riverside Press . 1875 . Entered , according to Act of Congress, in the year 1875, by JAMES ALBERT HARRISON , In the Office ofthe Llunao et Washington . HOM RIVERSIDE, CAMBRIDGE : PRINTED BY H. 0. HOUGHTON AND COMPANY Το MY SISTER . “ Vår gamle moriske vän Ben Mustapha , som ibland kommer hit öfver från Tetuan med dadlar, rökelse och rosenolja, berätter huru Persiens Sadi en gång i badet hittade ett stycke välluktdoftande lera . Din parfum förtjusar mig ; är du mysk eller cedroline ? frågade han, och det svarades : jag var icke annat än simpel lera , men jag har varit med rosorna och det är kanhända derföre som jag nu behagar dig so väl.” " Bravo canonico ! " ropade alla ; " det var visst en svart ros ibland dem . " LUNDGREN'S En Malares Anteckningar. PREFACE. In an exquisite relief the sculptor Thorvaldsen rep resents a fair woman holding in her hand a nest of amorettes : some are flying, some are struggling, some are pouting or caressing. The lovely bits of marble seem fresh from some divine workshop. There is something antique and ethereal in the grace with which the tiny creatures tumble and tussle about, filling and overfilling their nest with tender beauty. The disc becomes a diagram and the diagram tells one of the most delicate legends of antiquity. The group of poets whom the author presents to the public in this little book reminded him of this bas- relief. Who has not been visited by these lovely amorettes ; into whose life have they not entered with dainty feet and left behind perfume of an im mortal presence ? They have nestled through inef fable days and nights, struggled with our struggling and caressed with our caressing. These children of an elder world have crept between our curtains and filled our heads with beautiful dreams. A flutter and vi PREFACE. flash of silver wings, a spangle of purple light, a per fume, and they are gone. But their gift is sun light and their going is in beauty. The joy with which the study of these poets filled him moved the author to attempt some faint delinea tion of their career and haunts. The people and poets of the Old World are entering more and more into our life. There is a yearning for Eastern cult ure. Philosophies, religions, sciences, are streaming, westward. It is but just that there should be poets too in this pageant of civilization . Of the studies here presented some have already appeared in the “ Southern Magazine," others are new and now published for the first time. May it be hoped that a few kind eyes will venture with the author in his search after what he found so charm ing ? RANDOLPH -MACON COLLEGE, VA., January, 1835. BRITISA 22 AP 76 MUSEUM CONTENTS . PAGE THE SORROWS OF HEINE 1 ITALIAN HAUNTS OF LORD BYRON AN AQUARELLE OF BOCCACCIO THE ROME OF THE MARBLE FAUN IN Tasso's GARDEN . BENVENUTO - A LEAF FROM A DIARY A VENICE OF THE VIKINGS A SWEDISH IMPROVISATORE JASMIN THE TROUBADOUR BÉRANGER ANDRÉ CHÉNIER ALFRED DE MUSSET BAUDELAIRE 31 69 103 132 148 155 185 210 236 261 283 302 . . BRITISEN 22 AP 76 USEUM A GROUP OF POETS AND THEIR HAUNTS . THE SORROWS OF HEINE.

PERHAPS there is not a grave in all Montmartre that was reached by so long and so cruel a martyrdom as that which closed over the great German poet in 1856. The last eight years of Heine's life showed the grad ual crumbling of a frame that had always been deli cate . But it was the frame of a delicate Hercules ; and frail as it was, the disintegration which took place was resisted by a will and a power that seem marvelous when we look into the records of his death . It might be called an immortal dying, a life in death , Prometheus fixed like a star to the precipice, a death that sparkled with the wit and the nonsense of life. It was impossi ble for Heine to die without being Heine to the last brilliant, funny, pathetic, full of divine grimace, full of tragic persiflage. His friends trooped to see him dur ing his lingering decay, and eagerly enjoyed that pass ing bell of wit which he jingled incessantly to invite the world to his own funeral. Propped up on pillows, or floundering in mattresses, with one eye entirely gone, and the lid of the other paralyzed , the famous author of the “ Pictures of Travel ” entertained George Sand and Gautier, Béranger and Gérard de Nerval, Taillan 1 2 THE SORROWS OF HEINE . dier and Mignet, with all the stores of his rich intel lect. The torment which Heine had to endure from ambu lant correspondents who flocked to his dwelling to see or hear something of the German Voltaire, is patheti cally alluded to by Herr Strodtmann in his charming biography. · It became as fashionable to visit Heine as to visit the tigers of the zoological garden ; and Heine's dying afforded a living to the contributors of the “ Gar tenlaube. " A crumb of correspondence grew into a loaf that fed thousands ; a bon mot from Heine's lips be came gold in the pockets of interviewers ; a needle prick of humor tickled the midriff of half Germany in the columns of some Vienna chronique scandaleuse. It was never a principle with Heine to exercise the slightest restraint, to curb with the tiniest golden bit the antics of a remorseless tongue. Whoever had ever offended, whoever had ever been a little malicious towards Heine himself, trembled before the stinging cobra of the Rue d'Amsterdam . The higher the rank of the persons against whom his anger or his sarcasm was pointed, the surer were they of being reached. The wit might be Jove's eagle, but it always carried in its talons the grace of Ganymede. Sometimes it was a handful of peppered rose - leaves or a poisoned violet, or a beautiful and glowing sea-nettle, that he flung at his antagonists ; again it was a naked blade bitten with wondrous designs of Damascus ; oftener still it was the unshorn curls of Medusa that he wrath fully shook in their faces and mingled with the scornful tinkling of his cap and bells. He seldom grew imagi native over his enemies ; he struck them with the sting THE SORROWS OF HEINE. 3. of naked retort. Little verselets, tense and terse as a coiledrattlesnake, opened their tiny mouths and ejected thimblefuls of scarlet venom ; little epigrams, hardly able to contain their enormous bitterness, dropped from his pen and withered a Platen or a Börne ; little sen tences, abrupt as precipices, opened before the feet of his enemies and disclosed to them the whole depth of his. yawning indignation. His mind was an Indian jungle in which lurked tigers and tarantulas, gorgeous flowers. whose perfumes were anæsthetic, or whose leaves were livid with the passionate ichor of the East ; strange architecture of vines and parasites, filling the forest with the green of chameleons or the gloom of adders .; and over all arched the blue dome of Brahma, strewn: with stars as with tiger - lilies. It was a noble and a sad sight --- Heine aroused . All the occult glories and. horrors of the jungle would creep forth warmed into coiling and writhing life -flowers, perfumes,, strange: cries, suffocating luxuriance, glittering reptiles —sur rounding, smothering the offender. He could be fiend ish : and yet there was more tenderness in him perhaps than in all his antagonists put together. His most sus tained malice could not get beyond the memorial of Börne or the scourging of August Wilhelm Schlegel. And even in these outbursts, drops of gentleness, winds that had stolen over scented gardens, reveal how far real anger was from the purposes of the satirist. Heine's whip was a subtle silken cord of infinite deli cacy, and yet capable of contracting into wrathful ser pent- like folds over the heads of malefactors. It cannot be said that it was always artistically flourished. The memorable imitations of Count Platen which he per 4 THE SORROWS OF HEINE. a . mitted his friend Immermann to append to one of the vol mes of the “ Pictures of Travel, " called forth a contro versy in which Heine for once proceeded too far. The silken cord that cut the air like silver was transformed . into the avenging scourge of the Eumenides. It was a sort of vulture -scourge that tore the vitals of Platen. The æsthetic sense of Germany was outraged , for Heine exceeded the bounds of art in his personalities. It was perhaps more the artistic transgression than the moral obliquity that infused his afterthought with a tincture of regret for what he had done. Art was a great word with Heine, as it was all in all with Goethe. Goethe, the great ice -artist, the constructor of exquisite ice-kremlins, battlemented frost, turreted icicles, cathe drals in ar - rime, Roman elegies in snow, -Heine, the warm human breath that melts the pageant from the window -pane, -how natural to name these two to gether, how distinct the phases which they represent, and of which each was the living symbol. They might be called the mystic cherubim of Art and Nature, whose outspread wings overshadow the altar of the tabernacle. There was much of disrespect and flippancy in Heine's allusions to the great chief of German litera ture, as there was singular short- sightedness in Goethe's depreciation of Heine. " Heine has no heart ," quoth the Herr Hofrath Wolfgang von Goethe to one of his interviewers. That was precisely and preëminently what Heine had, if one characteristic more than another presents itself in his writings., Heart was the solvent that held all his peculiarities of style and contents together. But the facts concerning Heine's last years are more interesting than any attempt to throw him into juxtaposition with any of his contemporaries. THE SORROWS OF HEINE . 5 were . Heine may be said not to have lived before the Revolution of July. He had thought, dreamed, idled, trifled, written exquisitely. The “ Reisebilder ” on every shelf, the ballads were in everybody's memory, the love-songs hung in the air like a tender mist and bewitched the fingers of Löwe and Hoven to find music sweet enough for them ; but lived Heine had not till the mighty tocsin of July rang and summoned him to Paris. There was an eternal struggle in his soul between the poet and the politician. He could not be both , and the result was that he was neither fully. A poet of fragments, a singer of ballads as per fect as were ever written, there is the inexorable fact that his literary life lacked unity. He resembled a sculptor whose chisel was wondrously fertile in bas reliefs, medallion portraits, fairy -like Corinthian capitals, half bubble, half blossom , and all perfection . But the Parthenon is not built of bas-reliefs. Nor did he be come a politician with all his morbid longing for it. He lacked voice, physique, personal impressiveness, fortitude, spontaneous eloquence — the politician, in a word. There was not a single quality by virtue of which he was able, if he had tried, to become a leader of the people, a stirring forensic orator , an ardent champion of the rights of mankind on the hustings. With the consciousness of this discord, this absence of symmetry, this eloquence of ward and inability to act, the poet weakened while the politician came to naught. The best that remains of Heine is what he before the political idea had fully developed by a long residence in France. It is curious what affinity existed between Heine and the French. More than any of the great Ger gave 6 THE SORROWS OF HEINE. - " man writers he possessed that esprit, that mobile organ ization, that nimbleness and fire of fancy which distin guish the French and make of them the most charming of talkers. The grapes of his native Rhineland were sprinkled with the golden fruitage of Champagne the great, lazy, slumbering Rhine blended in him with the sparkling and vivacious Seine. He was a child of the line- a product of the old German feudalism as it met and wrestled with the Code Napoléon. He was Janus-natured German dreaminess with mystic rem iniscences of the ancient Teutoburger Wald, won and wedded to Gallic alertness, versatility, bustle ; equally eloquent from either side. As he said of himself, he was “ a German nightingale that had built its nest in M. de Voltaire's periwig." The record of Heine's last illness is infinitely sad. It is again the old story of the dying Prometheus. In exile, in continual financial distress, in continual dissensions with his rich relations, the poet's cup ran over when in 1845 a slow and stealthy paralysis began to creep over his limbs and senses, putting them out one by one like the wax tapers after a great ball. One after the other they went the eye, the lips, the tongue partially, the organs of speech, and the fingers and leg of the right side. “ I kiss, " says he pathet ically, “ but have no sense of feeling, so senseless have my lips become. Whole evenings I sit at the fireside beside my wife. Quelle conversation allemande ! ' she cries, and then she sighs.” He could not write except in large scrawling characters, so different from his once beautiful and regular handwriting. His thoughts would not flow for an amanuensis. The sudden death 6 THE SORROWS OF HEINE. 7 . of his uncle, the millionaire Solomon Heine of Ham burg, without specially providing for him in his will, and the refusal of his most intimate friend and blood relation, Karl Heine, son of Solomon , to carry out even the meagre dispositions which were made in his favor, threw him into such mental excitement as to bring on his terrible malady .' “ God pardon my family the sin they have committed against me ! ” heexclaimed in a letter to his publisher. His uncle had been his benefactor all through life, and his death plunged him into great grief and embarrassment. In the evening of his life Heine had married Mathilde Marat -- a faithful, loving, child -like Frenchwoman, whose devotion to him was measureless. The thin , nervous poet, whose whole life had been a battle from the beginning, from the days of the brilliant letters from Berlin up to 1835, had found the pearl of great price, and had grown fat by the side of his Mathilde “ whom," as he says in his will , " I spoiled unspeakably because I loved un speakably .” The bright Parisienne knew nothing of his celebrity as a poet, and it was his pride to boast of her disin terestedness, her affection, her cheerfulness, her inno cent little ways, and her ignorance. In 1842 Laube had parted from him in Paris, “ a plump, roguish man of the world with merry eyes." In 1847, five years afterward, “ I embraced almost with tears an emaciated manikin in whose face there was no longer any trace of an eye to be seen .” “ The former healthy color," says Schückling, after his visit, “ had departed from his countenance and given way to a delicate waxen pal lor ; all the features had become delicate ; they were - 8 THE SORROWS OF HEINE. > glorified, spiritualized ; it was a head of infinite beauty, a true Christ's head , that turned to me. Struck and frightened at this prodigious change, I said to myself that he could not live six weeks in that condition ; and yet he lived fully eight years.” When the revolution of February, 1848, broke out, Heine was in Paris. “ I ought either to have been dead or well !” he ex claimed, as he describes to the readers of the Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung ” theuproar and enthusiasm that prevailed and even involved the poor invalid in their angry surges. He lived in the region of the barri cades, and recounted with delight how a little boy of the house had brought home to his sick grandmother a pot of preserves captured in the sacking of the Tuil eries, and how enchanted they all were to find Louis Philippe's confitures so good . “ Paris is for Napoleon, that is, for the Napoleon d'or, " said he to Meissner as he watched the stealthy step of the president toward the throne, and criticised the luxurious and money loving society that for the moment was lotus-dreaming about a republic. His interest in the political condi tion of the French narrowed to a contemptuous smile at their endless frivolity, their wordiness, and their ina bility to conceive the meaning of a mighty catastrophe. It is the smile that curls the divine lips of the Py thian Apollo. In the month of May, 1848, he left his room for the last time, and, supported on the arm of a friend, took refuge from the din and turbulence of the streets in the calm and noble sculpture- gallery of the Louvre. “ Through the streets of Paris ," relates Meissner, “ surged the crowds of the people, driven around by THE SORROWS OF HEINE . 9 room . 1 their tribunes as by storms. The poet, half blind, half paralyzed, dragging himself along on his stick , sought to escape the deafening tumult of the boulevards, and fled into the adjacent Louvre. He entered the apart ments of the palace, almost empty at this critical time, and found himself on a level with the ground in the hall where the antique gods and goddesses stand. Suddenly he stood before the ideal of beauty, the smil ing, enchanting goddess, the wonder-work of an un known master, the Venus of Milo, who in the course of centuries had lost her arms, but not her witchery. Surprised , touched, cut to the heart, almost appalled at the vision, the sick man recoiled and fell into a chair, and the bitter, passionate tears streamed down his cheeks." From that moment he never left his sick . He had himself carried out to sweet rural Passy in the spring of the same year, where his fever ish and irritable nerves might be far from the noise of the town. “ So much is certain, " he writes to his brother Maximilian, " I have suffered more torments in the last three months than ever the Spanish Inqui sition was able to invent. Even if I do not die, life is lost to me forever, and I love life with such fervent passion !” After his return to town he entered the well-known dwelling No. 50 Rue d'Amsterdam , not far from the cemetery of Montmartre. Poor Heine ! in this isolated house, far from the boulevards with their gay throngs which he had loved so much, far from every green tree, or music of birds, or beautiful sunlight, far from all the rich color which the deep dyed orientalism of his nature demanded as it did the light ; with the dim twilight of a perpetual sick - room 10 THE SORROWS OF HEINE. diffused about him, instead of the sunny shimmer of Parnassus; with the dark, close- drawn curtains drawn about his suffering eyes and paralyzed body ; with the opium on his table, and the dagger near it with which he had resolved to end his life should his sufferings become insupportable -there there isis nono more mournful picture of a poet's decay. His dreams assumed the gorgeously perplexing type of opium -dreams ; he be came haunted by strange fears ; the gradual softening of the spine caused intolerable pain ; Mathilde and her parrot were his only companions ; he lost the hired attendant whose business it had been to read to him or to write down at his dictation the exquisite bits of poetry that visited him in the night like swallows, “ and dipped their wings in tears and skimmed away. " Out of all this opium , decay, restlessness, exuded many a pearl, pale with the anguish of its birth , or illumined with the whiter transfigured light of ap proaching dissolution . These poems have, so to speak, a lily -paleness as of death, and yet a bloom that seems caught from more than mortal experience. The little cycle called “ Lazarus” contains many of these glori fied reminiscences of life, these organ -notes from the cathedrals beyond the grave, these ascetic poems spir itualized, eaten to transparence by a divine hunger, by inner martyrdom , these bleeding stigmata branded as by fire. There is seldom the old joyous musical sense, the old tripping accompaniment of glad - footed refrains, the old gayety of heart, about this cycle of poems. They supplement the story of Lazarus in the Bible, and continue it down to our time. The helplessness, the blindness, the torment increased THE SORROWS OF HEINE. 11 » a from month to month . The moxa had to be applied to resuscitate the dying nervous system , and the poet, as he described to a friend in 1849, began to look upon himself as a ghost, an already departed soul looking sympathetically down on its poor, broken, agonized body. “ I will freely confess, " said he, in a statement published about this time concerning his health , “ great change has taken place with me. I am no longer a godlike biped, as Professor Hegel assured me we were twenty - five years ago in Berlin. I am no longer the freest German after Goethe,' as Ruge found me in healthier days ; I am no longer the great Heathen No. 2, whom they compared to the vine- crowned Dionysos, while they called my colleague No. 1 by the title of Jupiter of the Grand Duchy of Weimar ; I am no longer a life- loving, rather corpulent Greek, smiling cheerfully down on long - faced Nazarenes : I am now only a poor dying Jew, an emaciated picture of misery , an unhappy man ! ” . Heine ridiculed the French phy sicians, and would not bestow any confidence on them or take their medicines. For the last six or seven years of his life he was under the care of a distinguished Hungarian physician, Dr. Gruby, who from finding him twisted into a knot and lying painfully drawn to gether on the floor, salivated and incapable of all nour ishment, recovered him to a sitting posture, gave him back his sight and the motion of his arms, and in many ways alleviated the wretchedness of his condition. As a humorous revenge on himself, Heine diligently plied a course of medical reading to instruct himself in the pathology of his disease . “ My studies won't help me much . I shall at most be able to read lectures in 12 THE SORROWS OF HEINE. heaven to show my audience how ill the doctors on earth understand softening of the spine. ” As we learn from Strodtmann, Heine's day generally passed very simply : a bath when his condition permitted ; the mulatto nurse lifted him out of his “ mattress grave and carried him like a child in her arms ; then break fast of beef, fruits, and Bordeaux wine ; whatever. he fancied was set before him , even the rarest fruits ; the cook was the most important personage in the house after the physician ; between twelve and six he re ceived his visitors, dictated to his secretary, or listened to reading aloud. Most of his visitors were ladies, with whom he remained a favorite to the last, —ladies of the elegant, fashionable world , ladies of literature , ladies of Bohemia, pen in hand to take down the sibyl line wit that fell from his lips, or ladies of the neigh borhood . To all he described his sufferings in the most comical light, and made endless fun of his poor, tortured, perishing body. George Sand, the sparkling Delphine Gay, Madame d'Agoult, dropped in to ask after the sick poet, or to enliven his sombre solitude with the pleasures of their captivating health and con versation. Heine had the most brilliant French at command. It cost him no effort to throw his thoughts into the curt epigrammatic form so peculiar to the French , and so characteristic of the Parisian. There are records of his wonderful conversations with the Abbé La Mennais, and with the amiable and accom plished Théophile Gautier, in which he stood no whit behind these masters of rich and varied diction. Twen ty - five years' familiarity with the boudoirs and boule vards, the social life and political revolutions of the THE SORROWS OF HEINE. 13 French press. 66 metropolis, had washed away the last vestiges of ac cent. As his German displayed no trace of the nasal slang that is one of the idiosyncrasies of the German Jew, so bis French was filtered of all trans- Rhenine heaviness and clumsiness. His own French transla tions of his prose works exhibit every felicity of diction , every trick or point of wit, every hidden and almost unattainable grace of expression that give to the origi nal such undying charm . His friends Gérard de Nerval and St. René Taillandier, were constantly consulted by the poet in the preparation of his works for the To one of the French reviews he con tributed the immortal papers on German philosophy, religion , and romance, which are the most delightful reading their author has left us after the “ Reisebilder.” He did not attempt to translate his poems into the cor responding French poetical forms : there was too much soul in them to be translated into the language of There remain, however, delicious renderings of individual pieces by Taillandier, Schuré, Marelle, and De Nerval, especially of the famous “ Ein Fichten baum steht einsam” and “ Leise klingt durch mein Gemüth.” His Napoleon -worship in early youth, and the troops of French who settled in the Rhine prov inces in the first decade of this century, had produced a profound love of the nation in Heine, and toward the close of his life brought upon him frequent reproaches of lack of patriotism . How nobly he vindicated him self was shown by the long and sorrowful years of exile which he endured precisely for this ungrateful country, and for the reform and regeneration of its stag nant political wretchedness. reason. > 14 THE SORROWS OF HEINE . A little while before he died, when he asked per mission of the Prussian government to go to Berlin and consult Dieffenbach about his terrible condition, the great and good Humboldt conveyed to him as gently as possible the refusal of the king to grant his dying request. There were orders at every frontier station to seize and imprison him should he make his appearance. It might be said there were orders to imprison his corpse. The dilettante Friedrich Wilhelm loved Heine's works as he loved little else, but he did not feel safe from his intolerable tongue. Amongst the many caprices that took possession of the sick fancy of the invalid was a curious one to gamble in stocks, delighted as a child when he won, and furious as a tiger when he lost. He heaped his friend Friedland, who undertook these little financial speculations for him, with the bitterest reproaches when a new speculation did not succeed, and finally broke off all connection with him . Since the days when Tacitus described the Germans as preparing the “ potui humor ex hordeo aut frumento, ” as loving “ lac concretum ” and being pas sionately addicted to dice, the character of the nation has not changed ; and perhaps Baden - Baden and Spa were lineal descendants of the ancient haunts of burly, open -air loving, fair - haired Teutons. The numerous fugitives from justice and the Father - land who lingered at Paris during Heine's illness, were a source of inces sant vexation and excitement; and the calls for aid , and even the menaces by which they were often ac companied, increased the nervous irritability to which he now became morbidly subject. “ Alas ! ” he sighed , “ it will soon become the fashion for all the German " THE SORROWS OF HEINE. 15 > writers to make pilgrimages to me, as the Mohammed ans do to Mecca. And yet they say I have no relig ion ! That is curiously enough the last of me, that I should come at last to be looked upon as a relic ! ” He laughed to scorn many of the hypocritical expres sions of sympathy that came to him from his native land. “ You are right,” said he to a person who had just been delivering a budget from Germany. “ Re cently the big chimpanzee of the Jardin des Plantes became unwell, and all Paris was interested in the sick ape, and when he died at last there were nurses that visited the garden every day, and hung their heads pathetically, and sighed and said to their gallants,

• Hélas ! there's no such ape to be found anywhere !!! Among the many other tribulations of his long and in

curable malady was the correspondence that was forced upon him, chiefly from ladies, who recommended all manner of quackeries or begged for letters of introduc tion to French notabilities, or even requested the bed ridden martyr to look up a femme de chambre for them ! Gleams of light fell now and then athwart this im mortal sick - room ; dear friends from distant lands, from Germany, from Hamburg, from home, his only sister and his two brothers, old school- fellows, a num ber of devoted and faithful followers, gathered as with folded wings about the death -bed of Heinrich Heine. Bursts of the old eloquent conversation would surprise and enchant the stray visitors. He would have the little children of his neighbors brought over, and would eat cake with them and entertain them with all sorts of droll stories : how beautiful and bright it was in heaven , how they ate cake there from morning till 16 THE SORROWS OF HEINE. a 66 night, and how the good God had angels for scullions, who, when they had had a nice dinner, would wipe their mouths with their white wings. « Ce qui du reste est bien sale de leur part ! ” exclaimed his little god daughter indignantly, provoked at this celestial im propriety. And Madame Mathilde would laugh till the tears ran down her cheeks. He speaks of his situ ation in the preface to the “ Romancero ," as a grave without rest, death, without the privileges of the dead, who need not spend money, or write letters, or make books.” During his illness he drew up two wills, which , for pathos, exceed anything he ever wrote. They breathe the tenderest affection for his kindred, the firmest faith in God, the most anxious avoidance of all that could offend or hurt any living being. An eloquent solemnity pervades these documents, a gentle reverence for the feelings of others is their key-note. The beautiful allusion to his “noble and high -hearted mother, who had done so much for him ," is full of the thrilling tenderness which always existed between them . This remarkable woman, a deist of the school of Rousseau, exerted a powerful influence over him , and it was her fate to survive her son nearly twenty years. His whole conduct toward her, and his eager efforts to keep from her all knowledge of his frightful state, show the noblest and most filial feeling. She lived in Hamburg, in the humblest circumstances, and to the last remained in ignorance of his true condition. He thought himself justified in deceiving her by all sorts of little artifices, or by the always pleasant and merry tone of his monthly letters. His greatest solace was, of course, his wife Mathilde, whose exhaustless THE SORROWS OF HEINE. 17 cheerfulness and patience brightened many a dark hour, and threw about his sick -room an atmosphere of hope. Mathilde and Cocotte, the parrot, afforded him a never-ending theme for jokes. Although for many years no legal tie existed between Mathilde and himself, she clung to him with touching fidelity, with rare affection and appreciation. Her little plans and whims, her little bursts of temper or sunshine, her going out and coming in, her health and comfort, were watched from under the one poor paralyzed lid with an intensity of interest that rose to religion, and became a worship. His wife and his mother were the two idols of his heart. In the sleepless watches of the night, when his pains transcended the power of the strongest narcotics, he would remember them in exquisite coup lets of verse, in little rhymes full of the beating of a broken heart, in little stanzas built up of heart's blood, tears, and melody, exhaling only in the night, like the night jasmine. They were sighs breathed into the wondering, mourning night, burnt there like the fiery writing of Belshazzar, or more frequently like the shedding of gentle dews full of the ineffable light of the stars ; or again he would try to forget the physical misery by versifying witty fables of animals. “ Only two consolations remain to me," wrote he to Campe, my French wife and my German muse." with pain, " he says elsewhere, “ my poor head tosses. hither and thither in the horrible nights, and the bells of the old cap then tinkle with pitiless gayety." The strange tenacity with which he clung to life was aided by a disposition of unfailing hope. With him death was a conjecture, not a certainty. “ Opium is a re 66 9 “ Raging 2 18 THE SORROWS OF HEINE. t ligion ," he says somewhere. Lifted into its vivid and · visionary experiences, he forgot the ravages and dev astations of disease in his wasting body, and was able to look forward to an indefinite prolongation of life . He had become familiar with death, intimate with the grave, on confidential terms with the undertaker ; and owing to this perfect familiarity with all the possibili ties, à gentle oblivion of the end seemed to fall over him . In spring he would revive, as if a mysterious infusion of the kindly forces of nature had reached his darkened chamber too, and kindled his spent blood with new flames of vitality. The first and supreme singer of the sea among the Germans, the fragrance of the spring -time would inspire him again and again with those delicate phantom poems, where the wide sea, moon - painted by the Luna of the North, would stretch out its gilded gulfs before the dreamer's eye, and attune him to some delicious commemoration of early love. The imagery, grasped from the night and from opium , became at times painfully intense, -- the lights are lurid, the shadows are full of demons, the grave reeks with phosphorescent forms, the twilight becomes mon strous, the dawn a sphinx, leaning her eternal breasts against the burning sands of the East, unsolved and insoluble. There is the whirl, the incoherency of de lirium in many of these last utterances. Moral doubts, a red -hot core of misgiving that wormed at the soul of the poet, and made him peer out cynically over the brink of the grave, send up here and there their sul phurous exhalations. Then, again , sweet as Italian air on Vesuvius, a little word of hope goes up, a brave resignation to fate, a courageous determination to wait THE SORROWS OF HEINE . 19 and see what will be the end of all this, if there be an end. Nothing is more remarkable or more beautiful than the religious change that took place in Heine's view of divine things towards the end. We are told that his hatred of all positive religions had been com plete and ungovernable from the days when he studied under Schlegel, at Bonn, to the moment when he wrote tbe preface to Weill's “ Pictures of Manners from Life in Alsatia,” about the year 1847. He tells us in this preface that posterity is promised a happier future when the nightmare of the Christian religion shall be taken from the breast of humanity. “ Our descend ants will fancy they are listening to a nursery -tale when they are told what we have believed and suf fered ; and they will pity us . " Heine had been a stu dent and an adorer of Hegel at the University of Berlin . Like many another, he had listened to the mystical dialectics of the philosopher with profound but somewhat puzzled respect, and went away im. pressed with a vague feeling of mighty words that veiled still mightier thoughts ; but the words were long and the thoughts were dim, and the auditor was a poet ; and when he set his brilliant imagination to work to clothe the cloud - like Hegelian philosophy with some of its own transcendent clearness, he found that the philosophy was not so wonderful after all. It was not as a whole, or, if we are to accept his statements in the “ Confessions, " not at all that he understood this recondite system ; it was only here and there that a thought flashed upon him from the whirling nebulæ and took deep root in his sympathies. The system was in general, so far as he was concerned, like the mead 20 THE SORROWS OF HEINE. )- and moonshine of Valhalla . He ended by throwing his translation of Hegel and his Hegelianism into a French grate. With the burning up of this labori ously prepared manuscript, which he had undertaken to introduce Hegel to a Parisian audience, perished the last cinder of sympathy with the followers of Hegel. The next step in the “ great God-question ” was towards the pantheism of the St. Simonists : “ But this poor, dreaming creature — the God of the panthe ists —is, as it were, immured in the world , and gapes without powerand without will. To have a will there must be a Person, and to manifest himself he must have his elbows free . I have therefore, as I have already confessed , returned to the old supersti tion , to a personal God . I have renounced nothing, not even my old heathen gods, from whom indeed I have turned away, but I part in love and friendship . " The “ heavenly homesickness ” had seized the perishing skeptic, and after “ keeping swine among the Hege lians " and indulging the powerless day -dream of St. Simonism ; when he noticed that the rude Plebs began to discuss religious questions in their besmirched sym posia, and Atheism began to smell powerfully of cheese, brandy, and tobacco, his eyes were suddenly opened, and what he had not understood through his reason, he now understood through his nose. ” The fact is, that it was the reading of the Bible that had produced this wondrous change. “ I was like a poverty stricken man who has lost all and has starvation staring him in the face, when unexpectedly in a forgot ten , unnoticed drawer of his safe, he discovers a million . So in my heart I found a quiet spot where the treasure at you > THE SORROWS OF HEINE. 21 » а of religion had hitherto remained unnoticed . ” Heine was still, however (and remained so to the last), em phatic in his repugnance to the noisy dogmas of eccle siasticism as they cawed about his bedside and thrust themselves on his notice through the overtures of Protestant or Catholic. The rival sects were eager to claim this wonderful convert as their own. Heine was by baptism a member of the Lutheran Evangelical Church ; but he never cared for this or for any church, further than to ridicule “ the cruel joke of the Author of the Universe, the heavenly Aristophanes.” From the hopeless entanglement and paradox of his utter ances in these last years, as throughout his life, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to get a clear silken skein of consistent creed. The state of his religious views resembled cocoon whose infinite tangle of recurrent threads awaits some skillful hand to spin them into a harmonious fabric. Meanwhile, the hum of the cocoon could be heard day and night. Heine left precise directions in both wills that none of the clergy, not even “ the high clergy of Atheism ," should officiate at his grave. He recounts in thrilling words his profound belief in the immortality of the soul, “ though all his knowledge, his whole intellect, told him it was madness. I am perfectly con vinced by reason of our ceasing to exist, but grasp it with my feelings I cannot. " Every lover of Heine will remember the memorable speculations on the same subject that come, as it were, to irrepressible utterance in the pages of the “ Reisebilder .” Belief in immortality bubbles from the lips of the poet there like a divine wine, between his set teeth it presses victori . 22 THE SORROWS OF HEINE . > a ously. “ I am compelled," said he, alluding to his dis belief in Christ, while at the same time a painful expression passed over his face, “ to die without the help of our Lord Jesus Christ. " Still it would be easy to quote a dozen passages where he speaks of the Son of Man in terms of reverent and admiring devotion . Heine was, after all, more of a free -talker than a free thinker. All the ages uttered their wrongs through him ; he was, perhaps, the frankest man of his century, and this candor, largely colored as it was by impulse, led him into those endless apparent contradictions that make it so arduous a task to get at his real opinions. Börne said that Heine could not help telling the truth , even on himself. He was the mouth -piece of multi tudinous things that had to be said in an age loath to hear them , and he was rewarded with exile, excom munication , and persecution. Some of the last years of his life were devoted to the preparation of a complete edition of his works, and to the republication of his prose works in French. Though his situation became more deplorable from month to month, and his frail life began to hang more and more on the mystic thread of opium, there were peaceful, painless moments when the old poetic powers returned in all their splendor. Never in the deepest abysses of pain did the clearness of his intellect, the consistency of his thought, the sovereign vigor of his imagination, desert him for a moment. The tower might rock , but the silver bell at its pinnacle rang out clear and sweet to the last. It was in 1851 that the " Romancero " appeared ; a volume in which, as his biographer remarks, is mirrored every phase of Heine's THE SORROWS OF HEINE. 23 mind, all his marvelous technical skill and mastery over rhyme and rhythm , all his powers of grimace and cari cature, all the perfection of the mechanic, all the genius of the artist. As if the dying fire lifted itself for one glorious effort more, the genius of Heine sent forth this cry, this varied panorama of ballad, elegy, and satire, before it fell asleep in Montmartre. It is the author's Pantheon . All his gods are there. They are not all clad in their imperial purple, but they are every inch gods. More than any of his preceding works has this last volume the pathological coloring that hangs about it like the suffering figure of the crucifix about the heart of one who has received the last unction. Never did a warmer human hand clutch more shadowy hor rors or deal with more horrible shadows than loom here and there through this collection . The effect of the vivid intermingling of the most intensely living forms with the pallid visions of the Infinite that haunt the sick -room , is peculiar. One segment of existence, rigid, corpse - like, already familiar with the awfulness of the great change, already descended to the tomb, already fixed in the frozen cynicism of death ; the other palpitating, vitalized, reaching passionately into life, panting for the purple indolence and beauty of Epicurus, a voice full of yearning and sweetness . This weird dualism reigns throughout the “ Romancero . " Almost every line bears the trace of pain, every verse is stamped with its cloven hoof. There are lovely bugle-bursts of the old ballad music like that of “ The Boy's Wonderhorn ; " satires that sting like scorpions Scorpio idealized to a glorious constellation ; poems of the night, that have imbibed all its gloom and glory ; 24 THE SORROWS OF HEINE. poems of death and retrospect, charged with the utmost pathos that language can bear ; burlesques brimming with Gargantua become sentimental. It is the shiv ered mirror imaging the old , sweet, cynical face in its fragments. “ Like a dead man ,” says Gautier, “ the poet was nailed up in his coffin alive, but when the ear hearkened, Poetry was heard singing beneath the black bier -cloth . " But Heine's chief attention was directed to the com position of his memoirs, three volumes of which were completed up to his death , and which was to be his chief work. These invaluable memoirs were taken possession of by his family at his death, and sold to the Imperial Library at Vienna, together with all the poet's remains in manuscript. It is hardly to be hoped that they will ever see the light. The Heine family seem to have behaved abominably in the whole busi ness ; refusing all coöperation in the issuing and edit ing of the complete works, withholding his correspond ence from his biographer, exhibiting indecent hostility towards all thorough investigation of his relations with the family, and in many ways thwarting the effort to give the world a rounded picture of one of its most interesting and celebrated characters. In 1854, Heine was taken from the gloomy cham bers in the Rue d'Amsterdam to lodgings in one of the broad, benignant avenues leading to the Champs Ely sées. The lodgings lay a hundred and five steps from the basement, at the top of the house, with a sunny outlook over the animated boulevards, where the de licious spectacle of green trees and sunshine greeted him for the first time in years. It is touching to read THE SORROWS OF HEINE. 25 of the child - like interest the poet took in that grand spectacular drama, the Champs Elysées, crowded with all the luxurious life of the French capital, with its long lines of carriages, its foot-passengers going to the Bois, or returning to the obelisk in the Place de la Concorde, its dashing horsemen and armorial blazon ries. He had always loved the boulevards, those minia ture worlds of France on its feet, and in his last illness the old love returned. When the summer days were sunny and still he would have himself, carried out on the balcony, and lying on his pallet he loved to gaze at the lively throngs far beneath, through his wife's opera-glass.. “ You cannot imagine," said he to a visitor, “ how I felt when I saw the world again for the first time in so many years with my one half eye, and yet so little of it. I made them hand me Ma thilde's opera -glass, and followed with incredible pleas ure a pastry -seller offering his cakes to two ladies in crinolines, and a little dog standing on three legs by a tree . I closed the glass. I did not want to see any thing more, for I envied the dog." From this little balcony Heine gathered his last impressions, his last souvenirs of the world. He had reached, too, a spirit ual exaltation that betokened the near approach of death. “ Pouvez -vous siffler ? ” inquired his physician one day, after a violent attack of catarrh . 66 Hélas non ! pas même les pièces de M. Scribe ! ” replied the poet. The tender aureole that plays about the heads of so many dying poets, was with him changed to an aureole of humor, sprinkled, it is true, with tears, as it always is. He quizzed, and joked, and satirized to the last. The fun never left him . It was a constant > 26 THE SORROWS OF HEINE. watcher by his bedside. In his prosperous days it had been his never -failing companion ; in the solemn and stealthy approach of dissolution it sparkled and crackled more tremulously than ever. Even when his lips were paralyzed, and all that he took tasted to him like earth, he managed to articulate some witticism , some droll allusion to his weakness. He would scrawl huge notes with a lead pencil, on huger folio sheets, and fill them with the light of his brave heart. He was a Prometheus whose cries were transformed into the wit of Aristophanes. And his wit was so spontaneous that it was electrical in its effect. It was the natural lan guage of the man. There was no farewell for his friends at the grave, but there was a bon mot. It was his way of saying farewell. Heine rarely played the pathetic in conversation. He had so often jested with death that at last death itself became a jest. They conversed together familiarly from over the river like soldiers of two rival camps. They exchanged courte sies, cartes de visite, photographs; and the muse always got the better of the monarch. A few months before the end a singular piece of luck fell to the lot of the sufferer. He won the friendship of a most gifted and accomplished German lady, as to whose connections and origin neither he nor his friend Meissner, with whom she was also on intimate terms, could learn much that was definite. She was a waif, a spray of pure white flowers, that fell athwart his threshold and filled his sick - room with fragrance, a premonition of the last flowers that tender hands were soon to strew around the sleep that he sometimes fancied was to be eternal. Her bright face and winning manners soon THE SORROWS OF HEINE. 27 " a became indispensable, and the poet would write suppli cating notes when she failed to come as usual and enliven the tedious hours. “As the prisoner,” says Meissner, “ loves the little bird that is wont to sit on his window -sill, and feeds it tenderly to allure it soon back again, that it may forget its gay green woods from time to time, so Heine overwhelmed his faithful companion and friend with little gifts, designed to ex press his pleasure in a hundred shapes, and forced his hand that could scarcely write any more to throw off little notes that unceasingly, supplicatingly demanded new visits. We hear in them the tenderest words of yearning of the olden time, and the sweetest pet names, the well known ridicule from mere teasing up to blas phemous fury, the cries of longing after youth, enjoy “ It was to her,” says Strodtmann, “ that the magnificent vision was addressed in which the poet, in a waste place of ruins among the sunken statues of the gods, beholds himself in a marble sarcophagus as a corpse, above which bends the Beloved as a passion flower .” Wonderful little billets did he write her in those last days. “ I am almost mad with vexation, pain, and impatience," he says in one of them . Again , “ Nebuchadnezzar II. , formerly Prussian atheist, now lotus- flower adorer,” is signed to a New Year's con gratulation. The long, lonesome sickness was soon to end. The hour came when it was not looked for. Meissner re cords as follows: “ For three days an attack of vomit ing that could not be stopped held on, and nobody about him doubted that Heine would succumb this time. The monstrous doses of morphine which he ment, life .”

28 THE SORROWS OF HEINE. had gradually become accustomed to take had, it is true, brought on similar attacks before, but never such persistent and violent ones. Still he was defiant and hopeful that he should escape alive from this battle. He began a new will, without getting beyond the first paragraph, and remained conscious the whole time. Even his wit did not abandon him. A few hours before his death, an acquaintance rushed into the room to see him once more. Immediately on entering, he asked Heine how he stood with God. Heine smiled, and said , “ Be quiet. Dieu me pardonnera : c'est son métier ! ' So the last night came on the night of the 16th to the 17th of February. The physician entered , and Heine inquired whether he should die. Dr. Gruby thought be ought to disclose the entire truth. The announcement was received with perfect tranquillity. About 4 o'clock, Sunday morning, he breathed out his spirit. Mathilde had retired to rest about one. She never saw her husband again till his eye was closed forever. In death he was more beauti ful than any one who knew him had ever seen him in life ; even the physician declared he had never seen so much glory diffused even over youthful faces.” Gray and gloomy dawned the day of his funeral. Heine had always expressed passionate abhorrence of the noisy cemetery of Père La Chaise, and repeatedly expressed the desire to lie in the quiet burial ground of Montmartre. Here on the Mount of Martyrdom , where St. Denis and his followers perished, and where 80 many outcasts and exiles rest, lies the martyr, the exile, and the outcast, in foreign soil. Martyr, exile, outcast, poet, -glorious names to bequeath to a coun . THE SORROWS OF HEINE. 29 - try , infinitely pathetic when applied to Heine. Like his own Gods in Exile, the famous writer has become the property of other lands and other scenes than those which he loved to celebrate. The simplest of marble tablets marks the grave. A few of his intimate friends gathered about it, - a wreath of living immortelles, - and without religious services, and with the simple benediction of their tears, he was lowered into it. The French, English, Hungarians, Italians, Swedes, Norwegians, Danes, Dutch, Russians, even the Malay ans and the Japanese, do honor to the immortal singer, in their varied tongues. The foremost of German ballad writers, the last of the Gothic school of roman tic and legendary poets, the man by whom most of all the exhaustless treasures of German literature were opened to the French, the eloquent evangelist of inter national culture, - the dreamer, philosopher, wit, poet, martyr, –perhaps few names have a juster claim to be imperishable than the name of the Jew Heine. With all his paradox, with all his passionateness, there were the noblest ambitions at the bottom of Heine's motives, even among the most grotesque inconsisten cies. Had he remained a mere passionless observer like Goethe, a gatherer of fossils and plants and physi cal theories when the whole world was full of the woe of revolution, he might, perhaps, have attained to a more rounded, a more perfect development as an artist, - to a sculptured circle, not to glowing manhood ; but he had outgrown the exotic “ objective ” art forms of his great contemporary ; they were not enough for him , his luxuriant genius overflowed them on all sides. He was greater than Goethe through his heart. - 9 30 THE SORROWS OF HEINE. It was this heart, full of tremulous sensibility, that would not let him watch by the fire till his beautiful antique vase was finished ;; it called him away continu ally to the endless cries of humanity, and allowed him to return, often to find his precious handiwork in ruins. But his cunning genius wreathed the vase with lovely forms and fancies that hid the defects, and the wine of the Greek Isles mingled in it with the most living and sparkling of Rhenish . ITALIAN HAUNTS OF LORD BYRON. I. THERE are no more interesting files of letters in the whole range of literature than those that were ad dressed to the little back parlor in Albemarle Street, London, and contained so large a part of the life and adventures of Lord Byron. This little back parlor was the seraglio of the mighty London publisher Mur ray, the Garden of Delight to the literary London of fifty years ago, where many a reputation was born or blasted, trumpeted or trampled. All the men of wit and literature about town assembled there to discuss literary novelties, compare notes, usher timid con jectures into the world about the possibility of this or that literary venture being a success, or to sip of that voluminous correspondence which Murray cultivated with his authors, abroad or in the provinces. This correspondence throve especially with those whose works had been ushered with éclat before the world by this Ismail Pacha of publishers, who decided a reputa tion with a twinkle of his authoritative eye. As the publisher of the poems of Lord Byron, additional glory was acquired by his printers, and additional guineas rolled into his coffers. But more interesting perhaps even than the poems of Lord Byron are the letters in 32 ITALIAN HAUNTS OF LORD BYRON . which he details their conception, elaboration , inter ruptions, and final triumph over the world, the pen, and the printer's devil. For one of his chief difficulties was the illegibility of his handwriting, and his chief torment was the bosh diabolical which the printers made of it. These letters sparkled like fireflies and showered like hail upon the enamored Murray as he sat in his back parlor, warmed his feet before a sea - coal fire, and bethought him of his lordship’s wanderings, liaisons, and rhymes. They were the brilliant sparks thrown off by a wheel in infinite motion smiting sud denly upon circumstance. Flint to flint, every trivialest incident gave forth its bon mot, its nettle -sting of sar casm , its rapid felicity of expression, its little drama, from a love-scrape to a shipwreck, from Cadiz to Con stantinople, from the Milky Way of the sea —-the Greek Archipelago —to the orgies of Newstead . Like chemical ink, every commonplace turned to vivid colors before this man , every unseen circumstance be came visible under the sharp heat of his touch. So Murray rejoiced whenever a foreign post brotight in a letter from Lord Byron, and read out the felicitous hits and jokes, ribaldry and adventure, to an admiring coterie of blue-and -gold poets. Moore, Rogers, Crabbe, and Bowles were a few of the distinguished people that dropped in to hear a word from Byron, to laugh at his wit, to wonder at his strange fate, to pity his great and noble heart, and to swear that, in spite of Miss Milbanke, Sir Ralph, and the old nurse, never a better heart beat than that of the self -banished poet. There was strange witchery in his letters. Not even the love -let ters of Lucrezia Borgia ' to Cardinal Bembo are at a a ITALIAN HAUNTS OF LORD BYRON . 33 times more tender the golden -haired Lucrezia whose sunny locks Byron lingered over with lover-like fond ness in the Ambrosian Library at Milan, which he filched in part, and which he vows was the most beauti ful hair that ever shone upon adulteress. He swam in the soft Italian of her letters ; he drank in their ten derness and passionateness; he pored repeatedly over her verses, and found it enchanting in the gloom of the old cathedral city to steal over to the great library and read and re-read the witch locks and witch letters of the famous courtesan. The profusion of Byron's letters -- which in them selves are enough to have made him celebrated -filled the back parlor with delight, and its inmates with dis may at the prospect of answering them . The circum stances of Lord Byron's retirement to the Continent after his separation from Miss Milbanke are too well known to need discussion at this late date. We are indebted to the poet's misfortune for all that series of delightful letters which in themselves form one of the most perfect biographies, and which reflect the whole contemporary life like the literary correspondence of Grimm . A slender thread of criticism and by-play links them together in Moore's Life, and with this are blended corollary recollections of observers and trav ellers, critics and intimates ; never, however, obscuring the splendid figure of the chief actor, embellishing his surroundings like living coulisses, shifting or shoving in landscapes or backgrounds, stories and scenes, and throwing right upon him as he stands in the centre of the stage the whole affluence of their light. There is no better illuminated figure on the whole canvas of 8 34 ITALIAN HAUNTS OF LORD BYRON . history. Turning to the memoirs of this man is like walking down a corridor of the Louvre, where the Pagan mythology shimmers before us in marble, and far at the end, queen -like and alone, stands the Venus of Milo. Turn down what corridor you will, an excess of illumination falls upon the head of Byron ; it is cloudless save for one great cloud; it is put to the tor ture of endless light; it is the story of Regulus and the Carthaginian sun ; it is the glare of the dog -star upon the bald ruins of the Parthenon . As the house of the poet was continually ransacked by bailiffs in his one short year of married life, so his fame after death has been the Marathon of contending critics. Contenting ourselves with the wise and generous view of Moore, and glad to find so genial a resting -place for him from the bodkins of scandal, it may be agreeable for us to forget the “ Atlantic ” gossip, and turn an eye toward a few of those spots whose natural beauty has acquired a . stronger interest by association with the noble poet. Early independence had engendered a passion for travelling in Lord Byron from which he never recov ered. It created poems in him : the father of “ Man fred ” is the Bernese Oberland ; the bewitching tour of the Mediterranean is the mother of “ Childe Har old ; " Venice added an illustrious citizen to her . Golden Book in the author of “ Marino Faliero " and 66 The Foscari ; " " Don Juan” has mothers and fathers everywhere up and down Southern Europe, and has sprinkled his paternity like a golden sand along its shores. The completion of the second canto of “ Harold ” smells of Smyrna figs; the third and fourth have caught the spicery of the pines that fringe the ITALIAN HAUNTS OF LORD BYRON . 35 lagoon -land, those lazy, spore -filmed , strange colored swamps of Adriatic Italy. So up and down Lord By.. ron's poetry distinct odors of distinct 'lands can be discerned -chibouques of Turkey, must of the azure Symplegades, balsams of Athens, almond-blossoms of Albania , Sicilian clover of the isles, and palace-par terres of Cintra. Every play of Shakespeare has its individual climate, said Heine. Even more cosmo politan is Byron, for he has looked from the Seven Towers of Constantinople and caught sight of the lovely cypress-crowned burial grounds of Turkistan . This gives a strange mosque- like grace to some of his poems : the muezzin is heard calling aloft from the minaret, “ There is no god but God ; " the sleepy dervishes twirl in fanatical dance ; women with painted eyelids flit about; the whirr of eighty thousand wher ries that silver the waters of Stamboul murmurs here and there ; turbaned Mahometanism stalks silent through the stanzas; the fairy - land of the harem opens for an instant and displays the silken ottomans, and yet more silken beauties that recline along them looped in pearls and languor, waiting for the drink of a sul tan ; the full moon is a crescent; the stars drop dews of Islam ; the meteors as they dart, spin a thread of gold for the sultan's girdle ; the night itself is a huge turban flecked with planets, and crowning the head of Mahomet. It is the spell of the East, the arch - East, oldest of the points of the compass, that enthralls this part of the poet's work. The top of our world is hoary like the head of an old man . The Eastern poems of Byron are evergreens, annuals, blooming up and down all climes and lands all the year round, a panorama of the 36 ITALIAN HAUNTS OF LORD BYRON. 66 > world's greenness and goldenness, climbing from zone to zone, but never into regions of snow, as the vines climb from tree to tree through Tuscany to the tip of the Italian boot. The loins of the world , the Mediter ranean , were his favorite ground . The passionate Levant inspired him with its most impassioned voices. Not shawm or psalter-book , but the lyrics that blos somed in its almonds, dripped in its figs, flushed in its oleanders, carmined in its pomegranates, caught his eye. It was no fidgety can- can of France, but the sun dance of the East that he admired Rebecca poising her pitcher on her stately Israelitish head as in the old Bible picture -an odalisque, antelope-eyed , not the tramps of the Boulevard Montmartre . Thus his tropi cal affiliations might be tracked throughout "Harold, " Juan ," and their companion pieces. The scimiter of Ali Pasha flashes through the Pilgrimage, and the Pilgrim's wallet is rich in specimens of modern Greek life. The fens of Boeotia, the snowy peak of Parnas sus, the olive -grounds of Attica, the gorgeous costum ery of Albania, the mulberries of the Morea, the sun set view of Missolonghi all these group themselves into a tableau, and are projected before the imagination like the brilliant effects of the stereopticon on the Lord Byron is in fact the stereopticon of British poets : his mind is first darkened ,, gloomed into melancholy, overshadowed by sombre personal experi ence, and then suddenly comes a beam of light , a ray of genius, filling the screen with flooding life all the more intense for the surrounding darkness, till, so to speak , the very molecules of his thought become visi ble, the minutest sea - life, the remotest speck of a star, screen. ITALIAN HAUNTS OF LORD BYRON. 37 the tiniest aggregation of fantastic animal forms rejoice in the light. The beauty of Byron's work is that it is always young ; there is not a gray hair throughout it. The world is full of the youth of great men . On the tombs of Père la Chaise the visitor often sees the ex pression “ en perpetuité,” inalienable. So on the tombs of the great, the fiery edge of the chisel should cut in the pallid marble that their youth is a right in alienable of mankind . All is summer in the six-and thirty years of Byron's life ; there is the fruit, the fer tility of autumn without the bitter turning of the leaf. His genius was akin to the luxurious Orient, where there is but one season the season of bloom , and fruit, and unwithering leaf. Month after month, from 1816 to 1824, the post poured in its packets into the back parlor in Albemarle Street, amazing its denizens, flooding its tables with sketches, memoranda, epigrams, love -poems, pasquinades, pamphlets, romantic poems, visions, and autobiographies in verse . Murray shrugged his shoulders and peaked his eye brows at Milord's richness. Rolls of guineas had to be deposited at Douglas Kinnaird's for all this poetic incontinence, and countless letters written to acknowl edge their receipt. The gold -and- blue coterie clapped , and bravoed, and encored over the Channel to the exiled nobleman, who was Don -Juaning it in Venice, and Guiccioli -ing it through the Romagna. Tea and Milord divided the attention of the loafers of Albe marle Street. Bits of foreign scandal rained like manna there, and the Israelites of fashion and cul ture picked it up, went about rolling it under their tongues, aired it at Lady Holland's entertainments, The dapper 38 ITALIAN HAUNTS OF LORD BYRON . and sprinkled it through the sumptuous club - rooms of the Alfred and the Arcadian, so that May Fair did not suffer for tittle - tattle about its eccentric representative. Around the one great nucleus of gossip -the separa tion, and the silence of Lady Byron - gathered other nuclei, like coils of tadpoles in a stagnant pool in spring, or like ropes of monkeys that travellers tell us are sometimes found swung over impassable rivers, from tree to tree, in the jungles of the tropics. It is impossible to repress the feeling which the accounts of Lady Byron's part in this cause célèbre excite in the reader -- it is white, white as leprosy. The silences and semi-reconciliations, the heart - burn and the parti sanship, the playful hypocrisies and flowery vices of this paragon of virtue, bring before the mind's eye a certain Syrian who could not be cured of his snow white uncleanness. The bees still build and buzz about Hymettus ; the flâneurs of literature still lounge around this morsel of immortal dirt, and taste, and fondle, and dress it up for the scandalous discussions of drawing-rooms. Old Burton, in the " Anatomy of Melancholy, ” reports that one of the Louises of France was haunted by a stench wherever he went, and what ever he did. It is much the same with the book-lover who turns over this scandal, or comes anywhere in the neighborhood of it. The rich Turkish tint of Lord Byron's poetry dates from 1809, when he set out on his two years of travel through Portugal, Spain, Sicily, Greece, the Levant, and the Hellespont. He had left England on coming of age, and was attended in his peregrinations by the mot liest crew-English valets, a Tartar, a Lutheran, a Turk , " ITALIAN HAUNTS OF LORD BYRON . 39 and a Greek. Indifferent Italian and tolerable Romaic carried him through the Levant, and the adventures of the party appear frequently in the various cantos and cachinnations of the Giaour and his brethren, being further illustrated by the prose Travels of Hobhouse, his companion. These poems treated of enchanted ground, as yet virgin to the tread of the British canaille. Lady Wortley Montagu, Bruce, and Lady Hester Stanhope had at different intervals. sent back accounts of the wonder - land to the snobs and seamstresses of the West End. Lady Montagu had even penetrated to the mysteries of the seraglio and the Turkish bath. But it was reserved for the great powers of the English lord to expend themselves in such descriptions as to turn the tide of travel eastward, and to float the Archipelago with the scum of perambulating Britain. Since then there has been no peace in the Dardanelles. Annually tons of frantic Cockneys emulate Lord Byron in trying to swim from Sestos to Abydos, in rushing pell-mell upon mosques and muezzins, in boxing and banqueting in the most unheard - of places, in shooting pistols at dead of night over the heads of sleeping Mussulmans, and in slobbering and sentimentalizing along the Sea of Marmora. The plain of Troas is no longer a sacred spot with its Scamander and its “ Dardan Virgins " and its mighty tombs of Achilles and Antilochus. John Bull has defiled it with his tears and his quotations, his beef and beer, his missionary societies and “ moral pocket-handkerchiefs.” The charms of the convents of the Archipelago and their trousered inmates are gone. The towers of Pergama have sunk into a new Piccadilly. So much for Lord Byron, Bryant, and Dr. Schliemann ! Regent Street now extends in a straight > " 40 ITALIAN HAUNTS OF LORD BYRON . line to Calcutta, and the naked Hindoos are ready to be caught and clasped in the tatters of Evangelical Alliances. Buddhism is nothing, thinks the average Briton, if I can get those people to use Sheffield cut lery. Unfortunately they have already used it to some purpose on the throat of the great roaring Bull of the Hesperides. II. It was one of those Italian mornings, so clear that every tree stood forth like an exquisite bit of sculpture, and so soft that the Euganæan Hills rimmed the Adriatic like dim purple cloudlets, when the train traversed the flat vinelands in the vicinity of Venice, and shot over the great bridge that leaps in two hun dred and twenty -two arches from the main -land to the Stazione. It is vain to attempt to picture the silvery clearness of the climate of morning Venice, so distinct from its midday, its afternoon, or its twilight climate, when the air is atmospheric velvet, the sun - rays are hung like candelabra in the most crystal medium, and the sky shimmers with unshed dew. The sun was just rising and lighting up the shoulders of the half-naked peasants who were sauntering through the fields to work. The Euganæan Hills, which Shelly has so charmingly described, were blooming out their pur plest ; the Adriatic pendulated like a great blue water clock tranquilly at their feet ; the air tinkled like a tambourine as the engine and its meandering train divided it into two clear halves, and left a tube of silence in between for the wind to flute through airy flageoletting for the tired wanderers who had been ITALIAN HAUNTS OF LORD BYRON . 41 2 roused at midnight, turned topsy -turvy out of the coaches, and fumigated for cholera at some loathsome station , midway between Trieste and Venice. Sleepy and provoked as the poor travellers were, it was funny to see the Italian women stalking excitedly up and down the small room, spitting and spitfiring, holding their noses, stamping their feet, swearing like troopers, and expectorating their opinions of the whole matter, while the fumes of all the acids and alkalies that ever tormented cholera -ridden mortal poured in upon them . Venice loomed up all the more lovely from their recol lections of this, and the palaces waved a many- colored welcome from their islets. It is the most social of cities, with its two-and-seventy isles gathered as to a tea -drinking, and cosily chatting across the lagoons. No city ever lagoonized to such an extent, or ever so peaked and hunchbacked itself upon little dirt-heaps tossed up by the gambols of the Adriatic . It is the hermit of cities, and like all hermits bristles with eccentricities and abounds in crotchets. By a sort of Cæsarean operation it has separated from the land, and has been left to grow up amphibiously, groveling on all fours at the water-brink, taking ecstatic gulps of sea -water, and then wallowing in the mire of lagoons. It is the insanest, topsy - turviest, most picture - like of cities . Its very dialect has run wild with peculiarities, and preserves in many a quaint expression the ambered fly of republican times. A clever linguist could fish out a portfolio of folk -lore from their proverbs, their oaths, their saws and slang, the soft buzz of their sibilants, and the queer way in which their words “ telescope " each other. Adoge or two might be fished out of their > 42 ITALIAN HAUNTS OF LORD BYRON. common sayings covered with the slime and slang of ages. The most melodious of Italian voices, is the voice of the Venetian fishmongers, who lift their voices and their fish into a regionof transcendental' alto , and most musically invite the innkeepers and the osterie to buy. The war with Candia is preserved like crys tallized gall in that deadliest of Venetian oaths, Guerra di Candia on you! Though there is little in Shakes peare's two plays that shows intimate knowledge of Venetian customs, there is a curious oath, “ By the two headed Janus ! ” that would seem based local knowledge. The common people still swear by Diana. The narrow streets have crept into the narrow fore heads of the populace, and the black tempests into their eyes. Their complexions are Eastern , olived over by the continual gilding of their mornings and evenings. Phase of phases is the breed of odors that sing in one's nose like the frogs of spring ; fish , flesh , and fowl con spire to produce the inconceivable variety that lift you out of your rapture -shoes and land you like infernal Ganymedes at the slippers of Pluto . Venetian women are not pretty if one sees them squinting, arm akimbo, behind their booth - counters, inhaling the slops and slums of forty doges. They look like brunettes of Eblis. Their gibble -gabble is incessant. A little of the silent vaccine of Turkey might be introduced to advantage into the national carcass . If their skins are olive, their eyes are almond, their noses eaglet, their fingers polypus-like, going, into many pockets at once, and their tongues are trades most lucrative to those who will not listen to them . In spite of long oppression, Parisian modes, influx of travel, and all upon ITALIAN HAUNTS OF LORD BYRON . 43 66 that, bits of color still linger among the shreds and tatters of the peasantry that are delicious to the eye of the artist. We are accustomed to associate land with the term peasantry,” but the Venetians are the peasantry of the sea . , They dig , sow, cultivate, and harvest the sea, binding sheaves of sea to fill their granaries withal, and scraping the sea for the after math of blossoms and abundance. In the twirl of a Venetian kirtle, in the poise of a Venetian head, in the turn of a Venetian ankle, Tintoretto comes into one's mind, and the glorious walls of the Tintorettoed and Tizianized Palace of the Doges open before us, where we see these kirtles and heads and ankles in all their perfection. It is humanity re- created after the dreams and drawings of Tintoretto, glorious men and women, freshly formed in the image of their Maker, large limbed, full of sinew and grace and cheerfulness. There they stand, in church and palace and cloister, the world which Tintoretto's spirit called into being, Edened with all color, enveloped in all ambrosial delight, and as yet unfallen from their original state. The sword of cherubim has not yet driven them forth from their Par adise where are the mystic rivers that part and flow down through the aisles of the world. They eat of no forbidden fruit, for no fruit is forbidden them, and they may eat and drink of all. Unclad they are, too, fear lessly, in all unfigleafed freedom , basking in their gar den , speculating on no vain gossamer of evil, ignorant of the long line of mourning descendants, with wits wool-gathering amid infinite pleasaunces, eyes brimmed with the golden wine of joy, teeth gleaming pure from the vitriol-stain of sin ånd deceit. Tintoretto , Tizian, 44 ITALIAN HAUNTS OF LORD BYRON . > are the Miltons of Venice, and have sung all over its walls epics great as the “ Paradise Lost . ” If lost, it has been found again, and decked with a ring and clad in san dals like a wandering prodigal. Never city so rioted in the genius of color -- not those monosyllables of color that speak their Chinese language to us in the paintings of other masters, but the whole complex lan guage interwoven like threads of a fleece, wrought into painted poems, Iliads of color, Divine Comedies of the brush. Every church exults in them as in the great hymn of Ambrose ; the walls and altars shout aloud their painted thanksgivings. A passion of alms seized these painters and made them pour out their souls for cind. It seems as if the trinity of Venetians Tintoretto, Bellini, Tizian had come like the magi of the East led by some fragrant star, and had knelt with their frankincense, myrrh, and gold of color before the cradle of a new Redeemer. Unique is this busy city with its deep silences, its gondoliering, its marble steps licked by the caressing tongue of the canal, its hundreds of bridges rising like camels' humps for the gondolas to flit beneath . It is a monograph in the lit erature of the world, the sibyl of cities sitting in the sea and giving oracles to the nations. There is something insular in the Venetian character as of a people islet born, islet-bred and islet-buried, for the strange monster is self- supporting, bringing its people into the world, feeding, and then burying them all within its own lim its . The modern Venetians doubtless eat, drink, and di gest their ancestors from day to day, so that when they pray “ Give us our daily bread,” it is “ Give us our daily ancestor. ” The soil is a sponge of slime and animal > ITALIAN HAUNTS OF LORD BYRON . 45 corruption which receives the bodies of defunct Vene tians and then returns them to the all -enveloping ca nals, in and with which in turn the populace bathe, do laundry -work and irrigate their gardens. No city ever bridged and canaled itself into such grotesque shapes, or so obviously left the land to flirt with the sea . Venice lies like a lotus -blossom in the arms of the sea, idly rocked , richly saturated with sea influences. Its inhabitants are the animalcules that thickly rendezvous beneath the leaves of this lotus, and in its chalice and round its pis tils, shouting out their little lives in brief frenzies of joy or hate or heat. The roar of Florence, the murmur of Trieste are missed in this City of Silences, for water will not reverberate, and chariots cannot grind and growl along smooth expanses of water ; the track of each gondola is noiseless, and dies with the passing agi tation . It is as if all the world were sick , and straw were laid in the streets to quell the murderous wheels, or as if it were a mere phantom , a Fata Morgana of a city, presently to dissolve in a shower of silky spray. Nothing surprises you in Venice. Men with tails like fish , and women with fins are rather expected than not ; you look anxiously to see if the children have gills, or if the babies have scales. No watery curiosity would be beyond belief, for you are brought irresistibly by what you see to the conclusion that the human race is an evolution from fish, and not from flesh, and that mullets and not monkeys were our grandmothers.. For the human fish is seen there in all its varieties, in every stage of dress and undress fish in caps and clouts, fish in periwigs and point- lace, fish in crape and crinoline, fish promenading, going to the opera , tramp 46 ITALIAN HAUNTS OF LORD BYRON . ing up and down the Piazzetta , and sipping gelata under the arcades of the Palace Royal. You expect momentarily the gay groops of saunterers along the Grand Canal, right under the finger of St. Theodore and the Lion of St. Mark's, to shuffle off their uncom fortable clothes and dive helter -skelter into the con genial element -a school of fish . As in the old story, there must be some time in the night when all Venice becomes a fish . The only difficulty is to tell to what species of fish they belong — shark , sheephead, hogfish or sardine. You are uncommonly perplexed by this doubt when the bill comes to be settled, and you look up into the face of your benignant host. The perplexity does not last long, for the gondola is at the door and the train starts in ten minutes. The fishy host retires into his aquarium splitting his fins in fish -laughter at your stepid perplexities. Your last view of Venice is that of the mighty vision of the Venetian shark opening its colosseum of a mouth and crying alms. You shiver at this enormous gullet and its capacities to swallow , and wildly trampling the water -snakes and minnows of the station , precipitate yourself into the railway -carriage off for Padua. Venice is a soap bubble, one moment painted by the delicious cosmetic of atmosphere effects, and then elon gating and bursting into a mist of dirty suds. Its pal aces are the rainbow cheek of the bubble, and its shops and alleys the suds. The Canal Grande might be com pared to a huge sea - serpent, throwing its constricting folds about this Laocoön of a city ; and there is a hor rible rhythm in the folds of a serpent. The innumer able canals that debouch into this are the snakelets a a ITALIAN HAUNTS OF LORD BYRON . 47 spawned by the mother serpent and emptying their gall into hers. On either side of these rise just such quaint piles as you would expect a Lamia , a snake be witched into the form of a beautiful woman, to inhabit and fill with glittering coiling things, airing their iri descent bodies on the marble doorsteps or the delicate balconies, or along the feathery fret -work of the eaves. They are reminiscences of the East that have exuded from the ancient Venetian mind and hardened into painted gum of Veneto -Gothic architecture. The mystic germ of the Gothic has here come in contact with the seed -dust of the Orient, and from the contact sprang this passion - flower of Venetian architecture . It is like one of Hoffmann's ghost stories, yet every where abloom with more than mere spectral light. Imagine the palette of an artist, covered with all its kinships and antagonisms of color, suddenly converted into a cathedral, a post-office, a vista of arcades, a row of windows, a ten -pin game of church steeples, or a clock - tower. You would have the Cathedral of San Marco, the Palazzo Grimani, the Procurazie Vecchie, the Campaniles, and the Torre dell'Orologio. But no chance combination of colors on a palette could be breathed out like glass into these exquisite reveries of palaces, these elegies of Arabo-Byzantine dreams, these love-poems of Moorish Gothic that seem wafted there by a whiff of inspired breath, and left for the pathos of our time to mourn their decay. We see the loves and hates of the doges in these beautiful and fantastic structures, the poetry which they lived and transmitted , the East knocking at the gates of the West, and sweep ing in with all her teeming wealth of form . The first а 1 48 ITALIAN HAUNTS OF LORD BYRON . worshipers of Mahomet in Europe, out of Spain , were these stately piles that all but preach the Koran and cry Allah Akbar ! They are the spillings of the su per abundant Moslem life —the drops that ran over from Mahomet's cup and were caught up in the Holy Grail. Some styles of architecture resemble pure lucid water, others wine ; the Moorish is the rich pulpy Sicilian wine, that has drunk the heat of Etna and stolen the marigold of the dawn. In Venice the artists seemed to imitate the patterns of their gold brocades, or to imitate nothing but their own bewitching fancies. If the cry of the mandrake, which was fabled to be so sweet, could be transformed to marble, it would be a Venetian palace. They worked without comma or stop, these nameless inspired artists, in the breathless hurry of creation , like the joy of a beautiful bud hur rying into full -blown brightness. There was hardly a moment for a green leaf, so great was the pressure to blossom, so eager was the desire to make Venice the parterre for the world to envy. Palladio, Sansovino, above all, their unnamed brethren who worked and suffered, and now rot in ruinous churches, filled this parterre with their rare plants, their palms of Damas cus, their pinks of Aleppo, their lilies of the Nile. Nowhere more beautifully than in Venice is exempli fied the gospel of silent work. A yard of surpassing chiseling here and there, the bend of some princely window looking out on the canal, a tiny balcony hung aloft like a pocket under some group of statuary in the air, contain the souls of these men ; and how beautiful these souls were we see whenever we look up at these memorial objects. Venice is a city of specialties. ITALIAN HAUNTS OF LORD BYRON. 49 There are not those generalities of architecture that prevail in Rome, or that make Naples architecturally so tame. No house is like its neighbor, and the shapes are as infinite as the idiosyncrasies of the inmates ; each seems the outgrowth of its inmates, indeed. And each of these palaces is a special talent at stake, a living soul full of suffering and joy, a complete imagi nation as it once dwelt in a mortal form . They are therefore, in a measure , autobiographic. To read the lives of these artists it is not necessary to look into the charming volumes of Vasari ; they are written in these silent suffering palaces. In spite of their glory they are monuments of suffering. They are crowns of martyrdom to which these artists' heads stooped in life, and which glorify them after death. Every sin of the decalogue might be quarried out of these glori. ous buildings ; there they lie coiled and frozen in the painted heart of these palaces ; here Sabbath-breaking, yonder the lie, with its paleness fixed to white marble ; here the hot passion caught up and imprisoned in glow ing porphyry ; there the murder and the false witness. oozing down the frequent pillar of Eastern alabaster. It was but a step, a canal of green , hungry water, be tween the palace and the prison , between the doge and the dungeon . The artist who to -day might be plan ning his smiling cathedral, or the house of some grand iose nobleman, might to-morrow cross the Bridge of Sighs and be sunk in the prison well. It is this that lends these palaces a pathetic interest quite apart from their beauty. They are memorials of the men who labored on them , and more than all others recall the luxury and barbarity of those times. Pen -and -ink 50 ITALIAN HAUNTS OF LORD BYRON. autobiographies are the tamest of all. Let some scholar take hold of the Mercury, the Meleager, the Dogs of the Vatican, and work out the rich panorama of thought that moved to their completion, the rich tissue of experience and recollection that resulted in these great works. There is more of characteristic human nature in the two Greyhounds of the Belvi dere, as they play and nibble each other's ears, than in labored quartos of self-painting and self-puling. There never was an immortal dog before these two sprang from the chisel of the master and barked in marble. One of the sweetest of idylls might be written out of the tender, sportive, loving sympathy that created these animals, the wide field of winsome observation , the habitual companionship, the careful study that they display. The lives sealed and cemented in the Doge's Palace would fill a folio , if they did not fill a palace. Such biographies never die. They possess a perma nent value for the race, and exist perpetually side by side with the sense of beauty. In one of these very palaces the manuscripts of Petrarch were found crum bled to dust or petrified. Fancy Messer Francesco fſinging a petrified sonnet at Madonna Laura ! Such effusions were fluid rock when they first oozed from the chilly heart of Petrarch , in all probability ; the petrifaction was a natural result. But these noble artists, although they worked in stone, transfused it with their life's blood, and, as in the Golden Legend, gave up their lives for the king. Stones melt readily enough for any heart sympathetic enough to read their story Late in 1816 Lord Byron, lounging in true Milord . ITALIAN HAUNTS OF LORD BYRON . 51 > style through Lombardy, arrived in Venice, and com menced that wild course of amours and love-scrapes that remind us of the Chevalier de Faublas, and ended afterward in inconceivable loathing of the place. As Milord was poor, he had to put up in the house of a “ Merchant of Venice, " as he says, and afterward re moved to the Palazzo Mocenigo, on the Grand Canal. Venice attracted him by its autumnal warmth , its bright Asiatic coloring, and the good looks of its women. The first thing he did was to fall in love with Marianna, the wife of his host. This was Italian fashion, it is said, and such coquetting might be carried on quite inno cently, as every Italian dame was allowed a cavalier servente, or gallant, to escort her to and from theatres, take care of her wrappings, and feed her with confec tions. Never was Lord Byron more spirited or more sparkling than in these Venetian letters. They give evidence of a vigor that was Titanic. Venice tumbles and riots through them. They read as if each of them had swallowed glass of the rum -punch punch , by my palate !” — · which the ladies of Venice served out at the entertainments at which he was a guest, thinking it to be an English custom . Again and again through these letters the shoon of Childe Harold, the Phrygian cap of Beppo, the plumed som brero of Don Juan peep out as these poems were con ceived or completed, and the embryonic stage of their life is more interesting than the matured. Right out of the canals and palace windows were sketched the pictures that abound in each , the genre-pictures fleet ingly gathered from the lagoons and lanes. It is scarcely pleasant to dwell on the dissipations which 66 rum 52 ITALIAN HAUNTS OF LORD BYRON . a marked Byron's residence in Venice, and which pro ceeded largely from the morbid recklessness which was a reaction from the intense acrimony and scorn cher ished toward his English connections. It is a theme for the pathologist; it was a phase of character which might be moulded in wax and put up in a pathological museum as a study for the students of such things. Lord Byron was in a state of suffering most painful to read even sixty years after ; and in looking over his memoirs, the justificatory, or at least palliating circum stances, should be kept in mind . Venice, instead of soothing him with its beauty, maddened him like the red flag which the picador flourishes before the bull in the Spanish ring. Vain were his efforts to go over to the Convent of San Lazaro and “ babble Armenian ' with the friars, and equally vain the passionate rides along the surf of Malamocco. The one great wrong done him tortured the poet like Hecate. The too easy manners of the Venetians allowed of ready con quest ; the air, the isolation, the melancholy brought out all the becalmed voluptuousness of one of the most voluptuous of natures. Lord Byron became a finished roué. In after years he himself looked back with distress on the extravagances of this Venetian winter, and bitterly deplored them . Here, too, was renewed that exotic coloring which first began to tinge his style in 1809, during his visit to the Levant acquaintance with richer beams than illumine the more sober West. His language is gilded, papier-maché’d. Already this had broken out at the Villa Diodoti in Switzerland, on the shores of Lake Leman , and over flowed in the great bronze poem of “ Manfred . ” In > an ITALIAN HAUNTS OF LORD BYRON . 53 company with Shelley and his wife, he traversed this enchanting lake that has the blue and gold of England already tinted with the more fervid hues of Italy. His settlement at Venice coincided with this new - born Orientalism , this luxuriousness of word and deed, and called the hectic flush into the succeeding cantos of “ Childe Harold. ” Venice, more than any other city, recalled Constantinople, the city of mosque and Mos lem , of the strangely subdued and yet gorgeously epi curean Turkish life, the silent sunset streets, the columbine-trellised windows, opening into fountains and gardens ; the palace and pleasure- grounds of the Sultan shot up like the architecture of dreams out of the soil of ancient Byzantium, that lies stark and stiff twenty feet beneath the Grand Vizier's sandals. It was no wonder, for a more quaintly individualized city never clung mollusk - like to the sea. It is the Sybarite of the sea , sunk in voluptuous self -contemplation, ad mitting the kindly Adriatic to closest intimacy, the Aidenn of viking and corsair. Venice does not seem to have lived into what it is, but to have been dreamed into it, spilt there out of the abundant visions of a hasheesh -eater, wafted there like some great fleet of magic barges moored at rest. Some day it will be found floating down the Mediterranean as vision -like as it came, the swan - city floating summer-ward . The whole thing affects one strangely whose ideas have been anchored deep in land and will not at once sur render to water. It is a ballad of Uhland, built up in marble, full of the color that the German ballad writers are continually yearning for. It is the Ger man word sehnsucht embodied - the only word in the Ге 54 ITALIAN HAUNTS OF LORD BYRON . the gypsy language that reflects the whole German character, full of the patient, suffering, poetic enthusiasm that supplies the place of religion to the Germans. It is hard to think of all this soft beauty in combination with the stern republican virtues that once made Venice so powerful. But sea-faring people, with all their ruggedness, are full of these tender touches, these unbuilt Venices, this romance of travel, this passion and poetry of undiscovered lands and seas. There is nothing like the sea for abrading roughnesses, for ceaselessly rounding character like a pebble, like the mere lapping of the waves against the cliffs. Much of the charm of Sir Walter Raleigh's career lies in this sea - charm . He was the wandering minnesinger, of the sea. The age of Elizabeth contrib uted po finer poem to literature. The Venetians, who had little literature , lived it on the main , pulled it up with the deep anchors that pierced the heart of un known gulfs and oceans, carried it in their sails and sailors westward up the immeasurable bow of waters. They were proud of their island dialect, and enacted by law that it should be the language of the State. The history of Venice has never been written , for it would be strangulation to the historian that raised the dust of its vast archives, or lunacy to the historian that attempted to arrange them ; and so these archives pine and pulverize, waiting for some benevolent fire to consume them . The man has not been found hardy enough to explore this labyrinth of diplomatic cor respondence, commercial accounts, private and public squabbles and speculations. The libraries groan, and the rats breed among the love- letters of Marino Fali ITALIAN HAUNTS OF LORD BYRON. 55 ero. Here and there a venturesome statistician , a reckless antiquarian, goes snuffing and nibbling among the antechambers to this catacomb of horrors ; but it is wormwood and gall after an hour or two, and the un happy men are seen emerging covered with dust and gaunt with effort, spewing forth their statistics and antiquities with uncommon temper. As it has taken a thousand years to accumulate them , so it would take a thousand years to read them. Another Venice might be founded on them if pitched into the sea. Churches and church -yards would thrive if based upon this foun dation of everlasting dullness. Curious churches would they be that sprang out of this infinite tangle and wrangle and palaver of dunce and diplomat, and curi ous psalms would they be that were sung in them ; such as the Abbé Talleyrand could improvise, or the gray -haired Metternich . And the church -yards would reek with the boundless ooze of wronged creditors, unpaid debts, pence stolen from the widow and pounds laid up from the orphan. It is well, on the whole, that no such foundations have been laid, and no such spec tral Venice has arisen . Long may the Venetian ar chives slumber and perform their beneficent work of smothering antiquaries, strangling statisticians, assuag ing the hemorrhage of statistics, and feeding the rats ! Thus even Venice has its dullness, its archives, its anti quarians, and its statistics . But the moment one steps out on the balcony and catches the sunny shimmer of the beautiful blue waters, the ships anchored to their shadows, the clumps of delightful trees far out in the Giardini Pubblichi, the archives slink away and are forgotten. Venice is a 56 ITALIAN HAUNTS OF LORD BYRON . a book, in four volumes : morning, noon, evening, night. To be seen in its peerlessness, each volume must be read slowly and carefully, for each is distinct from all the rest. In the morning there is a crisp richness of tone that is a legacy of the night blending with the magnificence of Venetian sunrise. Noon is a glare of tremulous yellow that ochres the whole scene, and fits the soul for the deep shadows of sheltering trees, whither it may flee from the persecution of all this lustre. Evening is a thief, in scarlet and gold , that steals upon the lagoons and lights them up with won derful hues ; and the rising of the stars is a saintwith a glory about the head. Individual as all these is Venice, in her four phases. Perhaps the most touching of all is moonlit Venice —that marvelous phantom of un reality, when the shadows are dark upon the Doge's Palace, and the moon drops and dies upon the lagoons, and the churches are silent and men are still. The hush is sublime : it is broken by a guitar and voices in the distance ; it is troubled for an instant by the ripple of a gondola, then all is still. This moonlit stillness is the quintessence of music. If one could imagine a sigh wafted from other worlds and dropped into ours, that sigh would be Venice in the moonlight. The pathos of it is almost too great to bear when sub limated under the rays of the moon the dead city, the crumbling decay, the wistful majesty of a sover eignty that is extinct, the silent moon. The moon shining in the uplifted face of Venice takes away whatever of coarse or commonplace its features may possess, and makes a divine lunatic of it, whose ravings are corporealized in these moon - palaces, moon -piazzas, ITALIAN HAUNTS OF LORD BYRON . 57 moon -islets. And yet there is a strange excitement in this pallor, this absolute and entire calm . It is not laudanum to the heart, it is an elixir that riots through the veins, filling them , inflating them to pain . It is the only way to read Venice and find it true. It is then a soul, a cluster of souls, stripped of flesh, a body spiritualized. Its motive, its mission, its fate are laid bare. The moon opens its Book of Life and reads out its judgment over unconscious Venice. But there is such a glorious dropping of moonlit tears over these silent suffering palaces, over these plaintive churches, as the judgment is read, that it must needs last forever to satisfy the luxury of the heart. The coolest brain grows hot over Venice when the moon hovers over it and gathers all its wonders under her luminous wings. Democritus Junior would forget to laugh and quote Hippocrates under such circumstances. It is a tribute to one of the most lovely scenes in the world. The great sea-serpent of the Grand Canal then silvers his back betwixt the palaces, and creeps again under the marble arch of the Rialto, and past the camping grounds of Shylock, and out into the perfect moon light that sleeps upon the fifth act of the “ Merchant of Venice. " And all the little serpent- canals are moon -magnetized and drawn out from the slums and bridges, and electro-plated by the rays, and dip their slime- silvered heads deep among the green udders of the mother. The very silence is silvered ; the pigeons of the clock-tower of San Marco have silver plumage as they sleep high up over the illuminated clock ; the strings of dying guitars articulate silver ; the gondolas moored numerously round the theatre doors of Fenice, 58 ITALIAN HAUNTS OF LORD BYRON . the San Samuele, and the Malibran , are half shadow , half silver as they await their passengers, and the dip of the oars turns up a world of it as they spin along under the funereal roofs. If Tasso were sung nowa days under such influences, it would be a silver Tasso . The Venetian school of painting is at zero when the moon is up. Tizian, and Tintoret, and Veronese are mere school-children daubing their canvases with brụte pigment. Give the moon half a chance and Venice flowers out into an ethereal picture. The slime, and stench, and stupor of it fade away ; there is left behind the filtered ideal of poetic landscape. Having passed through the fires of Moloch during the day, Venice reappears a lovely wan Astarte, elfishly beautiful, purified , and sublimed . The sun of noon Claude-Lorrainises Venice, stores it with golden dis tances, ships bathed in sunny glow , rich foregrounds of portico and pillar through which streams the dying planet, men and women advancing brightly appareled down ample steps to watersides where strange boats, manned by fanciful crews, wait for them. It is the same Claude Lorraine at night, only blanched, measure lessly vast, moonlit. III. Lord Byron had not dissipated in Venice to no pur pose. There came an old Romagnese Count up from Ravenna attended by his bride, who soon revolutionized all his arrangements. The Romagnese Count was in all the bliss of a third marriage. The bride was ex tremely young, extremely fair -haired and blue-eyed, and extremely unsophisticated. The tapers, the missals, the ITALIAN HAUNTS OF LORD BYRON . 59 whispered intercourse, the sacred seclusion, the conven tual life of a nunnery had been her only experiences be fore the nuptial mass. She was a product of that rigid education which Italian mammas and papas see fit to give their daughters -- a daisy, blonde as England and blue-eyed as Pallas, sprung up in the corner of a con vent-yard, the more remarkable by contrast with the dark-haired, dark - eyed nuns that flitted about her. This convent- life of girls in Italy was the still pool where the waters, schooled eighteen or twenty years to calm , collect preparatory to the precipice of marriage and the world over which they immediately plunge on finishing the cloister education. For the Countess Gamba this precipice of marriage and the world con sisted of a superannuated Count who had already wived several times, an immense fortune, a gout, and an establishment. She was one of twenty children. This superannuated Count was Count Guiccioli ; and his bride, the Countess Guiccioli, came to Venice on a bridal trip. Venice was a drowsy old burgh in those days ; but drowsy and old - fashioned as it was, it was a bit of celestial good fortune to the convent recluse out for the first time in the world, though it was a world of water and escorted round by a superannuated Count. The gloomy old palaces woke up to sounds of revelry, and here and there a few stately dames and cavaliers sol emnly gathered in them of an evening and had a sort of ghostly conversazione. The lady of the house would assemble all her female guests about her in a semicircle and discourse learnedly on literary topics. It was a revival of the Precie Ridicules " and the “ Femmes Savantes ” of Molière. Pompous prigs, celebrated а 60 ITALIAN HAUNTS OF LORD BYRON . men mayhap for some portentous volume on Venetian fish eries, would draw near and enliven the conversation with a “ few felicitious remarks.” Then deep pauses would ensue, during which everybody went to sleep or sipped sugar-and -water, while the learned collected energy for renewed discussion. And so the evening would wear away, while the great apartments, lighted up by a few wax candles, reëchoed dismally with hol low mirth, and the melancholy canals lapped the door step wearily, and the winds sighed along the windows. The winter of 1817 was a round of these sepulchral gayeties. Lord Byron was forced to attend many of them , and created furore by his distinguished beauty. As he always paid more attention to women than to a principle, or lack of it, that pervaded his en tire life -- he soon became a general favorite with the Venetians, completely ignoring at the same time all pretensions and jealousies of other lords and gallants. The awful earnestness of the Venetians amused him in tensely, especially in these social gatherings, which in England were wont to be so free and easy. It seemed fitted to the stillness and stagnation that reigned around. At one of these entertainments he met Count Guiccioli and his bride. The meeting was decisive , and its effect is described in eloquent pen -sketches to Moore and others. This union was of course irregular, immoral, productive of unhappy results to Count Guic cioli, yet its influence on Byron , as everybody knows, was singularly happy. Deserving of all reprobation in itself, it is incontestable that no event in his whole life so helped and healed Byron, so compensated his losses, so toned him up to the heroic stand which aa few ITALIAN HAUNTS OF LORD BYRON . 61 years afterward he made for Greece. It was a provi dence of the devil that worked for good. Guiccioli was a medicine, a healing poison, an anodyne with English hair and eyes. After yawning through a whole winter of Madame Albrizzi's dinner parties, the meeting with this charming person proved, as his let ters show, most delightful. It was none the less piquant for having the twinkle of an adventure in it. They had declined on both sides to be introduced ; but fate introduced them , and fate was the beldame that arranged the preliminaries. · England and Italy con cluded an alliance ; the Saxons and the Cæsars joined hands. The nuns of Ravenna sent greetings to the monks of Newstead. But Lord Byron, who had be come largely Italianized , was in the best of times but a poor Englishman. He loathed the English, and com pared them on their annual scandalizing up the Rhine to a set of boobies in a state of infinite stare at the won ders that they saw . Few men were more free from geographical fetters, from the constraint of latitude and longitude, -and everything else, -- and from the bru tishness of mere insular prejudice. There is in fact sel dom a more unpromising associate than a Briton for the first time out of Britain . They cannot conceive that the world is a great tree laden with blossoms, of which England is one of the tiniest. : The fragrance that fills the world, they fancy, comes from their own island. The fruit that hangs golden and multifold be. tween the branches cannot be seen by these people un less it be as big as the moon or far off as the stars. And when from zone to zone these blossoms sweep over the round globe their fire of peach bloom, and 62 ITALIAN HAUNTS OF LORD BYRON . mingle their lives and loves at the antipodes, John Bull walks in his little garden after dinner, sniffs his tulips, and seeing the far off sunrise light of the twenty - five thousand miles of peach bloom, imagines it comes from his garden fence, and says : “ Well, I say now, this is really very fine ! ” So said one once as he stood before the exquisite nude Venus of Tizian, turning to the big buxom partner of his bosom. No amount of travel or conquest will wash the pompousness, the side-whisker ism out of the ordinary Briton. Ganymede at the banquets of the English gods would have to stagger round under a huge plum -pudding and a pail of beer. Lord Byron's extravagances were perhaps frequently due to his scorn for this temperament. The horror which his liaisons provoked in England gave a fascina tion to them in his eyes that he could not resist. It was a spice that even beauty, grace, and birth needed to fix so inconstant a lover as himself. There is no calculating what his loathing of Southey and his “ eter nal mother-in -law ” produced in him of what is now immortal and unrivaled in English literature. He would have become immortal from malice, if from no other motive, like Pope and Voltaire. “ Uncle's Southey always raised his utmost bile. The rumors that found their way over the Channel about Lord Byron always reached the ear of this irreproachable person, and were no doubt so intended. At the height of the Guiccioli scandal Byron wrote “ Cain ” and other poems, works which caused a sort of hydropho bia in Southey and resulted in a challenge on Byron's part. Aversion to his countrymen and affection for the lady made him leave Venice and seek her in her ITALIAN HAUNTS OF LORD BYRON . 63 home in the quaint old imperial city of Ravenna, a city which the English seldom visited , and where he could ride, shoot, rove, make love, and melodramatize to his heart's content. Ravenna is a sort of Italian Nuremberg. Of all Italian cities it has preserved its mediæval stamp most perfectly. Like Nuremberg, it is a vast toy, a costly relic of ancient times preserved in some miraculous way through ages of war and dis cord, and handed down in all its oddity. If the poet Rogers and the traveller Hobhouse Italianized at large up and down the peninsula, Byron preferred to sub Italianize, so to speak , to seek the acquaintance of the by-ways, to visit curious villas and villages, and to set tle for months in a place that had no theatre, no liveli ness, no quick connection with the outer world, and no literary stimulus. The interest of Ravenna is purely antiquarian. It outbids all Italian cities for old churches, old mosaic, old curiosities and old women. The compiler of hand-books on art hastens thither to examine and compare its rare treasures, to ferret out the secrets of its antique crypts, to prowl round its old convents, and to fetch away rapturous remem brances of the tomb of Dante. Unfortunately for two hundred years sentimental travellers have been shed ding their tears in the wrong place. It was found in 1865, the six hundredth anniversary of the poet's birth, that his bones were not in the mausoleum to which anxious travellers had been shown, and where Byron composed his famous verses. So that two hundred years of tears had to be shed over again and the ghosts of former tears propitiated. Travellers may now, however, use their pocket-handkerchiefs with perfect 64 ITALIAN HAUNTS OF LORD BYRON . nati; was safety. Dante has been found in a neighboring church and put where he ought to have been two hundred years ago . Some nervous old friar, being in fits about the perils of the times, removed the box containing his remains in 1677 and deposited it in the church of San Francesco. Now, precisely this church or the chapel where Dante was found had been regarded as far too contemptible to be noticed by enlightened travellers, and was ignored in consequence by this class of illumi and all the world was trotted by the cicerone to the dingy little mausoleum which turned out to be the only authentic and infallible place where Dante not. There is something supremely comical in Châ teaubriand's antics before this dirty little dungeon as he knelt bare-headed down before it, and Alfieri prostrat ing himself and “ embodying his emotions” in a gush ing sonnet, and Lord Byron leaving a copy of his works on the spurious tomb. Such is the irony of tombs. Whether it now be Dante that was found, or the carcass of some decayed friar who could not read a line of the Divine Comedy, may at least be doubted The antiquarians rushed in with tape and measuring line and affirmed that the skeleton was Dante's size, the skull looked as if it might have held the “ Divina Commedia ," etc., etc. The investigation was certainly an amusing appendix to the comedy. Be that as it may, old Ravenna glories in her Dante, spurious or not, and for five hundred years has squabbled desper ately with Florence and refused to let the city of his birth have him dead or alive. She attests her sole right to trot the world round to his resting -place, and to fill her pockets out of his bones, and to have her ITALIAN HAUNTS OF LORD BYRON . 65 Own show of him, come what will. It is probable that the outside of Dante's tomb has made' more money than did ever the contents of it. The poet starved and lan guished in exile the ravens of Ravenna fatten off his corpse. If great men could speculate on their bodies, they might at least out of the world enjoy the wealth which they were denied in it. What a Wall Street would rise out of Westminster ! what ducats out. of Dante ! The famous ode of Alfieri, the genu flexions of Châteaubriand, the complete works of Byron, if such illustrious tears fall in the wrong place, what will become of the rest of us ? Though Dante is the one great trade of Ravenna, there are minor bran nes in the line cathedrals, the palace of Theodoric, the mausoleum of Galla Placidia , the palace where Lord Byron lived , and the pine- forest renowned in Boccaccian story. Not contented with their ancient grandeur and the monuments that sur vive of it, the thrifty Ravennese hasten to turn an honest penny out of it, and to make the Gothic empe rors, most Christian princesses, and heathenish popes pay for ever having meddled with their goodly city. Tribute is levied on every inch of antiquity ; every thing is Cæsar's, nothing is God's, not even the sanct uaries where the saints lie, not even the holy things behind the altar-railing. At Antwerp it is only at stated hours and for a franc apiece that the public can look at the crucifixion of Christ. At Ravenna you are, so to speak, Judas- Iscariotted for silver twenty times a day. Thus the whole world, heaven, hell, and paradise, has become a show. It is becoming the most expensive of all things to be a virtuoso, to love pict a a 5 66 ITALIAN HAUNTS OF LORD BYRON . . ures, to worship music, to linger in the sweet twilight of country cathedrals, to dream over fragments of sculpture, or to visit the homes and haunts of the great dead . Every tear costs a franc. Every sob is watched and calculated by the shrewd eye of the cicerone. Every sigh causes a corresponding heave in your purse. Your pockets are picked while you are saying your prayers. The business of Italian towns in the country is the cicerone business, and that means the thumb screw business, the business of rifling you, bullying you , cupping you at every pore, and marching you to the tomb of Dante. The wonderful social instincts of their inhabitants gather them all at your heels and make them escort you pell -mell to church and back , to palace and back , all “ per l'amor di Dio . " These social instincts are the instincts of the pock ets. Like other instincts they will be gratified or there is a row . And so, provoked, gulled , and perse cuted, the fagged enthusiast staggers from object to object. Ravenna holds her place with the rest. Have ing accomplished Dante, there is the trot to the mau soleum of Theodoric, the Palazzo Rasponi, the mu seums and libraries, and the dozens of damp and reeking churches. At a lira apiece a fortune might be spent in Italy on the churches alone. It would beggar the Rothschilds to pay all the guides, remuner ate all the politenesses, fulfill all the expectations. It would be an interesting problem how much Château briand had to pay before he was allowed to kneel be fore the tomb of Dante, or how much Alfieri disbur dened himself of before the guide permitted his feelings to gush over in verse. Quaint Ravenna by ITALIAN HAUNTS OF LORD BYRON. 67 the sea, with its pride of antiquity and its noble pines, its villas of raral nobility and its recollections of Byron, supports itself amply to -day on all this squalor and deceit, no doubt as well as in the days when Au gustus used to visit it. One cannot grudge the town its support. Milord would have laughed and uttered one of his characteristic “ By Joves !” had he conject ured that the famous story of Guiccioli and himself would one day furnish half the girls in the town with dowries. As in Venice he was the voluptuary, so in Ravenna Lord Byron became the politician and conspirator. He joined the liberals, swore death to the Austrians, and became one of the Carbonari. It is pleasing to watch through his correspondence the profound change that had wrought itself in him after his departure from Venice, and the formation of his associations with the Gambas and Guicciolis. It is no longer the tone of the rake, the braggart, the blasphemer ; nobler im pulses break through these beautiful letters ; benefi cent influences are at work through them , a great gen tleness moves in them . at times furtively like the first glorious rays of the cause for which he died. It was Greece and Guiccioli that made a man of Lord Byron. Already in Ravenna the English Eccellenza, as they called him, had become famous for his charity and goodness of heart. There was no cause to which Lord Byron would not and did not give freely, save the cause of obscurantism and the pope. or two of his life show a nobleness of disposition that no trials could dim . All that was knightly and chival rous in him awoke before the spectacle of Greece The last year 68 ITALIAN HAUNTS OF LORD BYRON . humiliated . It seemed a compensation of Providence to give him so ample a chance to retrieve himself, and to allow him so nobly to do it. Dandy, sensationalist, voluptuary as he was, all these transiences fell off the instanthe touched the magic soil of Epirus. His let ters no longer tread on delicate ground. From Ravenna, Byron and the Guiccioli removed to an old palazzo built by Michael Angelo in the quiet city of Pisa. Caso Lanfranchi was its name, and it was here that the happiest year of the poet's life was spent. From Pisa they went to Genoa, and settled in one of those vast old palaces which the Genoese nobility built for themselves centuries ago, and which their impover ished descendants let out for a song to whosoever will pay the rent. AN AQUARELLE OF BOCCACCIO. SANTA MARIA NOVELLA is one of the most ancient and renowned churches of Florence. Perhaps, take it all in all, there is no church before the time of Angelo and Raffaelle which exercised so decided an influence on the development of Italian art. Begun about 1279, before the earliest beginning of this mar velous development, it grew up with it and was suc cessively enriched by almost every Florentine painter of distinction from Cimabue to Francia. Year by year its shadow grew ampler, and in process of time it came to resemble those “ tiger -striped cathedrals,” those marble and monumental zebras which are to -day the glory of the goodly cities of Sienna and Pisa. They are cross -shaped, campanile'd structures in black and white marble that lack the warmth of time-mellowed Lombard brick , fancifully striped or piebald, stretching out great cool lengths of variegated surface, alternately reminding of a colossal draught-board and a sonnet of Petrarch changed to stone. There is so much senti ment and so much southern extravagance commingled , so much taste and so much tastelessness exemplified. It is plain that their builders knew nothing of the sea, or the brilliant cheerful Levant, like the artists of 70 AN AQUARELLE OF BOCCACCIO. Genoa and Venice. There is nothing like the gor geous grotesqueness of San Marco Cathedral at Venice, or the golden exuberance of the Nunziata at Genoa. The Florentine dealt in cool, sober colors, in forms and lines more intellectual and distinct, less sensuous and sense-steeped. Whoso will compare a tunic or a cope of Paul Veronese, that Taine of Italians, with the exquisite fibrous textures, the sharp un clouded anatomy, the startling vividness with which the lines, like the light from an emaciated face, start through the thin colors of the tunic of the Sistine Madonna, will conceive all the heights and depths of difference that lay between Venetian and middle Italian schools of art, between the chameleon Adri atic, sprinkled with feluccas and lateen - sails, overarched with skies of peacock or primrose, and the clear, wind ing Arno, cool with umbrage, fringed with ilex or olive, dripping with vines, and festooned with clematis. It is the difference between the senses and the soul, between the sharp edge and the enameled bilt, be tween plumage and power to soar . Each is delightful, each is inimitable in its kind, but the great masters passed away before they saw each other, and the spiritual genius of Raffaelle never woke and found itself wedded to the glorious flesh , the sunlike sensu ousness of Tizian . So Santa Maria grew, till one day Florence was thrown into huge commotion by the rumor that one of her artists had painted a picture of Madonna so per fect, so life -like, that all who saw were amazed, and de clared the master to be inspired. His workshop was thronged ; everybody went to take aa look at the won AN AQUARELLE OF BOCCACCIOIO. 71 derful Madonna ; everybody confirmed everybody's opinion ; everybody thought it divine, a painted Script ure ; and everybody ended (as usually the case with everybody in Italy ) by laying violent or ecstatic hands on the picture and bearing it in triumph through the streets of Florence. The artist was no other than the architect Cimabue, who, abandoning his architecture, his painting on glass, and his frescoing, threw his whole resource and genius into the composition of this famous work, snapped the iron chain that so cruelly enthralled Art in the imbecilities of Byzantine tradition, and ap peared before the Florentines in the Piazza della Signoría, as the acknowledged lord and progenitor of modern painting. No place was found good enough for this divine Madonna, except a beautiful chapel in the new church of Sta. Maria Novella, and there it was installed, with great pomp, as the sweet presiding spirit of the spot. It may be fashionable to snub Cimabue for general lankness, leanness, chilliness, hankerings after the skinny spectres of the ancient art, ignorance of linear and aërial perspective, eternal blue, green , and yellow grounds intersecting each other at impossible angles, and producing various spasms of discomfort in your enlightened critic ; it may be amus ing to fall, tooth and nail, on the squirming babies which his everlasting Madonnas protrude on the spec tator with expressions of everlasting complacency, or contortions of everlasting adoration ; it may be wise to criticise the bony knuckles, the hungry elbows, the broad, simple brows, the indefatigable aureole that never seems to tire of floating, helter- skelter, about the pictures of the old masters ; the exemplary St. Johns 72 AN AQUARELLE OF BOCCACCIO . and Elizabeths, that kneel, or knot their brows, or smirk, or seem engaged in never-ending arguments on predestination or baptizo on either side of these poor forlorn virgins. But, in spite of all this, there is more of sweetness, strength, and beauty in these artless beginnings of art, more of the doctrine of immortality of soul, more of untutored genius, than in many a pompous canvas that hangs high in the synagogues of the Louvre and Vatican , and blazes afar with the names of more celebrated masters. Be this as it may, in the church of Sta. Maria was Cimabue's work en shrined, high over altars from which continual incense went up, it were hard to say whether to the Deity or to the artist. And as the centuries rolled on, the works of Ghirlandaio , Orcagna, Filippino Lippi, and others, illumined the walls, altars, and ceilings of this sanctuary with the varied story of martyr, Madonna, and patriarch, successively embellishing one of the most interesting of mediæval structures. One Tuesday morning, in the year of our Lord 1348, one of the most memorable years in the annals of Florence, seven youthful ladies found themselves assembled to divine worship in this church . They were in mourning; their birth was noble ; and they were individually united by ties of neighborhood, friendship, or blood. The great plague of 1348, which, between the months of March and July, swept off 100,000 of the Florentines, had stolen from the jungles of the Orient, and, tiger-like, sprung upon this devoted people. An universal horror and gloom befell the fair city ; the plague of lice, and blood, and obscene things, and Asrael smiting the first-born , along AN AQUARELLE OF BOCCACCIO. 73 the brutal and blood-curdled Nile, was heaped up and overflowing with all other abominable things in this pestilence of swellings and livid spots, this disease, whose hunger fed directly on the brain and heart, without the intervention of fever, this foul thing that passed aslant from the human race, and, like some loathsome reptile, rioted in the cries and helplessness even of the brutes. While the seven ladies fell to talking about the miseries of the times , the church is the favorite exchange and appointment-place of the Italian women , the idea was suggested, most natu rally, that they should make arrangements to leave Florence during the epidemic, and go some distance into the country, to a country -seat, entertaining them selves there with story, and dance, and song, and van sport, and all the graceful amenities that cluster about a Tuscan manor. The idea was received with acclama tion ; it should be put into execution at once ; and, on the arrival of three young gentlemen, likewise inti mates, and come, like themselves, to say their orisons, the plan was perfected . Thus, from the plans of these ten persons, so skillfully and naturally brought together in the venerable Sta. Maria Novella, on this Tues day morning, in 1348, came the immortal story -tellers who make up the hundred stories of the “ Decameron of Messer Giovanni Boccaccio. There are none but genial shadows in the darkness that overlays the biography of Boccaccio, -the shadow of the lemon and the ilex rolled into the purpled glooms where lovers are fain to walk or scalptors to muse or painters to loiter and watch the delicate sus ceptibilities of chiaro-oscuro on an Italian noonday 3 74 AN AQUARELLE OF BOCCACCIO . > The doctors all disagree as to where he came into the world, but that he did come we have delightful and indubitable evidence in the “ Decameron,” prince of jest -books, poet of tears. They squabble endlessly, too, as to whether he had any business coming as he did, with the bar - sinister in his escutcheon , the offspring of Parisian amours, the offshoot of illicit love, an unex pected quotient to the mercantile calculations of his father, who was hanging round Paris on business at the time and found leisure to hang round on pleasure too. There was little reproach on illegitimacy in those days. Petrarch , though in orders, and though eter nally sonnetting to Laura, found time for irregularities and natural children ; Dante was no rock when he en countered pretty signoras ; Ariosto and Tasso might fill an encyclopédie des amants with their Clorindas and Amintas ; and why not the good, much-bored Padre Boccaccio, wearied out with counting-room and ledger, and glad to get to the congenial society of some Ile- de- France grisette ? Boccaccio showed all the quick mobile tempers and tantrums of his ancestry. Paris sparkled in his veins from earliest infancy. He was born to lounge along boulevards, sip anisette, chuck shop-girls under the chin , fling out sharp word fire and wild - fire at François, kick rag-pickers down stairs, foot the Bois in all weather, go into the monthly ecstacies over the Grandes Eaux at Versailles, talk republicanism in the pot-houses of Belleville, visit the vaudeville of an evening, rhapsodize on suicide over the balustrade of the Pont de Jéna, snooze at cathe dral service in Notre Dame at misty November matins, be shriven once a year to escape excommunication , AN AQUARELLE OF BOCCACCIO. 75 > take the daily tramp to the Morgue, and the nightly tramp to the Mabille Garden, and do anything and everything, in one word , that is typically, eternally, and hopelessly French. On the other hand, there was an equipoise of Italian sensibilities, oak to clothe and clasp the dryad , ever ready to flit from sylvan im prisonment, a smart residuum of Roman common sense left after all the dredgings and drainings of the Cæsars ; various nets and contrivances of reason, worldly wisdom and sagacity, to hold the butterfly of French prepossessions, to keep the pot-au - feu always full, to replenish an emaciated pocket, to keep out of cabarets, to be shy of sergents-de-ville, to love olive oil, garlic, dirt, and maccaroni, to acquire strange economic tendencies, to say an Ave Maria or two, every day, to screw witless foreigners out of their last baiocco, to wear a dirk, and use it when necessary, and, in short, to do, be, and typify all that is typically, eter nally, and hopelessly Italian , These were the two battling elements of the combination, - Gallic froth and Tuscan fire, frost of the Great Bear and flame of the Southern Cross, – temper, and little prickly tenta tive sensibilities that, in France, are perpetually hung out to catch shreds of offense . The wonderful incar nation of this cross - fire was Giovanni Boccaccio . It is impossible to think of his wanderings, his attach ments, his scrapes, his follies, his artlessness, his tender human heart, without reverting to the sparkling arti ficialities of the Seine, and then to the calm , sweet shadows of Valdarno and Florence the Fair. There is all the difference that a quick eye discerns between the beautiful little Tuscan child whom Mrs. Browning 76 AN AQUARELLE OF BOCCACCIO. hears from Casa Guidi's windows so pathetically sing ing, “ O bella libertá, o bella ," and Beaumarchais primping and pirouetting out an yeasty existence before the Parisians ninety years ago. But then there was the genuine Beaumarchais in Boccaccio, flippant, flighty, full of ardor and accomplishment, sentimental, if need be, and able on occasion to clap his hand over that little leaden spot which Frenchmen call their coeur.” Beneath and beyond all this, were other, kinder strata, mellow with benignant warmth, rich in flowers not fossilized, but fresh and unperishing as Nature's own, crusted thick about the central heats of an inexhaustible heart, that burned warm and unwearied from 1313 to 1375. From Paris he seems to have brought away a dainty accent, great love for his mother, and boundless hatred for mercantile pursuits. No schooling or scourging of Father Boccaccio could bring the miscreant to com mercial travelling, filing bills of lading (if there were such things in those days) , signing contracts, and cal culating probabilities. Although Italy, in his time, carried commercial speculation to the sublime, wit ness the world-wide associations of the Chigi and the Medici, there was no glamour about it for these bright enamored eyes that with singular willfulness clung to what they saw in the mists before them, poems, travels, delightful Sicilian days, loves frequent and unfortunate, and all the unparalleled delights of authorship, success, and society. It was a case of clairvoyant genius, or genius in that rich suspended state before rushing like a salt into some glittering crystallization , conscious beyond its years of what - AN AQUARELLE OF BOCCACCIO . 77 was to be, and overstepping sheer all the objections and plads of a father. Meanwhile it had to undergo mortifications by the way, opposition, trial, recrimina tion. “ You shall be mercatante, and nothing else ! exclaimed Boccaccio Padre. 6 You shall be author and idler, and nothing else !” blazed forth Boccaccio Figlio ; and so the internecine war went on, one toss ing for heads and the other for tails ; the one at Capri corn and the other at Cancer ; the one Equatorial, the other Arctic ; the one at Mars, and the other playing leap-frog in the mountains of the moon. The boy was an ingrain vagabond ; he was a born pifferario, born to flute about the streets of Rome before images of the Madonna in Holy Week ; to toss confetti and put out moccoli in a Carnival on the Corso, and do all sorts of villainous and objectionable things. So, doubtless, growled Father Boccaccio. We read that a learned vicar taught or trifled much miscellaneous information , many odds and ends, into him ; but such a jackanapes as he must have been must surely have required angelic qualifications of temper and brain. It would be no marvel if this identical friar sat for his countless brotherhood , whom Boccaccio afterward so mercilessly flayed, and that in him were clustered the numerous frailties of his class . On the other hand, he may have been bland, unctuous, insinuating as any Tuscan Chad band, a prodigy combining the years of Nestor with the cunning of Ulysses. After remaining with him in or near Florence several years, and after ( incident ally) acquiring all the good man knew , doubtless, Boccaccio was seized and set down in the counting room , counting sequins and not spondees, voluminous 78 AN AQUARELLE OF BOCCACCIO . in correspondence (but not with the Muses), rolling his eye, not in fine frenzy, but through substantial account-books, peradventure, through the everlasting aching wilderness of debit and credit, meum and tuum . One can, with no very great stretch of imagination, fancy the vain efforts made to prune and trim him to a good, sober, plodding business man , combining all mercantile virtues and clevernesses, an incipient mill ionaire with the millions already jingling in his pock ets. If not Rex Railway, or Rex Tammany Ring, for very dearth of Tammanys and Rings, it should be Rex Ducat, Prince Florin , Duke Argent, or any other principality and power of money whatsoever, provided only it be cash . There was too much fun in Boccaccio to make a decent miser, too much spendthriftiness to get to be a Florentine Rothschild . In vain, therefore, did Boccaccio père harness him in apprentice -yoke to a merchant of Florence ; in vain did this merchant take him to Paris in the laudable hope of making something out of him , and waste six precious years trying to instill some principle into him. Boccaccio imbibed all of the gay city that was im bibable, saw all that was to be seen, no doubt became as untiring a boulevardier as Rochefort in our day, gathered many a wisp and thread to work up into the immortal cartoons of the “ Decameron ," and came back to his own home desperately ignorant of “ affaires." Again he was sent out on a mercantile pilgrimage ( Boccaccio, a drummer !) ; Naples was the Mecca. Eight years passed in loafing about the quais and gardens of the Bay, ogling Vesuvius, idling about the orange - groves of Sorrento, sitting on Vergil's tomb 2. AN AQUARELLE OF BOCCACCIO. 79 over the grot of Posilippo, saturating skin and bone with the exquisite air of the South of Italy, and fall ing hopelessly in love with no less a personage than a natural daughter of King Robert, the much -oded, much - sonneted Fiammetta. There never was a clearer case of gracelessness, ingratitude, unfilial conduct, etc. The poor father, if he did not give up the ghost alto gether meantime ( for the biographies and encyclopedias are not over clear), must have winced with indignation as the rumors floated up from Naples, —as they will float from pole to pole, -of the young merchant's conduct, odes, love- scrapes, gracelessness, and genius. What father of a great literary man was ever found to accord, at first, with the wishes of his son, further his precocious dreams, endue him with all helpful privi leges, and help him on bravely to the bias of his dis position ? We owe it to their own indomitable will that Tasso and Coleridge (a dozen others might be . mentioned ) did not turn out respectively a pettifogger in the Inns of court, and a shoemaker's apprentice. Imagine the “ Ancient Mariner ” peeping .woefully through the rent of a dilapidated shoe, or the “ Geru salemme ” taking form amid the chaos, and heat, and stench of a criminal case ? Nor did the admonition of his father avail more with Boccaccio, for, far from visit ing the staid mercantile establishments of Naples, pick ing up “ useful ” knowledge, drawing up memoranda of usable commercial maxims to be employed on occasion , manipulating the cúrious subject of compound interest and sixty - fold returns, hoarding heaps of smiles, be nevolence, and amiabilities for the prosperous customer, rigidly to be locked up from the pitiful presence of > 80 AN AQUARELLE OF BOCCACCIO . want, poverty, and small rent-rolls, this untamable jester turned his sojourn into a brilliant frolic, wrote verse , attended the gay doings of the court, and ingra tiated himself into the favor of the king, a far - famed patron of letters. The presence of Petrarch, the very Arethusa of sonnets, —in Naples, was of happy augury in fixing and perpetuating his inclinations to literature. A fervid friendship sprang up between the two, —they were different arcs of a complete circle, and each filled out the other. Petrarch treasured up passionately all the shreds and tatters of tradition , all the drops that overflowed from classic antiquity, all the lingering conservatisms that loitered by the way side or were left behind in the great cataclysm of the dissolved Roman Empire, the lineal descendant of the grace and sweetness of Catullus and Horace, but free, on the whole, from their uncleanness : an antiquary to whose love of books we owe so much of the precious lore of the ancients, a dabbler, too, in such Latin as the time afforded, which long plagued and puerilized its mind, tied its hands, tripped its feet, and shoved it Lazarus- like into the sepulchre of the Past. Petrarch is a rich , an eloquent segment of the Italian character, a sort of Vesuvius- crater filled with dew, lapped in vineyards, swollen and smouldering with internal fires, if ever smoking, casting forth such silvery exhalations as wreathe up from Vesuvius of a stilly autumn even ing, mayhap capable of swelling to the luminous cloud column which, to Pliny's eye, and to the world's, takes the shape of an umbrella- pine when the fire foetus is ripe to be vomited forth . Like Goethe's Mar garete, he may be the “ quintessence of all heavens, " AN AQUARELLE OF BOCCACCIO . 81 but the earth is there too, quintessentialized. On Laura's skirts, though she might be among the beatific in Dante's epicycles, lifting high her dainty wings to prevent them from being displumed even by the dust of angel-feet, there sticks the mud and mire of Vau cluse, the grease of convent-tapers prying open the blinking eyes of nuns to midnight prayer, stains of meat filched in Lent, and blemishes of neglected vigils, uncleanliness, and broken vows. Boccaccio, equally in love with antiquity, was a thorough radical withal, as bold as Luther, though he smiled ; as bright and trenchant as Erasmus, though he cut through velvet, wreathed in continual sweetness and jest, not shrink ing from indecencies, not skipping over those lines of Catullus where, though foul enough, the measure is as perfect, the rhythm as ringing, the structure as marvel ous as in cleaner passages. He was simply a more perfect-rounded man than Petrarch . “ Petrarch" brings up a close - cropped, sad, scholarly vision in gown and bands, flourishing the academical sceptre, a poet-monk, who compressed fifty years of his life into the fourteen lines of a sonnet, with something courtier like and stately in his bearing. Boccaccio is human nature, not tucked away in cassock and cowl, not sceptred, or polished, or furbished into a thousand veneered forms, but with his great genial heart over flowing all these as shallow reservoirs, too small, too contracted to hold the inexhaustible good things, the genialities, the graces, the gifts , the spontaneous joy which it came to lavish upon the world, to fertilize and indoctrinate it in the great catechism of kindness and love. The delicate chastened Petrarch, senti > 82 AN AQUARELLE OF BOCCACCIO . mentalizing, and love-ogling, and spinning Latin hex ameters from his ready distaff, was more than counter poised by the robust, mirthful, natural Boccaccio, whose laugh across the ages sets afloat a thousand musical associations, whose smile is the sweetest heir-loom of the fourteenth century, whose jest-book is as wise as Solomon, whose bright little stories engrave each its exquisite anagram on its own cameo, and present it for a brooch of wisdom and wit to the children of men. Boccaccio had not been long at Naples before the charms of the Princess Fiammetta (as he called her) attracted his heart, which had an endless susceptibility to the sex. It was for love of her perhaps that in hours of idleness he threw off the stories which have since immortalized his name, stories whose freshness and buoyancy have all the unstudied grace of improvi sation, carelessly tossed off like a glass of Montepul ciano, the offspring of a momentary wooing, the elf children of some fairy night, uncorrected, rich in obscurities on which commentators pounce like' vul tures and devour and digest in voluminous dissertations for our instruction . The good father who had pestered him incessantly about his worthlessness and unwilling ness to follow the ancestral profession, at length de parted and left him master of himself. Then first we see the true Boccaccio and then began his real career, so ample in honors, emolument, and literary toil. We find him Boccaccio - like running into debt in the purchase of costly manuscripts, rare books of any and every sort, entertaining luxuriously and wasting his by no means large inheritance in easeful prodigality. The kindly AN AQUARELLE OF BOCCACCIO . 83 hand of Petrarch helped him out of his difficulties. It is odd how much more we know of him than even of Shakespeare who lived two centuries later, and who hangs in the horizon of the Elizabethan time half sub merged in myth, half strangled with speculation, as misty as a wraith of Ben Lomond. There is something in the air of Italy that embalms and perpetuates. It is seen in the perfectness of its palaces and amphitheatres, in the wonderful brick arches of Nero’s aqueduct as fresh and delicate as of yesterday, —which Ampère finds to surpass everything of our own,- in the excavated villas preserved like flowers between the leaves of the soil, in the careful accuracy of detail concerning the lives and histories of early poets and historians rever ently garnered up and rekindled into glowing com memorations by the hands of succeeding biographers. There is this air of the herbarium in all that relates to early Italian literary history. So open any biography of Boccaccio and the facts fall out like pressed flowers still steeped in the original perfume, still heart- flushed with the original colors, still sprinkled with the dew that seems spontaneously to tremble upon everything that ever touched this charming author. To open a story of Boccaccio is to bathe one's face in the fresh ness of the morning, to catch a thousand odors that spring up off the face of up -getting Nature, to catch the first warblings of birds whose throats are yet full of the sweet warbling of dreams, to see the clouds frescoed by the divine brush of the dawn, to inhale all sparkling exhalation and color and dewiness and morning inno cence that shines upon the world at this poem -period of the day. There is at once a whiff from jasmined 84 AN AQUARELLE OF BOCCACCIO . and trellised gardens, a glimmer of fountains shadowed by laurels, a mellow looming of Lombard brick piled into the sumptuous architecture of Tuscan palaces, a horizon of mountain withdrawn into a mist of strange sweetness, just within, just beyond the vision, playing at hide - and - seek through the changeful glories of an Italian day. As a kitten takes a ball and sports with it now in , now out, of sight, so Boccaccio sports with his reader infinitely, with strange outcries of grace or tenderness or playfulness, trembling with eagerness to please him , and yet so masterfully withdrawing the tremor from sight that you are deceived by the up gush , the spontaneousness of the thing into believing it to be nature itself. There are all about him happy voices issuing from the thick of embosoming vines, pleasant noises of far-away laughter sweet almost to tears, wit caught and etherealized to a heart-tickling echo. Sometimes, too, there are bursts of merriment uproarious, not in the least ethereal, and at the bot tom of all of it the tender touches, the tears that lie at the feet of every laugh . It must be confessed too that Boccaccio is indecent, indecent as Shakespeare, Herod otus or Froissart is indecent. It was more perhaps the large homage which he paid to truth than the pru rient indelicacy of a spoiled or fetid taste. the large -hearted unstinted vision that took in this world in its circumference, not intensifying to a point, to one ravenous fixed idea, like Dante, not poring rabidly over its diameter. The broad univer sal fields struck his eye, not some solitary peak or process. It was the broad beauteous running and spreading of the Cordilleras decked out with all prodi It was AN AQUARELLE OF BOCCACCIO . 85 gality of lands and plains and rivers, not the mighty uplifting into some transcendent Chimborazo, some sunny Teneriffe. Other poets have built their Col onnes Vendôme out of Boccaccio, have lifted his val leys into their own mountains, have gone to his quar ries and filched the marble for their cathedrals, and stand before the world glorified of men. Sixteen hun dred persons could bathe in the reservoir of Caracalla's baths and go away and forget all about the charity of the emperors ; ten or twenty full- fledged reputations learned to float and swim in the sweet sun - lit fountain of Boccaccio and brought away enough in souvenirs to make themselves live generations beyond their due. Boccaccio in the crude has been worked up in the dainty elaborations of Chaucer, Dryden, Keats, Proctor, Longfellow and George Eliot, to say nothing of the continental literatures. It matters not who furnished the silk that was worked up into the tapestries of Raf faelle or who fabricated the paint that imprisoned upon canvas the glorious Mount of Transfiguration ; but it does matter when one man's wit and pathos are stolen and incarnated with another man's dullness and dribble. Often has Boccaccio been the victim of this. Italy, indeed, has for centuries been the foraging-ground of many a needy poet who could raise nothing at home, about whom no poetry would cling except be passed the seas and slept under the windows of Isabella or the fair Griselde ; poets who were absolutely sterile in English air or who were perishing in Scotch mist. All honor to them if they have come back laden with anything beyond their own dullness, with anything that has an immortal woe, an undying grace, a death 86 AN AQUARELLE OF BOCCACCIO . less tenderness in it. Perhaps it had never been known had they not gone and gathered. Nobody has ever committed a theft on one of Milton's angels and made him strut the boards in blank verse of his own ; nobody could steal Imogen or Ophelia, King John or Miranda, for at once as with Vergilian goddesses, their would be the ambrosial fragrance, the gait, the purple light, the patent godhood that would betray the theft. No Cacus can keep the bulls of Geryon from bellowing. But Boccaccio through very multitudinousness, through very variety, was prevented from rounding any two or any twenty characters into such ineffable shape, into such starry crispness, into such love-breathing or light ning -like individuality that you could put your finger on them and say, this is Juliet, this Julius Cæsar, through all eternity. Hence the ease of unlawful enterings into this spacious palace with its hundred rooms while the three or four hundred guests slept. Boccaccio be came the sport of his own profusion. Like a careless prodigal who possesses untold wealth and who gives the keys of it to thievish servants, purposing to go into a far country, his substance is eaten up, the costly dec orations of his palace are stripped and sold, his larder is emptied and weeds cleave the pencilings of his tes sellated floors. But thanks to the all -abundant genius of the Italian, he has not been quite eaten up yet ! For all the nibbling and gnawing and purloining of centu ries there is something left that resembles the Torso of the Vatican to which Michael Angelo when a blind old man would cause himself to be led, and over whose delicious lines he would pathetically pass his fingers, saying that it comforted him. It may be merely a a 2 AN AQUARELLE OF BOCCACCIO . 87 1 headless trunk with two mutilated thighs jutting out, but the Angelos will come and pass their hands over it when their eyes are dim. There is a curious story told of Boccaccio toward the end of his life. A monk of the Carthusian order fell ill, and when near death sent urgent entreaties to him to reform his life, repent of his sins, quit decameroning the men and women of Tuscany, and think of holiness and of God. The entreaties were delivered with all the earnestness and sincerity of a fellow - countryman of Savonarola and they had a powerful effect on the mind of Boccaccio. Little was wanting to a final toss ing of the “ Decameron " into the fire, for which the world would have made a far greater hubbub .than it did when Tom Moore disposed similarly of the me moirs of Lord Byron. Boccaccio was filled with re morse ; he became devout; he ceased to write, or wrote only long tedious dissertations and mythologies in Latin, sifted of all worldliness, purged of the De cameron spirit or if indulging in it, sprinkled with cloves and lavender, as dead as Memnon's statue when the Roman Emperor tried to force it to ring forth its music, stone- dead for all posterity, and never thumb leaved by the most inordinate admirer. He was not able to infuse into the Latin the piquancy, the point, the winsomeness of his love - stories or his practical jokes. It was a lump of dough quite impervious to such leaven . Petrarch again, —his beneficent fairy, — appeared in the nick of time and won the remorseful poet back to immortality and fame. If Boccaccio burnt up his own canzonets when he read the Italian poems of his friend, his fit of remorse had not led him / 88 AN AQUARELLE OF BOCCACCIO. to the fire with the “ Decameron . This great picture of life and manners must have had an asbestos quality ( as Gilfillan would say) ; it must have been non -com bustible ; it could not have burned so wrapped and swathed as it is in the tissues and twinings of the hu man heart. Who cannot fancy the fire flinging it off as a beam of water flings off the gilded ball and will not receive it into its self-abnegating arms ? As to Italian literature before Boccaccio and his friends, as well talk of the world before the flood. The great Florentine who “ found how hard it was to climb the stairs of others, ” the ghostly Dante Ali ghieri, filled the whole horizon with his single immense presence. Noble and pathetic as his great work was, it lacked sunshine, it was the result of a divine dyspep sia , it was spleen sublimated and quickened into genius, it was what the Italians call morbidezza on a grand scale, a sort of seraphic hypochondria, the oozing of that godlike ichor called Genius, the festering, the enrapturing thing that has filled the world with beauty and pain. It was out of this huge looming mass of gloom and splendor that the sunny language of Italy emerged. Hitherto the cultured mind had floated in a sea of Latin, or rather plunged and splashed like a diving -bellman with weights to his feet, —Latin odes, eclogues, epistles, and epics, Latin breviaries and church - histories and missals, Latin this, that, and the other. It was Latin, Latin, Latin, morning, noon, and night. If the people of Italy had suddenly and myste riously perished in the thirteenth century, the con clusion would have been irresistible that they had no language but the jargon of the schools. The superb lit AN AQUARELLE OF BOCCACCIO . 89 erary vehicle of Tacitus lived or rather gasped in the clutches of Dominican or Franciscan friars, ready at any moment to give up its feeble ghost, with pulse al most inaudible, with flesh already tainted by the tomb, with eyes already glazed and clouding in the agonies of dissolution . Still weak as it was it required no less a thunderbolt than the “ Divina Commedia ” entirely to annihilate it, to play the St. George to this rearing dragon . With princely calm the poem of Dante stepped in and took its supreme place, henceforth to represent the people. “ What ! write such a book in the lingua volgare ? ” ejaculated the schoolmen . “ Why not ? ” came with royal self -possession from the lips of the poet. The book was written in the 56 vulgar tongue " and soon lifted the despised vagrant to the lordliest seats in synagogues, universities, and schools of learning. Of course, however, the change was not an instanta neous one, for we find even Dante giving way to the force of habit and wooing the Latin ; even Boccaccio threw much time into his Latin works on the genealo gies of the gods, the names of rivers, mountains, and woods, the fortunes of illustrious men and women, and the eclogues. It is notorious that Petrarch went to the length of thinking more of the long lumbering epic quadruped of the Africa composed in this lan guage than of those tiny nightingales, the canzoni, that sing to us to-day the story of an undying love. Even Ariosto rested from the extravagances of the “ Orlando ” to turn his thoughts into “ elegant " Latin verse. So strong was custom, so nigh to hideous success in crush 90 AN AQUARELLE OF BOCCACCIO . ing the genius of the four poets who like the four piers that Atlas Buonarotti's dome have hung in the air the crown of Italian literature . The Latin had always skulked about the cloisters and convents, in the law courts, in the quadrangles of universities, in the pill boxes of the devotees of Hippocrates, in the rarer air of upper society ; but the revival of learning made it popular and fashionable, and the native intellect of the country had almost an apoplexy from the fuel that fed it. But other kindling influences were at work . The literature of Provence had kindled a school of Sicilian poets that kept alive the memory of the imprisoned Greeks who found time to remember their poets in the gloom of a horrible captivity ; an immense minstrel spirit was abroad in Germany ; and France furnished to the common fund her quota of propulsive influences : all which bore on powerful currents the new tendencies and enthusiasms, the worship of Aristotle and Plato, the imitations of classic models, the new - fangled hob bies and adorations, finally subduing and amalgama ting them , making them homogeneous or dropping them overboard . True, it was long before the literary stomach learned to digest the knots and callousnesses, the lumps and languors of a dead language that were continually forced into it in the shape of the imitations mentioned ; but gradually the processes of time over came these obstacles ; Plato and Cicero were locked up in the lecture-rooms of Bologna or Salerno ; the · sweet influences of the classics rained invisibly upon the tastes and intellects of scholars, and without pro voking in them literary concupiscence to spend their force in eternal sing -song of epode and idyll as eter AN AQUARELLE OF BOCCACCIO . 91 nally ignored by the people to come, moulded and mellowed their minds insensibly and prepared them to mellow their own Tuscan to its present cadence and melody. In looking over the older Italian masters, pre-Raffaelitish and pinched as they are, we are often struck by the long and painful labor it required to get the slim , square, dissonant lines of Giotto and Cimabue to the mellow curves of Perugino, the sunny voluptu ousness of Correggio and Albano, the heaving undula tion of the school of Venice, the sea-like spheric forms of the landscape painters ; how long, how anxiously Art brooded and brown-studied over how to get rid of these imperfections, how to breed out these bítter nesses like the acrid filaments of a nut, how to breed in the fine- wooled cashmeres, so to speak, how to assuage this everflowing wound of points and perpen diculars, these crude crowded back -grounds, rivers winding up the back of Madonnas, lambs browsing in their hair, processions winding up the hills of their elbows, Angels and Gottvaters leaning their chins out of the canvas, shoulders and all, the grotesque perspec tive effects that amuse in the .commencements of art. So the gaunt visage of Tully, the smile of the Sabine poet, the smirk of Catullus, the scowl of Juvenal, are perpetually peeping at us through the dormer -windows of Politian, Poggio, and other Florentine poets, dis torted like a stick in water from their true purpose, till the smile is the smirk , the smirk the scowl. But gradually the gauntness and the simper were softened, disappeared, and only the sweet melodious breathing of the great ancients was heard melodizing the litera ture. And as the perfect sumptuousness of art in the 92 AN AQUARELLE OF BOCCACCIO . > stanze and the loggie of the Vatican sprang from the clumsy beginnings of Tuscan artists, so the fertile lit erature of Italy, if it cannot be said to have sprung directly from the ancients, was largely influenced by the models of antiquity. Boccaccio shared with Pe trarch (who called his own vernacular poems nugellas vulgares ! ) and others the prevailing enthusiasm for classical learning. They copied with their own hands and with incalculable toil many of the manuscripts of ancient works. The former had himself taught Greek by an emigré (as the English of the last century were taught French) , an accomplished Greek of Thessalon ica, and if, instead of rendering Homer into Latin, he had rendered him into his own unrivaled tongue, the translation might have come nearer the spirit of the original in freshness, majesty, and simplicity, than any we have. There was much in Boccaccio that was akin to the high child - like heart of the Greek ; he could be as musically garrulous as any book of Herodotus ; he had a lark -like power of soaring and caroling among the clouds and suns ; and in the Italian language, as it ripples from his silver tongue, there is much that breathes the blithesomeness, the geniality, the sweet temper of the old Ionic words. A peculiarity of Boc caccio was his lover- like fondness for Dante, the gay est and the grisliest of poets. He was all his life- long enamored of him . It was the sunshine that loves the old cathedral walls and that dreams about its glorious windows and tumbles its octave of rainbow light all about within its dim spaces and fires the sculptured glooms with bloom . He was attracted toward this hard strange man as the swan of the North yearns for AN AQUARELLE OF BOCCACCIO . 93 the summer of the South. He continually recurred to Dante as to a great restful shadow for his own excess of light, his own excess of animal spirits. Like the German Schlemihl, Boccaccio was all his life in search of a shadow. His own nature threw none. It resem bled some bright perennial flash, it never slipped west ward to sunset, or sheathed itself in great dim meres of mist, or went away and rested among the cool shade throwing rocks. There is but one spot in his book where the reader pauses and recovers from the contin ual flood and freshet of humor. It is in that soft vale of shadows where he tells the story of unlucky loves. It is a chapter which seems to have caught its shimmer of tears from Dante's story of Ugolino and his children, - that story which tender-hearted Geoffrey Chaucer could not finish for pity, but referred the readers of the Canterbury Tales to “ Dant, the grete poete of Itaille. " In this corner of the “ Decameron ” crouch all the shadows, lurks all the gall that this gentle and genial story-teller could find it in his heart to show. For a moment the curtain is drawn aside, and the eye that had filled its large light-loving pupil brimful of the sparkle of the other stories, recoils aghast at this pathos of burning loves, this valley pressed full of harrowingly sweet faces and forms, this apocalypse of the Pit, this strange and exquisite host of mortal sad ' nesses that yet sing, that yet sparkle like a sea of glass. It is as if some sudden fiery serpent had rolled up from the seas and with many a coil had wound about the Priest of Apollo. Boccaccio was appointed to lecture on the poems of Dante, to which he added a life and valuable commentaries. There is something . 94 AN AQUARELLE OF BOCCACCIO. a beautiful, something appropriate in one great author thus doing reverence to another. To have heard Boc caccio lecturing on Dante ! the lecture - room ' must in deed have had a fragrance of inimitable talk in it as this prince of talkers explained or commented or eulo gized. It must have been one poem melting into an other, deep calling unto deep. The simple talk of Boccaccio over the episode of Francesca and Paolo must have been a divine dropping of poetry, a cadence, a chorus, a rush of happy imagery, a fullness of exqui sitely tender comment. More delightful even than Ver gil would have been such a guide through the Para dise, the Purgatory and the Inferno. The solemn Mantuan never cracks a smile through all the nether journeying, but with Boccaccio even Hades would ring ! There is a joyousness like some sylvan thing in his disposition, a frankness, an impulsiveness most con trary to the awful moral finger of Vergil continually berating the child - like Dante. The marvelous vision under his interpretation must have gained a richness which no mere symbolic phantasmagoria could ever at tain . In talking or in telling of Boccaccio , it seldom enters into one's mind that he was author of anything else than the single celebrated work that is the theme of this lit But in fact, beside the numerous progeny of his Latin tastes and affiliations, there were poems in ottava rima, in terza rima, sonnets, canzonets, ama tory compositions, a hunting romance, tales, composi tions of intermingled verse and prose, satires and the life and commentaries referring to Dante. This exu berant outpouring recalls the natural profusion and tle paper. AN AQUARELLE OF BOCCACCIO . 95 picturesqueness of his native land . But not to these does the world look when the genius of Boccaccio is mentioned . It is to those charming"novelettes, those little feuilletons gay and numberless as fire - flies that form the varied mass of the “ Decameron . ” In the ten interlocutors who carry on the dialogue of the work and knit it into a living and harmonious tissue, the seven signoras and the three signores, we get glimpses askance into the boudoirs and dining-rooms, the saloons and circles of Florence before the invention of printing. It was a rich epicurean aristocracy, a society flushed with patrician elements, an upper circle grown into its own exclusiveness and refinements from a very democratic form of government, all the more ex clusive and refined perhaps from the nearness of a plebeian past. Our story -tellers are lords and ladies creamed and sugar-plummed and confetti'd up to the standard of Florentine gentility, full of wit, good breed ing and accomplishment, and simply adorable in the perfect humor with which they tell their stories. They have agreed to adjourn to a villa in the neighborhood and try to while away ten days in entertaining each other, a plan which they deemed most efficacious in driving away all recollection of the plague, and so far hindering infection . On one of the lovely slopes of Fiesole lay the Villa Gherardi about two short miles ( due piccole miglie, says Boccaccio) from Brunelles chi’s cathedral in the great square of Florence, and to this villa they sauntered forth , purposing to remain until the virulence of the epidemic was assuaged. Boccaccio's own house was in this enchanting neigh borhood , -a bit of paradise painted and planted with ! 96 AN AQUARELLE OF BOCCACCIO. olive, myrtle, and cyclamen (so familiar to the readers of Mrs. Browning) traversed by rivulets, dotted with white cots, yellow with maize- fields or abandoned to a reckless luxuriance of undergrowth. Fiesole is a tuft of celebrated names, immortal memories. The house of Dante lay near, Angelo was born in an adjacent village, the Machiavelli owned estates near by, the meeting of Milton and Galileo took place near an an cient tower that crowns one of the hills. Landor, Leigh Hunt, the Brownings, and many another cel ebrity lived and labored there, embowering the place with overarching recollections, sanctifying it with the musings of the poets and sculptors, the men of letters and of science, to all time and all generations. Every spot there is historic. To crown all, the whole locality reeks (if so coarse an expression be allowed ) with in cidents from Boccaccio. No church - yard is more thickly studded with monumental slabs than are the slopes and promontories, the vales and environs of Fiesole with the genial localizations of this writer. It is itself a glorious Decameron, — this ruined hamlet, —- of scenery and association, sylvan beauty and poetic loneliness. The verdure and freshness, the beautiful palace with its court-yard and corridors, its colonnades and pavilions, its halls and chambers full of joyous frescoes ; the meadows and “ maravigliosi ” gardens around, the wells of coolest water, the cellars of curious wines, - the Villa Gherardesca complete, -stand be fore us in the glowing pages of the “ Decameron,” one of those rare old Florentine summer -seats that lean with indescribable grace on the slopes and spurs of the Apen nines and beckon to the traveller even yet to come and a > AN AQUARELLE OF BOCCACCIO . 97 enjoy them . Forth the' mirthful party tramped and were soon installed, mistress and maid , in the many chambered recesses of the delightful old bit of dilapida tion . They ate, they drank, they slept and danced and walked and bathed to their hearts' content, winding up each day's ten stories with some piquant love-song, either caught and quavered forth from the ready pow ers of improvisation native to the race or remembered from their prevalence and popularity at the time. They all sing of love, they are all tender little sere nades such as are heard any time among the deep vaulted cafés of Rome particularly of a summer even ing. At times they swarm with innuendo and again are amiably impersonal, at times slyly titillating the fair dames and gallant gentlemen, and then soaring carelessly into amorous impersonalities. At all times it is etiquette to applaud, and they are applauded right heartily : after which the jocund company betake them selves to rest. There is no more fragrant picture of Italian life, the license, the luxury, the culture, the urbanity of it, its mornings and evenings tipped or made tuneful with song and story, its great tropical noons slept away in siestas, en déshabille, its nights prolonged by wake and dance, its dreams a sort of un conscious mellifluence . It is as fresh as the pastoral of Longus, and, as bedewed by the artless eloquence of Boccaccio, it has a charm that excels the romance of the Greek . It is not Arcadia , because it is not per fectly innocent ; it is not Elysium because there are frets and fallings out ; but having gathered to its bosom the joyous, the gracious elements of human nature as it is, making no effort to idealize or eliminate, making 7 2 98 AN AQUARELLE OF BOCCACCIO . > all the present swim with what happiness is to be found in it, and stopping on a Sunday to wash and go to church (as the author naïvely remarks), there is not a harsh word to be said against the ten . Where Boccaccio got all his stories has teazed and tormented half a score of his editors. These creatures imagine that by looking they too can come upon hid treasure . And so they pick and pilfer, and snuffle and scent here and there, up and down the attics and lum ber -rooms of history in the hope of trapping and taking him flagrante delicto. It is a looking for gold that has

• not always been successful. Like a forger or a runa

way he has been tracked in Provence, in France, in Britain, in the wanderings of Marco Polo, in the idyls of Theocritus, the stories of Apuleius, the lives of the Holy Fathers, the Hundred Novels, and even in the Purgatory of Dante ! Inexhaustible have been the pains taken to surprise him in pilfer or plagiarism . Even if his stories do sometimes sink their roots in some dismal romaunt of Provençal troubadour or some dreary fabliau of Gaulois poet, it is no business of ours to regret that he has made them bloom, that he has made them brilliant. Boccaccio beyond a doubt drew immensely from contemporary sources ; his personal experience had been checkered, and furnished hints which were all that so fertile a head needed ; and quaint old Mannelli ( whose Latin notes to his hero are often of the most comical description ) tells us that num bers of them were facts, happening to the author and his friends. As told in the bewitching manner which he employs, they surpass anything of the sort ever written in grace, in fun, in verve , in infinite knowledge AN AQUARELLE OF BOCCACCIO . 99 . of the world and in subtle pathos. The " Heptameron " of the Queen of Navarre -- a professed imitation is far beneath its archetype. Few historians have suf ficiently emphasized their immense utility as agents of social and ecclesiastical reform . No such scalding satire ( truly a geyser in flame, in beauty, and in gor geous color), was ever applied to the corruptions of priestcraft, the vices of nunneries and monasteries, the vileness of spiritual advisers, the looseness of men in gowns, the rottenness of remote curates befuddling rustic congregations, the gluttony, concupiscence, effeminacy, greed, and drunkenness of those cassocked myrmidons that ransacked Italy from one end to the other in his time, and disclosed a picture of awful moral eclipse never paralleled in the palaces of Sardanapalus. Boccaccio died a hundred years before the birth of Luther, yet the spectacle of anarchy which the Au gustinian monk beheld as he sauntered through the Porta del Popolo in Rome and put up at the Augustin ian convent beneath Monte Pincio, had been recorded and archived in ink of poison by one of themselves three generations before. Boccaccio's laugh at the priests is perennial. They are his favorites, and as reflected in the pages of the “ Decameron their pimpled , obese, sweltering carcasses rolling to the altars or into the confessional or around the gal leries of the choir swollen by every passion and acrid with everyhumor known to Venus and to Bacchus. The priests were the dandies, the Beau Brummels, of the day. Their delicate white hands, their ample skirts, the unguents which they used after the fashion of the contemporaries of Martial, the wines and spicery, " we see 100 AN AQUARELLE OF BOCCACCIO . the fine linen and eider- down with which their cells were stored, the late hours they kept, the itching for amours and love -scraps, intrigue and sensuality, the neglect of the church, the hatred of piety and fasting, the lengths they went to satiate the most licentious dream , the continual vortex of scandal and profanity in which as in one of Descartes's whirlpools they were swept about ; the triple direction in which they were pulled by the world, the flesh , and the devil, all equally converging in one pit of squalor and obscenity : all this carrion of ecclesiasticism , this gangrene of human frailty, is touched by the divine smile of Boccaccio in a manner at once so light and so piercing, so pro found and so winning, that while loathing the details of his anatomical lecture, you cannot for the life of you help enjoying the mirth that plays about it . Never were priests so fully served up in all the sauce and spice and anchovies and brimstone, that the most finished gourmand could desire. There are omelettes of priests, ragouts of priests, priests aux confitures, priests in potage, loin of priest, priests auxfines herbes, and priests with no herbes at all. All the munificence of a princely fancy twines and tangles about this filth like a vine that springs fervently from a cess- pool, and shakes its innumerable blossoms in the air. Boccaccio ebbs and flows with his own moons ; he obeyed the tidal wave of his own epoch ; it is undeniable that he loved intrigue, and the telling about it, and he dwelt upon these things with a directness and circumstantial ity that have cost his translators unknown torments. For this squeamish tribe the great Italian's fare is too coarse ; they twist and writhe in circumlocution, beat a AN AQUARELLE OF BOCCACCIO . 101 ing about for some fig -leaf to hide their confusion , evading obvious meanings in many a meandering of phrase, fleeing before the full horror of a situation or a dilemma into thickets of words, performing all the feats of prestidigitateurs who, instead of standing on their legs like other people, whip a somersault, crawl on all fours, or double up into unrecognizable masses of arms and legs. A perfect translation of Boccaccio would savor of the language of Swift, or would go even farther back to the rich quaintness and homeli ness of early English, if the air, the art, the aroma, the sprightly atmosphere of the original, are to be caught in any form not perishable. The Frenchman, Courier, understood how to do this with a few chapters of He rodotus and in the masterly rendering of " Daphnis and Chloe ” after the model and in the spirit of Amyot. Littré fancied that Homer could only be done into thirteenth century French. There is so much of the sweet sunny Froissart temper in the “ Decameron that it is a pity to bring out its author in any but the chivalrous costume of at least two centuries and a half ago, the costume of Raleigh and Sir Philip Sidney . Leigh Hunt would have made a delightful translator : so imbued was he with the essence and imagery, the turns and idioms of Elizabethan dramatists, and so in sympathy with Italian literature of every era. He was a deep drinker and lover of Boccaccio, too, and loving congeniality is the master characteristic of successful translation . Boccaccio's view of women is loose and yet lovable : he will go to any permitted length and beyond, but in a spirit so amiable, so full of oldtime gallantry that the > 102 AN AQUARELLE OF BOCCACCIO . ence. iciest of the sex must thaw and forgive. There is end less variety in his panorama of them , - craft, cunning, heroism , voluptuousness, sublime devotion , - every emotion, every situation of which woman is capable is stowed away in his great portfolio of human experi He is minister of the Interior to the race at large. No field of diplomatic encounter as developed in the female heart, no stratagem known to it whether when beleaguered or neglected, no excess whether on the side of hate or affection, escapes his wit. And so his princes, sultans, friars, huntsmen , knights, boors, and men of science come within the same broad curve of universal sympathy, touched by the same mellowing influence. They form no panorama of dolls and sticks. They are from the seething throng that gathered one morning under the leadership of Savonarola in the piazza of Florence, and with yells and howlings built up a pyre of exquisite works of art, thrust in their idiot torches, and burnt up the whole, but chiefly copies of this very work. The very priests whom it satirized were perhaps the cause of its preservation, for even they could not flinch when they found their vices scourged by such a laughter -loving hand, and most likely had Boccaccio lived a little longer, he would have beheld the “ Decameron ” placed as a luxury on the convent- shelves side by side with the unguents, the confections, the perfumes, the Greek wines and the rouge -pots which it so scathingly rebukes. With an old Latin writer we may exclaim , Utinam similes fabulas vel historias plures descripsisset Boccac cius ! THE ROME OF THE MARBLE FAUN. I. a THE “ Diary of an Ennuyée ” was one of the truest and most charming books ever written on Italy. Such was the opinion of the painter Allston, as delivered in his sonnet to Mrs. Jameson. The poet, in his declining years, re-awoke to the charm of the associations called up by the pen of the invalid lady. He remembered the days when he sauntered among the stone -pines of the Villa Borghese, listening to the conversation of Coleridge, and a thousand bright and winning adven tures were startled into life again as the friendly histo rian went on recording her experiences, criticisms, and impressions. In language scarce less vivid than the figures on the canvas, he thanked and blessed her for her charming book, and closed his own works with the sonnet aforementioned . But truer and more stirring was the work in which the genius of Nathaniel Haw thorne lifted up its voice and shed the yearning of many a long year as a sweet odor abroad upon the world. Like yeast worked the sunlight of the Cam pagna in him, as he sat in his dim cottage-home, at Redcar, in England, and thought of the fogless, luxuri ous land which, with its art and landscape, its air and light, cleft the blue sheet of the Mediterranean with 104 THE ROME OF THE MARBLE FAUN . many a curve and swelling promontory, many an inlet, with its lines of beauty, many a seaside resort, em balmed in the double benediction of pagan and Chris tian civilization . With Hawthorne there was no in cident, no recollection, no experience, that did not take a dramatic form and creep forth quaintly or richly idealized into romance. So, amid the quiet of life, in a small seashore resort, there were times when, drop by drop, distilled the honey of rich remembered expe rience, when he was in the habit of idling along the bright, shadowless streets of Rome, out upon the Via Sacra, among the clustered convents of the Aventine, within the shattered wilderness of the Coliseum , as it lay spiritualized in moonshine, or over the blossoming fields that cover the Catacombs, and have cicatrized, in such a beautiful manner, these gigantic wounds of former days. The unceasing fermentation of these walks and associa tions ended in “ The Marble Faun ." “ The Marble Faun , " like the ancient palm its author loved to watch in the gardens of Monte Pincio , holds its head aloft among its strange- featured brethren , and may be seen afar as the crown of all his works. Perhaps absence from the actual ground of his story gave a fervor to the romancer which, had he trodden among the filth and the superstition of the reality as his plot progressed , would materially have modified it and thrown about it less of the poetic gauze of the imagination. Still the author's instinctive taste revolted at any exaggerations, and never ran into the grosser form of excessive color. Rome was to him an infinite depository of facts, beyond which there was no going, and no desire to go. Its history and its legends were familiar to him, and they THE ROME OF THE MARBLE FAUN . 105 surpassed in marvelous detail all the “ vexed Ber moothes” which the poet could create or enrich with his deposit of fanciful beings. How interesting is the process of this work , this stalactite dripping through seven years, distilling drop, drop, drop, oozing noise lessly through the quiet nights, the busy days, the twi lights, and the dawns ; shedding the shining deposit unheard by mortal ear-drum , until up grew the re spondent stalagmite, together clanged the crystal seg ments in the fire-point of a human soul, magically sprang up the twined and many-angled brotherhood of columns and crystals, caverns and arches, incrustations, frozen dews, quaint efflorescences- characters, scenery , passions, dialogue, plots —reared like an Arabian pal ace, or a temple of Astarte, pervaded by its own strange light, resonant with its own goblin music, swept like some many-chorded instrument into rich instrumenta tion, full of sweet noises as the voice of Casella singing to Dante amongst purgatorial fires, full of immortal pain and triumph, humiliation and victory. And all this going on while the gray German Sea was tụmbling in at his feet, while the dim English fog was hugging the shores of inhospitable Redcar ! Rich, indeed, must have been the incrusted memories of this sojourn in the sunny peninsula, living, indeed, must have been those experiences, submerged like ever -thrilling bells in consciousness, underlying, like a world of wreathing coral, the routine of daily life, flow ing a viewless river that sang of the land through which it passed like the stars in the “ Paradiso. ' Hawthorne's life as, indeed, the life of every great was cleft into these pregnant halves: the prac 66 man - 106 THE ROME OF THE MARBLE FAUN. > tical, the business- like, the world -absorbed, in its most poetic phases a sort of summer Netherlands, prosper ous and tranquil ; and then the leaf turned down, into which no human eye could look, brilliant, quaint, fanci ful, scribbled all over with the handwriting of Ariel and Puck, burnt at the edges with the glowing dyes of Byzantine illuminators, affluent in arabesques that have bewitched the margins in many a moment of idle imagination, etched with the rare essences that scar any but the fingers of genius, fertile as any natural leaf in those wonderful lines that cross and recross, curve and recurve upon each other through the works of Nature . And all so persuaded into accord, so im mersed in individuality, that the wonder is how they did not overgrow the other life and make of it a thing equally beautiful and striking. It came forth, how ever, after long brooding; the embodied aroma of Italian wanderings, —this leaf, or rather this blossom, with a fragrance unlike any other, mellow to the core with all the mellowness of matured powers. There is no crudeness, no acid, no cold twinkle of sep tentrional stars. All is warm, benignant, voluptuous, for the romance has bathed in the baths of Caracalla, and been richly mulled with the spices of the Eternal City. The sun of the Janiculum, the sweetness of Italian art, the mirth and tenderness of Italian char acter, the gayety and loveliness of Italian scenery,form such atmosphere of reality in the book, that the shut eye beholds again the Alban Hills, the villas, the ever-spouting fountains, the sky -piercing obelisks, the heights topped with convents, the mournful and glori ous ruins, and all the heroic or the petty characteristics THE ROME OF THE MARBLE FAUN. 107 which, fused into one transcendent whole, summon before the imagination the awful and touching vision of surviving Rome. No man knew better than Haw thorne how to spread this atmosphere over his work, make everything swim in it as in a mysterious refract ing medium for his own artistic or imaginative pur pose. Real as his characters are, life - like as is their life, they are all but unreal in the presence of that immutable fragment of antiquity amid which they move and act. But so skillfully has the artist carved their loves and fates, their lives and geniuses on those masses of immortal rock, that they seem part and par cel of the handiwork of the past, and come before us endowed with the same unchangeableness. There was a rare cordiality in the understanding between this representative of the New World and the venerable mother of the Legions and the Twelve Tables. It did not appear to be a relation of exotic to conserva tory, but of seed to soil, of instinct to fruition , of dream to realization . Hawthorne found in Rome all the thin spiritual media which he loves to hang be tween the reader and himself, all the canonized hero ism or pathos that could move the most obdurate heart. His whole stay there was a yielding to these instream ing impressions, this aura of antiquity, these battle winds that blew over Cleopatra and Cæsar. And without becoming incarnate as with the historian, they set the poet to poetizing, and shed over his work the sweetest sense of ancientness and truth. The obelisks become older, the palaces of the Cæsars more eloquent, the aqueducts of the emperors more vener quiet footfall reëchoes among them , or this kindred as this 108 THE ROME OF THE MARBLE FAUN. tongue moralizes over the vicissitudes through which they have passed. The touch is so gentle, and yet it communicates an infinite remoteness to what it touches. The footstep is so light, and yet it crashes with the boom of thunder through these vocal ruins. The pen is so full of grace, and yet with wolfish pertinacity it worries the secret out of whatever it describes. While his characters move with passionate precipita tion through the catastrophe and plot which the author has designed for them , yet behind and beyond all there is the repose of eternal nature, eternal art, eternal re ligion. It is a repose flowing in from the Campagna, leprous with sunlight ; repose gathered from the tomb of the Scipios, welling up from the nine hundred miles of catacombs, and resting upon all the romance like a spirit of peace. It is just this contrast that makes “ The Marble Faun ” so charming- the great South ern heart of Miriam lighting its eternal fire amid this divine tranquillity, Medea stung to madness under the noble quiet of Ægean skies. Even upon King Lear, even upon Hamlet, it steals like the dews of evening. Throughout Hawthorne there are these breathing spaces, these lyric interludes, these joys of ever-living hills and valleys, along which may be found still waters of rest. Whenever there is a solemn eclipse, a moment of overwhelming struggle, a sorrow more than the heart can bear, up loom the lovely precipices of Sor acté, gayly leap the fountains in the great Piazza of St. Peter, royally glints Bernini's colonnade in morning sunshine, lovingly are the exquisite arms of Tuscan landscape thrown about us, and weare allured away. So adroitly is this done, that we hardly notice it. THE ROME OF THE MARBLE FAUN . 109 cross. When he takes us into St. Peter's, we are lost in the ambient sunniness of the cathedral, so golden, so'great, so hospitable does it seem ; so numberless the clustered tombs of popes and emperors ; so graceful the cherubs that sway aloft the vases of Acqua Santa ; so oppres sive the possibilities of a great festival there ; so measureless the ornamentation of this mighty, hollow And yet, glorious as it is, it symbolizes merely the instrument of crucifixion, and is but a crystallization of that. We grow dizzy with this richness, and all but forget the errand that introduces Hilda into it. Every phase of modern Roman life and manners was familiar to him. His object was not, however, to describe these. They were left to the pen of Story, About, and others. But it was 6 the sense of sweet ness that ever trickled round his heart, " the sentiment of touching and unchangeable rest that broods upon the lava-stones of the Appian and Flaminian Ways, and hangs about the Roman Forum, and loiters along the Tiber- brink, melting as voice into voice into the artistic and landscape envelopment of Rome. The Rome of art met ' a deep response in this quaint New England nature. After his acquaintance with Italy, it is plain to see that Hawthorne's style took a richer form , an eastern sunniness which it had never known before. It is just the delicious sunbeam that Rem brandt van Ryn throws athwart his sombre portraits. Always prone to create gorgeous women, the women of “ The Romance of Monte Beni ” show the atmos phere in which they were bred. Miriam exceeds Zenobia or Hester Prynne in richness ; Hilda, though ethereal enough, is brunette, soul and body. Kenyon a 110 THE ROME OF THE MARBLE FAUN. is redolent of Canova, in whose studio the romancer places him ; and Donatello is not only a faun, but akin to the impassioned creations of Boccaccio, child of fervid crusades, blood - brother to the fiery genius of Dominic. Whatever the ancients meant by their faun creation frolicsome, humorous waifs as they were, Donatello, in Hawthorne's hands, is endued with the warmest humanity, and a humanity fed on the cream and fire of an Italian clime. Quite as perfectly as Praxiteles , has he wrought out his conception of the Faun, but he has suffused the marble with the enam ored blushes of life. Long before Hawthorne, Boc caccio had worked out the same problem, the same cipher, the same transformation of dense animal tis sues into quivering nerve - force . As we read the art less stories of the “ Decameron ,” we cannot but con trast this story , in particular, with the exquisite elaboration which it received from the genius of our countryman nearly five hundred years afterwards. Whether Hawthorne had read Boccaccio, we have no means of knowing, but both writers struggled for the same prize, the faint, faint link which visionaries had thrown between man and beast in the old my thologies, — the hand grasping through the darkness after the severed chain of creation, - the instinctive consciousness of a chasm somewhere for thousands of years tugging at the heart of man, recently so cele brated from the investigations of English experiment alists. Modern science is not so poetic as antique myth, and it may not be more true. It was, at least 11 Dec. , Giornata Quarta, Novella Prima. 1 THE ROME OF THE MARBLE FAUN . 111 curious that both in Boccaccio and in Hawthorne, Love “ L'Amor che move il sole e l'altre stelle," should be selected as the agent of reconciliation. It is interesting to follow Hawthorne in the architect ural and landscape elements of his story, to watch how step by step he worked each into his woof, - combin ing, foreshortening, distributing masses of light and darkness, throwing here transparent graces of color, and there projecting Salvatoresque glooms of shadow ; and everywhere diffusing his own personality like a fine mist. Few travellers have observed old Rome so lovingly, so delicately ; with few has the pathetic eloquence of its decay dwelt in such permanence. Even more elo quently than in the noble lament of Gibbon, because in a more spiritualized form , looms up the wasted presence of the Eternal City in this book. All its poetry is therein garnered and sung ; all its noonday glare and indo lence are commemoratedl ; the freaks of architect, time, and nature ; the many beauties of antiquity and art ; the airiest caroling of its legends of the saints. The very blood - stains on its garments are touched by the chrism of this magician and made to sparkle with the rich fires of worshiping fancy. All this perhaps is not discover able in detail ; but the book at large is imbued with it. It is the last will and testament of a heart that was sick ening, bequeathing to the world its sweetest possession before yet the evil days were come, while yet the rich ness of the evening was shedding itself over the world, while yet the sea was garrulous with outgoing tides, while yet the skies were enamored of the light and 112 THE ROME OF THE MARBLE FAUN . Ormuzd shone afar on the evening hills. Hawthorne seems to have weakened after the publication of this romance ; he had given his best ; more he had not to give. To quote Dante's beautiful verses : “ Era già l'ora che volge ' l desio Al naviganti, e intenerisce ' l cuore Lo di ch' an detto a' dolci amici a Dio. E che lo nuovo peregrin d'amore Punge, se ode squilla di lontano Che paia ? l giorno pianger che se muore." It was not hard to see that the pilgrim's ear was quick ening to other sounds. His garments were travel stained, his staff broken, his sandals rent, and the scal lop was dry. After long and memorable journeying he sat down under his favorite palm of the Pincio garden and conceived this conclusion to his day's work . He put into it all the gifts that he possessed : dramatic power , ennobling sentiment, nervousness of style, fervor of memory, strength of imagination, and searching psychological analysis. The whole moved in the world's highest and most concentrated focus, impreg nated with the luxuriousness of the afternoon, steeped in the inspiration exhaling from the spot. There are few more genial guides to the treasures of Rome mod ern, ancient, or mediæval. The octaves which he has chosen from the great instrument are just those from which are crushed the most enduring harmonies. It is impossible not to be smitten with admiration at the alter nate relief which tumultuous action and the passionless solemnity of nature afford each other in it, the frozen masses of the columned and capitaled temple and the fervors of the ever-burning shrine. The book is full of art, antiquity, grace. And such is the sweetness of THE ROME OF THE MARBLE FAUN . 113 its language that all these, like an antique Psyche en wreathed in drapery, shine the more alluringly through the transparent film . II. How delightful it is to climb the stairs of the Capito line Museum at the foot of which dreams the mighty figure of Hadrian, and, throwing aside the curtains, enter the room where are grouped the Faun of Praxiteles, the Dying Gladiator, the Apollo, the Antinous, and the self -same Girl playing with a Dove which Hawthorne so beautifully sketches in his opening chapter. This opening chapter salutes the reader like a salvo of silver bells, and for sweetness there are few in our language that excel it. Below, in the court-yard, with its satyrs and Priapuses, reclines the once popular figure of Mar forio , which the Roman populace used to regard with such reverence for the confidential dialogues carried on between it and the statue of Pasquin, so genially recumbent, so meditatively tranquil as it looks downis filled with water and serves as a fountain to this classic court-yard. There is a jovial hugeness about this statue which most genially reproduces the time when it was the people's delight, and every morning found it fes tooned with diatribes against pope and citizen. Pass ing on up to the piece of sculpture which suggested Hawthorne's story, there are seen the plans of ancient Rome which have thrown so much light on post-Au gustan topography ; the Doves of Pliny that flit ethere ally about their mosaic vase ; the Iliac table that taught into the commodious sarcophagus at its side . Po 8 114 THE ROME OF THE MARBLE FAUN . the Roman school-boy how to figure Troy; and the dim chamber of the Capitoline Venus, delicious foam imprisoned in pouting marble, a snow - flake sculptured into the voluptuous semblance of a goddess, that once adorned the boudoir of some Suburran beauty. You are then shown down through chambers where, the pious . fingers of the antiquary have labeled , numbered, and shelved the hierarchy of Roman emperors and courte sans like reptiles in jars. What an audience of smirk ing, scowling animals, relieved now and then by the grace of Aurelius or the charming contours of Agrip pina. Graphic marbles, equal to any gallery of New gate ! But in the presence of the sublime Gladiator, the beautiful Praxiteles, each with its impress of impas sioned weakness or grace, -these mystic caryatides of Life and Death, Light and Twilight waging here as everywhere immortal warfare, - these. twin pillars of human existence cloven from the eternal heart of Pentel icus, —reigns the serenity that Greek sculpture diffuses wherever it rests. There is a smile, an archness, an in describable lingering of happy memories about the lips of the Faun that have passed into Hawthorne's ro mance and made it sweet. In the crossed leg, the careless attitude, the arching head , the idle flute (one warble from which would shake the frozen limbs loose, and make them dance like Berenice- hair ), the graceful indolence of the arm against the thigh , we have the supreme of expressive art. You see the rounded curving of voluptuous life, the swell and arch and undu lation of lines delicate as music, the sunshine of the Parthenon and Praxiteles, the abandon of artistic joy > ?i THE ROME OF THE MARBLE FAUN . 115 working on the smiles and the sweetnesses of life, not passionately a-hunt as though gadfly -stung for some conception that will divinely content. Praxiteles must have worked out this figure in his sunniest hours, when his mood was golden or the air was full of moonbeams. It must have been in the presence of the Cupid that he worshiped, surrounded by the lovely women of Athens, with reminiscences of Canephoræ and Ephebi and all grace- informed things crowding in upon him. He must have sung as Leonardo did when he painted, clasping to his memory, as Fra Angelico did the cru cifix, the eloquent marbles of Polycletus and Pythago ras, chipping the spotless fragments from off the dim dawning shoulders of his Faun, like flakes of light, and with a mind instinct with the brilliant elation of genius dragging, lover- like, reluctant immortality from the marble. We can fancy each delightful incongruous influence swelling up to the workshop of the master and melting as the hum of bees multitude- like into the mood that conceived this fairy birth. There is so much human tenderness in the smile, that Hawthorne was justified in seizing upon the mystic possibilities which it foreshadowed and building them into the airy fabric of transcendental romance. Among all the European gal leries and all the copies of this statue there is none so sweet, so true as this. This is truly an animal budding if not blazing into humanity. This is indeed the dead phial that began to live and blaze under the intense eye of Faust. But the animal is no longer the fixed but the ephemeral type, the magic globules boil within the brain of Faust and convert him into a demi-god. Prax iteles has gone so far as to conceal the tail that accom 116 THE ROME OF THE MARBLE FAUN . panies and hopelessly bestializes other fauns, as if he would make the transformation absolute, as if he would pluck out the last discord from the sublimated organiza tion of his work . He looks as if his lips had just reaped their sweetness from the flute which he grasps, and his limbs were one after the other lulling under the dropping cadences into luxurious repose. Or as if the most soul-suffusing mirth had somehow got en tangled in his spirit and released the glowing chrys alid from a simply brute repose. The Greek type has been departed from , in the slight upward turn of the nose, that tendril - like curve of the nostril which struck Hawthorne as so genial. With great skill has he limned as with streaks of fire the outlines of his Donatello and imparted to him the gayety, the gentle ness, the movement of the Faun, deepening, as the story proceeds, under the Oriental richness of Miriam's association into more fervid hues, characteristics more distinct, tokens more telling of a human soul. This splendid shadow of a woman, so poetic, so melancholy, so inebriate with art, whose character has the purple opaqueness of clouded amethyst, with all pardonable and unpardonable desires, this Miriam swoops athwart the poor bright faun -disc like some scarlet eclipse, span gles it with blood, and soon subdues it to her own like But the evolution is not through smiles - it is through the poisoned bath of tears, it is through strong crying and infuriate wrestling. Praxiteles did not probe beyond the mirth — but here is something sterner , haggarder, holier. How charming is the success of the ek artist, how fragmentary that ofthe Anglo - Saxon ! It is a dream -drugged lotus-eater compared with the ness. THE ROME OF THE MARBLE FAUN. 117 creature moulded of all lovely memories of the Ilissus and the Eurotas. In the soft rounded contours, the artless witchery of the pose, the fragrant joy that ex hales richly from the original, there is focalized the whole of an extinct civilization, there is unsphered from the mere pictorial symbol the glorious fearless ness and freedom and energy that triremed the whole Mediterranean and ham-strung the monarchy of Xerxes. But Donatello, however marvelous may be the shy elaboration of his character as faun quickly glides within the margin of modern sympathies and loses the tricksome sylvan instincts of his forefathers. It is more a human being lifted to the quaint realization of the faun - nature than a faun quickened to darkling con sciousness of humanity. Not even Donatello's sensi tiveness about his ears will quite make us believe him a scion of so picturesque a race. How characteristic is the ear ! Winckelmann knew but one perfect pair that had come down to us from antiquity. The ears of fauns as found in sculpture are furry and shoot upward to a funny little point, precisely as if they would twitch humorously and their owner bound away at the slightest human footfall. Praxiteles has ideal ized them to two tender little rudiments about which hover amorous clusters of curls, anxiously abundant if, peradventure, the tell - tale point may be hidden. It is a brilliant, breathless promise of possibilities. At this point he is seized by Hawthorne, kneaded by palms of flame, marvelously wrought into more than statuesque life - likeness, brooded upon passionately by all the fash ioning energies of the artist, and like some exquisite instrument flung upon the airs of summer and shower 118 THE ROME OF THE MARBLE FAUN . ing them back in music, imbibes a soul. The humor, the merry playfulness of the original, appear in the earlier volume of the romance, but finally thicken into grim sarcasm and lurid violence. At times we cannot help thinking that a most lovable being has been spoiled by attraction into the whirling vortex of humanity, that we should prefer the Faun, as the rival of Scopas has so sunnily conceived him, to all the rich romance of imaginative fiction . The Faun of Praxiteles as he nestles in one's memory is a being perfect, sufficient in itself, the charming offspring of poetizing fancy, loath ing darkness and sadness and the babble of multitudi nous cities. There are dancing, fluting, drinking, flower crowned fauns all more or less eloquent with dance, drink, motion, pleasure, and music ; but to none have been communicated such generous shares of genius and glory, such ethereal mirth and sweetness as to this work of Greek imagination. There are fauns in Pa rian and in Pentelic, of the Louvre, the Vatican, the Uffizzi, and the Museo Borbonico, of the vases of Etruria and the frescoes of Pompeii. But all pale be fore this emblem of sweet youthfulness that sheds a positive glamor of joy over the little square chamber where it stands. This little square chamber struggles as vainly to hold all this radiance as the witch-shadow to quench the bright protuberant limb of the new moon. From the same small chamber, when wearied with the riches of the Museum, the eye may wander through double windows to some of the most characteristic landscapes about Rome. Through one, across a tufa paved quadrangle in the centre of which prances the THE ROME OF THE MARBLE FAUN . 119 noble equestrian statue of Aurelius in bronze, sole relic of innumerable such that once tossed their tawny manes in every piazza of the city, -rises one of the palaces built by Michael Angelo. This palace is full of dim tapestries, fragments of colossal feet and hands (ex pede Herculem ), odds and ends of triumphal arches, an authentic statue of Julius Cæsar, the famous bronze Wolf of the Capitol, and numerous remains of former ages. And not to be forgotten are the shell cameo women who, nestled in one of the under apart ments, sell specimens of carven shells, Roman mosaic, works in pietra dura, and florid copies of Umbrian and Florentine masters. Behind stretches the squalid pre cinct of the Tarpeian Rock , upon which you look from a delightful garden back of the Prussian embassy, breathing memories of Niebuhr, Bunsen , Dr. Arnold, and Thorwaldsen . Beyond swim the undulous pur ples and amaranths of the Campagna threaded by the Tiber and dying in golden faintness against the cliffs of Alba. No light in the world is so soft, so phospho rescent, so touching, as that which broods over the Campagna Romana and converts it into one of the most delicious epicurean landscapes. No Cuyp, no Claude, no Zuccarelli, no pencil of Turner or Vernet ever heaped up in picture such magnetic mounts of slumberous gold, such fertile metamorphoses of morn ing and evening mist, such lines of penciled aërialized mountain that throb faint and far against the sculpt ured horizon. It is the fashion of tourists to snub the Campagna for its monotony. But whoever loves the storied cloud , the pensive magic of cloud - capped dis tances, the pathos of ever-brooding solitudes, the mag 120 THE ROME OF THE MARBLE FAUN . netic power of rains and towers and tombs, and slopes of far-expanding hills that seem to swoon against the sky in ghost- like glory and dimness, and to lean for very giddiness against the shoulder of the firmament ; whoever loves a dim and turbid river that traverses the most magnificent of earthly silences, and from the fret and the spume of its yellow waters seems to spurn the notice of the parvenus hurrying to the pleasures of the city : let him follow these aqueducts as they sweep through the desert and vanish into historic heights ; let him follow the trail of these ruined tombs. Through the other window stretches, or rather sleeps in opium - slumber, the landscape so graphically described in the Romance : the Mamertine Prison, the sculptured sweep of Severus’s Arch, the domes and campaniles of ancient churches, the historic parallelo gram of the Roman Forum with its ruin - strewn floor ; and beyond, Coliseum , Via Sacra, the massy arch of Constantine, and the gardens of the Dominican monks of S. Gregorio, shut in by mountains whose hues seem borrowed from the blue lustres of brimstone. From the back window of the corridor the eye climbs lei surely up the straggling pile of the Ara Coeli church whose interior is so dim and ornate, and whose richly columned aisles point backward to a hoary antiquity . It was amid these aisles that Gibbon loitered one evening to vesper-service, and while mourning the lost presence of the Capitoline Jupiter, suddenly gathered the idea of the “ Decline and Fall. ” No hill in the wide world is so enamored of memory, so coro neted with recollections, so cloud - capped with the min THE ROME OF THE MARBLE FAUN . 121 gled duskiness of successive civilizations as this humble hillock of the Capitol. However bemired and be mewed with sentiment, it is impossible to resist its po etic appeal. In more modern times Rienzi and Pe trarch the Knight and the Poet of sentiment have clothed it with romantic interest. Near by is the con vent founded by Vittoria Colonna, the street made memorable by the tower of mirrors of the magician Virgil ( Tor' dei Specchi), and at the foot of the hill dwelt Messer Michele Agnolo. III. Around this focus of transcendent recollections the opening chapters of " The Marble Faun ” cluster like a group of feathery palms. Insensibly, historical Rome has crept into its pages, and given a mellowed under tone to the imaginative framework . The adventure in the Catacombs brings vividly before the mind that tract of subterraneous Rome which in all ages has powerfully thrilled the fancy. It is the ground - floor of which Rome and the Campagna are the second story . More interesting than the hillsides of Judæa or Cyrenais, because intimately connected with the early Christian church, these awful caverns riot and run like estuaries of hell through leagues of mouldering bones and twine about the foundations of palaces and villas . Santa Agnese, S. Calixto, and S. Sebastiano admit the visitor to their abysses of horror, foul with gases, and oozing at every pore with the ghastly ichor of centu ries. The guides fetch out a jar of pinkish wine and 122 THE ROME OF THE MARBLE FAUN . fortify the constitutions of the weak against the chill that lurks in these dismal sepulchres. The imagina tion of the martyrs who inhabited this Tartarus, this obscene gulf of Eblis, rioted in a hideous architect ure whose rudeness intensifies the horrors of the in fernal grottoes where it is found. Now and then a beautiful epitaph over some mouldering saint illumines the place, and occasionally the slit- like passages swell into oratories, in whose awful shades the Christians worshiped by stealth many a long year ago . Noth ing is more curious than to dip into some historian who exults in the outer magnificence of the Roman Empire, and then dive into these abominations of inner magnificence with all their scowling suggestive ness. The palace -life of Rome was no less familiar to Hawthorne's eye. He knew the exquisite cloistered court-yards of Baldassare Peruzzi. He had studied the huge piles of tufa fashioned from the Coliseum by An-. gelo into Farnese -palaces whose walls flaunt with frescoes of Annibale Caracci. He was intimate with the ornate palaces of the Doria, the Colonna, and the Farnesina, whose outer shell is chiseled into an archi tectural fairy - land and whose interiors at once blaze and bloom with all the riches of decorative art, sculpture, painting, mosaic, bronze work , candelabra which perhaps Cellini modeled, pillars of rosso antico climbing into ceilings where float Guido's Aurora, the Psyche of Raphael. He had often walked through their corridors that wandered as if unconsciously into spaces peopled with the creations of the chisel, stair cases ascending to lofty darkened chambers replete THE ROME OF THE MARBLE FAUN . 123 with portraits, luxurious furniture, ancient tapestries. Suburban villas, like the Ludovisi, the Borghese, or the Albani, whose very names in the liquid Italic tongue sound like music, and whose presence is an im mortal compliment to art, were the objects of many an expedition. But there was a far humbler class of pal aces with which he was acquainted, the comprehensive abode of princes, patricians, ambassadors, magistrates, artists, shoe - blacks and pastry-cooks, all in one, to which the Eternal City treats her teeming population, and which tier on tier, floor on floor, like the hanging gardens of Semiramis, rise from fountained and flower ing gardens to the dismal attics that night- cap all Ro man houses. In these encyclopedias of life you may climb over the heads of scions of the Sang Royal, car dinal legates, representatives of puissant realms, sprigs of the aristocracy, the venerable representatives of the Law , the Prophets, and the Pill-box, into the meaner sphere of plebeian, artistic , or economical Rome, en tirely ignoring each other's existence, each behaving as if the whole tenement belonged to himself, and each coming or going on his respective business in the most independent way possible. Cabals, cakes, cardinals ' hats, maccaroni, lawyers' briefs, plasters, salves and sig nories, pride and punchinello, princes of the purple and beggars with the purples, all issue from these houses in picturesque confusion . And whether it be measles or millionaires, divines or dice, maccaroni or marchesi, seldom does anything occur to mar the de lightful harmony. A sculptor's studio nestles amongst the beautiful apartments of the Palazzo Barberina. A livery -stable embalms the under atmosphere of an . 124 THE ROME OF THE MARBLE FAUN . other. The clangor of soldiers is heard in the yard of the Palazzo Rospigliosi, where the casino lies that en shrines the masterpiece of Guido. Such is the Rome of reality and of Hawthorne, -a jumble of contrasts, incongruities, filth , and glory. At one moment the ol factories are outraged by fiendish smells, and the next delighted feet are pacing the halls of the Villa Albani where Winckelmann studied the treasures of the an cients. One of the queerest of these Roman Babels Haw thorne selected as the dwelling of Hilda, a square mediæval tower, still to be seen as one of the curiosi ties near the Palazzo Borghese. Kenyon, the fourth character of the book, occupied the studio of Can ova, a tiny twin - storied house, inlaid with frag ments of bassi relievi and traceries, like Abbotsford , lying near the Mausoleum of Augustus. This mauso leum , after overflowing with imperial corpses from Divus Augustus to Hadrian , was rified, burned , con verted to a fortress in the Middle Ages, and has now become a spot where Rome literally dances over the graves of the emperors, an open -air theatre. It was strange to hear the ravings of the melodrama, one bright August evening, in this mighty sepulchre, while the chimes of neighboring churches rang the Ave Maria. The air was sweet, the stars twinkled, the chimes floated elfishly through an atmosphere ring ing and resonant as a cymbal. But the hoarse dec lamation of the actors fell on the ear with strange remoteness. There was in the air a more powerful presence that touched the spiritual ear and made it tremble with inaudible melodies. Bandits have roosted -- THE ROME OF THE MARBLE FAUN . 125 in the tomb of Cecilia Metella ; popes and prelates have made the tomb of Hadrian frown with cannon ; and the tomb of the Cæsars has become a theatre ! It is only on the Tiber that history indulges in such wit. But grim as it is, it is all wreathed in intensest poetry. All round the everlasting monuments of pagan and pontifical civilization have grown up a second poetry, a more fertile art, a many pillared architecture, not less interesting than the first. Through many a chink and cranny has this stolen into the “ Romance of Monte Beni," and fertilized it, and made it flourish to sweet purpose, and left it in our libraries an ardent memorial of worship of the beautiful. Of the fourteen or fifteen hundred shrines that burn a taper before the image of the Madonna in Rome, Hawthorne has kindled and commemorated one that will shine as long as our language lasts, -the taper in Hilda's Tower. The worship of Our Blessed Lady clings and climbs about the territories of the Holy See more fervently than anywhere else. Before gas and Victor Emanuel were introduced, these tapers shimmered through dark and dangerous streets, and the wayfarer was indebted to their Samaritan radiance for many an escape from thieves. Gas has cheapened the pretty superstition , and there is no little inkling of shrewdness in the way piety and utility have blended in having the public lamps lighted before these ancient shrines. Alas ! the Rome of dim streets and gorgeous ceremonies, frantic carnivals, local superstitions, bright bodiced cantadine, panniered donkeys, and impassioned morra , is helter -skeltering away before the sturdy little giant Victor. The artists' models no longer loaf on 126 THE ROME OF THE MARBLE FAUN . the Spanish Stairs, as when Dickens so charmingly pictured them . The sweet voices of the nuns of the Sacré Coeur are no longer heard at sunset chanting the litany of the Virgin. The pope no longer ambles about on his white mule in the sylvan fastness of the Vatican garden. There are no processions and pontifical tunics flaunting along the Corso, or buge carcasses of purple-pampered dignitaries rolling by in lumbering coaches. And the Friday evenings of sum mer . passion into the eloquent purple of Roman mid night, without the usual sermon in the arena of the Coliseum . The American of old-world spirit bewails the evanescence of these things and begins to look about him for the compensating graces or even utilities of all this reform . One of the villas of the Esquiline has been transformed into a Caliban of a railway sta tion ; the Prætorian Camp is fast reforming to a laby rinth of obscene alleys ; the old mills that have been grinding on the Janiculum from time immemorial will soon, doubtless, no longer be driven by the rushing tides of the great fountain of Paul and Fontana, and the remorseless calculations of improvement will let out the Aventine in lots ! One of the most attractive features of Rome is the fountains that tinkle or tremble in the many piazzas. Of all imaginable designs, from the simplest to others that luxuriate in the extravagances of fancy, they throw up their sheets of silver through the Roman noonday with a freshness and a plenitude that no language can describe. From the pair that shoot aloft their spark ling water-dust in the square before St. Peter's to the magnificent amplitude of the Fontana Paolina, as it a THE ROME OF THE MARBLE FAUN. 127 shivers in threefold splinters into the lake- like reser voir, there is every variety both of size and artistic excellence, some are genuine works of art. If Bernini succeeded in anything beyond his grand colon nade -- his angelic and devotional statuary is disgust ing -it was in the piling up of his fountains, marvel ous as they are with their winged, tailed, writhing or leering gorgons, their great rock - encumbered basins, the rich carvings of their ample shells, and the sublime ugliness of their tritons. But when the living waters are let loose like tigers into the empty receptacles, and begin to wreathe and sparkle about these tails, and claws, and fins, when the sheeted waterbeam leaps sheer from the upper tiers of reservoirs upon the limbs and loins of these frenzied giants, when the bubbles and the many -curling lip of the ripples curl and quiver about these snorting dolphins, - meanwhile Iris doing her sheeny work on the crystal chaos, - the thing lives, becomes a piece of consummate adapta tion , and enthrones Bernini among the artists of his time. No human eye was ever more afflicted than the eye of the promenader who ventures across the bridge of St. Angelo and beholds the marble mummery which Bernini has stationed there to symbolize the Passion of Our Lord. They symbolize nothing on earth but the spectator's passion ; they are a thousand martyrdoms felt and seen . Yet few human eyes ever beheld a more bewitching scene than the Fountain of Trevi at midnight, bursting from its vast palace-side and trans lating its daylight waters into the wizard language of moonshine. Bernini was the inspiration , if he was not the author of this fountain . The fountains of the 128 THE ROME OF THE MARBLE FAUN . gone times. Triton , the Tortoise -shell, the Baboon , the Elephant, of the Medici before the temple of Vesta, the Barcac cia in the Spanish Square, the octuple fountain of the Obelisk in the Piazza di Popolo, and the grotesque creations of Bernini in the square near Pasquin's statue, are a few of these benignant legacies of by Such shining, tumbling, foaming abun dance of water was never seen , and such squeezing of lemons and concocting of lemonade at the ever adjacent kiosks was never dreamed of by untravelled Peregrines. The summer days are not long enough to squeeze out all the pyramids of golden -dyed lemons heaped up round these popular resorts, and the chaffer ing of lemon- bibber and lemon - barterer is prolonged into the sma' hours. The ever-ready fountain is the famulus of the kiosk , ever at its elbow , ever abundant, and ever delicious. The shades of Agrippa and Alex ander Severus must, with goodly complacency, haunt their noble aqueducts that still bring floods of mount ain water to slake the heat and the stench of the Imperial City. With the spell of Hawthorne's romance on us, which is so irradiated with knowledge, sympathy, and appre ciation, it is impossible not to catch the enthusiasm which he feels for these monuments, and blend it with the enthusiasm of personal remembrance. The moon light ramble, the subterraneous experiences, the sylvan dance, the stroll on the Pincian , the faun's transforma tion through the dire agonies of love and blood -guilt, the dead Capuchin, the bronze pontiff's benediction in the market-place of Perugia, the frolic of the carnival, the scenes by the wayside, into all of which he inter THE ROME OF THE MARBLE FAUN . 129 > weaves so much that is touching or interesting, evoke the ghost of living Italy far more potently than any book that has been published on the same subject. Far more even than he was aware, the art, the gar dens, the multitudinous associations, the lyric joyous ness, the radiant vitality , the lichened ruin , the ilex bordered promenades, and the pleasant babbling of suburban rills insinuated themselves into the book, and produced that substantial sense of reality that goes hand in hand with many a romantic improbability, To any one who has ever visited Rome, and traced out faithfully the allusions and panorama of “ The Marble Faun,” this sense is present with tenfold vigor. This book figures in the Guides in abundant extracts. It was full of Hawthorne one forenoon that, after travers ing the goblin oratories of the Church of the Capu chins — oratories that grin and gibber with their horrid architecture of human skulls, thigh -bones, and vertebræ, a sort of vertebrated hell —the bare- footed friar ushered us up into the solemn twilight of the convent-church itself, and with a flourish drew aside the green curtain that covers Guido's picture of Michael slaying the Dragon. This church is the scene of one of the central incidents of the romance, and this picture gave rise to one of its many beautiful conversations. There blazed the splendid indignation of the youthful archangel grinding beneath almighty feet the writhing seed of the serpent, a wonderful picture, wonderfully described by Kenyon and Hilda, more beautiful than even Raffaele's, because more serene, orbing all the brightness, the loveliness, the silence of the lightning flashed out of the East into 9 130 THE ROME OF THE MARBLE FAUN . the West by one effort of supreme genius. The whole Inferno scene of Miriam's encounter with her dead foe in this church is pervaded by the same graphic pictorial truth . Whoever has loitered on the sunny highways leading mountainward, or lounged for a day in an antique mountain -inn of the Apennines, as yet un reaped in freshness by the sickle of fashion , will re mark the vivid truthfulness of the scenes at Perugia, or at Donatello's castle. It is the same squalid, grim acing, musical, sensuous, imaginative folk of Martial and Catullus; the same creature of exaltation and de pression that breathes before us in marble and man ; the same assassin, saint, beggar, and hero of the legends and the histories ; the same Cæsar Borgia, St. Francis, Verdi, and Fra Diavolo. The knife that digs out your bowels will be hung the same evening before the miracle -doing Madonna of Sansovino in S. Agos tino, and a missa solennis be chanted for your soul. It is such materials as these that he labored upon , and to such effect that he accomplished. In the “ Improvi satore, ” Hans Andersen has described many of the same scenes ; but with him it is the fairy glamour of the thing, the voices from Elfland , the ideality , the gay symbolical drama of Italian life, not the rugged facts, the red -hot soberness, the telescopic vividness to which Hawthorne clings as to the Pillars of Hercules. Nothing, for example, could be more perfect than Andersen's portrayal of the atmospheric phenomena, the amber transparencies of air, the death-like swoon and sickness of nature in a Neapolitan twelve-of-the clock , the sulphurous barrenness of the Campagna, the Mediterranean moon - drawn or murmuring up the mid a THE ROME OF THE MARBLE FAUN . 131 world like a great sluggish golden behemoth, the physical light that may be handled and ladled on the steps of the Temple of Pæstum . It is the flesh and blood of light that he gives us. But beyond this the “ Improvisatore " is a fairy -tale as truly as its swan -brethren, fairy in machinery, in allegory, in dim depths of hinted meaning, and in all the fantastic ap purtenance of its plot. There are few things in litera ture that excel Andersen's dream -poem of the Blue Grotto at Capri ; but the witchery of the Coliseum and the convent, of the obelisks that yearn heaven ward and homeward like solid tongues of flame, the mossy and moonlight ruin , the mighty necromancy of the Forum , from whose mile - stone Roman arts and Roman law went forth to chasten, subdue, and prepare the world for the divine imprint of Christianity - to the Anglo - Saxon must we look for all this, and not to the charming idealization of the Dane. 1 1 IN TASSO'S GARDEN. AMONG the many beautiful and neglected old gar dens in Rome, none is more beautiful or more neg lected than the garden of St. Onofrio . It is the more exquisite in its decay, as it is connected with some of the verytenderest recollections of Italian history, and its beauty has the pathos of those old conventual gardens that are fast going out of fashion in the Eternal City, and which once were filled with artistic or musical re cluses, the glory of their time. Any loiterer may see them any day from the Trophies of Marius to the Ponte Rotto, and from the Popolo Gate to San Gre gorio those high, antique, dust- covered walls , running miles along the powdered highways, with a wealth of stifled vegetation peeping dolorously over them, or with a gargoyle- like spout communicating with some unseen reservoir and sprinkling the idle saunterer as he ventures near ; walls the most uninteresting in the world, an architectural ennui, a yawn incarnate, a heaped -up misery cemented for eternity by the sun of Etruria ; walls that have baked and blazed almost from the times of Diocletian , or were, perhaps, con structed from the baths of that politic emperor. These highways run smothering along two such walls half the length of Rome, gasping in their own dust, and flinging it remorselessly in the face of passers-by. IN TASSO'S GARDEN . 133 Along the Esquiline, where the Romans used to cast their dead, and which afterward blossomed into the elegant gardens of Mæcenas, just such a highway runs, connecting the obelisk of Santa Maria Maggiore with the holy precinct of the Santa Scala and St. John Lateran. In the five months of rainless summer these roads are shoe -deep in pulverized dust, as white, but not as sweet, as the dust-like poisons which the Borgias administered to their enemies. The floating remnant of the Empire, and , perhaps, many a famous statute described by Pliny, ground to powder and used for cement, and many a column from the Portico of Octavia, hover in this intolerable nuisance that plagues the Capuchin in his nocturnal tramps, and pesters everybody during the Roman midsummer. Uninteresting as these walls may appear, it is often the case that they encircle spots consecrated by history, illumined by art, and embellished with every material of delightful romance. In more than one case their gray arms embrace cyclopean baths, whose marble reservoirs, porticos, colonnades, and peristyles beheld the sports or the wantonness of Caracalla and Titus ; in others are vineyards of grapes as old as the Anton ines, and others tell of crypts where, through lingering ages, lay the bodies of Christian martyrs in the awful catacombs beneath. To the poetic traveller, indeed, who may be acquainted with Petrarch's canzoni, or the stateliness of Dante, or with the wisdom and wit of early Italian literature, nothing can be more attractive than just such time-worn walls, purple -stained, per haps, with mediæval siege, battered by internecine war, overgrown with grape or mignonette, and con 134 IN TASSO'S GARDEN . taining brotherhoods of friars, who keep up the tradi tions of the place, and awaken in the transient visitor some of the infectious enthusiasm that seems to linger about such haunts of religious recluses. There the past is the present, and its presence lends the charm that lurks in ambuscade for whosoever visits such places. That sunset over the Campagna which we have just witnessed, is a sunset of Innocent the Third ; those fire haunted clouds that loiter on the horizon are the clouds that cast their shadow on St. Francis as he fell down before the feet of the pontiff and entreated liberty to found his great order ; and yonder church is the basil ica where St. Francis and St. Dominic, the twin cary atids of mendicancy and the rosary, met and parted . There is everything to keep fresh the illusive charm of convent- life in the Dark Ages ; for is not this the well designed by Messer Michele Agnolo, and those the frescoes of Fra Angelico, and those beautiful bronze cast doors of Messer Ghiberti the same that were esteemed worthy of Paradise in the sixteenth century ? It is one of the glories of Rome to have many such convents, convents into whose architectural secrets no foot save the bare feet of the friar ever penetrates, rich in sacred art, rich in religious memories, rich in shadows wherein artful allegorists, like Hawthorne, love to find colors for morbid romance. There is something awe-inspiring about these huge, irregular, five- piano'd piles, where the rubbish of successive ages has accumulated, or where are found the painted doll babies, the bambinos of pre- Raffaelites, side by side with exquisite marbles from Canova's workshop. So new and so old, so venerable and so frivolous, so ample IN TASSO'S GARDEN . 135 and so niggardly, with their tiny cells for mystic and cenobite, and their vast refectories, their lavishness in court-yards and their stinginess in accommodations, their miniature oratories and their magnificent spaces swelling sumptuously into domes and baptisteries, the architectural meeting -point of the Tiber and the Bos phorus. Some of them have perhaps been reared after the heroic drawings of Brunelleschi ; others number among their treasures marble archbishops or mighty Judiths from the chisel of Donatello ; and there are some along whose mouldering corridors Giotto or Leonardo had painted divinely sad heads of Dante or Apostles at a Last Supper. Nobody, to look at the exterior of these buildings, would dream of the unique inner-world which they have housed and nur tured ; for inquisitions have gone forth from them ,rec onciliations of potentates have taken place in them , eloquent monks like Savonarola have thundered there, or monks of genius whose very finger tips thrilled with art, like Fra Angelico, have covered their walls with angels and Madonnas, as in the sunny convent of San Marco ; or alternate monk and man of the world, like Benvenuto Cellini, once lived there, whose hands were now imbrued in blood, now busy with wondrous gob lets of ivory, and now moulding in bronze the Perseus of the “ Loggie.” Fathers of the Church who burnt lamps before the bust of Plato, and walked and talked with the philosophic Medici, pored in these chosen re treats over the massy folios that now support the spider's loom in the Ambrosian or the Laurentian library ; possibly in one Da Vinci grew into the musician, sculptor, architect, engineer, painter, and 136 IN TASSO'S GARDEN . scientist that contemporaries marveled at, marvelous alike to them and to us. There was nothing of art or architecture, or courtly embellishment, which these grim monasteries did not possess and lavish on the devotees who endowed or frequented them . How silent they all seem to-day these once sunny and lordly seminaries of a by -gone day, with their great gardens overgrown with weeds and brambles, unfre quented by meditative feet, uncheered save by the lovely charity of Italian sunshine, unadorned even by the cabbages which Diocletian boasted of after laying aside the purple of empire! There is a pathos in them that is indescribable. The long corridors are empty ; the rats scamper across the vacant refectories ; the oratories still shine with the mystic lamp, but there are no worshipers ; the friar who roams about within them is ignorant and superstitious ; the gates hang ajar ; the doors creak ; a plaintive melancholy dwells everywhere; the plague of malaria has driven away all but a few plague-stricken contadini ; and you look through iron gates into yawning churches, sumptuous in adornment and silence, as dead and as musty as the bells in their campanile. These convents and their tributary churches -- for there are everywhere spaces sundered from the rest for the beautiful purposes of prayer were once in the sunrise of art like the very sunrise in color ; apse and tribune and nave blazed with frescoes ; they were the picture -galleries, the sculptors' studios, the museums, the ateliers of their time; both Portico and Academy, villa and palace, schools of diplomacy, and retreats whither the wearied politician or the disappointed scholar withdrew to IN TASSO'S GARDEN . 137 - spend — mayhap in the bright Florentine atmosphere or among the glorious scenery of Valombrosa -the remnant of their days. Guelf and Ghibelline, Palles chi and Piagnoni, Medicist or Savonarolist, Lazarus and Dives, put up at them as at hotels, just as we find still the case in Alpine or primitive regions of Europe. Monarchs did not disdain to retire to them : a king of Naples laid aside the royal ornaments to become a Jesuit anchoret ; and long lines of warlike pontiffs performed menial offices in them before ascending the chair of St. Peter. But, nowadays, neglected, often ruinous, difficult of access, damp when entered, dismal when contemplated, vermin - haunted if slept in, stale with many generations of incense propagating other broods of foul odors, every chink seamed with the lush vegetation of the South, every fresco dimmed by the exhalations of the censer, or whitewashed by the monks these interest ing spots still abide with us from the past, and silently put in their protest against the utilitarianism of the times. How easy it is, following the outlines of the Aurelian wall, to stumble upon many an ancient mon astery of this sort, utterly deserted, utterly unclad in the ivy that makes England so lovely, having in their appearance something infinitely dejected, appealing to the imagination with the utmost force of picturesque eloquence, memorials it may be of the munificence of some Colonna or Piccolomini, having sculptured over their massy portals the bees of the Barberini or the dogs of the Buonarotti. The shining summers of Italy serve only to increase their gloom ; and if you look carefully you can discover among the purple mists 138 IN TASSO'S GARDEN . of the Alban Hills others perched upon inaccessible crags, swimming in the luxurious light of the far stretching Campagna, clothing themselves in purple air, but, nevertheless, empty and forlorn as any Etrus can tomb. The air around Rome is a sphere, an opal, giving forth at the touch of the summer or autumnal sun , all its opalescent hues, falling about tower and bridge, and convent and tombs on the Appian, and monasteries on distant hills, and the violet peak of Soracté with a strange magnificence ; just the most bewitching of draperies for memorial landscape, just the light to remember the Lucomos and the Cæsars, the popes and the priors in, just the ineffable beauty that makes of a ruined convent something sweeter than the faces of Correggio, something more touching than the exile of Dante. Just such an old convent, just such an old garden, are the convent and garden of St. Onofrio in the Borgo, at Rome. It nestles on the height above the palace which Raffaele made famous by his Galatea, toward the historic slope of the Janiculan, overlooking the boat-shaped Isle of the Tiber, itself part and parcel of the majestic past. For in one of the palaces near lived the famous bankers who fêted Leo the Tenth , and then cast into the Tiber the sumptuous plate upon which the entertainment had been served ; in another were memorials of Christina of Sweden and her court ; and in the quaint corner-house, on the way up to the delightful grounds of the Villa Doria , tradition whis pers , dwelt the Fornarina, the sweetheart of Raffaele, whose portrait hangs beside Guido's Beatrice in the Palazzo Barberini. Among all these illustrious mem IN TASSO'S GARDEN . 139 ories of prince and palace, art and heart, aloft on its own elevation, commanding one of the exquisite views in the Trastavere, or rather courting this exquisite view as a guerdon for those who have toiled up the steep hill-side, rises St. Onofrio . At Angelus and Ave Maria, -- the dawn and dusk of the Roman day, --- its chimes are heard in symphony with their innumerable brotherhood, filling the air with melody and startling the forastieri with their musical jangling. It is a monastery of Hieronymite friars, antique of aspect, with a broad flight of steps leading up to it, and a small quadrangle paved with brick and furnished with parapet and stone benches, hospitably receiving the visitor at the top. The entrance is through a piazzetta crowded with slabs and monuments of defunct worthies, through which a pale young Hieronymite brother, clad in black, conducts you to the church a fanciful old affair indeed. The pavement is sunken ; the chapels are numerous, and incongruously heaped together ; the walls are overloaded with Domenichino's pictures ; the altar -pictures are too big for the altars, and the altars too small for the rows of candlesticks and silver hearts ; everywhere there are tablets and sepulchres, spaces full of dim carvings, domes lifting them selves heavily into sphered twilight, faintly illumined by mural paintings ; sudden darknesses caught and sealed up between twilight pillars, and sudden radi ances falling athwart half - concealed statues ; clumps of congregated shadow here and there, and here and there the toiling limbs of huge cherubs uplifting vases of holy water, with a sunbeam trembling like a prayer upon it : altogether a curious, crowded, inartistic, in 140 IN TASSO'S GARDEN . > teresting church, enriched by Giotto and Leonardo, but rich beyond compare in the possession of the ashes of Torquato Tasso. It was in November, 1594, that Tasso knocked at the door of this convent, and said to the monks who came forward to receive him : “ My fathers, I am come to die among you ! ” After years of persecution , allured by brilliant promises, Tasso had come to Rome to be publicly crowned on the Capitol like Petrarch , over two hundred years before. He was broken in health, he had become liable to fits of madness, his great poem had been stolen from him and surrepti tiously published , he had been assailed on all sides by pedants, misunderstood, baffled, imprisoned, in frequent peril, and journeying from Ferrara to France, and from France to Sorrento, often in poverty, often in disgrace : it is no wonder that he met his kind hosts with this memorable exclamation, and lay down in the cell pre pared for him, ready for the closing scene of his exist tence. There are few faces more touching than the face of Tasso ; it possesses a beauty within which lies a world of sadness, for his whole fate is imprinted upon it. There is not in it the merry roguishness that hovers like a flower round the lips of Boccaccio, nor is there the tragical sombreness of Dante, or the voluptu ousness of Alfieri. But there is a something tender, weak, noble, moving, worthy of the singer of Godfrey and Tancred. The pointed beard, the close -shaven hair, the large, dark Neapolitan eye, the doublet and knee-breeches, the silk stockings and dainty frills, the sallow complexion and impassioned brow that could flush richly with exulting thought ; the pensive and a m IN TASSO'S GARDEN . 141 - yet proud tenderness immersing the whole in the very dew of genius : how curiously does all this accord with our preconceived notion of the chivalrous lover of Leo nora and Lucrezia D'Este, the poet of the delivered Jerusalem , the passionate student of Sorrento, the vis ionary minstrel of Crusades, with more eloquence than St. Bernard, and more fervor than many a pilgrim who dipped his scallop shell in the consecrated waters . He seems a figure too weak, too womanlike, in the best sense, for those tumultuous ages, a gentle spirit that dreamed gloriously, but failed in action, - no lute player or improvisatore, and yet neither warrior nor saint ; but a poet mystical and contemplative, imbued with the languor of Neapolitan associations, impreg nated with the soft air of Sorrento, versed in sunny and splendid scenes where he was observer simply, sensitive to all the minute pageantry and parapher nalia of Italian courts, effeminate somewhat by the absence of heroic virtues, thrilled to the quick by win ning music, costly furniture, flashing wit, rich dresses, lordly dinners, houses, brilliant services in great cathe drals mysteriously fragrant with incense and women ; a lover of pomp and high living, richly alive through five powerful senses to the world as it then was, varie gated by costume, superstition , rivalry, and the luxury of opulent nobles. It is impossible not to see all this in the luxurious verse of the “ Gerusalemme," as the large untroubled stanzas curl over like great billows and break upon the ear. There is a sentiment as of the ample moonlit Adriatic sweeping dreamily up the marble steps of Venetian palaces as the gondoliers sing or waft their hearse-like vessels along; as of some 142 IN TASSO'S GARDEN . It was > thing mellow , and voluminous, and vast, touching the ear and making it tremble with sweet sounds. fitting for such a nature, the incarnation of music, to withdraw to the cloister, and there, after a life passed amongst such playfellows, devoutly prepare for death . Tasso was sick. “ I am come," wrote he to a friend , " to begin my conversation in heaven in this elevated place, and in the society of these holy fathers. " “ During the fourteen days of his illness, " continues the historian, " he became perfectly absorbed in the contemplation of divine subjects, and upon the last day of his life, when he received the papal absolution, he exclaimed : ' I believe that the crown which I looked for upon the Capitol is to be changed for a better crown in heaven .'” Throughout the last night a monk prayed by his side till the morning, when Tasso was heard to “ In manus tuas, Domine !” and then he died. The archives of St. Onofrio have this entry : “ Torquato Tassó, illustrious from his genius, died thus in our monastery of S. Onofrio. In April, 1595, he caused himself to be brought here, that he might pre pare for death with greater devotion and security, as he felt his end approaching. He was received courte ously by our fathers, and conducted to chambers in the loggia , where everything was ready for him. Soon afterwards he became dangerously ill, and desired to confess and receive the most Holy Sacrament from the prior. Being asked to write his will, he said that he wished to be buried at S. Onofrio, and he left to the convent his crucifix and fifty scudi for alms, that as many masses might be said for his soul, in the manner that is read in the book of legacies in our archives. murmur : . IN TASSO'S GARDEN . 143 Pope Clement VIII. was requested for his benediction , which he gave amply for the remission of sins. In his last days he received extreme unction, and then , with the crucifix in his hand, contemplating and kiss ing the sacred image, with Christian contrition and devotion, being surrounded by our fathers, he gave up his spirit to the Creator, on April 25th, 1595, between the eleventh and twelfth hours (i. e. , between 7 and 8 A. M.) , in the fiftieth year of his age. In the evening his body was interred with universal concourse in our church, near the steps of the high altar ; the Cardinal Aldobrandini, under whose protection he had lived during the last years, being minded to erect him, as soon as possible, a handsome sepulchre, which, how ever, was never carried into effect.” And so Tasso fell asleep in this very room, two hun dred and seventy - five years ago, with this crucifix in his hand. What a quaint winsome little room it is, too ! It is full of sunshine, andthere is a view toward the Vat which the sick poet must have feasted many a time before his death . A cinque-cento escritoire, some autograph letters, a bust, the bedstead upon which he died, a chair, a plaster - cast of his features taken after death, are reverently kept as relics of this famous visit. The room is approached by a long loggia amply lighted by small square casemented openings, through which flooding sunshine streams and falls upon the uneven brick floor. It was the tidiest and cheerfullest of clois ters in this tender morning light — so clean, so sweet, so calm, that one ceased to wonder why men came there to pass their lives and forget the world with its vicissi tudes. It was the spot of all spots in the world for sun ican upon 144 IN TASSO'S GARDEN . - shiny thankfulness, and the inner peace which recluses seek after as their pearl of great price. The sweet genius of Tasso it is that has left behind it the stillness and the brightness that were after all innate to it golden characteristics for any place, but especially for the meek precincts of the cloister. As you enter the door of the cell, the first thing you see is Tasso standing before you, casting a most perfect shadow , and appar ently about to step forward and bid you welcome. So life - like is the figure, so perfect the shadow on the wall, that for a moment you doubt the evidences of your senses and are ready to meet the figure half-way. It is only painted on the wall -a delusive shadow . And before you have recovered from your astonishment, the monk begins to chant his dreary round of cicerone twaddle, as if you were an altar and he the officiating priest. We escaped from the jaws of this padre as soon as possible, and thanking God and San Julian like Boccaccio's heroes were shown, or rather shuffled ( for it was unlawful), into the most delightful of old con vent gardens, full of cabbages, and grapes as old as the Cæsars, falling gently towards the Tiber, abounding in picturesque dilapidation, and with views over the Cam pagna and its gem - like mountains such as only S. Ono frio affords. The garden was full of the scent of ripening muscats ; sugar- loving bees and wasps were busy in it; the musky vegetation of summer luxuriated along the walls and alleys ; the August sun smote blindingly on the house-tops below, and the air tingled with the heat. Far below stole the Tiber beneath the Bridge of St. Angelo, where Bernini's statues, like petits -maîtres, cut their capers in the air ; beyond lay - IN TASSO'S GARDEN . 145 the meadows of Cincinnatus yellow and sunburnt; the golden archangel atop of St. Angelo shone afar and seemed to exult over the heathen mausoleum ; the obelisk in the Piazza del Popolo lifted aloft its mystic flame-point, as if again before the temple of the sun at Heliopolis ; and the broad streets that diverge from it and run through civilized Rome, were cleared for the twelve o'clock siesta. It was the fierce Roman noon day. The old garden was filled with an almost Assy rian light. On a height at one end rose clumps of statuesque cypresses, lifting their arrowy foliage like loadstones into the chiseled air ; near by was a pool of water, about which ivy climbed and clung, or failing of a support, ran in helpless wealth over the adjacent ground. The oak planted by Tasso, which a storm thirty years ago nearly overthrew, spread its joyful leafage around and suggested associations as musical as the beech-tree of Melibeus. There was altogether something Vergilian in the place, something fit for a delicate amabean eclogue or the sunny idleness of two fluting shepherds. In the little amphitheatre beyond, the antiquarians tell us that S. Filippo Neri, the foun der of the Oratorians, used to gather the children with a little silver bell and preach to them . The gloomy church of this order has another of those colossal mon asteries attached to it which abound in the city of the Santo Padre. If we are not mistaken, it was in the square before this church that the citizens were morning gathered to listen to the marvelous improvi sations of a little baker's boy who turned out in after years to be —Metastasio. S. Filippo and his children must indeed have delighted in this venerable garden, one - 10 146 IN TASSO'S GARDEN . venerable even then, and perhaps beautiful with all the trimness and culture of monkish science . The monks were skillful horticulturists. Every year, on the 25th of April, there is a festa of a peculiar kind celebrated at $. Onofrio. The Acade mia assembles, and Tasso's bust, sculptured from the plaster - cast, and crowned with laurel, is placed in the centre of the amphitheatre. Music, accompanied by declamations and eulogies, diversifies the entertain ment, and keeps green and sweet the memory of the poet. April, in Italy, is an exquisite month, airy and light and picturesque, showing its wantonness by the outbreak of a thousand flowers, a thousand landscapes painted with shadow , shower, and sunbeam , more afflu ent in all these than our sunset lands, more inclining to the embonpoint of summer, less etherealized to the airy slenderness of our spring, and sprinkling its mountains and mists with a bloom that is delicious. It makes all the convent gardens in Rome frolic with roses and camellias, and whosoever walks under the parapet of the Giardini Colonna, at this happy time, is saluted with a carnival of bright blossoms. Nothing is prettier than the spring, when it has stolen into one of these ancient gardens and made its wildernesses sing with roses, or when the summer heats have set the soil afire and made it burst forth into magical verdure. The gardens of the Vestals then become the gardens of Adonis . Ivy and eglantine climb the walls like thieves; glorious clumps of cactus pile one over the other their prickly towers ; citron and olive have appeared as at the wand of a black artist ; palm and umbrella-pine catch the contagious green, and the in IN TASSO'S GARDEN . 147 a fection spreads to the bulbs that have slept in stupor through the winter. Abbot and friar ejaculate " Maria Vergine ! ” at the fertility. Then is the time to visit S. Onofrio and enjoy the loveliness of its vineyard, its glassy pool, its trailing creepers, its acclivities en ameled like a goldsmith's counter, its obelisk -like cypresses, and all the genial recollections of the place. The Hieronymite brothers are kind, and for a paolo are glad enough to tell you all they know about the illustrious ashes that rest within their church . One of the sweetest of Madonna - faces greets you over the convent door, covered with glass and blurred by the finger of time, but still having gathered to itself such ineffable sweetness as the shepherd -boy Giotto some times knew how to put into his female heads. On the staircase above is a famous Leonardo, having the same smile of voluptuous irony that characterizes almost all of this master's work, held in great awe and reverence by the monks. Within the church are various awe inspiring relics, seldom profaned to heretical curiosity. There is a tranquillity in its interior that falls tenderly around you like a perfume and lays a quiet hand on your irreverent investigations. The cicerone speaks in whispers ; there is a midday twilight through aisle and transept ; the very tombs hold their breath as if afraid to trouble the serenity of the place, and right before you, in the duskiest, serenest spot, is the tomb of Tasso. The light falls through the window on a magnificent mass of sculptured Carrara recently erected to Torquato's memory, but there is no pathos in it as in the antique slab whereon the monks record that Messer Torquato Tasso, son of Bernardo, has found a resting -place there. BENVENUTO - A LEAF FROM A DIARY. I AM reading Benvenuto Cellini's autobiography, translated by Goethe, a most charming work, and doubly entertaining after the sniveling pietism of Jung Stilling. In the silvery waters of Goethe's German, which glide with such transparent might and throw back such thronging images of earth and sky, I find a delightful refreshment. It is interesting to watch the quaint unfolding of Benvenuto's mind as he uncon sciously gives it in the limpid pages of his autobiog raphy. Subjects the most delicate, things scarcely to be breathed to one's self or only in the shrinking twi light of the closet, he discusses and particularizes with a naturalness that is truly inimitable. He is full of the frisking grace of hoyden children , the romp and the elasticity of twinkling -footed fauns, the breezy fra gility of his own marvelous chiselings in ivory and sil I love this oldtime freshness, this great-minded impropriety and thoughtlessness of the Middle Ages and the court of Francis I. It evokes a chivalrous era, a background where the world stands full of ro mance and an immense child-likeness still has hold of Benvenuto's piety and his enchanting sin fulness contrast singularly together. They suggest ver. our race . BENVENUTO - A LEAF FROM A DIARY. 149 ness. how far back the moral inconsistencies of the present Italians тау be traced. He scruples not to live in open sin with a wench whom he used in modeling, and crosses himself with devout ejaculations when he has succeeded in destroying certain wretches who had as sailed him. His details about the origin, progress, and completion of his imperishable works are fascinating. It was at Baden - Baden in September that three of us took it into our heads to pay a visit to the hunting lodge of the grand duke in the neighborhood. We hailed a droschke, settled our terms satisfactorily and dashed off on the beautiful pike, lined on either side by venerable elms, and winding like the arms of Love around Psyche through scenery of indiscribable loveli It was the green, dewy beginning of a most gorgeous autumn. The foliage had just begun to fall into that luxurious decay which conceals itself in a sea of color and calls forth the sweetest melancholy to mourn over and enjoy it. The hoot of the autumnal owl was not yet to be heard, nor did even the subtle chill in the air scare away the multitudes of little quiv ering creatures that sang and sprang from branch to branch, as if a fairy mobilization had taken place in the army of the elves and everybody were busy with restless possibilities. On we whirled, however, drawn by two splendid grays, and fully luxuriating in the elastic atmosphere, the changing landscapes of the Black Forest and the singular richness of the surround ing vegetation . Soon we got deeper in the mountains : the road pitched delvingly over softly resisting hills and round angles of towering rock, wild for the loving eyes of 150 BEVENUTO -A LEAF FROM A DIARY. some artist —all hung about, like the menacing brow of a Medusa, with scarlet- and-gold -besprent creepers. I had never seen anything more graceful than the ver dant fall of those trailing parasites, clinging like sensi tive fingers to the rock, and blooming in stem and twig with the warm abundance of September life. The sap shone through the transparent bodies of the plants that stretched out their long thrilling arms and fastened to some variegated boulder or neighboring tree. My companions vented their delight in exulting interjections. P. was seated at the boot, by the driver, and had a magnificent point of view for the sudden and pleasing transitions which from time to time shifted themselves before our eyes. M. was à phlegmatic German, travelling for pleasure, and beset with every comfort and inconvenience that can possibly be in vented for the torment of peregrinating mortals. I sat back in my corner and gave myself up wholly to one prodigious, all-swallowing stare, drinking more than I had ever drunk before at a fountain whose virtue it is to be inexhaustible. My eyes were on both sides at one and the same time, and such comic evolutions and revolutions as they described in and about my entire head would have roused the wonder and horror of Fraunhofer. I was simply in a state of lyric excite ment, of melodious susceptibility, every nerve swing ing with novel enthusiasm , and every muscle enjoying its individual rapture. It was a drive of some two hours as if we were driving in the grooves and intaglio meanderings of a cut emerald magnified into mount ains and sunny dells and fluctuating lapses of bright verdure and sombre fir - land. BENVENUTO- A LEAF FROM A DIARY. 151 a At length, after innumerable turnings and gradual ascents, fringed with affluent growth, and once in a while rimmed with a parapet of gray stone, we got among the umbrageous obscurities of the high dark beeches and pines. And here, for the first time, I watched that wondrous play of shadow and light, those - shades in their purple sportiveness, which lie in my mind among my recollections of Rembrandt and Correggio. There seemed to chase each other over the tops of the swaying firs whole banks of the richest violet, toned down to an exquisitely soft purple, trem bling for a moment amid the multiplicity of needle like cones, and then giving way before a cloud of illu mined green, sent fluttering over by some trick on change of light. Beneath and through the hundreds of stems I could see the deep mellow clare -obscure of a primæval cultus, a twilight of the nymphs and gods. It was like the sweet shadows of a tenor voice ; every where there was embroidery of waving ferns, and those zigzag curiosities of vegetation which brandish their delicate swords and nod their many-toothed plumes amid the heraldic solemnity of a great forest. I shall never forget my delight as I stood, far above the ancient castle of Ebersburg, on a vast pyramid of castellated rock, and watched the sports of the shadow, and the light on the summits of that immeasurable stretch of fir. I ceased gathering mosses and other exquisite little souvenirs of our immortal trip, to linger over the delicate mystery which went on under my gaze in the leafy and romantic hiding -places of tradi tion and traditionary history. In the meanwhile we had reached the grand duke's 152 BENVENUTO -A LEAF FROM A DIARY. hunting -lodge, suffered the driver to provide for his noble span , and announced ourselves to the concierge, whose hereditary office it had been to receive and entertain gentle guests. A dog attacked us furiously, and seemed minded to endanger both our pleasure and our legs. It was most auspicious for us that, after we had taken a turn in the ivied garden , a pretty little maid appeared and pro posed to introduce us to the lofty chambers and equally lofty reminiscences of the ancient lodge. We entered the paved court-yard , which was shut in by perpendic ular walls. The grasses and other objects that had begun to peep, Picciola - like, from between the gravelly interstices of the curbs faintly suggested the neglect of pampered domestics. We ascended a dimly- lighted corkscrew of a staircase into a tiny antechamber, with suits of antique armor ; and as I was absorbed in meditation on the inconceivable discomfort of such an outfit, and was congratulating myself that those times had fallen into an unwaking slumber, our cicerone ushered us into the gala apartment of the lodge. It was dim with painted glass and aged furniture. No carpet lay on the polished face of the floor. The walls were in halb-dunkel, and here and there the portrait of some renowned clerical or worldly dignitary, or, may hap, the sombre ancestry of the house, illumined some unusually obscure spot with armored bust or ruffled elegance. At one end stood a buffet, crowded with magnificent drinking cups, of all shapes, values, and weights. Among them it was not long before I dis covered two beautifully worked beakers of ivory. Their finish, their delicacy, aud their fragile beauty BENVENUTO - A LEAF FROM A DIARY. 153 at once proclaimed them the labor of Benvenuto. How full of moral were their fair, spotless bowls ! What lips of beauty or of royalty had tasted from them the rare wines of an extinct epoch ! The figures on their swelling circumference were potent with en ergy and a vivid life that showed the artist had trans fused no small part of his eternal self into the susceptible ivory. I recollect simply a throng of life informed figures garlanded together just beneath the polished lip of the tankards, and dancing about it with genuine Athenian grace. The heads, in delicate relief, were just so poised as to catch the first fragrant drops that fell over the brim. Methought I tasted the wine of an indescribable Past as I contemplated these masterpieces, and began to cogitate over the dead gayety and mirth that used to arise from them on many a festal occasion. Were they made for the per fidious cardinal of Mantua, or the gallant Francis, or his fiery mistress ? What history and philosophy, what generations of drinkers had they served ? What stories nestled within these radiant tusks of the ele phant ? What beauteous models and stores of observa tion had contributed to the inspired limbs, the inspired foreshortening of the dancing forms ? There were goblets and pokals, and broad -lipped tankards of gold and silver, and quantities of precious glass, but none pleased and interested me like the goblets of Cellini. A delightful autobiography had described them ; a great monarch had handled them ; they were labored at in danger, and handed down to posterity as the most exquisite depositaries of a wondrous art. The Greek priests made a passionate secret of their metal lurgical science . There is a charming frankness in 154 BENVENUTO - A LEAF FROM A DIARY. Benvenuto, whose airy chiselings in ivory are them selves an autobiography. Commentators wrangle over the obscure passages of Æschylus that distantly hint at a secret in coloring objects. The beautiful openness of Benvenuto leaves no doubt to his commentators and only delight to his readers. The vicissitudes of his life ; his belief in strange and special providences that at one time opened the gates of his prison and then encircled his head with a magical aureole only visible early in the morning ; his disputes with rival sculptors ; his exquisite taste in gems and numismatics ; his hon orable years at the courts of the Medici and Francis ; his withdrawal into a monastery, and subsequent career, – how little known are they, and how much they merit attention ! The age of Solyman, of Charles V., of Leo X., and of Luther, produced nothing more re markable, more unique. Our little guide took us to the balcony and let us admire the glorious view over the deep, deep valley beneath, and the clinging vineyards climbing up the fruitful declivities, and the distant picture- like white cottages in the scoop of the mountains, and finally the fresh moisture of a mountain rain. I stole ivy and variegated leaves from the buttressed walls, and com mitted the theft to my portfolio of souvenirs. It was here that I made my first acquaintance with bright, naïve Benvenuto Cellini, whose attractive diaries cost Goethe many months of his valuable life. The trans lation is as great, and as simple, and as masterly as 6 Wilhelm " Werther.” It is to Cellini and to Diderot at Goethe has given one more touch of im mortality, a new lease on eternity, a new evasion of the artifices of time. 66 or A VENICE OF THE VIKINGS. AWAY up in the pale Northern lands there is a city of the sea. It has not the paint and the powder, the glory and the glare of the lotus- flower of the Adriatic, the Venice of dreams and doges, that lies in half -swoon like Tizian's Venus, the heirloom of an empire to mod ern art. The colors there are pale ; the skies are blue as transparent icebergs ; the clouds are swansdown ; the trees creep low and large-branched to the water's edge and the water itself when not wonderfully steeped in the hues of summer is black as noir-antique. It is a low, low land, just above the water, flat and fer tile and dank with vegetation , with its coves haunted by reeds and wild ducks, its pools loved by swans, and its winter nights cloven by the thousand trembling spears of the Northern light. It is Denmark, and the city is Copenhagen. A quaint city it is, too, old -fash ioned as a spinster of the last century, quiet as gray hair, inoffensive as a dove, honest as honesty itself, veined with canals like the threads of a Persian carpet, bristling with masts like a pincushion with pins and on sunny days sending down a scarlet shimmer from its red tile roofs into the clear quaint streets below. These streets are as clean as a new sheet, a needle could a 156 A VENICE OF THE VIKINGS. be picked up in them . The shops are as spotless as a deacon's coat : a Hottentot would be converted to tidi . ness at the sight of them . Behind the counters stand cranberry -cheeked boys and girls ; in the windows of the provision shops are arranged squadrons of plates and dishes beautifully garnished with the queer things the people eat : anchovis, Norwegian herring, fish from the fjords, spiced minnows, makreel, rödt- gröd, and a score of odd dishes, with here and there a great glow ing lobster flaming forth from groves of bright green parsley. A glimpse into an ölhalle is a glimpse into Copenhagen's heart of hearts : a series of tiny apart ments the size of Pompejan bed -chambers, each with its polished table and chairs, its white thread curtains, its glazed pot of lobelia or lavender, its Danish newspa per and its pure sanded floor. And as you enter a ra diant vision of goodies spread on a huge étagère, heaps of strawberries and cherries, artistically dressed meats, green and crimson and white glass interspersed like poppies and lilies among the good things, and the whole crowned with Zealand cheeses and plates of kringle -cakes. . The genius of all this is a substantial Jute Psyche in an embroidered cap and apron, wreathed in perennial smiles. Hither the good Copenhagen burghers come and call for “ Jordbaer med Flöde ” or a strange raspberry - and -almond jelly or a half bottle of the sweet native beer, never forgetting to take off their hats when they enter and say “ Farvel” when they leave. The whole town is perforated with these beer-cellars like the heart of a green cheese. Great chocolate -drinkers are they and when they drink they munch sweetcake and raise ecstatic eyes to Heaven or A VENICE OF THE VIKINGS. 157 stroke enraptured stomachs in the enjoyment of una dulterated bliss. Absinthe has stolen into Denmark from France, with many another Romance custom, and the mint-green glasses may be seen of an evening in front of the cafés full of the stuff which the French soldiers brought with them from Algiers. It is too cool to sit much in the open air, even in midsummer, and so the interior of these cafés sparkles with lights, and warmth , and cosiness ; in the centre, always the gorgeous table of titbits ; on the sides, always the little chambers, wee and winsome as bee- cells. All Copenhagen descends from its flats of rooms, high up in the tenement-like houses, at least once a day, and whiles away an hour or so in these Danish paradises reading the “ Dagbladet.” The people live sandwiched one over the other, in great houses, each floor of which is the Odyssey and Iliad of a separate family, as dis tinct as possible, ascended to by a common stair- way, floor over floor. Through the five stories trickle the mutilated sounds of as many pianos and the squalls of as many babies. “ Tannhäuser, " performed on the pianos or on the babies, reaches the fifth story, smoth ered under pillows, like Desdemona. At all the windows smile blooming flowers ; in many a one sings a yellow canary, like a bit of vocal sunlight. A whole façade may be seen thus brimful of blossoms and canaries. The purplish -blue of the lavender mingles with spots and windows of sky-blue lobelia. A shriveled cactus now and then awakens a painful sense of unfitness ; the great, gorgeous, juicy cactus of the South, with its half human expression, shrunken to a little green goblin in icy Denmark. And so it is with the Co 158 À VENICE OF THE VIKINGS. rinthian columns of Christiansborg Castle, the huge dull palace of the North, that has robbed the exquisite forms of Greece and transplanted them to its own frozen zone. The beautiful foliations of the capitals languish and droop their heads like exotic flowers, and become a gray mass of weather -beaten mummery. As well let loose the glorious revelry of an Italian carnival on the ice- peaks of Spitzbergen ; as well pack up the Acropolis and exhibit it in the British Museum. And so the delicate capitals of Christiansborg Castle, the great dull palace of the king, have withered to gray gnomes that scowl upon the by -stander and shake down elfish curses, and dwell in infinite loneliness amid the stupor of a northern palace. There is no gracious light of Hellas to creep like a fairy into the bosom of the acanthus- buds and stir them to fragrance and life, and send them curling and twining like wreaths of autumn smoke about the heads of these shining pillars and clothe upon them , and dwell in them , and hang about them in lovely clusters sweeter than the grape. Corinthian columns in the North are as appropriate as it would be to clothe the grace of an urchin of Sor rento in the bearskin of the Lap. Great gray Chris tiansborg, where the good king dwelt, and where the dreary pictures hang, and where the endless apart ments drag their slow length along to ashen infinitude, and the grass-grown court-yard shudders around a melancholy fountain, with the reek of the state dinners still haunting the place, and the twinkle of faded court dresses vanishing, goblin -like, along the tedious cor ridors, and the presence of a colossal ennui crushing down the loiterer more than the Christ- child did Chris ) A VENICE OF THE VIKINGS. 159 summer - can a topher -what a type of the sombre, solemn North. Not even the delicious sweetness of the short Danish the very honeymoon of summer awaken it to cheerfulness, or light up its gables and colonnades, or throw around it one spark of summer loveliness. It is an old, slipshod palace, run down at the heel, wherein dwells a host of sprites whose mis sion it is to float a ghastly light in among the dismal apartments, and to gnarl and besmirch the roof, and to put a boundless dullness among the chimney- pots, and to call forth the withered grass from the untrodden pavement. One would think it the palace where the dead drearily await resurrection . And out in front of it prances the good king in glistening bronze on a stately horse, with many a withered garland cast at his feet, and the legend carved in the stone that he loved his people. The good monarch looks so proud of the vast sad palace behind him , as his eye catches the glint of the canal before him , with its busy boats and market-yachts. On either side is a spot of ex quisite verdure not bigger than a span, like a summer in the circle of a gold ring. And the bronze figure catches fire and dilates with dark enthusiasm , while the bronze eyes of the king flame molten bronze, and his lips quiver as he beholds his good city of Copenhagen so great and flourishing. So goes it with the good king and his mighty Castle of Christiansborg. Copenhagen is no sunny Greece or gold Italy on the shores of the Baltic. The life is impregnated with a different spice, another mythology, a poetry that is distinct, a religion and a literature, a superstition and an antiquity of its own. The swan is the genius of 160 À VENICE OF THE VIKINGS. its poetry, the swan that floats amid the Arctic night and inspires the sweetest strains of Scandinavian ro mance ; the living pearl of lone Norwegian lakes ; the swan that climbs far beyond the mightiest Fjelds with the clangor of its wings, and sweeps the light of the polar stars down into the hearts of Scandinavian seers ; a feathered song, a winged arrow, a shaft of light, a centre towards which curves many a line of Scandi navian experience. The gloomy Norwegian has in his heart this one fragrant drop of poetry ; the Swede sings of it in his musical tongue, and the Danes im mortalize it in their stories . The swan -myth may have arisen from the vision of swan-like clouds frozen fast on the clear glass of Arctic nights. But the living swan is the beautiful kernel of Scandinavian legend . To the warm lands fly the swans and the storks when the winter comes ; to the whole world may they be said to have come as impersonations of the grace and quaintness of the North. Lively, busy, and mercantile as the Danes are, the swan is in their hearts , the stork is on their roofs. There is a poetry about the life in Denmark that it is difficult to describe, so mellowed is it with humor. Their short summer is a whirl of pleasure – pleasure parties, boating, excursions to the green forests that surround Copenhagen, tea-parties in the delightful deer-park, tramps to charming Charlot tenlund, Sundays and afternoons at the chalet-restaur ants along the beach, or half-holidays at the beautiful watering - places of Marienlyst and Elsinore. They literally troop in thousands to all these places in a fever of joy while the soft weather lasts. Railways, omnibuses, steamboats, and street - cars are thronged. À VENICE OF THE VIKINGS. 161 The town is almost deserted on Sunday, and then is the time to hear the glorious old beech -woods resound ing with laughter of the burghers and their wives. It is marvelous as a Flemish picture. The places of amusement in Copenhagen are not numerous, but they are excellently attended. A noble opera -house has just been finished . Through the summer come gray days -processions of Carmelites -and the grief is universal. Passionate rain and hail rattle at the windows with out a moment's notice. There is no end to the fruit women in queer Quakerish bonnets, who run for dear life to keep their fruit and paper from being pelted to pulp by the hailstones. In a trice the streets are deserted, everybody has fled under the arched door ways, or into shops. The lightning ripples along the wire, and long sighs of deep-mouthed thunder are heaved by the distant clouds. In half an hour follow great patches of velvety blue, the cloud - veil is rent like a blanket, and the sun shines and stews the fleeing vapor ! Such is the capricions temper of a Copen hagen day. People slip in and out of their overshoes as by magic, and in and out of smiles and frowns with equal ease. Furs and velvets cast scorn on the July sun, and in the brilliance of the sunset, that is often feverishly bright, nobody forgets his overcoat or shawl. A true capriccio is the Danish' climate -a devil's fugue, soft as tears, stormy as the Cattegat. The equanimity of the Danes under it is admirable. It is their herit age, handed down from St. Olaf and the Vikings. They are accustomed to double windows, flannel in the dog -days, and feather- coverlets in the heats of August. 11 162 A VENICE OF THE VIKINGS. An agreeable people, full of ceremony, loving a bit of colored ribbon in their button -holes. Ahem ! Herr Etatsraad ! And so they promenade the summer away, hate the Germans, think the Americans speak Portuguese, and go to bed with good consciences ! Their heads are full of stories about the New World, its extravagance, expensiveness, the cheapness of life, the dearness of honesty, the laziness of American The simple, careful Danes cannot understand the magnificent hospitality of America, the generosity that is still one of our savage virtues. They peak incredulous eyebrows, and pucker incredulous mouths when you tell them people are entertained weeks and months in our houses, and allowed to go away without paying their bills. women . II. Egypt is the gift of the Nile," said Herodotus. Copenhagen is the gift of Thorvaldsen to the world . Before the birth of Bertel Thorvaldsen, in the cross street behind the antique guard -house, in the King's Newmarket, the greatest of the many Venices of Scan dinavia enjoyed very small repute indeed. People knew of it, local poets celebrated it, Holberg drama tized it in brilliant comedies. But it was as remote as an Ethiop from European sympathies, it hung preci pice-like on the brink of the extreme North, it clung to the skirts of Thule, and was dreamed and talked of like a pretty fairy -tale that everybody liked to hear but nobody particularly believed in. But presently a light began to shine. It filled a little cross-street. A VENICE OF THE VIKINGS. 163 It got out into the great gay market-place. It rolled down the green grass-clad ramparts of the town. It filled, it overflowed all Copenhagen as a goblet is over flowed with foaming wine, and ran down over Germany and Italy, and then into all the world. People thought it was the Northern Light, but it was Thorvaldsen. People thought it was a flaming Jötun filling the skies with the light of his rosy presence, but it was only a poor carver's son. People thought of the sun at mid night crimsoning the cliffs of Finland with fiery dew , and making the twilight fjord a sea of glass and fire, but · it was the only son of an Icelandic artist and a Jute peasant-woman -phlegm and flame. The forgotten city began a race with the other cities of the world . It began to climb, and through the toil and moil of the ascent its green groves shone as through a mist on the mountain side, and its palaces began to teem with marble wonders. The world awoke as from a dose of opium , rubbed its eyes, yawned its astonishment, care fully wiped its eye-glasses, and grew critical. Then a stare, a survey, a gorge of indignant remonstrance, a giving way, and a burst of acknowledgment. Copen hagen was Copenhagen at last ! There arose an art in the North . There seemed to be life beyond the classic parallel of latitude. The pomp of Paros and Carrara took ship and sailed for Denmark. The eternal frosts of the Baltic became good for something. All this in the brief period -- brief from the artistic point of view between 1770 and 1844. How long had Greece taken to run through the gamut of her immortal sculpture — from the grotesque germs of Egyptian and Eastern forms down to the Laocoon and - 164 A VENICE OF THE VIKINGS. - from papyrus the marble passion of the Wrestlers rolls to the Old Mortality of ancient times, the elder Pliny. But here is a flaxen -haired Scandinavian , child of Freja and Thor, working through beggary and neglect up to the most elaborate pinnacle of art in the stealing away of seventy years, building upon those old matchless forms and getting his own con ceptions almost as high. It was an era in Thorvaldsen's life when he got sight of the first antique, as it is an era in the scholar's life when he reads the first tragedy of Sophocles. It was a plummet of fire dropped into deep, still waters, sending through these waters an intensely sparkling undulation like the wave of the serpent in the heavens. It illumined the whole depth, and with its scorching edge cut away the film of authority, leaving a clear sweep of vision through the seas. Thorvaldsen's early work betrays traces of academic influence . There was an ipse dixit here, as in every great man's early life. With the old pagan philosophers, as one of them selves said , “ ipse autem erat Pythagoras." Thorvaldsen it was the sculptor Abildgaard, the head of the Copenhagen Academy of Art, who, with the sharp force of an inflexible formula, bent the genius of the young sculptor his own way and well-nigh caused a malformation : but the antique was a revelation a slide in a magic lantern , revealing a new horizon. The grace and fearlessness of the nude copies in plaster that were placed before him opened a view before him like the sweep of a Roman procession through the Arch of Titus into the beautiful demesne beyond — the long crystal distance of the Appian A VENICE OF THE VIKINGS. 165 Way, the sacred Grove of Camoenæ, the pallid Cam pagna, opening and withdrawing beyond. The artist gave a sigh of infinite relief. He had worked for his father in carving ornaments for ship -heads, such as queens and mermaiden, reaching out from the prows and straining their gilded eyes over the water ; filigree work, in wood, for the adornment of rich skippers' brigs ; fantastic designs for furniture, even a small bas- relief, now and then, to decorate some royal occasion when a new princess came to dwell in the Danish Castle. But never before had a gleam of Greek art, even in copy, appeared before his eyes. There are streets in Copenhagen that are like a memoir of Thorvaldsen. You see the squares and lanes where he wrestled with his childish comrades, and was taken up by the police for playing hide-and seek in a sentry -box ; by -ways and upper floors, where the people point out with pride some memorial of the Thorvaldsen family ; the room where his club met, and music, ale, dramatic recitations, and sculpture divided the evening; the apartment where the rising sculptors came together and tried to carry out their audacious plan of establishing a school for the study of the female figure ; rooms where the fiddling, dancing Thorvaldsen and his friends wrought and wassailed, mimicked their professors, and tried to make the fiddle bow the bridge over frightful penury. The early days of the Danish Phidias were evil days, uncompensated, unappreciated days, when the father drank and the mother scolded , and orders for figure-heads were few . The world was all cold shoulder. Like the first warn ing sigh of a tempest came the marriage of a royal 166 A VENICE OF THE VIKINGS. - prince, when Thorvaldsen was employed to embellish the triumphal.arches, and his work was mentioned in the accounts without the author. It was a step, and a weighty step , to put such life into dead triumphal arches that people gazed and congratulated each other on such clever work. Unknown to himself, it was the first stone in the triumphal arch which his country afterwards erected to him . There were examinations, awards of medals, and finally, to his great delight, a stipend from the Academy that enabled him to sail for Italy. There were whispers, too, of a beautiful bust of Count Bernstoff, the powerful minister, and a bas relief that had attracted immediate attention , besides a copy of the ascetic features of Tycho Rothe, a deceased dignitary. All this gathered murmurously about the departing artist and filled his ears with the hope and the excitement of talents at length appreciated. Few saw him off in those troublous times the time of the French Revolution but all the more were there to welcome him on his memorable return thirty years after. The stipend was renewed again and again , and years replete with the most pregnant study and obser vation passed away before the youngThorvaldsen came back a bronzed and white-haired demi-god to the shores of Denmark. A mould of Italian manners had fixed itself on the bland and open -hearted Dane. There are spots bits of mildew on this otherwise unspotted sojourn . There was a certain fierce Italian woman who intruded upon the calm world of sculpture, and left in it traces of her disturbing presence. This wild head peeps out now and then from between the folds of Thorvaldsen's naïve correspondence, half À VENICE OF THE VIKINGS. 167 sons. goblin, half god -like, giving a tragic terseness to the otherwise plain style. There were wranglings, part ings, pursuits, reconciliations. The easy voluptuous ness of the South crept into the very marrow of the Dane, and filled him with weakness. This is the poetry of Thorvaldsen's life —these hot Italian liai But he was not absolutely carried away. He had inherited an intense phlegm side by side with the most graceful imagination. In looking over his Italian journals and correspondence, one is surprised to see so little enthusiasm for the art and scenery that encrusted his surroundings like the rich fretting of Etruscan gold. His Danish is the simplest. Its naturalness is like a child's, but beyond this, in the whole mass of cor respondence which his friend Thiele discovered in the cellars of the Palazzo Tomati, and interwove with his genial biography, there is little that betrays an emo tional frame of mind. In fact, the Danish antiquary Zoëga found him grossly ignorant on the commonest points. There are serious discussions as to whether he could read before he was grown, and it was never settled as to whether he could spell. Art was his supreme gift, not let down from Heaven among an exuberance of other gifts as among the artists of the Renaissance, but the entire possessing presence that en grossed his whole life and hardly left him time to learn the most elementary things. He wrote with the great est difficulty, drawing up frequent drafts of the simplest letters, or scribbling envelope -backs full of intended epistles. Still nobody can look at his fine library of books, in almost every language, and say that Thor valdsen was ignorant. He became a delicate connois a 168 A VENICE OF THE VIKINGS. seur in gems, cameos, intaglios, vases, antique plastic figures, medallions. His cases were filled with the patient accumulation of years. A cultivated and watchful taste prevails in his collections. Rare sets of ancient scarabæi, seal-rings, jewelry, coins, pottery, costly copies of old vellum - bound classics, numerous and elaborate works on historical, critical, and 'tech nical art, attest that his long residence in Rome enabled him to do away with the reproach of ignorance, in fact, place himself beside the cultivated men of his time. Thorvaldsen seems to have possessed an amiable and gentle disposition in a high degree. Generous and helpful to everybody but himself, simple to ascetic ism in his manner of life, conferring upon his native land the untold wealth of his collections, Art pos sesses in him an illustrious instance of a man who, while having the most complete mastery over his own profession, had yet noble -mindedness enough to appre ciate fully the merits of others. He extended to the men of his own art and to many others ready sym pathy and practical help in their peculiar pursuits. The gallery of pictures left to Copenhagen, among his other possessions, is full of mediocre paintings bought only to contribute his mite to help some struggling artist. Many of these faded canvases have a touching interest of this kind. There was a goodness of heart in the Danish sculptor that was proof against the most abundant success. The original phlegm of his nature could not be lashed into fermentation by vain - glory . There is something grandly simple in this old man. His heart was sunny beyond three-score and ten . He A VENICE OF THE VIKINGS. 169 was too massive-souled to be spoiled by the world . There was a kindness in his face that endeared him to everybody, and that beams down from the many portraits of him that hang among his books and pictures. He loved to go to the theatre of an evening when weary of the mallet and the chisel. It was his delight to listen to the gay vaudevilles of the Danish playwrights. His seat in the theatre was beside Oehlenschläger's, and the moment they entered all eyes were fixed upon the famous contemporaries. It was at the theatre late in 1844, after a day of dining, amid the cheerful music of the orchestra, that the head of Thorvaldsen was ob served to sink, and when his friends approached, the sculptor's spirit had taken flight. He was driven home to the old Palace of Charlottenborg in whose delight · ful garden he had once walked arm in arm with the Queen of Denmark , surrounded by his friends and the loved sculptures into which he had breathed so much of his noble genius. He could not be resuscitated. The vast gray palace with its outlook on the canal and the sunny cobblestones of the Newmarket was wrapped in a stony mantle of supernatural quiet. Co penhagen was orphaned. It was no common bereave ment. The old man's white hairs and amiable simpli city had become a sight dear to the town. Thorvaldsen in Copenhagen was a sort of returned Ulysses. He had been fêted , decorated, bejeweled with a score of orders ; he had become intimate with the most august personages ; he had been honored in every possible way. Even his comb was stolen by some enthusiastic admirer that a thread or two of sil - > . 170 A VENICE OF THE VIKINGS. a man. cross. ver hair might attest an interest and a love for the old Costly morsels of paper, stray leaves scribbled with the embryo of some drawing, scraps of letters with pencil marks of marvelous things afterwards wrought out into celebrated works, are religiously kept by people in Copenhagen . All that the old man gath ered about him , vocal of him and his busy life, is treas ured there in a great Museum like a piece of the true Most pathetic of all his works is the model of a bust of Luther in clay which he was engaged on at the time of his death an eloquent unfinished memo rial, like himself, a piece of deathless clay. It is here as if we caught the breathing of the master, watched his nimble fingers kneading the clay, discovered him in the very act of creation and beheld the birthpangs of his newborn conception . The Thorvaldsen Museum in Copenhagen is at once a tomb and a museum . In the centre under the cope of the sky a square of luxuriant ivy wreaths and tan gles over the grave of the sculptor. It was his wish to lie among his works -the master among his children . The Museum represents an ancient Etruscan tomb, ob long, open in the middle, filled with small chambers and corridors and richly decorated with frescoes within and without. In one small chamber the Gany mede sheds a gentle glory as he stoops to feed Jove's eagle. In another the Shepherd boy sits and rests his leg with the perfect grace that Thorvaldsen alone had a flute - like power of breathing into mortal forms, the face bending and brooding over some delicious thought. In another the Graces stand like foam of the sea tossed into the wonderful form of human beings, human and 11 A VENICE OF THE VIKINGS. 171 not human, full of the mystery and music of the sea, full of Italy, poetry, and Thorvaldsen. Through the high windows shone the sun one summer day and broad beams coquetted with the snowy limbs of these delicious creatures. It was more than Pindar or Sap pho -- the yellow curling sunlight twining flower - like round those voluptuous lines, charging them with mys tical life, kissing them to burning blood like the kiss of Pygmalion, throwing a golden mantle about their shoulders, making the whole room a faint far cloth of gold vision whereon floated these milk -white lilies like a sweetness from the skies. Magical work does this Danish sun make when it steals coyly in the early morning through these lofty windows, creeps along the frescoes, and fills the tiny chambers with hazy lustre, falling about the Mercury or the Psyche or among the bas -reliefs let into the wall. There is a tremor of sunny gloriousness as if the old sun rejoiced to be once more in congenial company among just such breathing fig as he used to shine into resistless life in the Greek temples. Then comes the other group of pallid , passionate Graces in haut- relief, only half protruding like ex quisite half- folded blossoms from their marble disc, - a dream too perfect to be realized, a fancy too delicate to be chiseled out into the icy articulation of complete figures, a something only half dreamed of by the sculp tor himself and left immersed in the clinging marble as too fragile to venture into the rude world . look they seem to shrink and vanish, the dainty heads nestle deeper within the marble, the coiled hair is on the point of loosening and rippling in luxurious care ures As you 172 A VENICE OF THE VIKINGS. a a lessness down over the limbs and the whole vision of fading like a fairy -land of hoar- frost. Thorvaldsen lean ing on Hope stands opposite, a fine life - size figure, ath letic, ample, but dull. From his face nobody would judge that he was the author of all this beauty around him . It is a face like a thousand faces a face that loved ease, good dinners, laughter, a joke. It is hardly a face beneath and behind which a world of de lightful poetry lies. It is a pondering, ponderous face, square and broad , with a massive jaw, delicately fair, il lumined by the twinkle of kind blue eyes, framed in rich light hair, surmounted by a fur cap in some portraits. It is like the outside of the grotto of Capri —but inside it is as if living sapphires were dropping dews of azure and moonlight of turquoise. He stands stolidly, ham mer in hand, with fat veined fists and big finger - rings, shirt thrown open and blouse wrinkled into countless lines like tissue -paper, leaning on Hope. To this statue too the sun gives benignant life, and Thorvald sen lives and reigns among his works. There is no fairer company in the world than this museum in the dewy cool of an August morning. The people have not yet begun to come, and you have it all to yourself with the exception of the sleepy attendants. There is a spell, a fascination in this solitude teeming with poe try which no other place in Europe offers. An indefi nable dreamy sensation comes over the spectator as the rooms begin to overflow with morning light, and a silence and sweetness ineffable to stream from the sun A silken glory hangs about bust and bas relief and amorette. Dolphins, lions, Cerberuses, cen taurs, dancing fauns swim in elysian softness of light. lit spaces. A VENICE OF THE VIKINGS. 173 The charming little Nest of Loves, Hylas and the Nymphs, the moon - like discs that contain the Four Sea sons are full of shadows and sunbeams. The whole museum becomes an fantastic marble masque, a fairy drama. In this Museum Copenhagen and the North see their future. It is the Pio Clementino of Scandi navia. Peasants and burghers troop thither to receive precious impressions of beauty. A school grew up round Thorvaldsen that is carrying his influence in channels of fertilization all through the intellectual life of Denmark. The lively Danes have keen susceptibil ities. The existence of the Museum is in itself a school of culture scattering seeds and sermons every where. To look at the great Jason, the heroic bust of Napoleon, would go farr to create a taste for the art that could create such things. There is no country so rich in the entire possession of one great man as Den mark in the possession of Thorvaldsen . The Museum contains a vast number of his works, and year after year his sketches are executed in marble by a fund be queathed by the artist himself for that purpose. The Castle of Christiansborg and the other royal residences are adorned with works by him. Many private houses glory in some rare bust or sketch from his hand. All his pictures, furniture, antiquities are there ; the whole range of his rich and cultured virtuosity is represented ; the cathedral is enriched with his celebrated series of the Apostles, with Christ. Thorvaldsen is Copenhagen and Copenhagen is Thorvaldsen so far as art is con cerned . Canova is not Venice or Florence or Rome, Venice, Florence and Rome swallow up Canova in their painted and sculptured infinitudes. It is one 174 A VENICE OF THE VIKINGS. rose in the garden of the Sultan , one leaf in the fra grant circle of the rose . As Madonna -worship was the Bridge of Sighs that united antique and modern painting, so Thorvaldsen -worship is likely to become the influence that shall unite antique and modern sculpture. It is becoming the art-religion of the North . There is an immense revival of pagan forms going on there, a marble ritualism , a paganism in sculpture. In Thorvaldsen himself there was always a combat be tween Christian and pagan, between Sion and Mars' Hill. His Christ is built up out of Greek forms, his Apollo and the Muses commune with the people of Antioch . Thorvaldsen's correspondence is almost as dull as Michael Angelo's. The letters written to him by famous personages were numerous, and have been skillfully used in Thiele's biography. Grouped around Thorvald sen they form a charming bit of artistic memoir. We grave and ceremonious in his official dealings with the Academy, giving accounts of his works as they grew under his hands : then cordial and gossipy in his letters to his friends. A shadow lay on Thor valdsen's relations to his parents which Thiele has dis pelled. It was said that he heartlessly abandoned his father and mother. His stipend from the Academy was very small and allowed him purely for his artistic cult It was even insufficient to maintain him with decency, much less to allow him to help his parents. The shameful neglect of his friends in disposing of the works which he sent from Rome to be sold for their benefit called forth the rumor that he was letting his dearest relatives languish in want. It was months and see him

ure. A VENICE OF THE VIKINGS. 175 even years before he could get authentic news about the disposition of the articles sent to Denmark. His father died in a hospital, but it could not well be pre vented . The old man was quite a character in his way. His letters are running over with humor and breathe the most affectionate devotion to his son. The poor old fellow was incensed at the way in which “ Bertel ” prolonged his stay in Rome. But it was the only means of attaining the necessary knowledge of his art. His success was insured from the moment the Englishman Hope saw the model of his Jason. But his poor parents had not lived to see it. III. Before the eyes of one who has visited the gray Scandinavic land , —-the island -kingdom of Denmark , - there hovers a tremor of green, a recollection of ver dure and luxurious fertility such as springs from land won from the sea. Such land is Aphrodité -born, born of the sea, rich in the gold that Scandinavian legend fa bled to dwell in the sea and that sprang forth as golden tasseled grain on the land. The summer of Denmark is short and intense as a brain - fever. It is a sort of prayer, brief and fervid and full of possibilities. The summer days are endless, the summer nights are a lit tle hyphen of black between two brilliant sentences. The dawn, when comes it ? the twilight, when does it fade ? You may wake up any hour and, as in the old legend, find the Wolf- Sköll — the Hunter - pursuing the fleeing sun over the skyey race- course, or the other Wolf Mánagarmr moon -swallower --- swal 176 À VENICE OF THE VIKINGS. lowing the moon, as in the Edda, quenching the stars before the chariot- and - four of the giant of light. The glorious sheen of this Danish sun is hacked to pieces by furious storms of rain, pitiless axes of sleet. And then the broken bits of sunlight gather themselves up, flow together and form the most beautiful silken stream the world ever saw . The flowers riot in this short summer, laugh themselves to death, laugh and sparkle with such a gush of color as even the tropics hardly know. They are children of impulse, blood - red or pur ple impulses, tiny school-children whose mission is to rush through leaf, blossom , and fruit for the sake of men. They hold aloft for the world's delight wee bas kets of perfume and color : tiny caryatids of the field , they clothe the feet of the pillars that uphold the world as Mary clothed the feet of Jesus —with pre cious odor and dew of tears. As you approach Copen hagen from the lustrous ebon - blue of the Sound, great low -lying trees come to the water's edge to meet you or drink of the sea with arching limbs. All imaginable images vainly suggest themselves -- a sea of verdure, dashed with malachite, a sea - green lake, an emerald Sahara lodged between the molten glass of the Sound and Ymer's skull, as the Edda calls the sky of Odin. The beeches expand like dowagers into ample crowns of leaves and interlacing branches beneath which lurks a furtive twilight in ambush imprisoned like the moss in agate, but still so silvery and transparent that it is like music or Titania's wing or the islands of the blessed . Each of these trees is in fact an Island of the Blessed. Its amber -tipped twilight is rich in such things as the dragon guarded in the Hesperides, - a beechnut a À VENICE OF THE VIKINGS. 177 a may fall and symbolize the dropping moon, a sun beam may steal betwixt a leaf and suggest the lovely myth of Freij, whose sword was the sunbeam , breeze may throw the myriad - voiced leaves into vi bration and suggest the thousand - fold leaves and voices of the tree Yggdrasill, the Scandinavian Tree of Life, whose leaves and voices are human lives ; or a ship may float lazily by in the sunshine on the blue bend of the horizon, suggesting the old Jute legend of the Ship of Life whose halyards men climbed up as little lads and came down again as gray -haired old men. All this may spin itself forth from one of these pyra mids, these leaf- Babels, of green babbling trees. In view , just in front, there are so many ships that they cannot be counted, cutting the sea into more shapes than a star - fish . The shore of Sweden is a blue dream afar. It dips up and down like a sea -bird before the eye, or like a thin serrated slice of the sweetest azure drifted to the other side of the Sound and anchored there for the eye to feast on. There is a lustre and a sharpness everywhere --- a keen flashing sunlight, as if the Valkyrie flashed their swords as they led the slain heroes to the Hall of Odin- a vivid gold tipping the steeples like a luminous accent as if the time still were when the ancient gods played draughts with tablets of gold and filled the world with their shine. The roofs of Copenhagen each receive this accent, grave or sharp according to circumstances, and throw it back multifold. The Round Tower, the Saint Nicolai, the cathedral, each glories in its special illumination . The Round ower -- the only play -ground of the Copenhagen poor, from whose summit the eye sweeps over manifold 12 178 À VENICE OF THE VIKINGS. landscapes of water, land, and sky through rent veils of mist. Beneath is a crowd of hurrying people small as ants, tripping through thread - like streets, floating on silver horse-hairs of canal, driving in carriages made of a mouse and an acorn, carrying microscopic specks of bundles, urged by impulses as microscopic. All above is free and dilate ; dizzy tremors shake the brain when you look down into the abyss of mist and sun light and thousand - fold creeping things. Around, on the circular summit, quaint little urchins, babbling Dan ish and timorously peeping over the battlements, keep up an incessant chatter. Men, women, and children climb to the top of this tower as they would to the top of a hope or an aspiration finding the round battle ment debouching on the infinite sky. The clouds are thick as brains Ymer's brains they are, says the legend ; but often of an evening there comes a warmth from the west like a holy hope, and fans them into red hot coals. The poetry of their night is indescribable. In the first place the sun does not set. Like a colossal rose it drops to pieces and scatters its rose -leaves through a hemisphere, -like a burning vase of oil it consumes it self or runs- over in wondrous drops of burning color , like the song of the swan changed to sunset, or a cam paign of Alexander laden with the gorgeous spoils of Babylon, or a bit of Aztec civilization . Then when all Heaven is richly dight, and the west looks like a pageant of the Alhambra or a dream of Jean Paul, you wait hours upon hours expecting the dark, waiting for the mountain dwarfs to fetch out the twilight in great blocks of dusk and build it up over the world into a A VENICE OF THE VIKINGS. 179 > a twilight of the gods. But it comes not . or rather it is there, but you do not notice it, for as it slipped down from Finland over the fjords it caught in its trail so much of the dolphin's changeable beauty and the North Sea sheen, that you mistake it for simple sunset. If the night is cold and brittle the phantom drama of the Northern Light may begin to play that superb drama which is an “ awful rose of dawn, " a flower of the Infinite blooming along the pole ---- a drama beyond the Greek, for its characters are the silent snow - capped mountains, the frozen pallid sea drenched in blood, the white Infinite . Against this background of climbing crimson stalk the gigantic forms of Scandinavian mythology, Balder the Adonis of the North , Odin the golden air, Thor the strong, Freja the beautiful, the Jötuns with cheeks reddened with dawn, the swarming elves and sprites, but tower ing and flaming to the skies, Yggdrasill, the Tree of Life. A Danish night can thus become what no other a sublime song of creation. Then a Danish interior is the sauciest, cosiest thing imaginable. There is cleanliness that sparkles, spotless floors, flower -laden windows, stoves and tables crowned with plaster-casts, light curtains and gay mirrors, rooms smelling of lavender or juniper, and everywhere an atmosphere of tidiness . For be it known, the summer is their holiday . All the young men go in kids, and the ladies carry everlasting shawl- straps, holding the wherewithal to ward off the keen afternoon cold. The prettiest skins, the oddest combinations of materials in dress thrive in this land. Furs and muslins, velvet and cambric are here in amicable alliance. There is can 180 À VENICE OF THE VIKINGS. a something piquant, restless, and vivacious about the Danish women that reminds of France. Like a bale of cloth thrown up on the beach, many a quaint old custom has survived in this corner of the world that exists nowhere else. Denmark is the ingleneuk at the world's fireside. The gossip of the nations does not reach this favored kingdom except in mites so in finitesimal that even their absurd newspapers can hardly catch it . Surrounded by their sea, cloaked up in their beeches and lindens, the Danes are provincial and happy. The world to them is a far -off murmur of incredible things. Their politics hardly extend beyond their noses. The only thing that pricks this sunny, sweet- spirited people is the bodkin of Schleswig-Hol stein. Every Dane flames when he recounts the wrongs of Denmark and the encroachments of Germany. Like a gnat it is ever buzzing about the ears of this dropsical ox. They love every inch of their flat land, beit moss, bog, or fen . The muddy islands that make much of the miniature kingdom sit and squint and spew in the Baltic like Nornas the Fates of the Edda when they think of possible devouring and digesting on the part of their omnivorous neighbor. They have been green and sweet there for centuries, calling into being one of the cosiest of civilizations, furnishing re nowned admirals to the navy , piling up immense libra ries, sending forth delightful poets and philosophers - why should they melt into the blubber of a German Confederation ? But who thinks of this in summer when the entire realm is blue with forget -me-nots and scarlet with ge ranium, with the solemn stork standing on one leg upon A VENICE OF THE VIKINGS. 181 the thatched farm -houses, the trailing hop - vines wreath ing porticoes and fences, the hedge -rows all abloom and a -twitter ? It is then Charlottenlund or Klam . penborg or Söndermarken —spots delicious with trees and shade and music and sea - views. The entire . town of Copenhagen runs mad after these places. Trains are laden with ladies and children and lunch -baskets fleeing to some isle of verdure in view of windmills, sweet- smelling cornfields and sloping lawns. Every body is Munchausening it, telling others incredible stories of enchanting meadows and breezy downs. The far- famed Dyrhavn echoes through all its remote and immense length with picnic groups, heaps of children, carriages of mammas and nurses and babies. Some times twenty thousand people are there a -pleasuring fifteen miles from home. Everybody is at his wits' end for a seat in the railway carriage, everybody is eating, laughing, or talking. The whole is a brilliant social picture. Motion - there is no such motion as the streets of Copenhagen show on a bright day. These streets are chains of living beings let down be tween the houses, the squares are blotted out, the canals swarm with wherries, the street cars outside and inside are black with patent- leather and parasol. There are as many shops in the cellars and up -stairs as on the ground - floor. Narrow pavements force the crowds into the streets. The lack of elegant shops is atoned for by the multitude of small ones, pigeon -holed and dug out everywhere, sliced and sandwiched, room over There is a vast deal of small buying. The square of the Old Market is thronged every morning with peasants and carts and panniers of vegetables all room, 182 À VENICE OF THE VIKINGS. in the street, and as you pass, the old peasant women give you a knowing wink. The fisherwomen sit a-row along the canal ; luggers filled with pottery and hard ware are moored above and below the bridges, and carts backed in so as to form a fringe to the market, display all through the summer months loads of straw berries, cherries, and gooseberries in bewildering abun dance. It is a bright, unrivaled scene. The Norwe gian gloom is not to be found in these faces nor yet the Swedish licentiousness. In winter, of course the picture changes. The air is dense with fog and snow, the Sound is a floor of ice shrouded in mist, the earth is banked and barricaded with frozen garbage. Shrill blasts. howl like Hecate round the corners and among the chimney -pots. The swallows and the storks have gone. If there is sunshine it crackles like isinglass with frost a frozen sunshine armed with needles curdled brightness sharp as nitric acid . It is the time of fires, of huge Swedish stoves all aglow , of interior warmth and comfort, double windows and heavy cur tains. By nine o'clock in the morning there is a fee ble glimmer through the streets, the very asthma of light, and by three or four in the evening such a crust of darkness as your finger could cut, succeeded by an apparently endless night. It is darkness thick and firm as an egg -shell. The pavements shine with sleet ; the lamps in the squares glimmer spectrally through a fog like the phlegm of diphtheria, droschkes and omni buses glide dim and reeling along the ice-bound streets ; all the world is up to the chin in furs. Humanity be comes a sort of phantasm of mink-skins, otter-skins, and beaver- skins ; women are indistinguishable lumps a À VENICE OF THE VIKINGS. 183 a a of woolen and velvet ; children look like bear -cubs ; men are hay- forks clad in fur. But inside, in the homes of Copenhagen, reigns a tropic warmth . Long ing for spring has produced the loveliest Danish and Norwegian poetry. The first violets are greeted with rapture. The spring is a sudden glory bursting from the tomb, transforming the Sound into a mass of grating ice, putting new blue in the sky, sending through the whole land a marvelous thrill of awakened vegetation. It is so sudden, so quick -footed that six feet of snow will melt in a few hours and disclose a bed of crocuses . The swallows build, the storks return, the house-leek springs from the thatched roof, and every tree becomes tipped with a myriad of green nipples. There is a ripple of vegetable life enlarging into waves and ex panding into billows from Copenhagen to the Skaw, till the whole land is inundated. The sun appears again and the sombre tragedy of winter becomes the sparkling vaudeville of May. Overture to this charm ing vaudeville there is none. The Danish poets sing of it when the blood is warm . The fog has made the Norwegian sad, the Swede voluptuous, the Dane viva cious. Norway has been the prey of a mighty legen dary Past which has cleft the Norwegian nature, so to speak, into fjords and frowning precipices, with only here and there a sweet sheltering valley' or a streak of shining water. Its coast is a Runic alphabet, a cleft and carven hieroglyphic of nature, a boundless jagged ness filled with seams of ore, a gnarled and distorted goblin coast on which gnomes have hammered for cent uries, producing strange likenesses to themselves. The North Sea has eaten it into a shriek of granite, a 184 A VENICE OF THE VIKINGS. sort of half-human cry of wailing nature . Frost has cracked and blackened it. Its poetry is the Aurora and the myth. But green Denmark has preserved its gay individu ality all through the ages, surrounded by the same gir dle of sea that makes Norway so sinister. It is the ever-moving pageant and panorama of ships that helps the national tendency. The fleets and merchantmen of all nations scorn the storms of the Skager Rack, and keep constantly before the eye of Denmark the picture of life and civilization . With a pathetic im pulse the Norwegian sailors seek the liquid tropics and learn Spanish , basking in a sunshine that is not for them . There is something morbid in this hunger after brilliance and bloom in the Norwegian heart. It is like a man's yearning after a woman. In the long Norwegian night the South looms like a matchless poem before the fancy of the Norseman. The South is to him a radiant butterfly, a perfume, a light. There are butterflies in Norway but it is long before they There are perfumes and light there, but they are not gloriously heaped up and incarnated as in a Tuscan landscape. All through the Norse lyrics there are the tenderest, dewiest recollections of Italy. A man of the North writes wonderfully of Tasso's gar den, of Dante's tomb ; the poet Welhaven sings of Glaukos and the Troubadour ; others, their dreams of Venice ; others dream and weep. But with it all there is an unconquerable preference for Norway. a come . A SWEDISH IMPROVISATORE. > SWEDEN is a country so little known that one can make discoveries there even in the nineteenth century. A poet or two, a novelist or two are all we have from that land and its rich literature. But to the scholar who visits Sweden and studies the language, a fervid literary activity is obvious, confined within certain bounds it is true, but possessing a generous measure of individuality and likely to become one day celebrated. The world is tired of Hindoo epics, but it might be interested in a Swedish dreamer, a Northern scald simply because the thing is so new. The astonishing multitude of translations from the English, French, and German that exist in the Swedish might not argue well for the national productiveness of the Swedes. But when it is remembered that they are people of ex quisite culture whose cravings go out after other litera tures than their own, the fact does not appear so start ling. The Swedes have had scalds, sculptors, painters and historians, philosophers and naturalists, who might be placed side by side in some cases with the world's greatest. The mystic Swedenborg, the naturalist Lin næus, the chemist Berzelius are names that are house hold words ; but Runeberg and Carlén and Atterbom and Tegnér are not so familiar. A simple culling of 186 A SWEDISH IMPROVISATORE . 1 poems here and there from Swedish lyrists fills a vol ume of nearly seven hundred pages. The presses of Stockholm , Upsala, and Lund teem with romances and travels, essays and biographies. The professors and the students at these universities rival each other in fer tility. The Museum of the capital has a special series of rooms devoted to Swedish art filled with beautiful creations, luxuriating in a warmth and delicacy of tone, an amplitude and variety of subject such as would dis tinguish even more southern capitals. The beauty of the capital itself is an everliving source of inspiration to the artist and the poet. Stockholm reappears in picture and poem continually. It is the favorite resi dence of the kings, the resort of savants, the seat of an immense intellectual and commercial activity, full of magnificent hotels, palaces, and churches, and the heart of Scandinavian culture. With all this it is a shame that the bright Swedish people are not better known. It is a shame that people should be publishing Finnish and Hottentot epics when the literature of Sweden is so extensive and so well worth knowing. If the Esqui maux or the pygmies had a literature, scholars would rush to it, fall into rapture over it, and translate it with great outcry and self-congratulation. But here is a country overflowing with delightful poets, story tellers, and littérateurs perfectly nnknown to the world except through an occasional translation of Longfellow or the Howitts. The three Scandinavian literatures are as different as the states which form the idea 66 Greece. " The Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian literatures are almost as different as Attic, Doric, and Ionic, or as the three orders of classic architecture. A SWEDISH IMPROVISATORE. 187 Spartan, Athenian , and the voluptuous inhabitant of the isles do not contrast more completely than Copen hagen, Christiania , and Stockholm .. Still, though their colors are red, white, and blue respectively, they all have the cross in the centre. There are characteristics common to all, a language that is mutually intelligible, a sympathy that is more or less developed. It is in teresting to watch the angles as they become more and more acute year by year. There are discords that protrude from the consciousness of each and mutually irritate. Swedish curiosity is insufferable to the Dane. Danish arrogance and love of lucre provoke the Swede. The Norwegian laughs at the big feet of his neighbors. The Dane retorts by ridiculing the long legs of the Norwegian women. But this is mere sur face sarcasm . The three lands are intertwined by common associations and a common ancestry. Back behind all towers the august Edda the phantom of the old Norse tongue -the deep fire of a wondrous legendary Past. It is true, the old Norse was called the “ dönsk tunga,” but it pervaded both peninsulas and shot up into the strange fantastic blossom of the Edda for them all. This Edda bent over from Iceland and shed its fragrance upon the entire Scandinavian land. Nothing is more striking in the history of these three lands in the Middle Ages than the incessant shift ings and the continual conquests of one by the other. The great generals are nearly all Swedes, the great admirals nearly all Danes, the great sea -robbers and vikings frequently Norsemen. Gustavus Vasa, Chris tina, Gustavus Adolphus, Charles XII. for Sweden ; Tordenskjold , Niels Juel, and Kort Adeler for Den 188 À SWEDISH IMPROVISATORE. mark ; Margaret for Norway. It was the brilliant recklessness and insouciance of Swedish generalship that dazzled and enthralled Europe for centuries ; it was the romantic daring and gallantry of the Danish admirals that kept Sweden in fear ; it was the rapid conquest of Denmark and Sweden that gave to Mar garet the name of the Semiramis of the North. Put ting the three together, there is evolved a rare and distinct individuality , “ Scandinavia . " Of the three lands, Sweden is , perhaps, the most attractive, not from a landscape point of view, but from its lively and im aginative population. The ancient capital was Upsala, and in its neighborhood are shown three ancient and mysterious mounds, where tradition says Odin , Thor, and Balder lie buried . There is an antique church there, with a church -yard full of gillyflowers and tombs ; an inn , where travellers drink mead from Bernadotte's horn, and peradventure a stone or two carven all over with runes. It was in the great pink castle on the heights that Christina abdicated ; beneath and around lie the University of Upsala, the University Library, with its precious manuscript of Ulfilas, and the two-towered cathedral, an imitation of Notre Dame of Paris. When it is remembered that there were parts of Sweden which were pagan, even as far down as the fourteenth, fifteenth , and sixteenth centuries, when it is remembered with what ardor of idolatry they clung to Freja, and the wide- spread legends of their mythology, the slow intellectual development of the Swedes cannot be a source of surprise. The land was spun over by an infinite web of legends, like a mulberry tree with the silk of the cocoon . The lakes A SWEDISH IMPROVISATORE. 189 were full of Nökken , the greensward swarmed with fairies a -dance in the moonshine; the slopes and heights kindled with the fleeting host of Huldre, the rivers transformed their shoals of fish into shining water sprites. There were black elves, and white elves, and swan -elves who, touching water, instantly changed to lovely transparent maidens ; there were the Little Folk, who came of an evening to help mortals while they slept ; there were goblins and dwarfs, who were the crooked Vulcans of the gods, working in silver and gold ; there were fairies that dwelt in certain trees, intermarried with the human race, and begot a strange race of mythic beings ; there were wise women, and white women , and Norna-women, who made predic tions, and filled the land with grotesque poetic horrors. Field and flood, lake and shore were thronged with a population that cast athwart the threshold of every day life a luminous shadow from the other world. Then to this busy web of pagan superstitions came the wandering Christs, the fires of St. John, the lovely stories of the Madonna, the Jew , the daughter of Herodias, the legends of the saints, the musical and multitudinous legendary inventions of the Dark Ages, blending with the pagan , forming a coalition of bright, poetic forms, such as the world had never Superstition became spotted with gold, like a butter fly's wings. The revels and wanderings of the twelve Scandinavian gods became embalmed in allegory. The dew of the tree Yggdrasill became honey. The three fountains at its feet, in which the swans swam, became pools of Bethesda. The eagle that floated in its upper branches became the companion of St. John . The seen. 190 A SWEDISH IMPROVISATORE. serpents that writhed about its roots, and shot forth the blood -red fangs of the Northern Light, became harmless as doves. The entire figure became a sub lime allegory of the Christian Tree of Life. Upon the heart of the Edda were sprinkled the changing waters of the new faith . And so over the land there passed another web, woven of many colors, through which the other loomed beautiful and pale. At one point one would protrude, at another point the other, but the whole had become infinitely fairer. Through these successive stages of history and influence, the Swedish character became imbued with a peculiarity that gives it a great charm . It became essentially poetic. It had always been an ardent believer in its wonderful world of myth. These beliefs left behind them on the sand the foot-prints of innumerable things. As the delicate feet of the water- fowl leave on the new -washed beach a world of delicate impressions, - a rune -world of twinkling feet,,—- so these old beliefs, garnered up by the grandmothers of Scandinavia, and diffused continually abroad, produced their harvest of poetic impressions, and scored the national mind all over with their traces. This mind itself became a book of runes —a sculptured and curious piece of antique furniture, a fragment of an elephant's tusk twisted and chiseled into an ivory drama. There were shed down from the North the strange dews of Fin land -- their odd mountain life, their fantastic idol worship, , their wealth of ballads. Over the Baltic drifted the magnificent visions of Russian winter. From the west, through the storm -cloven mountains, strips of exquisite valley, gleams of sunny winding A SWEDISH IMPROVISATORE . 191 an fjords crept into the minds and memories of the Swedes, making part and parcel of them. From the south rippled the laughter of Denmark . Sweden became the core of a group of sweet influences, the honey -comb filled with the spoils of surrounding fields. Amid all this beauty, sunshine, and laughter, resting on this bed of legends, with one hand on the Edda and the other on the Evangelists, with their long winter, their sudden spring, and their brilliant summer —how could the Swedes help being scalds and seers, mystics and enthusiasts ? While the eyes of Europe were fixed on Germany, on Spain, and on England - Shakes pearė, the Nibelungen, and the Cid art, a phil osophy, and a literature had arisen from the embers of the Sagas. It was a swan rising from the ebon waters of a Norwegian lake, scourging the air with milk white wings, and uttering strange cries of music and hope. Like their swallows and their storks, they had been flying to other literatures and other lands for sustenance. But now their own fields were green, their granaries were filling, and summer was come.

Among the many who crept forth from this great mass of historical and legendary association was the poet Carl Michael Bellmann. It would not be going too far to say that Bellmann is absolutely unknown outside of the three Scandinavian countries. The Germans know little of him, the English nothing. In Sweden he a household word. His songs lie on every piano, and accompany every guitar. The students that serenade, serenade with Bellmann's sweet songs. The night that is gay, and glowing, and up roarious, is rendered glowing and uproarious by strains 192 A SWEDISH IMPROVISATORE. from Bellmann. The burgher's parlor, the students ' drinking-club, the lady's boudoir, the concert-room , do frequent homage to this Swedish Improvisatore. The preface to the last Stockholm edition of his works grows eloquent in describing his originality , richness, and passion. There was a spirit in him , combined with a tenderness and a spontaneousness that drew people about him , called him before the dignitaries of the land, and stamped him as a great poet. Wine lover, women -lover, song - lover, and scapegrace, of course his life did not escape censure. There were found critics to dissect, and fault - finders to pronounce judgment. This host of creeping things — the critics clad in their own conceit, like the caterpillar in his furs, fixed upon certain specks in his career, made the mote in their neighbor's eye as big as a planet, and flew into hysterics over the derangement of his household affairs. But out from this household there ran a radi ant line of joy and song that pierced even their callous hearts and melted them to sympathy. Born in Stock holm, in 1740, it was said that an Orpheus, a Bacchus, and a Satyr - music, wine, and mimicry -- were blended in his features. His great-great -grandfather was a tailor, and had wandered to Stockholm from Germany. His grandfather was professor in the Uni versity of Upsala, and his father secretary , with the title of judge. From his mother he received his most striking mental characteristics. She was a deep -souled Swede, a devoted parent, and a cultivated woman. Carl grew up in her house a wonder of music and poetry. Languages came to him with ease. Latin , French , German, English, and Italian are enumerated A SWEDISH IMPROVISATORE. 193 serve. as having been mastered when he was fifteen . What ever glimpses we catch of him in these early years show him as a shy, dreamy, poetic creature, brimful of joyousness and sunny impulse, filling the house with improvised songs. There is a light of tricksomeness and mischief about him, too, that is not the less charm ing because it was to be expected in so genial a tempera ment. It is no mass of curling golden hair, and sweet ness, and mystic lilies, and sentiment no Dolce -head, this. It is full of character, for the eyes sparkle, the mouth is a nest of Thorvaldsen's Loves, and the noble brow is the massive entrance to a temple. Life , fervor, energy have traced their lines in the face, but over the whole there floats a shyness, a feminine re It is the preface to a beautiful book. That an Anacreon could arise in the North, that a Hafiz could be born out of Persia, seemed impossible. He has been compared, and justly compared , to both. The lustre of perpetual roses, the voices of perpetual night ingales, the glory of an unending summer seemed necessary to call forth those delightful beings who sang of the grape and the garden, the cicada and the amorette . A Swedish Hafiz seemed a contradiction in terms. A Scandinavian Anacreon was absurd. But suddenly, without a moment's warning, he begins to sing. The whole country listens : it is a viol and a human voice pouring forth delicious improvisations. It is not a rose or a nightingale, but roses and nightin gales, the plaint of the sea, the gleam and perfume of wine, the dew of joy, the dash of the waterfall come to life in it, and are heard afar. Grave Upsala rubs her eyes ; periwigged and gowned professors stare ; 13 194 A SWEDISH IMPROVISATORE. . clergymen, armed to the teeth with the Lutheran cate chism , thunder forth their excommunication . But the sweet voice sings on ; the viol breathes forth its bur dened soul on the air. Sweden must have her poet. Gowns, periwigs, professors, and the clergy found it vain to stare and to excommunicate . At nineteen , the poet entered a bank as clerk, but having fallen into extravagances was discharged. He retired to Upsala and then returned to Stockholm , where he found a position in a manufactory. With poet's recklessness, he soon abandoned this place, and found himself on the world with nothing much beyond a pocketful of verses. Curiously enough this fiery and voluptuous drinker and dreamer began by psalm writing and psalm -singing. He did German hymns into Swedish , and wrote religious and philosophical books. Strange beginning for the most sensuous, the most drink -loving of poets! The roses and the night ingales were such as grew and sang in the Garden of Gethsemane. Down from the mountain rang a silver voice saying ineffable things. All this afterwards changed. In the background of these psalms there were Bacchantes with wild hair, mænads dancing to clashing cymbals, the wine-cup sparkling like Solomon's Song. It was as if some lovely pagan voice had stolen into the Holy of Holies, and were making it vocal with strange song. From his twenty - fifth to his fortieth year he laid the foundations of a per manent reputation. In these fifteen twelve -months he rose from an obscure translator of foreign psalms to be the universal favorite. The old Judæan poetry, however beautiful and noble in itself, did not suffice A SWEDISH IMPROVISATORE . 195 · him . Independent work resulted from slavish repro duction . The Lake of Galilee, the beautiful vision of the Dead Sea, with its golden, salt - crusted shores, were not sufficient for the poet of the Mälar Sea. He soon drew upon himself the attention of the King Gustaf III., and through his appreciation and patronage Bell mann was lifted out of his impoverished circumstances and obtained a secretaryship in the lottery. His mar riage soon followed , and then the birth of five children , one of whom died, robbed of his senses, in a Stockholm madhouse. In spite of the joyousness of his temper, his rare musical accomplishments, and the tender poetic light in which he viewed life, there is little reason to affirm that his domestic circle was perfectly unclouded . He was reserved, timid, sparing of speech, and it is said that frequently his genius refused to respond unless there first burned within him a glass or two of the finest wine. When the rare old vintage of the Rhine or of France had diffused its subtle fire through the poet's heart, his imagination lifted its wings, the fountains of poetry quivered and gleamed, and the thrill of a stormy and uncontrollable impulse passed through him. He would seize his guitar, and to the chance accords improvise one of his songs, or recite one of his “ Epistles." His songs came into the world . attended by the divine fairies of Music and Wine. The heat of the one and the heart of the other slipped into his words, expanded them like bubbles, and painted them with the glories of fancy and sentiment. Bellmann without his guitar would have been a trou badour without his harp, a Meister-singer without his rhymes. As his fingers hovered flame- like over its 196 A SWEDISH IMPROVISATORE. were simple strings, they trembled and spoke each in its own language. They were hazel - rods discovering the mys tic sources of song. No man, perhaps, ever possessed more singularly or more richly the gift of improvisa tion . Improvisation had long been considered the heirloom of a southern clime. Italians, Persians, Provençals —the silver --lined southern edge of the great cloud of Europe and Asia, where the sun dwells in glory, the grape glimmers from beneath transparent leaves, and the myrtle and the palm flourish supposed to be the cherished home of this charming growth. Improvisatori came as naturally from these lands as ottar of roses from the rose-lands of Turkey, or leeches from the Lower Danube. Nobody thought that there was sap or sun enough in the pallid North to mould so delightful a creature. But, mayhap, a swan in its flight from the warm lands had brought the gift -- mayhap the swallows, as they built and chattered under the eaves of Palermo or Ispahan caught up the wonderful thing like a sparkling stone and carried it in their beaks to Sweden. For there it was found and there it grew into an exquisite flower, and there it ripened into a delicious fruit in the poems of Bellmann . These poems are something unique in the experience of the North . There are poems in the Edda ancient of language, white with a vast antiquity, set in the surrounding myths like snowy pinnacles, reaching far beyond the context in There are old nursery songs and rhymed legends, and bits of moire antique in the poems of the valleys of Norway and Finland. Many of these poems have the rush and the tremor of improvisation. But in none are found such spontane age . A SWEDISH IMPROVISATORE . 197 ous outflow , such vivid blending of the genius, the wine, and the melody of the moment as we see in Bellmann's “ Epistles. ” It is the voice of the Swedish summer that speaks through him. It is the tender beauty of the Swedish night that throws its violet horizons behind and about these poems. It is the thawing lakes, the chiming waterfalls, the far thunder of disenthralled seas, the sparkle of the reindeer's feet over the snows, the flight of wolves through the firs, the murmurs and the mysteries of these firs themselves that evolve themselves from the complex woof of his works. The outer sadness of Swedish landscape in winter the ice, the vastness, the solitude of it - con trasts with the cheeriness within . The Christmas revels, the blazing fires, the nook by the hearth -side made eloquent by the narratives of a Swedish grand dame, the shelves of books, even the flowers that bloom like summer in prison along the windows, produce a mood that shows itself more than once in these poems. It is a cordial mood, a sympathetic mood, a mood that dilates like the iris of an eye with all colors. Looking out on the snow is to it looking out on a white ideal world filled with elfish strangeness. The snow is to it a field of flowers, a world of fantastic shapes, a stage upon which the lovely sports of the frost and the storm-wind have thrown the ice -crystals into shapes of jötuns and giants, titanesses and Titanias, an Edda host of poetic creatures. It will not be forgotten that the sublime forms of the Norse mythology crept forth from the ice. All the Norse legends are hoary with icicles. Frost- giants and fire- giants spurt flame and snow , and when the world goes down into the twilight 198 A SWEDISH IMPROVISATORE. - of the gods there is a silence like that on the highest Alps. It was said to be characteristic of Bellmann that his friends had to collect, to preserve, and to publish his works. With the heedlessness of genius he threw them aside with the mood that had produced them . Like a king that only puts on the richest garment once, these rich poems were used for the purposes of mo mentary amusement and then dropped. Most of the poems constituting his chief work -- the "“Epistles of Fredman were written before 1780, but a complete edition did not come out for ten years. One of his biographers remarks that this indifference coupled with the circumstances of their production probably caused the loss of some of his best compositions. He even sold the right of publication to one of his friends for fifty Swedish rigsdalers (about fifteen dollars), and how little value he set on money may be seen from the fact that when asked to write his autobiography and promised a ducat for every page, he abandoned the enterprise at the second page. Carelessness, shiftless ness, great gifts, were mingled in him in equal propor tions. With the star or the strophe of the moment were gratified his utmost wishes. Beautiful Stock holm , its pleasing life, the noble environs of the city , the striking alternation of cliff and water and luxuri ous slope, form the constant theme of his praises. There is perhaps no nobler situation in the world for a city. The low horizons of the Danish country are here replaced by lofty eminences mantled with the densest vegetation, severed by strips of bright water from each other, covered with villas or needle -wood or churches A SWEDISH IMPROVISATORE . 199 as the case may be, a brilliant focus of culture and civ ilization midway between the Baltic and the Mälar Lake. On these densely populated islands is crowded all Sweden in miniature. Swedish palaces, Swedish refinement, Swedish architecture, peculiarities, habits are grouped here in combinations sometimes grotesque. Up to Upsala winds a pretty river bordered by ancient châteaux. Down to Göthaborg meanders that won derful system of interior lakes and canals known as the Göthaborg Canal. Out to the Baltic run lines of water communication to receive the flotillas of queer craft from St. Petersburg and the Russian shores. The centre of all this matchless activity sits Stock holm with half a hundred towers, spacious in gardens, interesting in museums and libraries, with the splendid palace of her kings and a cathedral full of lofty and venerable associations. A point of light in the dismal North , a garden of beauty in June, the meeting-ground of a powerful and cultivated aristocracy, the Swedes find there all that they need in literature, sentiment, and life. To Bellmann, under a mild administration, an appreciative king and a small but adoring circle of friends, Stockholm was a paradise. Not the “ urbs, urbs” which Sainte-Beuve remarks that Cicero is so continually calling for in his letters, had a larger share in the affections of the accomplished Roman than Stockholm had in the affections of her poet. There is something in the character of the Stockholm popula tion that is more lively, more impressionable, and more impulsive than in the rest of Sweden. The dia lect is not drawled so intolerably as in middle and southern Sweden. There is almost a tropical fire at 200 A SWEDISH IMPROVISATORE. times in the eyes of the people. There is a love of wine, of opera -going, of shooting hither and thither over the water in their tiny steamboats, and of outdoor amusements such as reminds of a fair at St. Cloud or a kirmess in Bavaria. Bellmann is a child among these children , an enfant reckless as ever patrolled the boulevards. He is up to any and every thing. He knows the unsavory places, the faubourgs of doubtful repute, the inns and the ale-houses, the table of rouge et-noir and the tennis - court. But there laughs within his heart side by side with these all that makes life beautiful. There is a charm of innocence as well as a stain of knowledge about him. The smile about his eyes is a smile that sometimes makes the lips quiver. So, when the poet was dying of consumption, he wrote one of his last poems in prison, a prison into which he had been thrown by the malice of enemies, begging to be allowed to spend the summer in a little room at Drottningholm for the benefit of his health . Where here and there The golden air Might steal into the poet's lungs.” 1 The golden air stole into these yearning lungs only for one summer and one winter more. Soon the end was to come. One evening when he felt his end ap proaching he summoned his friends about him, took his guitar, and sang them each a song. All night he is said to have poured forth the most beautiful and touching improvisations, calling to mind the joys and recollections of by -gone times, flooding them with his 1 Sefiren då och då Flåsa i poetens lunga. BELLMANN . 66 A SWEDISH IMPROVISATORE . 201 melody and his tears. The night wore on and the day began to break.. They begged him to spare his strength. He would not. The spell and the passion were upon him and the long hours from dusk to dawn were passed in this memorable manner. A few days afterward he died. It was the year 1795. There is something peculiarly Swedish in Bellmann. No other nation in the world could have produced him. The fact of his becoming at once an universal favorite as soon as his works were published guaran tees that there was in him that which profoundly spoke to the national consciousness. Bishop Tegnér wrote a noble hymn to him. The critic Atterbom in his fine work on the Swedish Scalds and Seers has de voted great space to a delicate and profound analysis of his life and works. Professor Ljunggren of the University of Lund has appeared in a special mono graph on Bellmann and Fredman's Epistles. There is a charming sketch by the poet Erik Bögh, a rich and appreciative essay by Arndt, a life by Carlén and a critical discussion by Theorell. Every year there is one thing or another from the Swedish press on Bell More than any other Swede he seized and comprehended and reproduced the humor that is a ground characteristic of this genial people. It is hu mor that flaunts its many colored banner through Fredman's Epistles, that throws over their coarseness a harlequin's cloak , that covers their multitude of sins with the red jacket of punchinello. These poetical epistles froth and foam with humor, often rude, often Bacchanalian, but always enjoyable. It is Ponce de Leon's fountain , it is the udders of the cow Audhumla mann . 202 A SWEDISH IMPROVISATORE. from which ran down the four rivers that fed Ymer and his children . It is inexhaustible. From the ale house, the serenade, the excursion in the country, the revels of choice spirits round the punch - bowl, the streets and the water-ways it gushes and bedews the whole book. Arndt was the first that noticed the pa thos of this humor, this Isis behind the veil. The poet of the moment, the moment was the supreme thing for him . The evanescence of the joy mingled with the most brilliant joy itself, and from the two came that delicate spiritual tone in him that hangs like a mist on the shoulders of autumn. The fleeting, the perishable, the mutability of all things — strange words to drop their nut-gall into the chalice of hope - strange words to change the crimson wine-press into a hideous quag mire. Even the feet of cupids may press poison from the wine- vat. The tusk of the wild boar may desolate all the beauty and the voluptuousness of Adonis. There is the hiss of an adder in this mirth sometimes . The feet of Venus are scarred by nettles . Fredman and his friends leave traces of blood on the snow as they traverse it in the stormy pursuit of pleasure. But their color is the sacred color of Mahomet, - perennial green , the green of youth and love that never melts into the gold of autumn. They die young, in the June of life, long before the murky heat of the latter day. They are self -devoted to death . The fangs of an in tense sensuous happiness are fastened upon their vi .tals. The glory of a crowned and contented old age is not for them. Fatalists of pleasure, they believe in El Islam , “ resignation ," but it is resignation to the senses. Their walk is a delirious whirl, their conver À SWEDISH IMPROVISATORE. 203 sation is often ribald . The sky blooms above them red as a poppy -- a scarlet opiate. The soft morning seas are to their reeling senses a spume blue as Dis. The lights and shadows, the thousand pranks and poetries of these seas are smoothed out into a marble gulf of in finite gray. If there is hope, it is the hope of infatua tion . If there is faith , it is a profound belief in them selves. Imagine a throng of irresponsible sons and daughters of joy, and you catch a glimpse of the revels of Fredman and his circle. It is not an aristocratic circle in which they move. It is the middle class of bland bourgeoisie. There are soiled linen, and unkempt hair, and neglected finger -nails among them . They are tradespeople or innkeepers or discharged soldiers. Their meetings are no symposium of Plato. Their Al cibiadeses are always stretched under the table. The wit and wisdom fall from stammering lips. It is no antique perfumed candelabra that gives them light. A rush-candle illumines their table and their faces ; their goblets are pewter tankards ; their drink is the distilla tion of the country. Far into the night rise their cries of exultation and drowsy revelry. And yet human as they are, faulty and extravagant as they show them selves, a more vivid and living set of faces have seldom appeared in literature. Efforts were made to confound him with the characters he painted and to make of him a worshiper of drunkenness and lewdness. But no view could, historically, be more false, and no view could, morally, be more offensive to the truth. Equally remarkable with their humor is the struct ure, the architecture, of these poems. Poured forth as many of them were, from the lips of an improvisatore, 204 A SWEDISH IMPROVISATORE . they have a perfection that places them among the masterpieces of artistic Swedish poetry. Nay, the crit ics who are most competent to relish and understand all their subtleties of structure, say without reserve that they are the most perfect specimens of finished and melodious versification in the language. That many of them must have been carefully elaborated, stands to reason. But Bellmann was an ideal, a born improvisatore, and such was his mastery over the rhythmic resources of his native tongue, that it was no matter of difficulty to him to improvise spontaneously. The rich and flexible vocalization of the Swedish ren dered this easy. It is related of him that on one occa sion, when a mere child confined to his bed by illness, he became delirious, and during the delirium not only poured forth an incessant stream of poetry, but sang it to strange and sweet airs of his sprung from the abyss of fever. His lips moved spontaneously to music and verse. The Swedish critics who feel all the delicacy ofhis complicated metres, say that it is impos sible to dissociate music from Bellmann's poetry. It was born under, in, from music. His knowledge of music was varied and vast ; his capacities of adaptation marvelous. All the music of his time is embalmed in the manifold airs to which he has set his verses. lies as under clear, crystal glass, or like sea- shells at the bottom of transparent seas, or like the water-sprites in the “ Masque of Comus." Looking into these clear - gazing down on this sparkling embalmed music -you see the movements of a vast contemporary life, you catch the whirr and echo of an immense epoch . What the Swedish father - land sang and danced, capri own, alike It seas 1 A SWEDISH IMPROVISATORE . 205 and grew а . oled and lived through during its mighty resuscitation between 1740 and 1795, sings and dances, caprioles and lives in these tunes and semi- chords. Bellmann's memory, like the legs of a fly, was covered with minute hairs, to which everything musical stuck . Nobody would think of adapting to his songs any other music than that which grew to them as of its own accord. His poems were an Amphion -Saga, —the stones picked themselves up into a noble wall with a hun dred gates. The music watched him like the eyes of Argus, like the starry skies watching Io. It came to him suû sponte. He had a peculiar method of his own of making decent and presentable whatever came to him in tatters, or covered with sores. Sweden is the land of idle and wandering music. All he had to do was to touch it with the tip of Ithuriel's spear. In the old Norwegian legend, the sword flashed and rang along the wall when peril was near. These bands of gypsies - these Ishmaelites of tunes flocked about Bellmann like the birds around St. Francis. All he did was to pick and to choose. His choice was in every case so nice, that the airs to.which these compositions are now sung, are the same with those of a century ago. There is something quite extraordinary in this facility of musical adaptation. Much of it was genuine creative genius. There were existing airs so skillfully manipulated, as to become at once and forever Bell mannesque. Further, if ever there was an Augustan era in music, it was that which embraced the period between his birth and death. But he was no musical sneak skulking round operas of Beethoven and Mo zart ; no Lazarus covered with corruption and lying at 206 A SWEDISH IMPROVISATORE. their doors. Independent, creative, comic, he composed in the spirit of his time, and filled this time with the babble and the buoyancy of his attractive melodies, to the last, himself. The great day in Stockholm is Bellmann's day, the twenty -sixth of July. On this day the populace flock forth to the Djurgaarden and celebrate his anniver sary as the Romans do the birthday of Tasso. The Djurgaardén is a park full of noble precipices and frowning boulders, villas and country -seats. Its trees are among the hugest in Sweden, its beautiful drives and winding promenades offer delightful retreats to tourists of health and pleasure. It is a pagan solitude, brimming with Christian civilization . Scores of boats skim over the numerous canals, and land along its shady bulkheads. Swiss châteaux rear their fronts of delicate Alpine tracery aloft among the venerable lin dens and beeches. Oriental pagodas, in which sit knots and orchestras of musicians, rise from glowing coronets and living garlands of flowers. Over the rocks creepers are trained, and along the eaves creeps a green inunda tion of blossoming vines. Here and there flag -staffs fling out the colors of the Swedish crown. Every where gay groups arranged in unconscious picturesque tableaux, give a human ring to all this statuesque re pose.. ' Clusters of booths, tents of marionettes, clinging like barnacles along the slopes, open -air theatres, and the whole phantasm and confusion of Jocko and his friends, enliven certain points with spots of animation and color. The great Gothic wilderness of beeches and lindens, boulders and promenades, mingles with its cus tomary stillness the swarming sounds, the thronging as > A SWEDISH IMPROVISATORE. 207 . sociations of human life. The wave from Stockholm breaks into eddying pools of gossip, or into whirlpools of boyish laughter, the ebb and flow of a thousand smiles, a thousand little dramas. Here is King Lear, deserted by his daughters, yonder is Hamlet, wandering like a ghost. On this side is a roaring Falstaff, on that a sentimental Jacques. It is Stockholm — Sweden the world a bee - hive of busy interests, a Babel of multitudinous talk . Each ripple of the sea makes the multitudinous sea-laughter. Each tremor of a leaf makes the woven language of the trees. Each child, woman , and man, throws in his grain of dust, his jest or jeer, to form the mad whirling globe of a Stockholm anniversary. It is no sunken , suffocated moon - this luminous globe —with its spectral gulfs, and its craters emptied of light, its pallid glimmer like a tertian fever, its skin and bones of joy and brightness, its hooked and horned excrescences like a ghoulish face. It is more like the flame-whip of the comet, goading on the planet slaves like an overseer, visiting all the universe with his scarlet scourge, whipping up the dilatory suns, scolding the truant stars, tickling the asteroids. It is a cheerful thing, enjoying its cheerfulness to the full, not grudging the overflowing drops to any “ celestial biped.” On the twenty-sixth of July it is Bellmann about whom gather these skirts of applause, around whom is cast this mantle of mirth . A colossal bust of the poet rises on a lofty pedestal over the heads of the people. In its mobile features, lie the dream of the North, the passion of the South . Its lips are more than laughter. In the cheeks there is a rounded full ness, in the chin there is a dimple. The large eye ex 208 A SWEDISH IMPROVISATORE. presses neither the eagle, the gazelle, nor the ox, but there is an indescribable something that is Bellmann. There may be something like the large liquid globe of the ox, the sun - fire of the eagle, the moonlight of the gazelle. But moonlight, fire, melancholy, are not Bellmann. He has all these with his own piquant and pointed individuality besides. What this is, no pen is delicate enough to catch and transfix, any more than one could harpoon a butterfly. Whatever it is, it is all afloat in humor. Humor is the sea that flows round the other characteristics and makes islands of them, so to speak, islands of moonlight, islands of tenderness, islands of fire, -but it itself is the all-shining, the all -pervading. In this sea there are islands of slime, and islands of mother- of-pearl rants of Bacchus and sayings of gold -dreams of beauty and nightmares that hug the breast like a whole St. Gothard. But about and around them all is the silent shining sea. It is a November night, when the sea turns up its gold to the livid moon . But with it all , there is a horror of un speakable things -- monsters of jelly like illuminated blubber, a floating and swimming of living sperm, a spreading through the sea of icy, convulsive, horrible vitality. There is a lustre of dead fish, of rotting scales, of the silvery putrescence of scaled and corrupting things. It is Bellmann's coarseness, in a word, that sometimes gives a jar like the spring of an aching tooth. This coarseness belongs more to his day than to him. It was in the air and went round with the changing This plague of indecency has visited the world as regularly as any other epidemic. Europe grew hysteric in convents and nunneries during the seasons . A SWEDISH IMPROVISATORE. 209 Middle Ages. The East is danced all over by dancing dervishes. The Thebais was honey-combed and inhab ited by the ribald hermits whom Boccaccio flayed. Bellmann is spotless in comparison with the lechery of Claurens, Rousseau, or Tom Moore. His time reeked with wine and intoxication , both spiritual and alcoholic. Amid the pleasant solitudes of the Djurgaarden stands this bust on its marble pedestal, a sunny presence, a flower, a symbol of joy. The wild pinks grow around ; the wild birds sing a tiny operetta of summer among the dells ; the blue-bells cluster by the roadside and call forth Alpine recollections. Bellmann is happy, for it is his park , his anniversary. 14 JASMIN, THE TROUBADOUR. - On the right bank of the Garonne, seventy -three miles southeast of Bordeaux, stands the little town of Agen, for a long time noted for being the entrepôt of trade between Bordeaux and Toulouse. Its prefect ure, seminary, public library of fifteen thousand vol umes, and churches, were pot more remarkable than those of other provincial towns that basked in the warmth and cherished the reminiscences of Southern France. Nor did its manufacture of serge, cotton prints, starch, leather, and sail- cloth suffice to bring upon it greater repute than its Gascon sisters enjoyed as centres of thriving commercial interests —active little bourgeois towns that worked barefooted all the week and came out on Sunday in sabots and ribbons to spend the afternoons in dancing and wine-tippling. It dwelt in the shadow of its rocks, secluded from the world, apart from the passions of the metropolis, sip ping its vin blanc and eating its rye-bread in peace, caring nothing for the wayfarer who recounted the wonders of the capital ; in love with its own remote ness, living the life and dying the death which Mon sieur le Curé registered in the parochial record, when it was ushered in, and dismissed with the crucifix and the unction, when it was ushered out. Nobody JASMIN , THE TROUBADOUR. 211 thought specially that it would ever be sprinkled with the golden dust that flies behind the chariot of a poet ; for though it boasted of the residence of one great scholar in the sixteenth century, and the birth of another, and the church of Notre Dame de Bon -En contre in its neighborhood was famous for its legend, its miracles, and the pilgrimages that were made to it in the month of May, these circumstances were not enough to bridge over two hundred years of insignifi cance and make it one of the shining lights of the Hautes- Pyrénées. It was of course proud of the peo ple who had lived in it, of the scholars whose arro gance and rancor, whose learning and boastfulness had been the talk of their century ; but it seemed loath to lay claim to a dignity beyond what the accidents of fortune had conferred upon it and to assert its impor tance by the production of a great writer -a singer that should warble of its trim poplars and pretty vine yards, a historian that should recall the glory of hav ing once seen there a page of the Emperor Maximil ian, a scion of the Princes of Verona, a famous knower of antique physical science in a word, the commen tator on Theophrastus and Aristotle, the author of the first philosophical treatise on the Latin lauguage, the immortal Scaliger. But perhaps the staid capital of the department of Lot- et- Garonne felt in its heart of hearts that the time was coming, that it could afford to wait for the years to break the silence and tell the world of its existence in notes as rich as those that awakening summer sends from the throat of the thrush in notes that should be at once a tongue and a lyre, a thing that talked and trilled, wherein dwelt fire 212 JASAMIN , THE TROUBADOUR. a from heaven , through which a whole segment of the national life should reappear wrapped in the mantle of the old troubadours - only a mantle that had gone with them to the skies and for thirteen generations been lost to the human race . So that there is a moment for silence and a moment for speech with all of us. Long silence is indeed the signal for a more delightful break, for according to the adage it has become golden . How much honey can gather in the human mind in four hundred years, through four hun dred springs, when four hundred suns have rolled over, and four hundred summers have garnered the sheaves, colored the poppies, winnowed the corn - flowers and ri pened the juices of a national tendency ! When this ten dency is poetic, what a fullness is apt to gather, chafed by long reticence as by a nettle, all the more luxurious for long continence, all the more irrepressible when the flood -gates are once opened ! Then the slightest occa sion evokes a strain of music ; the whole man buds and blossoms like the rod of Aaron ; the simple meeting of a nymph, a faun, and Silenus, as in the sixth Eclogue of Vergil, becomes the motive for lovely and wonderful singing of the most lovable of ancient philosophies. All the back years are warbled into consciousness again ; all the dormant recollections have their ears plucked like Tityrus, and break forth into praise and thanksgiving ; every forgotten thing rejoices in being remembered again ; all the past breaks like long lines of sea on the beach over the mind and the artistic perceptions of the poet. The very stones that such lucky mortals throw backward grow like Pyrrha’s into men and women , and become the source of a world -allegory or a grace JASMIN , THE TROUBADOUR. 213 ful fable. Whatever has imbedded itself in conscious ness turns at the first stroke of this sunlight upward toward expression , lifting its head into the light for the crown or the commemoration of the poet. What ever lay on the book-shelves of human emotion covered with dust or spoiling with neglect, is brought forth and bathed in those beneficent instincts that have given the world so much solace in the works of genius. The glee of him who has thus been made the mouth piece of many mute generations is prone to run into extravagance, into enthusiasm , into ardent lyric form , into whatever gives eloquent and laconic expression to emotion, seldom into prose with its colorless peri ods. The South of France has always been the home of poetry. The æsthetic invalid of our day seeks its healthfulness as the most genial prescription for his world-worn body ; but there was a time when what ever of culture Europe had, be it crowned head, knight-errant , or savant, looked to Languedoc for liter ary sustenance as we look to the presses of London and Leipzig. There in a corner seemed gathered all the sweetness that had survived the Roman Empire --- a nest of singing-birds that had escaped from the palaces of the Cæsars, and for three centuries dwelt among the lemon -groves and the vineyards of Provence. It was there, in a second Italy, that were preserved the precious relics of Latin civilization ; and the recollec tions of the Latin past seemed to maintain themselves longest in the popular language, customs, and associa tions. While the scalds were filling the language and literature of upper France with the myths of the far 214 JASMIN , THE TROUBADOUR. North , and the sword of the Moslem was cutting its way through the Iberian peninsula, scattering broad cast the legends of the Koran and the Khalifs, this sunny southeastern nook of France was preparing it self for the lovers of the “ Gaie Science” who in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries filled Europe with their gallantries, their chivalrous manners, their refine ment and their literary activity. It was an afterglow of old Rome in the days when Vergil brooded over Theocritus and Horace lived with perpetual eyes on the isles of Greece. It was a strangely modern revival of the olden time too, for the Crusades were at hand, and the rich shadows of the Christian system had fallen athwart the shadowless demesne of the pagan world . There is disturbance, fermentation , outcry : unconscious art is no more ; it is the beginning of the long chain of forces that culminated in Goethe's " Iphi genie " as distinguished from the genuine antique; ; the commencement of the sphere of retrospective and yet creative art. The old mythology had fled and given place to another in which heathen gods and goddesses found themselves metamorphosed into Christian Ma donnas and saints, in which Plato's dream of the just man who died in expiation was absolutely realized , in which the speculations of Socrates were surpassed by the most beautiful of ethical systems, and the statue of Jupiter was transformed by the kisses of thousands into the similitude of a Christian martyr. Perhaps no country has ever been more favored by circumstances than this division of France. It lay with its face toward the Mediterranean, at the very threshold of all the cultivated nations that have given JASMIN , THE TROUBADOUR. 215 to our world its most glorious heritage : the Greeks had transferred thither in the earliest times much of their beauty and enterprise ; it had been traversed by continual Roman armies that left behind them a taste for the poets and the masters of the literature which they represented ; the Goths from the North settled there for two hundred years, and imprinted upon the language something of the chastity and strength that were native to them ; finally the Arab gave the finishing touch to its manifold combinations, and until expelled by Charles Martel in 725, distrib uted over Burgundy, Dauphiny, Gascony and Langue doc the riches of his imagination, his religion, and his philosophy. From all this complex action and reac tion, from the clashing of these hostile and yet harmo nious forces, resulted that Queen of the Dark Ages, the wonderful little kingdom of Provence, the very name of whose people was between 1090 and 1290 the synonym for poet, for poetry, for all which was dear to the heart of man in its moments of gallantry, love, and adventure. Its geographical boundaries were the sea, the Rhone, the Alps, and the Var; its spiritual boundaries were not measured by parallels of latitude . The very time of the mediæval period was, so to speak, calculated upon the meridian of Aix, its capital, for we find the German imitators of Provençal song cele brating in their Minnesongs the French spring -month April instead of their own, which was May. No Anglo -Norman, Teutonic, or Spanish troubadour dared depart from the established usages of those amiable sonneteers, who addressed a hymn to the moon or to Blanchefleur, to the Virgin or to a flower, with equal 216 JASMIN , THE TROUBADOUR. ease, grace, and point. Its arms coil all about the feu dal times like the serpent of Laocoon, not in deadly but in genial compression, exercising the gentlest of tyrannies, - a force that was persuasive, that stirred men up to noble deeds, that sang and died with the pilgrim -kings before the Holy Sepulchre, that cheered the captivity of monarchs, that filled the whole coun try south of Loire with bright and busy throngs who to the sound of lute, harp, and viol contended in poetic tourneys and carried on lance or shield the love- favors of their dames. It was almost inconceivable how this great tide, drawn by some unseen moon, rose to the brink, brimmed over, flooded the civilized world and then mysteriously crept off - drew in its floods, sank downward into the earth, and left it utterly, to the point of being entirely forgotten from the fourteenth to the eighteenth century. It was the fable of Luna and Endymion —the kiss, the ambrosial presence, the light, then flight, abandonment, darkness. In our day nobody knows anything of Provençal literature except it swell upward in a mysteriously sweet chord of Pe trarch, in an echo from the poems of Dante. These great geniuses did not disdain to interweave with their writings the Easter -daisy and the dark -leaved olive of Provence. Through the canzone and the “ Divina Commedia” Provençal influence steals like a sinuous river, now sinking out of sight, now reappearing as a thread of silver . There was more than one ray of it in the great radiance which the poet and his conduc tor saw from afar, and which turned out to be the face of Beatrice. The sudden silence after so much tumult, the quiet that fell over France after the pastorals and - > а . > JASMIN , THE TROUBADOUR . 217 the tensons and the chansons de geste , the jeu -parti and the cour d'amour of the troubadours, was like the spell that a snake casts over an aviary . There was a hush all the more painful from the musi cal babble that had preceded it -gray sand - bars after the tides had gone out . a period of widowhood in forlorn contrast with the brightness and the cheer , the gayety and the abundance of the pristine minstrelsy. Aix and Arles , Romanin and the others, from capitals whose wealth and influence assembled a hundred con tending talents to their jousts and tournaments, dwin dled into haunts of rural nobility. Provence lost its antique savor

its language

, which had stood midway between the Latin and the French, and was a written language when Middle High German and French were little above barbarous dialects, lost its hold and sank into a patois, while the beautiful literature it had pro duced lay in obscure libraries and waited till the times and the eyes of Raynouard and Diez, Bartsch and Meyer for interpretation. The hour came when the tongue that had been the delight of Thibaud de Cham paigne and Alphonse of Spain , of Limousin troubadour and fair châtelaine, decayed to a peasant's jargon and became an utter non-conductor of poetic as of every kind of thought. So it remained , fallen from its an cient prerogatives, while its rival on the north of the Loire, the Langue d'Oil, rose and shook itself like a giant ready for the race , gradually perfected itself through the stories (contes) and allegories ( fabliaux) of the Trouvères, proceeded from stage to stage , from the chronicles of Turpin to the chronicles of Froissart, from the fables of Adam to the fables of Lafontaine, / the war -songs , . 218 JASMIN , THE TROUBADOUR. from the Romance of the Rose to the romance of Mad ame de la Fayette, and came forth the language that is now spoken all over the globe. The purpose of this preliminary sketch is in some degree to prepare the reader for what follows, to in troduce to him the national poet of the South of France, who has rescued this language from neglect and placed it again in the ranks of living languages ; the man who, since 1820, has revived the olden troubadour fer vor that has always slept in the veins of the Gascons and has called into being rivals and imitators through out his country ; the man whose works, written in a tongue long abandoned for literary work, now shine among the classics in the best libraries, have been translated into English, French, and German, and have become text-books in almost all the seminaries and lycées of Languedoc - Jacques Jasmin the Trouba dour. Our age has witnessed many reforms and innova tions, many revivals of ancient things and discoveries of new ; yet perhaps none more quiet, more thorough, or more unique than the upstarting of an entire nation ality into rejuvenated and rejoicing life, the re-birth of an extinct but noble literature. This re-awakening began with the people, the mother of us all, the com mon source of all strength and failure, the warm com pensator of all that is true and high. It was early one morning in 1798, in an old rat -haunted house in Agen, behind the door, that Jacques Jasmin, the son of a tailor, came into the world . His father had a hump and his mother was lame; they were poor laboring people, frightfully poor, so poor that they often knew منکهبهمردمدرانقرللنعنل JASMIN, THE TROUBADOUR. 219 a not whence their supper was to come, or whether the bailiff would not be upon them for arrears of rent be fore the soft southern night closed in over their heads. It was a tradition and a fact in the family that all the Jasmins died in the poor-house. Toward this bourne father and grandfather and son saw themselves drifting from generation to generation, from birth to death, through long years of wearisome and unavailing toil. It was the one shadow that overspread their lives ; for they were happy people, and on the road to the last stopping-place they managed to have many a moment of joy that did not cost anything, or if it did, the sou that was spent spread open like the fairy's pavilion and embraced them all in its wonderful arms. It was a fate no worse than that of thousands that had struggled uncrowned with success against circumstance : a hard profession that worked almost to the quick and did noť reward ; the small wages pitifully doled out, the harsh words, the consumption day by day of what was earned, the weeks of languor or of lying-in, the neglect or the penury of which the world recked not. The birth of the poet was not ushered in , as we learn from him, by salvos of artillery like a prince's, but to the uproar of a great charivari headed by his father, who had composed verses for the occasion, and with vast tumult of horns and kettle-drums was serenading a neighbor. The child lay upon a little cot which was stuffed with lark's feathers, a meagre, tiny little fellow , but " fed on good milk and growing like a king's son ," a wee bundle of humor and sadness, a nervous little accretion of tears and smiles, swaddled in ' rags, not a whit less comfortable, perhaps, than the lace and cam > 220 JASMIN, THE TROUBADOUR . bric of gentler blood. When he was seven years old he valiantly toddled after his father to charivaris, horn in hand , with his head done up in gray curl-papers ; or, carrying his lunch, went a -brush- gathering in the islets of the river with his little playmates, no doubt all as ragged and bright little tatterdemalions as ever pilfered the sunshine or the fruit of a neighbor's gar den. The sunshine was the only fireside that they had ; but it was very beautiful for all that, and made them live in no envy of the rich children that had card -houses and rattles and ill-health for their share. “ To the isle !” was always the cry with the young vagabond and his companions, for the sand was like velvet there ; at no other place in the world was lunch 80 sweet, and abundance of bark, brush -wood, small branches and stray lumber thrown up by the river, was to be found. How deftly they bound it with osier withes, and how much they gathered before the advent of the evening star ! And then what a pretty little tab leau on the homeward march : thirty fagots balancing on thirty heads, and thirty childish voices mingling in one refrain ! The story of his youth as told by Jasmin in the most musical of poetic memoirs, “ Mes Souvenirs ” (Mous Soubenis), smells like Sicilian thyme where the bees of Hybla collected their honey. It is the prattles of a child through which breathes the deep tenderness of the man, the tender smile of the father . Common apples became apples of the Hesperides when smitten by the golden light of this mind, so genially retrospect ive, so ardently responsive to what is beautiful and true. The forlorn poverty of those early years breaks through in spite of the laugh, however ; but through JASMIN , THE TROUBADOUR. 221 the story there runs a rhythm that is inimitable : it is a song without words ; it is like the touch of Mendels sohn ; it is the sea beating time on the shore ; it is Ariel in the wind. So light, so musical is the treat ment : the poet is going over the dulcia arva the pleasant fields of youth ; like the lost Hylas, he lies on the hyacinths among herbage that the lowing cattle love ; he calls up his remembrances from the high ways, and makes them , like the antique shepherds, flute forth all their soul to the reader. Simple though they be, they are full of cadence, full of sparkle. The wonder is how incidents in themselves so common place can have gathered to themselves tones that be long to the great masters, bars that seem stolen from one of Beethoven's symphonies, cadences that seem caught from the full sweep of Mozart's fingers. He puts his winning life -story, as it were, into a little boat, and sets it adrift on the sympathies of his race. Even in the French translation of this poem -which is rude -- all that limpid peculiarity is preserved through which as in a clear pool we see every pebble, every water- lichen , every minnow that darts like a sunbeam or cleaves the light like a prism ; the naiads among the grasses and lilies reach upward their arms and draw us down despite ourselves. We see him as he leapt fences and filched nectarines from his neighbor's close ; and it is pleasant to remember the kindly re morse that seized him for it in after -life, and made him pardon those who robbed his own little vineyard. In spite of his pranks, however, he was a dreamer ; the single word school made him mute, and produced on him an effect like the sound of a viol ; he could have a -

a 222 JASMIN, THE TROUBADOUR. 9 wept, he did not know why, when he heard his mother in her corner at the spinning -wheel repeat it softly to the old grandfather and glance furtively toward him. So, too, when he had filled the boursette with big sous by running errands during the fair and handed them over to his mother, her sigh and her thanks would go like a poniard to his heart. But there was a butterfly there, a flower, and in the flower a fairy that tickled him elfishly and made him wild and hopeful beyond the reach of trouble. In winter for lack of fuel they sunned themselves ; but how sweet were the winter evenings when forty village gossips in the room at forty spinning -wheels, made forty bobbins fly, and grouped themselves round the marvelous crone children and all -- who told of the Ogre and Tom Pouce , the Sorcerer, Barbe- Bleue, and the Wehr wolf howling in the street ! Half dead with fear they would creep to their couches pursued by sorcerers and ogres, and the next evening reassemble to work and to listen to the superstitions that with Plutarch and the Bible have from time immemorial formed the sweetest aliment of our human kind. Scheherazade is the Homer of children, and the morose Sultan of the Indies is humanity, that will hearken as long as she talks. We all become Khalifs and ghebirs and genii when we dive into this underworld of gnomes and dwarfs, wehr-wolves and swan -maidens. It is the cranes of Ibycus that will always make known the murder and form the theme for infinite poetizing as long as life lasts. And so in this hot Gascon blood the old leaven was at work. One day while at his sports an unusual procession in the street attracted his JASMIN , THE TROUBADOUR. 223 attention : he looked up— it was his grandfather whom they were carrying on a litter to die in the hospital! No more fun , no more amusement for him . His eye involuntarily turned to make an inventory of the old chamber, opened to the four winds : three poor beds, a half dozen curtains riddled by mice-teeth like a sieve, four or five cracked plates, two broken jars, a wooden goblet worn at the edges, pieced garments, clippings of cloth from his father's scissors, à pitchy candlestick , a frameless mirror blurred by smoke, four bottomless chairs, an armoire without a key, a wallet, a beggar's staff - that was all. And the dear grandfather who had chosen always for him the ten derest morsel of the bread that he had pitifully begged was gone ! From this moment the iron entered his soul, to become afterwards wondrously transmuted into gold, into fame, into universal veneration and respect, into verse that should become classic and be placed on the same shelf with the richest intellectual inheritance of his native land. Books that were to be dedicated to Charles Nodier, to Sainte -Beuve, to Lamartine, lay in the glance that followed that stricken procession through the streets of Agen to the hospital. A ring set with gems was to replace the wedding- ring that the mother wrung from her finger and turned into bread for him. The bitter herbs were to be followed by ban quets innumerable ; the ragged urchins among whom his early associations fell were to be succeeded by lords and ladies, even kings and princesses. A sin gular future lay on the hills for him like a light from heaven. A medal, a prize of 5,000 francs was to be adjudged by the French Academy to the lofty moral 224 JASMIN , THE TROUBADOUR. ity and genius of the words that were to come from this child of the South, the son of deformed beggars, the descendant of those whose habitual need it had been to take alms, and to take them gratefully. The for gotten Provençal (or rather the written Provençal, for it had always been alive) was to resume something of its olden dignity ; the chorister of Magdeburg was to be the author of sweet and noble hymns; the boy of Agen was to be a hero of whom an Odyssey of wan derings from ovation to ovation and from town to town was to be recounted and remembered. There is something in this career that calls to mind knights errant journeying from court to court, the life of Walter von der Vogelweide or one of the retainers of Hermann of Thuringia. Meanwhile to school he went : in six months he had learned to read ; six months after he served at mass, became chorister, intoned the Tantum ergo, was entered at the seminary on a charity - scholarship, and then driven forth soon after with execration and curses . He himself tells the circumstance with infinite verve in his “ Soubenis ” (from which these details are all extracted ). He had so far ingratiated himself by his studiousness and zeal as to win an old cassock that had been offered by the priests as a prize ; but having been guilty of some unchorister -like improprieties, his misdeed was found out, and the culprit locked up during the whole carnival, 'with mighty hue and cry on the part of his clerical confrères. Unfortunately the prison was ad jacent to the Superior's pantry ; and being one day an hungered, the luckless youth, forgetting the awful sanc tity of this spot whereto the Superior was wont to > . JASMIN , THE TROUBADOUR. 225 withdraw for devotions, fell tooth and nail upon the delicacies therein stored with an appetite to which bread and butter had given additional fierceness. The good Superior meanwhile, with soul full of pardon, had determined to forgive the improprieties, which were after all very pardonable, and to release the delinquent. So puffing and perspiring with benevolence he arrived at the door, walked in and what a scene ! The mis creant was finishing a jar of grape - preserve . With a bound and a yell “ Ma confiture ! ” that rang like the crack of doom, the canon pounced upon the burglar, swore at him roundly, and shook him till the jar deliv ered up its contents at his feet : “ Dehors, diablotin, dehors ! Ceci est un péché que nous ne pardonnons pas! " His grape - preserve was a sensitive point with the Su perior ; it was against his most reverend stomach ; there was no relenting after this unpardonable offense ; the thing cried aloud for vengeance ; Jasmin slunk away cassockless and accurst from those holy portals, and became a barber. This, in the mind of the monks was but the culmination of a downward career -soap and razors after Glorias and Tantum ergos ! Never was there such a by-word and hissing among men . The ecclesiastical fowls cackled over it months long. Saucy glancings at a girl, stealing the Prior's good things, bespattering that saintly carcass with its own confiture, becoming a barber, and going to the devil what was all that but one and the same thing; a logi cal chain handed down after the straitest sect of ancient logicians ? Never had such edifying discourses been delivered within the purlieus of the sanctuary as in the 15 226 JASMIN , THE TROUBADOUR.

outraged monastery on this occasion . The Prior fairly pranced with fervor in describing to his audience of tonsured crowns the moment when his apostolic eye first encountered that child of Satan as he stood gorg ing himself with canonical goodies : " Hé Dieu ! en escrivant cette parolle A peu que le cœur ne fend ! " But in good time it fell out that men became more afraid of this barber than the tyrant Dionysius was of his. He grew wise and potent, developed a poetical turn, sang and improvised astonishingly as he seized his customers by the nose and drew the razor daintily over their faces, got to be the town talk, and soon rose into one of the celebrities of Agen. He was as musi cal, as witty, as nimble as the Barber of Seville. A silver streamlet, he says, began to flow into his humble shop. Men were interested and touched by this pic ture of genius and poverty , by this eloquent and yet humble scene, by this delicate muse that shed a mys tery and a perfume over one of the coarsest of the pro fessions. It was something unique altogether in its kind. Poets had been barbers before, fiddlers, prin ters, artisans, beggars ; but there had almost always been an ambition to rise and forget, to ignore, or some times to hide, the shame of obscure beginnings. Here, however, was the true spirit of the Gascon king, the monarch of the Pont-Neuf, the good and fearless Harry of Navarre, which made men stop and admire, which went abroad through the land and recalled another singer in the North whose fearlessness and honesty were as great —Béranger. The dialect that the Age nais spoke, too, was almost as mellow as the Tuscan, _ JASMIN, THE TROUBADOUR. 227 rich in vowel- elements, liquids, trills, elisions, with the old Latin heart beating afar within its consciousness, still a - tremble with the vibrations of the troubadours, still haunted by Gothic and Saracenic reminiscences, still clothing its hills and skies in metaphors, as is the impulse with semi-tropic languages, within which, so to speak, still flourish the date and the palm. The vocab ulary had been suffered to run wild in the mouths of the peasantry, unkempt and unpruned ; but it had ac quired a ripeness and a number that men wondered at when they saw it in type, set before them in elegantly printed volumes, embellished with every grace of typog raphy, engraving, and illustration. Of all contrasts between gift and profession, of all Apollos tending the flocks of Admetus, this was surely the most striking. There was a rhyming baker some where else in France who marvelously imitated the ele gies of Lamartine, so that even good judges were de ceived ; but here was an idyllic muse that in the lingua rustica brought forth imperishable poems, uttered things that were immortal with a Gascon accent, composed works that unconsciously put in practice the great prin ciples of pagan art, works athwart which the antique world passed like the transit of Venus athwart the sun's disk , about which hovered something redolent of the Portico, through which peeped the gardens of Epicurus, the shipwreck of the Cyprian merchant Zeno. There was no material here for heavy tragedies, vast epopées. There was too much heart for that ; too much idyllic tenderness, too little ambition. No work perhaps was ever so remote from theatrical envelope, from sensa tional effect. It was a scene of perfect nature ; it is 228 JASMIN, THE TROUBADOUR. St. Augustine pouring out his confessions ; it is Mon taigne in one of his priceless chapters. For him who seeks there is scarcely the exquisite mosaic on which , as in Wieland's romance, Aspasia and her ladies enact the wonderful myth of Daphne ; but there is the ivied battlement, the oriel window , the sunny domain, the minstrel-haunted hall of wassail of an ancient provincial château, such as that which Sire de Joinville describes when he left it under the holy King Louis for the Pay nim wars. The minstrelsy of Provence has toned down into lyrics and elegies which the language, in which they are written permit to be sung, or even to be danced, by strophe and antistrophe. Not so varied or 80 sublime as Béranger, who is the poet of unrest, of republicanism , of advanced theories, of intellectual stir, of an era busy with rationalism : there is in Jasmin cordial concurrence with the established order of things, a preference for monarchical perspectives, an absence of tumult, skepticism , irony ; a faith in the mother-church that is at once lovely and moving. He is not a bard ; he is a simple being to whom life and events present themselves musically, attuned to an inner rhythm , rhythmic without arbitrary choice, full of the occult quality which the ancients deified and made into the nine sisters, full of the mystical glory that dwelt on Mount Parnassus and floated down to Homer when he uttered the first line of the Iliad . There is more of the Frankish spice in Béranger : Jasmin is the poet of Aquitania. Strangely distinct to this day are the na tions whom Cæsar found in Gaul, ruggedly independ ent despite the attrition of ages, perpetuating them selves in quaint customs, traditions, individualizations. JASMIN , THE TROUBADOUR. 229 а With Jasmin a curious problem has come into being, whether there are to be two literary languages in France. The popularity of his writings at once evoked a throng of rural poets who sang in the same or kin dred dialects, and busily propagated them through the land. Metropolitan French is hardly intelligible to the Agenais ; to the Parisian a translation is necessary to understand the Gascon tongue. Jasmin's works, instead of being the swan - song of a dying language, are wet with the very dew of the morning ; instead of the last blossom of an effete system , they embody the efflorescence of a language for the first time genuinely alive. In Rembrandt's picture we see Lazarus coming forth from the shadows which the poet has made so lustrous, alive and strong ; in Jasmin we see emerging from twilight a young and beautiful language, not in firm because a written language ages ago, not degen erate for having been rusticating among the Gascon peasantry, not a whit inferior in high and genial memo ries to the other dialect, the dialect patronized by Mes sieurs les Académiciens. This language is spoken by a large rural population, a population of merchants and manufacturers, vine-dressers and cultivators of silk , be ings full of the thrift and the impressionableness of the South ; and after the preservation of so many centu ries, it is impossible that it should not continue to be perpetuated. It was remembered that Montesquieu and Montaigne, Mirabeau and Massillon, Henri IV . and Massena, were men of the South ; from there came the “ Marseillaise, " and the brilliant throngs with which it teems spring not from a province of Italy, but from a continuation of Italy itself — as Pliny says, quoted by 230 JASMIN , THE TROUBADOUR .

M. Villemain. The Secrétaire Perpétuel of the Acad emy crowned at once Jasmin and his patois when he said that in the luxury of great commercial cities as in the châteaux, in the villages as in the drawing -room , from Lyons to Marseilles and from Toulouse to Bor deaux, the poet-pilgrim found a welcome. It was his habit to journey from town to town like his predeces sors in the thirteenth century, everywhere greeted with ovations : a branch of gold from the city of Toulouse for his poem “ Françonnette ; " a golden cup from Auch ; a ring and pin set with diamonds and pearls from the Duchess of Orléans ; a seal enriched with rubies and emeralds from Villeneuve ; a medal from Bergerac ; a crown of gold from his native town ; a medal and the prix extraordinaire at the sitting of the Academy in Paris. These demonstrations of enthusiasm bring back the crowning of Petrarch at Rome in 1341. He was as celebrated for his powers of pantomime and recita tion as for his poems. He produced a sensation in Paris at a literary soirée given by the élite of the town . There was a grand entertainment, and then recitations in the original from his writings. The crystal of Paris ian cynicism melted and bubbled over in tears and eulo gies, as we see by M. de Pontmartin's account in the “ Union ” next day. He had hardly been listened to five minutes, says an eye- witness, when they were com pletely won , and that, not only because the Agenais poet was overflowingly endowed with all the Southern qualities, expansiveness, vivacity, warmth, exuberance, éclat, power of glance and gesture, but for reasons more serious and profound, because in Jasmin a su preme art had combined all, and produced such accord JASMIN , THE TROUBADOUR. 231 between idea and expression that the hearer seized them both at once, divining the one by the other. It is the plowman Burns amazing the wits of Edinburgh. Another peculiarity remarked of Jasmin by this critic, was his sobriety, his self-restraint amid the tempting richness of a Romance imagination . So much was said in so little ; unceasing seemed the toil for concise ness ; there is something almost austere in the simplic ity of the lines and forms which he chooses ; some thing ascetic in the figures he has immortalized ; something antique and hence musical as of highest art in the virginal serenity that is enthroned upon all his female characters. He recovered the secret of the old ballad —a something that is indefinable, artlessness, pathos, sweetness, strength—call it what you will - all pervaded, all sublimated by the same master-tone. It is the sweetness of an ascetic face not strong in the sufficiency of the world, but strangely sweet by reason of self abnegation, quick of scent for what is spiritual, seizing facts and making them grand and mellow for all times to come. No instinct was ever happier in selecting its facts. The race is not to the swift nor the battle to the strong. The battling of the weak is noble ; the race of the slow - footed is sure ; both have their day of reckoning and compensation. So there is more pathos in " The Blind Girl of Castelcuillé " ( L'Abuglo de Castèl- Cuillé), who follows her faithless lover to the church and there hears him wedded to another while her heart breaks and kills her, than in many a volume of “ tragedies over which the world has sniveled . There is no frenzy there but that of the most piercing human grief, no background save that of the awe- struck 66 » >> 232 JASMIN , THE TROUBADOUR. 1congregation gathered to the nuptials -no beauty of perspective save that which the village church offers with its time- honored stalls, its simple crucifix , its image of solemn death, its bridal-veil rent in twain . People know this legend by heart who perhaps never heard of the Cid or Zaïre ; to whom Corneille and Racine are empty names . It is one of the legends of Gascony torn from the recollections of those who knew the circumstances, transformed by these melting sym pathies into a rare masterpiece, breathed through by a pity and a gentleness that gather into an anthem in the concluding verse. More moving even than this is the story of “ Martha ," another legend from the memories of the people pre ciously embalmed for us in myrrh and spikenard, day one of the classics of French literature : Martha, the poor idiot, who for thirty years begged her bread through the streets of Agen, whom everybody loved without knowing why ; whose tragical story nobody knew until Jasmin learned it, never to be forgotten , on a pilgrimage through the lanes and vineyards of his neighborhood. Like the other, it was a story of love, desertion , the coming of a great shock , and life setting in insanity and darkness. The author never perhaps so fascinated his reader as in this little work, so rich in tears, so impassioned in conception. There rings through it a litany of silver voices that weep and cry pardon to all the world. The exquisite picture of the two girls trying their fortunes by the cards for their lovers who are to be drawn in the conscription ; Martha's hope when the cards - queen of hearts, knave of clubs and all came out for her brilliantly, g 66 ܘܐSWgrme It tuTEmo61 tei" thrnotthatat t- JASMIN , THE TROUBADOUR. 233 ز until the dark queen of spades, the last in the pack, emerges like a spectre and dashes it ; the conscript off for the wars, swearing eternal fidelity ; the resolve on Martha's part to sell all she has inherited and redeem Jacques by putting a substitute in his place ; the coun try priest whose kindness to her is so great ;,the poor girl's rapture when Jacques has been found, delivered, is hurrying home to throw himself at the feet of his unknown benefactor ; Jacques' return with a strange woman at his side as they all stand breathless in bridal array at the church door, awaiting him to unite Mar tha to her lover forever ; the one supreme glance in which Martha understands all ; the gayety that aw fully breaks from her lips and seals the doom of her reason ; the tender light which all this throws over Martha's fear and flight whenever afterwards, in beg ging from door to door, the boys in the street cry “ Martha, a soldier, a soldier ! " -- how thrillingly, how lovingly is all that told ! It is a brimming river that sweeps onward to the sea, not waiting for its shores to grow lovely with verdure, not lingering for embellish ment, but all that and more under the tender stars ! It is an idyll sweet as Ruth or Esther, almost Scrip tural in its austerity, almost Christ - like in its sadness. The poem is worthy of Goldsmith in his best mood, the mood of the “ Deserted Village. ” The author himself tells how he used to run, and cry with the others “ Martha, a soldier ! a soldier ! ” until her story flamed through him like a sword, and gushed forth in this noble expiation. Seldom has there been a recital that so.wounded the tenderest fibres of the heart and at the same time healed the wound with such balm . 234 JASMIN , THE TROUBADOUR. It is the oil and wine of the Good Samaritan benefi. cently at work within . A recitation of this poem in public must have been what he said of another : It was Corneille ; it was Talma. It bruises the heart with exceeding sweetness. In “ Françonnette " there is more lightness ; but it, too, in the successive pauses as the cantos are called soon grows dim with shadows, wild with storm . The author has an indescribable touch ; all the chords that ever smiled or wept come crowding beneath his fingers and roll onward at the faintest pressure : it is the children of the captivity remembering Zion ; it is a waltz of Strauss. Like the wedding -party in Tell, quick upon the joy comes the arrow that flies to Gess ler's heart : in Françonnette the charm , the sprightli ness of the flirt fade into the distance at the whisper that her father was a Huguenot and she is sold to the Evil One. The South of France is a nest of supersti tions. This was one. The elements of the story promise to be more tragic than either of the others ; for a long time the thunder mutters along the clouds ; but the close comes in a burst of sunshine that laves the senses like the dew of summer . There is recon ciliation delightful as the singing of a harvest -home after the garnering of the sheaves, delightful as voices from over the water happy with the burden of their own joy. The smile with which we close this little drama is a smile that has the richness of something deeper, it penetrates to the region of tears. Jasmin may not be a perfect artist ; there is little of the mar ble calm that shines so sovereignly in the creations of the Greeks ; we are haunted by what we have read, JASMIN , THE TROUBADOUR. 235 not as by a vision of great restful Ionic temples with their lordly serenity, but as by a spot overgrown with human lives as with mosses, twined about with loves and hates, quickened every inch of it by human ashes. Goethe may look upward to the heights and see calm ; but beneath , the valleys and the floods skip and clap their hands. There are moods in which it pleases us not to be dealing with impersonalities. One Thersites can put to rout Ossian and all his shadows. Every where, through the poem to Liszt and through “ Mes Souvenirs , " " Mon Voyage de Paris, " " La Semaine d'un Fils,,"" « Les deux Fréres Jumeaux," there is the same frank individuality. One of the best known poems was that written for the purpose of collecting funds to rebuild a ruined church in Périgord — " Le Prêtre sans Église.” In company with the curate he travelled all through the southern provinces, working and gather ing and reciting with such success that the church was not only restored, but a magnificent spire added, and the whole dedicated in the presence of six bishops, six hundred ecclesiastics, and a great multitude. The man’s whole life was a constant alms-giving ; the ruis seau argentin that flowed into the barber -shop soon became a source that solaced innumerable miseries, genially kissing many a door-step on the way and leav ing behind traces of its generous waters. Not often has genius been so consecrated by goodness ; not often has goodness become so illustrious by genius. a BÉRANGER. Mes chansons, c'est moi. - BERANGER . a TOWARD the middle of January, 1833, in the sweet seclusion of Passy, sat an old man in a great arm - chair, chatting of the reminiscences of his youth, using a sim ple eloquence as he wrote that charmed all hearts, scattering wisdom and wit, among his god -children, looking with such tender eyes on human folly, regard ing with such amiable indulgence the peccadilloes of men, prattling like a child and a philosopher of a past that had been to him at once beautiful and sorrowful. It was a pleasant sight : Passy with its stately souve nirs of Franklin and Count Rumford, its ample histor ical gardens, its serenity after the great accouchement of July ; the old philosopher in the chair, with a face. revered by France, with a head that had grown into a noble spectacle of silvery and reverend hair, with eyes reverted, dim with the dew of those morning reminis It was a preface that he seemed to be writ ing -a preface that was to be an adieu. It did not begin gayly like the other prefaces. There was all the solemnity of a farewell in the deep gratitude which it began by testifying to the audience that had received the author so benevolently for more than twenty years. cences . BÉRANGER. 237 > There was no gay allusion here as formerly to the threat to resolve in three volumes, octavo, the question why booksellers insisted on prefaces and why readers insisted on skipping them ; no witty glance at the em barrassments of the “ Bourgeois Gentilhomme ” in his efforts to compliment the charming marchioness as in 1815 ; no sly irony on the scholars that ransacked their brains to derive the words flon - flon and toure louriho from the Greek and Hebrew. There was a soft reverie, a tender musing while the fires burned again along the lines of remembered youth, an evident effort to overcome emotion at the thought of the patri otic sentiment, the constancy, the disinterested devo tion that had been shown him through so many trials. Amid the graceful explanations of the birth and period of his earlier productions there rose before the old man's eye the wistful face of the great Napoleon, the noblest object of his songs, the idolized epic that is written on every Frenchman's heart ; then the Cent Jours, then the Bourbons, then the Citizen King and the whole host of glorious memories that like Leviti cal priests blow their silver trumpets around the cen tral figure of the first Buonaparte, all jotted down with nimbleness, gently or indignantly according as the sen sitive and impressionable nature of the writer had re corded. It was strange how eloquent the fingers grew as they touched these vitalized reminiscences, how the eye sparkled with interior light, how the lines flew eager and breathless along the pages like winged seed burning to find a lodgment, how the thought glowed long after it was written with a beauty and a steadiness that cling to it to -day. It was an old man taking leave 238 BÉRANGER . of his people , a benefactor blessing the thousands that he had helped and loved , a father kissing his many chil dren and calling down upon them the riches of a benig nant Providence . It was Béranger taking leave of his songs. It was the “ Chansons Nouvelles et Derniéres ” that he was prefacing, a prelude that was rich with the music of one of the most harmonious natures that had visited France . The world listened and wondered as the old man went on , telling with delicate grace and truth the story of a long and eventful life in language that was simply inimitable for artlessness and force . To some the benignant wisdom , the light -hearted phi losophy of the Franklin of the widow of Helvétius was suggested, to others a Homeric simplicity and loftiness in the genius that had made a philosophic ballad of a drinking -song and wedded it to perpetual youth -- Hebe to Hercules . With all there was the sense of an irreparable loss in this preface, for it contained a re nunciation, and a renunciation that was final. It seems odd that one man can do the world so much harm by withdrawing from it his help , his genial and gentle mirth , his word of cheer, his hand in the darkness , his indignant tears, his passionate 'remonstrances. It would seem such a man's mission to continually gain say spiritual darkness in high places

to throw up bar

ricades against wrong in all the moral highways

to march like Cæsar at the head of spiritual armies;; to die

like the Roman monarch on his feet when his time had But a great and good thing had already been done in the life of this man : strong and sweet and sunny had been his warfare , although his philosophy was an indolent one, and indolence was his favorite t1 come . t.toI. BÉRANGER. 239 ace. vice. His weapon was a laugh, a song, a sword that was thrust home in a gay refrain, the teasing persist ence of a chorus that returned and returned until it had acquired a victorious force and its moral purpose was done. It was the pæan, perhaps, even more than the phalanx that wrought such wonders for Alexan der. The sunbeam is the most effective of the arms of nature. It is this sweet presence that is the fa miliar spirit at the fireside of this valedictory pref As the recollections one by one were marshaled up from the past, and one by one dismissed with a blessing or a tear, it is as if the sun shone upon the glinting helms of a host assembled for the good and glory of mankind. There is nothing shameful among them , nothing that quails or hides its head ; and the old man smiles as he cuts his pen and sends it quiver ing through some proud story of independence or pov erty snatched from oblivion and made luminous on the page of history. There is no manipulating, no artful adjustment by which the perspective is made more grandiose than the reality : it is the artless talk of a great man seen through the lens of the most crystalline of tongues, with no reservations, no confiteors to be added in an ugly appendix at the end of a life-history. Perhaps this is the pleasantest song he ever wrote . this last chat with his readers, in its crystal honesty, this high and holy spectacle of a soul that no imprison ment, no persecution, no wrath of archbishop or Bour bon could trample into silence when there was reason to speak, this serene self-measurement that so artlessly tries to shelter itself from popularity under apologies. Like a bell vibrates this clear, crisp prose that some 240 BÉRANGER erence . 15r htW times breaks into wonderful little lyric pictures , like frost -ferns on the pane . There is a sense of rhythm , of repose, of quiet, strong will, of summer freshness, of autumn mellowness in these pages. Not garrulous, not egoistic, they constrain respect, admiration , rev From: momentous events he comes to de scribe his songs

masterly is the touch

, acute is the analysis. He naturally shrinks like a father from pointing out too clearly the defects of his children . But there is fatherly wisdom in the observations he makes , a great sweetness in the deference he shows the people to whom they are bequeathed, a profound and sympa thetic consciousness of the people's need for a litera ture. The pen grows talkative, and tells how its mas ter did not know Latin , was not learned in the languages, was foolish and wild in youth, loved the people and wine and women and Buonaparte, was overflowing with all winsome philosophies, and did not take it ill of his old patched coat and his garret to disclose the secrets of honorable indigence. Perhaps it was never more interesting or more persuasive than in these confessions that have a positive melody of frankness in them , a harmonious aptness to the frame work in which they stand. The Dane, Andersen (whom he resembles in more than one respect) , could not tell of “ The Loveliest Rose of all the World " with warmer hues or tenderer commemoration than does this capital story -teller , who differs from the other in that he sings his stories to the lyre and makes his fairies dance on the village green. It is pleasant to see this tranquil recapitulation in the evening of life , this settling of old scores , this rearrangement of hcshan раThRuan blctheintfulnesSON JeaIhave. prit BÉRANGER. 241 armor after the battle and toil of the day, this adjust ment of claims so purged of anger and partiality. Passy has grown greater since : Paris has spread out her suburban arms and amplitudes until the fair rural demesne has become one of a dozen such assimila tions ; but. perhaps it will be long before any event more remarkable than this adieu of January 15, 1833, takes place there. In the song to which this event gives birth a song which, like all great things, was born into the world amid pain and tears the reason is given for this sudden and sharp swerving from the line of promise which the world had for a score of years so keenly and hopefully observed. It was the retreat in good order of a skillful general, drawing off his forces before they were diminished or destroyed, with colors flying and joyous fanfares in all the hope and prime of conquering strength. There were shadowy Cossacks on the horizon - elements of defeat and failure which the poet saw betimes and pre pared to meet with instinctive tact and resource. There was to be no sumptuous frozen zone of all the Russias that glittered like a toy before this general and then sank like a Morgana into a scene of disaster, blood, and humiliation. The first menace of the storm, the first key that shivered and threw the instrument into quivering discord , was reverently listened to, care fully heeded. Hence with all their impassioned sweet ness, hence with all their Brazilian richness, the Chan sons Nouvelles et Dernières," the last songs of Pierre Jean Béranger. If Béranger had been an antique poet, Ovid might have put down the 19th of August, 1780 -the anach 16 242 BÉRANGER. as a dies fastus, a day in the calen dar to be solemnized with thanksgiving to the gods for sending into the world the most joyous-hearted, the most tuneful of mortals. Pretty Dame Béranger, the good and careful mother, no doubt saw in the birth entry of this only son a fact that was pregnant with opulent possibilities. We are not told that the child came into the world sickly, squeamish , dying, like Pas cal and Voltaire, with the germs of a life-long dolor that has thrown its halo over more than one great genius. Here was a child of glory, born without the sharp Pauline thorn, absolutely healthy, supremely cheerful, irrepressibly buoyant, no object of doleful foreboding, but saucy and sprightly and well to the heart's core. His very first recorded utterance was a joke, a sally, on recovering consciousness after being struck by lightning. His pious aunt had sprinkled holy water copiously round the door- sill during the storm, but in spite of that, poor Pierre was struck and lay long insensible. After listening to the anxious conferences about what should be done, without being able to say a word , he suddenly cried gayly : " Eh bien ! à quoi sert donc ton eau bénite ? ” ( Well! what's the good of thy holy water ?) Sainte-Beuve gives us this anecdote. A jolly household must have been that in the Rue Montorgueil, Paris, at his grandfather the tailor's, when this brilliant being enlivened it with his face, before he was sent off to Péronne to his benevolent aunt. It does not at all resemble the stately and sad boyhood of Victor Hugo with his grand royal ist mother, his mysterious sadness, his unboyish prefer ence for Tacitus and Juvenal, his sunless and sulphur ronism apart . BERANGER. 243 a ous gloom . All is air, sunshine, gayety, sportiveness ; no, brooding over the sublime historian and satirist of the Cæsars ; no poisonous household discords ; no travels to Elba, Spain, the province of Avellino, to extirpate Fra Diavolo and his bandits ; no passionate fights with little Spaniards in behalf of the “ grand Empereur ; ” no vague purple twilight, such as surrounds the author of “ Les Misérables, " as it were with a sacred awe and mystery comparable only to that of early Pelasgic demi-gods. There is little drapery to this figure ; no magnificent withdrawal into a Pagan twilight ; no re moteness from the gaze of men ; no flinching in the fine nude limbs, the manly open eye, the mirthful phys iognomy ; no formation of a cult round the spot where the divine fire of genius and song had fallen . You might have seen (had they been there to see the spear point that flashed in the hand of the sentinel, the shield that sweated blood, the red-hot stones that fell from heaven, the blood-stained sheaves that lay in the bas ket; the sun fighting with the moon as we see them in the naïve XXII. Book of Livy : 80 void of willful sensationalism is this great poet's coming. After some years of service, and rummaging through Télémaque, Racine, and Voltaire ( which happened to be in his aunt's library) , he returned to Paris, not, however, before attending, as his biographers tell us, a school which had been modeled after the theories of Emile, and where, as elsewhere in the realm , the visions of Jean - Jacques had been practically realized . The chief thing here was to sport a uniform and compose big sounding addresses on all public occasions. Such was the ideal of the Genevese doctrinaire ; such was the 244 BÉRANGER a initiation which Béranger received into life : such was the apostleship of the most advanced liberalism that was thrust upon him, and which became the mantle and symbol of his activities henceforth . Questions of social science, however, did not yet occupy, as they afterward did , all the high places of his songs. For a few months fortune smiled and enriched his father. There was a brief interregnum of wealth and independ ence. Eighteen months passed away, and with them the affluence that had wrapped its caressing arms round father and son, and imbued them with its expensive tastes. But with rare stoical nerve Béranger, with all the instincts of an epicure, cheerfully surrendered his luxurious habits and set to work to learn printing as a profession and support. His teacher fortunately took more interest in his genius than in his handicraft, and while he could not make him learn the mysteries of type-setting, managed to instruct him in versification, and encouraged the very decided inclinations to litera ture which the young verse -writer evinced. We learn from the song “ Le Tailleur et la Fée," that his grand father was opposed to his becoming a " faiseur de chan sons . ” The heavy wooden sabots were light enough on the feet of the young vagabond, " à la paresse, hélas ! toujours enclin," and he could not reconcile himself to remaining waiter-boy, printer, or clerk (" garçon d'au berge, imprimeur, commis ” ). Well did the fairy pre dict that his light songs would become dear to the French and solace the tears of the exile. It would be hard to forget the moved and tender tone in which in after - life he responded in one of his poetic epistles to the announcement that the “ Chansons " had reached the > BÉRANGER. 245 Ile -de - France, and were sung there with as much en thusiasm and admiration as through the streets of Paris. The poet could not conceive how these airy little waifs could float a thousand leagues over the sea and find access to those far tropical latitudes. But it was this very airiness, this ethereal pathos, this drum -beat of immortal gladness, this generous sympathy with all men, that winged these tiny Mercuries and made them messengers of the gods even to the under-world. They were wondrous combinations of Air, Fire, and Earth , so that when they rose into the sky, they shone like pole-stars before the fancy, and travelled their perpetual orbits, in beauty, on their errand of mercy and amelior ation and soft human fellow -feeling. As in the natural world by the agency of shifting zones, so in these songs were the flora and the fauna of remote climes brought together so that each could recognize his own cuique -- strangely mixed , cunningly distributed, fur nishing keys to every heart, unlocking every conscious ness, so to speak, grazing chords that brought North and South together in one common and felicitous ex perience. No wonder, therefore, that their delightful wit and spirit were reverberated by the crags of the Ile -de- France and left trails of echoes in the interven ing leagues. There was a common understanding be tween Béranger and the lovers of song, a preëstablished harmony, a spacious margin for contact and recogni tion . There was no such thing as a misunderstanding possible, as a word to be toilfully looked out in any dictionary alien to the reader's heart. The first note of the sweet romance that Blondel sang roused the poor captive king and woke within him, like a swarm suum 246 BÉRANGER. 1 of golden bees, mysterious yearnings, dormant regrets. So the chansonnier might exclaim with just pride : " Aux bords du Gange assis, Des exilés, gais enfants de la Seine, A mes chansons, là, berçaient leurs soucis." This young brain too, like so many others, swarmed with fervid dreams of great epics, long heroic poems, the pomp and majesty of the numerous Alexandrine. It was the exuberance of fertile youth conscious of its plenitude, stirring with vague creative instincts, feel ing the advent of puberty, turning its blind inundating force to the highest as the only vehicle of relief, and then losing itself like the Rhine in the sands of the Netherlands. It was lucky for French literature that there were found friends and patrons to dissuade him from his projected epic on Clovis ; else we might have had all those perfect little Anacreontics molten into some vast smoking and smouldering " Henriade," with just light enough to illumine a disastrous failure. What would then have become of all those scintillating, leaping, laughing Nereids born in the purple of the sea amid foam and shells, and following the eerie blue fire breathing horses of Poseidon --- the songs of Béranger -to be suddenly overclouded , appalled, dispersed by this Titan ? Unique as La Fontaine in the fable, perfect as An dersen in the fairy -tale, is Béranger in the song, and in precisely the same way. His life, grace, and poetry arise from his mission to be a singer and nothing else, a maker of subtle little lyrics that have the wings of Eros, the bloom of the Asiatic Aphrodite, the aërial perspectives of Anacreon. He manages to find just the BERANGER. 247 point, just the marvelous image in the Villa Hadriana, just the little dramatic episode that will give rise to those inimitable morsels of love -dialectics such as we enjoy in the “ Ad Lydiam ” of Horace, or the “ Pélerinage de Lisette ” of our author. Béranger was eighteen before the thought of composing songs entered his brain . It suggested itself to him as an amusement, as a pastime; and in the ease with which he gave himself up to it was recognized the unconscious Sibylline oracle that bade him walk this Via Appia to fame. Hence we feel in his first essays all the outgush, the rollicking merriment, the self -abandonment of a sport ; a thing of ease, eva nescent, ephemeral, not too profound ;; the twinkle and the fascination of the moment, bright but perishable it nay be, with something that resembles a dithyramb ; the first onward sweep of the fountain without stopping to form crystal pools to catch the images of the unfath omable stars in. One of the most memorable things that survived the Revolution was this harp of the poet, this triumphant lyre, the very magnetism of which seemed designed by Providence to make up for the " songless reign of the Revolutionary Tribunal.” 1 That line from an old anthology -

• Αειδον έγών μέν, εχάρασσε δε θείος "Ομηρος

( I sang, but divine Homer wrote ) - seems very applicable to this genial personality that could not put pen to paper without leaving it wet with some delicious song ; the singer preëminently and per ennially, in whom the singing mood outweighed all other, with whom to sing was as natural as to breathe, with whom life was instinct to the finger -tips with a 1 Sainte-Beuve. 248 BÉRANGER . music that scarcely needed a bidding, the pebble of an obstacle, the slightest wound to break forth victoriously , Nor did the poet see any hindrance to clothing the lit tle cupids or fairies or goblins, or whatever they might be, in the delicate Racinian elegance of a Louis XIY. style. There was perfection of form side by side with a perfection of fond, perfect in body and soul. They are fed on the manna that fell from the sky. What ever of vagrant melody might be begging in the streets for an alms of noble words, was caught up by the vigi lant artist and set to words that went like fire to the popular heart, and reappeared marvelously heightened , colored , perfumed, apotheosized to the gamins who be fore had found there but a nest of ribaldry. Grand Madame de Maintenon, queen of France, and mistress of the king, soon forgot in the glories of Versailles that she had ever been poor grateful, graceful little Madame Scarron, who had been to America and lived in an attic, the wife of the author of “ Virgil Tra vestied . ” Béranger did not forget these poor plebeian airs, these errant Bohemians of the quais and cul-de sacs, when he had immortalized them and made them by his surpassing talents queens of France. The promenader on the boulevards may hear any even ing toward nine o'clock at the cafés chantants, amid much that is maudlin and objectionable, these sprightly airs mingling their saucy allusion, their strong, help ing word, with the follies and revelries of the reck less Parisian canaille. It was the glory of the poet not to elevate vague memorial types, altars to an un known god, obelisks over written with hieratic symbols ; but a man , a woman , with all their eloquent frailties ; BÉRANGER. 249 a great trait, the very presence of which was a flag of victory waving over innumerable battle- fields; a grand mother who talks exquisitely of the days when she was young ; a good and lax “ Camille, " who illustrates perfectly the manners of the time ; an old vagabond, who in his misery and loneliness touches some of the profoundest questions in political economy ; a suicide, who teaches the divine lesson that there is no grief so bitter but that it is appeased by holy duties accom plished. These incarnations of principles that speak to the nation from the vivid realistic experience of cour tesans, vagabonds, suicides, gourmands, attic philos ophers, were the pulpits where the singer taught an ethics, a jurisprudence, a religion that crept through the thatch and hovered round firesides where no thun ders of the Sorbonne, no elaborate exposition of the Code Civil, no lofty disquisitions of University fellows could penetrate or reform . Jouffroy might sit at the Collège de France and ingeniously lecture on the phenomena of dreams or the relative value of moral systems, but he could never from those remote dis tances hope to pass through the portals of poverty like the exquisitely sunny and captivating morality of " Le Troisiéme Mari ” “ Le Commencement du Voyage. ” These were worth many a folio on ethical law, many a digest of wearying statutes. Such power to compress deep and loving instruction into a handful of after- dinner couplets, to wreathe in smiles the lips of Themis, has been given to few of the geniuses that have visited our earth . The " Falling Stars" is itself a whole epitome of human history, a universal history in a nutshell more complete than the issues of all the presses of all the or 250 BÉRANGER. > printing establishments on the globe. What more sublime requiem was ever sung over Waterloo than “ Le Cinq Mai ? ” What sweeter sigh was ever wafted with benediction and tears to Napoleon than the “ Couplets sur la Journée de Waterloo ? ” They must have penetrated to the old bronze warrior of St. Helena like the sweet odors of the palms of Tuat to the pil grims of the Sahara . How much playful tenderness he could draw out of his old coat ; what poignant and contemptuous sarcasm coiled its electric circles within “ The Court Dress ; " how as in the successive condensa tions and intensifications of a voltaic pile he heaps taunt on taunt and gibe on gibe in “ The Coronation of Charles the Simple ! ” Poor Charles Dix ! With the birds which, in accordance with antique wont, he caused to be released in the Cathedral of Rheims at his corona tion, was released a whole flight of superstitions, ancient enormities, Ultramontane absurdities; ancestral tyran nies, which the pitiless singer transfixed with his dia mond javelin and pelted with inextinguishable ridicule. It is hardly to be wondered at that there were judicial prosecutions, arrests, a fine of 10,000 francs, imprison ment for two months and then for nine. Some spot had to be found where to muzzle this lyric upstart, this ox that trod down the corn ; some oubliette where to disarm nay, were it worth while, to destroy this irrepressible champion of human rights, this bold and truculent tribune of the plebs. The humble pro letariat was his joy ; the grisette and the artisan were the objects whose simple happiness he loved to com memorate ; the garret and the wine -cellar were the extreme points of his misery and his bliss. Lucien - BÉRANGER. 251 > " Buonaparte, an enlightened patron of letters, himself a poet, relinquished to him his pension at the Univer sity ; the lowly position of expeditionary clerk , with a pittance of 1,000 francs annually, was all which excited his humble ambition, a place which he filled for twelve years with intelligence and zeal. The liberties, not to say the licentiousness, of such songs as 66 Bon Vin et Fillette, " " La Bonne Fille, " " L’Education des De moiselles ," " Traité de Politique à l'usage de Lise ” pro duced great scandal among the decorous guardians of morality at the University : Messieurs the students might be infected. So he was reprimanded and sent off with the menace that the publication of his next volume of songs would insure his dismissal. The next volume was of course published as soon as the poems which it contained were ripe for the press. We are told that he did not even wait to hand in his resignation, but from the moment of publication ceased to put foot in the bureau of administration. Not even for this posi tion , which seems to have been at that time his absolute and entire maintenance, would he for a moment com promise his dignity and swerve to the sceptre of in tolerance. There is something bewitching in this un tamable spirit, this never failing smile at the petulance of the black-gowned gentlemen who circulated round Charles X. ; this fresh, fragrant Gaulois independence which we see frolicking and rioting through “ Gar gantua, " the “ Heptameron,” the “ Essays” of Mon taigne, the wonderfully clever old farce of “ Maistre Pierre Pathelin . ” Béranger is a typical being as Figaro is . You may see this being any day in the windows of the caricaturists of the Palais Royal, the Rue de Rivoli, > " 252 BÉRANGER. a " It was or the Place de l'Odéon . It survives with us in the en gravings of Hogarth . It is a being wise, cynical, melo dious, as full of tact and antennæ as à sea -nettle, shoulder-shrugging, apologetic, armed with a sneer that can draw blood, voluble, with its pocket full of deadly innuendoes, and withal a heart so light that it finds its personification in the hero of Mozart's lovely opera. To look at it, it seems powerless to harm ; but it stretches forth its long thread - like blood-drawing arms into palaces and round thrones, and racks their possessors with inexplicable pain. It was a kind of reflex of that against which the late Emperor waged such uncompromising war in his proscription of the London “ Punch . ” It is this which to -day menaces Mac Mahon 'with its strange omnipresent wrath. this in which Béranger found his most abundant re Yet it was a beautiful idealization of this to surround it with all the charms and insinuations of music and make of it a superb work of art. In a memorable antique we have the figure of an ancient god of incomparable beauty bending his bow at the flying Python. In was in this attitude that Béranger stood when he ridiculed the vices or the whims, the tyrannies or the liberties of the epoch. It was never in a disgraceful or cowardly attitude. Monarchy in his day was a Venus de' Medici concealing its poor trembling shame as best it could after the noble tragical dream of the Empire, cowering before the eyes of the people, conscious of guilt or of lascivious toying with the sacred prerogatives of constitutional right, ready to speak off in infamous abdication or perish in the unctuous hands of the Jesuits. A single dart hurled source. BÉRANGER. 253 at it made the whole fabric start and totter. No anathema' could be too severe to blast into stillness the tongue that had dared to wag at the king. The best epitaph on the reign of Charles X. would be that it could not stand a laugh. Béranger knew this and he laughed at it cruelly, and made the gamins laugh at it, and set all France to laughing at it, so that the king and his ministers fell to counseling together and concluded to shut up the offending satirist in the prison of La Force. Instead of quelling, this pro ceeding seemed like greenhouse air to push the germs of satire into sudden and tropical efflorescence. Never was there a period of his artistic life richer in telling or tender song. He was the centre of a bouquet of cherishing sympathies. His friends heaped attentions on him, fêted him , crowded to see him ; admirers in the provinces sent him baskets of game and rare Bur gundian, Chambertin, and Romanée wines. From all these solicitudes grew many a sweet verse of love or grateful thanks or patriotic fire or philosophic resigna tion , which the world would be the poorer for losing. The immense social and political importance of these songs is not their slightest claim to a long and appreciative remembrance among his contemporaries and the generations that come after. A short -lived popularity ( the most Homeric longevity, says Sainte Beuve, does not nowadays exceed fifteen years) was all that he expected.. But assuredly the lips and hearts of men are the most enduring means of perpet uating an undying fame. We observe this in the poems that have come down to us from our Greek and 254 BÉRANGER. Teutonic predecessors, preserved to us by oral tradi tion through long lines of minstrels and rhapsodes. Béranger's songs are so wedded to the national con sciousness that we may safely predict for them an ex istence as well-defined as that which awaits the mas ters of history and the epos. In Homer we touch our remotest ancestors with our palpable fingers ; in Bé ranger we are jostled and elbowed by all the throbbing vitality of the era. If life is a characteristic, then is this writer the most living of authors. He is no skele ton or fossil : here are breathing lungs, palpitating veins, a voice that rings like a trumpet. There is no death’s -head at this banquet such as was brought in at Trimalchio's. It is a stirring panorama of directest hu manity, full of joys, needs, inspirations. Whateverwas austere repelled, whatever was buoyant and sweet-tem pered attracted him. We may deduce from " Le Dieu des Bonnes Gens ” and “ Le Bon Dieu ” as any one may do --- the good-humored, smiling Being whom Bé ranger reverenced as his God — a God who was far from making a fast of life , or launching thunderbolts, or writing fine sermons, or twitting anything save hypo crites and spies. He was even a drowsy, negligent God, who slept late, swore a little, and said Devil-take me at times. His heaven was a place of sunshine, pretty demoiselles, benign harvest -homes where great golden harvest-moons shone over vineyards of Muscat grapes, and the merry vintagers danced to the airs of Wilhem . At times, beyond these gayeties, there strike the deep chords of a beautiful hymn full of trust and hope, rising into a soft diapason, filling the eyes with involuntary tears. Perhaps in so short a compass > a BÉRANGER. 255 no more speaking Christian regret was ever expressed than in those touching lines on the suicide of his two young friends, Lebras and Escousse. In a few brief words the poet soars into a magnificent pathos that is ablaze with the fires that burnt on the Mount of Olives. Sudden were the changes in him, for the piece that follows this is gay with the fiddle of “ The Fiddler of Meudon ," like an allegro in a dead march . Long poems were tried, but elegies and eclogues, epics and Alexandrines were not his strong point. It was in those brief barbed " Gelegenheitsgedichte ” that he ex celled, the tiny fun of the tiny Bauern and Bäuerinnen of those wee Dutch genre-pictures, where on a bit of canvas, with a barrel, a beer-tankard, and three drunken peasants, Teniers and Adriaen Brouwer can evoke immortal scenes with the sunlight of immortal genius on them . His mood is as diverse and as deep lined as that of Murillo , who will gather a crowd of mellon -munching beggar -urchins in a corner, lit up by sweet Andalusian sunshine, and then transport us to heaven to the great presence of his Immaculate Con ception, with its pedestal of adoring seraphs. In both there is the master-hand, the distinct kinship of the beggar with the Mother of God . For, after all, is not the beggar of this world the king in the other ? Mention has been made in the early part of this pa per of the “ Chansons Nouvelles et Dernières. " There is scarcely a poem among the fifty -six that compose this collection that is not worth its weight in gold , without which France would not feel a loss that could be supplied by no other writer. The collection begins with a picture of the prisoner sitting at his fireside in > 256 BERANGER. La Force, 1829, marveling at the sweet company which his fire keeps him through the rigors of the win ter, chattering with his bon Gènie, building châteaux en Espagne, Swiss valleys, glaciers, torrents, lakes, mount ains, herds, moonshine, out of the glowing embers at his feet : letting us look, too, into the glowing embers of his heart, where solacing visions likewise rise and disperse in clouds of gleaming sparks. The glimpse that we get into this great kind heart, now lying in the white marble tomb in Père la Chaise so gentle to misfortune, so lion -like in the presence of despotism -is a glimpse that is good and helpful. The diction has assumed a strange richness in this last work, the thought is sadder and more retrospective, the face has something infinite and unchangeable in it, like the little mermaid's after she has come into possession of a soul. Not that the prior issues were without this mo mentous quality : but in them the lively, the epicurean, the simply lyric and, joyous, have the upper hand and fill the entire foreground. And, furthermore, as a critic remarks, Béranger bad not yet discovered to its full extent the capabilities of the song, its ability to be transformed into something far more elevated and lofty, its aptness to become a high lyric agency in the amelioration of society, its birth through epic themes into a heroic ballad, to be sung, were it possible, in the migrations of nations, to be chanted, as Valerius Maximus tells us the deeds of their forefathers were, at the dinner - tables of the Roman nobles. There is all the patient riches of the leisure of long imprison ment shed over this concluding chapter of a life -work , the slow gatherings of the winter evenings, when there > BÉRANGER. 257 > was nothing else to do but to think and to sing. The poet, too, was now old enough to mingle with his lyric impulses the softened glow of recollection, and thereby create that fascinating atmosphere of half-sunny, half dreamy melancholy that is the most delicate charm of this part of his life. He reverts to his youth, to the “ souvenirs pleins de charmes ” of the 14th of July, when the Bastille was taken and Mirabeau thundered against the court, to his friends become ministers, to the tombs of July, to his happy infancy, to Saint- Simon and Fourier, and all the visionaries that have made the human race dream a happy dream. There is a ju dicious mingling of the emotional with the didactic, the results of a peculiarly ample experience with the effu sions of the heart. The straightforward rectitude of his intellect, the ideal honor of his dealings, enabled him to resist the most alluring claims of personal ag grandizement and maintain to the end a course of almost haughty self -abnegation. An amusing anecdote is related by biographers of his love of directness, an anecdote which serves too to illustrate an important phase in his literary method : “ A poet of the Academy to whom Béranger, still unknown, was talking of his idylls and of the care that he took to name every object by its right name without the intervention of fable, objected to him : “ But the sea, for example, the sea, how will you say ? ' ' I will say quite simply the sea. What ! ' cried the Academician, Neptune, The tis, Amphitrite, Nereus, would you throw all that overboard out of gayety of heart ? ' Assuredly,' re joined Béranger .” The narrator of this incident leaves us in the dark as to what gesticulations of despair, 6 17 . 258 BÉRANGER. what passionate recriminations and expostulations this member of the Quarante Immortels went through with at this saucy innovation. Meanwhile the sea was the sea to this clear calm vision ; there was no mythologi cal go -between , no rococo screen embroidered with pretty sky-blue goddesses and sea -monsters and tridents and fabulous trumpery, to shield the reader from the awful shock of the reality ; no quirk or subterfuge to economize emotions and save a scene. In the lines to Châteaubriand we get an inkling of the far -reaching influence which that great poet exer cised over him. There is something in Châteaubriand profoundly charming, though he is a weak figure, a soprano among authors. Béranger felt all the stateli ness and grace of his style, that style as it were the dernier gentilhomme of French styles, about which there lingers something majestic and ample of the olden time, in which we recognize the silver shoe-buck les, the silk stockings, the lace ruffles, the ermine lin ings, the costly accessories of a by - gone costume, wherein the imaginative needlework is more obvious than the comfort. Châteaubriand was imbued with antique culture as few Frenchmen have ever been, and perhaps read his Homer more diligently than his Bible. Béranger was absolutely without the rich dyes of classic association. It is scarcely hazardous to state that he knew no language but the French ; but he knew all of that, every chink and cranny of it, and like the masters of the old seigneurial châteaux in the Dark Ages, possessed secret ways of access, subterra nean galleries and staircases, skeleton keys that un locked to him its most hidden resources. An old fab . BÉRANGER 259 liau , an Italian romance , the work of a Norman trou vère, the infidelities of Lisette, a great sonorous ballad like “ Le Juif Errant, ” gave equal scope to his felici tous talent and developed his erudite acquaintance with all the stages of his native tongue. He could not, perhaps, like Littré, reproduce the epic poetry of an tiquity in the French of the thirteenth century. This is simply a feat of scholarship with its stigma of ped antry. But he enjoyed, perhaps, more keenly than the lexicographer the sources from which Molière and Lafontaine got their delicious humor, the literature of those fun - loving centuries when the confrères of the Passion and the clerks of Basoche called into being such amazing stores of mysteries and moralities, with all their lambent wit and indecency. It would be of course an intricate task to trace all the phases of Béranger's political career, his love of the Empire after it had empurpled itself in remem brance with all the enchantments of the ideal, his ob stinate resistance to the first and second "Restoration, his delight at the expulsion of the Bourbons, and the change that brought Louis Philippe to the throne, his somewhat grim acceptance of the second Empire when it came, despite its ideal attractiveness. His purpose was to spend the decline of life in writing the memora bilia of his career, and composing memoirs to assist in clearing up contemporary history. His songs are the best memoir that he could give. It might be well to contrast him, if space permitted, with Burns, Tom Moore, Arndt, Körner, even Tyrtæus, in the various moods that he appears in as a singer convivial or ag 260 BÉRANGER gressive. Whether, to notice a current theory, he was the only poet of the time that could have dispensed with printing and enjoyed an oral celebrity, does not devolve upon us to say. We are told that in the wild ferment of the Middle Ages there were painters who could not write their names and yet who filled their canvases with imperishable art. So the poems of Bé ranger might have been handed down from age to age like an old Norse lullaby, and been none the less ten der and true, none the less fiery and impressive. ANDRÉ CHÉNIER. It has been complained that the French literature is monochrome, like the gladiators whom Horace de scribes as always painted with red ochre : such and such a poem is blue, another is yellow, in another scarlet dominates, everything is modeled according to shadow and light ; in no work are the scattered tints of nature all brought together and harmoniously wed ded. There is some show of justice in the com plaint. To take simply the poets we shall touch upon : Baudelaire is curiously rich in pale spiritual grays ; De Musset in warm Titianesque backgrounds ; Chénier in the light of the antique chambers, where on excavation , we are told by Gautier, the walls are found covered with animals that terminate in foliage, winged chi mæras, geniuses springing from the chalices of flowers, palaces of quaint architecture, a thousand caprices and pleasantries. The light falls upon his poems from above as in the Pompeian houses, striking at the first leap the ever -playing marble fountain , a circle of sculptured colonnades, or a group of bronze satyrs by Lysippus. The prevailing color with him is hard to catch ; it is like the maze of Arras- tapestry where Flanders red interblends with Tyrian purple. The same reproach of oneness may be made to anyliterature 262 ANDRE CHÉNIER. save to that which the great exceptional figure of Shake speare represents. It is our glory to form the exception to all such generalizations. To the honest seeker there is after all a certain pleasure in the uniform . A vague eclecticism has spoiled more than one clear poet ; Greek philosophy has in more than one instance given way to Neo - Platonism . After dwelling in the shadow of an author through weeks and months, we are loath to leave it for the garish light of more tinted individualities The eyes are tender ; there is an unction, a well- doing in the gentle abiding atmosphere of a writer that we shrink to part from , to which we are pleasantly used , wherein we can dream and live at large, as in a pavil ion stretched for us by the prescient kindliness of au thorship. When we lay aside our favorites for a new acquaintance, somewhat the same feeling is evoked as in European art-galleries on leaving the tenderly lighted cabinets of Italian painters, through which there are the sweet shadows of the Christian past, for the great babbling, noisy, glowing salon, where the masterpieces of Paul Peter Rubens writhe and junket as in a frolic of Kuklops. We are struck as it were by the lightning of a new genius : it is the Typhon of Scarron after the Titans of Hesiod ; the effect is for the moment disagreeable ; the clear wine that had mel lowed into amber repose is stirred up anew, and the lees film it like a mist. Then again the same result ensues after a thorough loving friendship with the be nignant types of Rubens, on entering the presence of those absurd little Holy Families of the Cologne school, that seem to have gathered all the angles of Euclid into their elbows, necks, and feet. The complaint, = ANDRÉ CHÉNIER. 263 » therefore, however just, turns rather to the profit of individual authors. It is not the Eastern olive through which the fragrance of all fruits is perceived ; it is the lotus or the myrrh, the lilies and the parsley of Horace (neu vivax apium neu breve lilium ), the violets and poppies of Vergil ( pallentes violas et summa papavera carpens), which we look for and in which we take real delight. The literature that has engaged us in the last paper is fertile in genial spirits who derive their whole geniality from the single pervading tint that at all times and tides runs through their work , and is to it the crier of the Eastern tale. The old masters were fond of adding the autograph, the “ Al. Dürerfaciebat," at the bottom of their pictures ; but it takes no skillful critic to decipher the more poignant autograph of a manner, a breath, a grace, a revealing consciousness, that tells the whole secret and discloses to us the whole fine hidden structure of the artist's nature. We need no critic to tell us that the Dying Gladiator is a divine cry in marble. It is for the vulgar science of the anat omist to pry into the wisdom of it, and inform us that there is a muscle in one of the arms that is not found in the human frame. “ It is only in a series of authors that we get the perfect octave. " Still it was the key of D in which Beethoven composed his glori ous mass. Through all those wonderful harmonies the single key soars and pierces like a wild swan ; it is the voice of the poet, it is the anointed head of Saul. It was thus that Athalie singled out Joas from among the children that served in the temple. When we tell over to ourselves the genius that early death has taken from us- - Marlowe, White, Chatter » 264 ANDRÉ CHÉNIER. ton , Keats, Shelley, Hallam —we are prone to think ourselves unique in these irreparable losses. It is for gotten that there were Körners, von Kleists, Hauffs, Müllers, von Hardenbergs, for whom Germany mourned. Nor has France been spared : Théophile, Malfilâtre, Gilbert, Loyson, Chénier ; these are some of the young immortals whom the gods loved and took away. What beauty, what further completeness they would have added to their literature, we can only conceive from what they have left behind ; rich legacies enough, though there are but a few trembling lines on the faded parchment. Sainte -Beuve has some beautiful specula tions on this subject in his essay on Euphorion, where he laments the countless poets and historians who have not survived the ages, but who perished both in the original and in the translation . He represents them whom we see by Livy's preface to have been oppres sively numerous — as rushing to the banks of the Styx, and stretching forth their arms in speechless yearning to make known even their names, if not their lost works; as pursuing the boat that carried the small number of noble surviving figures, motionless and serene in the light, and calling gods and men to wit ness for the crying injustice of this second death . For they had once enjoyed the sweets of fame, these Gal luses, Philemons, Euphorions, Callimachuses, Menan ders, Partheniuses, — this swarming book - life of Alex andria with all its sunny and prosperous philosophies ; this spot where the swarm of bees settled and filled the world with their hum ; this antique Leipzig with its Philologenverein. We might speculate too -like St. Bonaventure on the souls of dead infants on the ANDRÉ CHÉNIER. 265 unuttered thought of those who died prematurely and left with us only a bunch of the figs from the Promised Land. But speculation is useless ; there is no Ægina to be robbed, no monastery of St. Gallen to be ex plored. Let us therefore to our critical work. There was a queer coincidence between Chénier's birthplace and the tastes that afterward so strongly developed in the young poet. He might be called the last of the Byzantines, the joint product of the Crusades and of Greek art -the poetic successor of Anna Com nena and the long roll of Oriental historians. Through his mother Greek blood flowed in his veins, through his father the blood of the Western Empire. He was born at Constantinople in 1762, while M. de Chénier held the position of Consul- general of France to the Sublime Porte. The wit and beauty of his mother were celebrated. She was the sister of the grand mother of M. Thiers, the former president of the French Republic. It is interesting to see how the old Greek blood divided into two streams and formed the most brilliant historian of the Consulate and Empire, and the most delicate imitator of Tibullus and Theocritus. The one is a Roman under the twelve Cæsars, the other might be a contemporary of Alcibiades : lively, practical, the one ; graceful, tender, the other. One cannot help thinking of a youthful poet who sang naked the victory at Salamis ; on the other hand, a vision of Capræan luxury and lawlessness will rise. They rep resent these classic kinsmen the two great prin ciples that for centuries were locked in deadly conflict Roman sense and Greek idealism. The one might recall Thorvaldsen the father, stone-cutter and carver a > 266 ANDRE CHÉNIER. of vessel-prows, industrious, sober, acute, sympathetic ; the other Thorvaldsen the son, chiseling Elysian fan cies, Adonis, Hebe, the Christ, the three Graces, chis eling exquisite candelabra after the descriptions of Pausanias, peering among the masses of white marble for the Jason, the noble male beauty, even the Madonna that lay there. With Chénier it is hard to say whether the pagan Elysium or the Christian Eden, -- whether Phryne in the bosom of Hyperides or Jesus in the bosom of Mary, --had more force. As a painter he would perhaps have represented Christ on the Cross as as a dying Adonis as was remarked of the painters ofthe Dark Ages. Attic luxury would have given to the severe and sublime faces of the Apostles the lips of Antinous. Tertullian would have cried out that the divine figures that he created were possessed with de mons, and would have luxuriated in the prospects of his torments in the other world. M. de Chénier returned to France some twelve years after the birth of this third son, the famous André. Not, however, before the latter had felt the influence of that mysterious trade- wind that from all antiquity has been blowing over the fields of Greece from the East, redolent of all sorts of passionate worships and myths, legends of Astarte and nonsense of gymnosophs. The fact of his birth in the olden Byzantium seemed early to have impressed him with a precocious knowledge of what the fact meant. The purpureum lumen, after hovering over several of his brothers, finally settled upon him. They were children of talent; he was the genius of the family circle. Say what we will, much de pends on where a man is born . Great cities are the ANDRÉ CHÉNIER. 267 Mother Lupa that picks up the fatherless babes, be they a Jewish lawgiver or the grandchildren of Numi tor. They are fostered and become kings and found ers of kingdoms. Surroundings that are mean and mousing, without the pageantry of a history, without the genius that broods over great multitudes living together, hatch a race of Bæotians at whom the wise Greeks loll the tongue. Beginning in Constantinople and ending in Lutece is no mean preparation for a life -work . These were the terminal points of Ché nier's activity, the ends of the great bow, the points where the fulcrum of the philosopher rested and by which he has in effect moved the world. The usual fog of uneventfulness hangs over the early years here as elsewhere up to the twentieth . He knew Greek at sixteen - which we learn not by any confession à la De Quincey — and attended the College of Navarre at Paris. Like Vauvenargues and Alfred de Vigny, he was early smitten with a passion for mili tary life ; but soon disenchanted, the young sous-lieu tenant quitted the Strasbourg barrack , and revisited Paris to spend all his leisure in ardent study of the ancients. Then the old story of genius, over-study, sickness, and Æsop the hunchback stepping in like an antique Voltaire with the sneer and the moral. No amount of fox -and - goose wit could prevail upon Chénier that such ardor would lead to harm, and that sharp reactionary illness would set in if he did not cease rising before day to worship his favorites. There is something very striking in this serene pur suit of forgotten lore at a time when such momentous things were in the air, --- the Revolution of 1776, the 268 ANDRÉ CHÉNIER. > ܪ Revolution of 1789, the grave, earnest Puritan, the blood -thirsty and supple Gaul, struggling for life on either side of the Atlantic Jefferson and Robes pierre, the Continental Congress and the “ Amis de la Constitution. ” And yet with all his ideal ambitions, few men have been more actively interested in their own time. The very strength that he drew from those fresh and distant sources was expended in efforts to enlighten the political ignorance of the day, and instill into it some of the temperance and the self-restraint of ancient times. The passion - play of 1789-94 has been often enough depicted without entering into de tails ; it is no Byzantine picture with meek -saints in a golden background. It is stormy as Salvator Rosa. Upon the sinister canvas of that time this pure young face stands out in ineffable relief, full of benignity, a face cut upon a carnelian, a soul chiseled into a gem for the finger of a Cæsar. All else so full of revolt and guilt, this alone beaming with the innocence and the purity that were brought into the world two thou sand years ago. About the same time the idyll of Paul and Virginia was hovering like a sweet feverish dream in the brain of Bernardin, one of the sweetest poems that ever sprang from the human heart, a whiff of fra grance from the tropic seas. So the lacrima Christi is drawn from the heart of Vesuvius. It might be thought that there was little enough time for tranquil withdrawal into the society of Latin and Greek sages when the air was alive with electric sensibility. The men of the 7th Thermidor were breathing the same atmosphere with himself, inhaling deathful poisons where he was drinking in the sweetest ANDRE CHÉNIER. 269 - anodyne for misfortune and pain . Marie Antoinette was beginning the lovely pastoral of her girlish life in the gay palaces of Trianon ; dairymaid, horsewoman , coquette, and queen, with less of the black eagle of Austria in her than the white lilies of France the sweet life that resembled more the blooming wilderness of Fontainebleau than the trim gardens of Versailles, akin to the swans that swim those immemorial waters, descendants of those she fed. The young king was studying and shrinking from court, gathering maxims from Fénelon and translating Gibbon into French , amusing himself with Maurepas' epigrams and wonder ing at Turgot's philosophy, while all through the land famine and misrule had changed the " saltpetre into powder.” The American outbreak was the igniting spark. So many beautiful poetic existences were be ginning, so many were closing. The tomb had just closed on the great lights of Ferney and Montmo rency ; the Contrat Social had just instilled its enchant ing wormwood into all hearts, from Marseilles to Brit tany ; Burns was awakening in the North and Béranger in the South , to sing the rights of man and the dignity of independence. Like evil spirits, Vol taire and Rousseau, when they were able to live no longer themselves, had left the world with a curse. They had flung Greek fire into human society. The air was full of them ; Jean Jacques beat at the hearts of more than twenty millions, and his books lay under the pillow of shopkeeper and politician - an Orsini bomb in which there was something more dire than flame and explosion. Since the world began, perhaps there was never such susceptibility to new and strange - 270 ANDRÉ CHÉNIER. doctrines, to general enthusiasms pervading entire populations, to panics of hope and fear a sort of great congregational singing, soaring over Europe and lifting commonplace men into heroes. We see in the French of to -day the emotional children of that epoch , the pale offspring of the mothers who had to weather Austerlitz and the Hundred Days, back to Marat and his devils the mobile beings who retain in themselves the passionate and sensitive reminis cences of those sickening years of fright and despair alternating with sublime hope in Buonaparte, when they were still in their mother's bosom. Imagine those that leapt unborn at the news that travelled like fire of the glories of Marengo, of the disasters of Moscow : what could they be but a people who at one time would utter themselves in the tears of the “ Autumn Leaves," and at another in the capricious and brilliant miseries of the “ Mystères de Paris ? ” a sort of monomaniac that wept and raved, smiling into being air castles of Utopian republics, and then falling into ecstacies over constitutional monarchies. We have the exact psy chological product of ' $9 and 1814 in many an orator who now ascends the tribune at Versailles and glares with fire-eyes at every antagonist that picks up the gauntlet. On the other side of this sea Chénier dwelt in a land where every tree fabled the metamorphoses of Ovid, where every cloud was dipped in Sicilian sunshine. There is scarcely a tone in him , except toward the lasty that betrays the swift agony of the years antecedent to 1794. All is peace with him. There is the of fauns' feet, the gambols of satyrs, the dewy breath of ANDRE CHÉNIER. 271 of a river- gods, the sparkle of Pactolus, the sweet breath of Vergilian flocks no cry as of an arrow -stricken doe, such as pierces the ear from the writings of Gil bert. All is sunlight, quiet, shadowy, mysterious as the apple- gardens over which Priapus rules , as we catch them in the antique epigram . It is a glade in a Ruysdael landscape, where pure jeweled water quar rels against the rocks into silver foam , speeding away into voluptuous glooms, with the great gnarled tree trunks and branches twisting up into organ- pipes to give forth soft wandering music. Found in an Italian monastery in Petrarch's time, his works would afterward have been preciously stowed away in the Laurentian or the Ambrosian library, as the rel delicate eclectic poet in whose mind as in an alembic lay the choicest works of the pagan genius a sort of Aulus Gellius, who spent the winter nights in Athens in gleaning for the connoisseurs of Adrian's tine mor sels that still delight philologers and critics. There is far more of antiquity than of the Dark Ages in Ché nier ; more of the legendary ring of Polycrates than of the famous carnelian of the Florentine museum whereon is engraved the portrait of Savonarola ; more of a triumphal entry of Bacchus with månads, silen uses, lynxes, than of the solemn outgoing of crusaders to Jerusalem . It is the thyrsus, the dappled leopard's skin, the purple robe that Tuscan mariners take for a king's mantle, the golden horns that the Greek sculp tors concealed in their representations of the Indian Dionysos, rather than the bishop's crook, the white toga, the shirt of mail, the marshaled clergy of a mighty Christian uprising. When we analyze the 272 ANDRÉ CHÉNIER. music of his verse, it is a Phrygian flute, a timbrel, a breeze blowing through the reeds of the Simoïs, the table -music of the old Romans as they lay and dined and listened to the heroic ballads of their forefathers in sunny ease not the hymn of a Last Supper, or the soft breathing of voices in twilight churches where Boccaccio's lovers have their rendezvous. All of modern romance is as if it were not for this curious forgetter, this courier who with the flurry of an Athe nian herald rushes in to tell us news of the beggar Homer, of a young Locrian, of Arcas and Palemon , of Mount Eta, of a captive, of an idyll of Bion. Even when he describes contemporary events, it is in a man der so veiled, so obstructed with allusion, so remote, that one is reminded of the traveller who could not get to Thebes for the sphinxes that lined the roadside. All his facts have, so to speak, their heads lopped off, mutilated like a Hermes, or if not mutilated, so clothed on with classic reminiscence as to read more like the chronicles of a Pontifex maximus than a record of genuine event. The poet Gray shadows forth some what in his completed cycle of years what André Ché nier might have become had not an early and violent death carried him off. Goethe, in a chorus of the “ Iphigenie," has nobly represented the fall of those whom the gods once delighted to honor :

• Der fürchte sie doppelt

Den je sie erheben ; Auf Klippen und Wolken Sind Stühle bereitet Um goldene Tische. “ Erhebet ein Zwist sich, So stürzen die Gäste I ANDRÉ CHÉNIER. 273 Geschmäht und geschändet In nächtlichen Tiefen . Sie, aber, sie bleiben In ewigen Festen An goldenen Tischen ." - Chénier's works are the most pathetic commentary on his brief life almost all fragments. His method of working was to construct a sort of tessellated pave ment for which he had prepared the bits of marble, the designs, the harmonious colors. There they all are, heaped up in their unfinished pathos, monuments of loving toil, snatched from his full hands at the moment when they were about to be cunningly put together pieces of a bell in each of which sleeps the wonderful tune that might have become far more perfect if wedded into a marriage-bell of sweet sounds. It is almost like turning over the leaves of an ancient - these " Poésies d'André Chénier ; ” you almost expect to look for foot notes, annotations, glossary, a prolegomenon , or the mystic references to old Dutch or Venetian issues with which modern editions of the classics abound. Frag ments from Sappho, Pindar, Bion, Ovid , Propertius, Plato, Euripides, Oppian - at one time " a little idyll of Meleager on the Spring, and then a single verse of Moschus, ” a paraphrase of some rich thought of Plato's or a distich from Tibullus -abound, all so inex tricably tangled and braided together that it is next to impossible to discern between the original and the bor rowed, between the warp and the weft. You see the ar tist behind the Gobelin tapestry ; you watch the twinkle of his nimble fingers ; you admire their deft cunning ; you wonder at the sly grace of the figures that start up 18 274 ANDRE CHÉNIER. a in such magical profusion under his hand ; but you can not tell where thread joins thread , or how the violets be come burning scarlets, or how the colors take form and life and stand before you in such inimitable daintiness. In a poetical epistle to a friend he gives some interesting particulars of his proceeding ; how he would take a phrase or a turn from an old author, and by a twist —as a Spanish caballero his cigarette -charge it with a new thought, give it new being, breathe a soul into it, give it tongue and limbs, touch its lips with flame, make it eloquent and alive. His effort was, we are told, to ingraft the Greek genius on French poetry ; to go beyond the Louis XIV . bombast, and do over again , more perfectly, the work of Ronsard. There was much in his way ; the road was barricaded with the mighty peruke of Racine that frowned from beneath its mountains of curl and powder on every innovator ; there was the ferrule of the grammarian Malherbe, the stony epic of Chapelain , the buffoonery of Panurge, the obstacles of a national temper whose truest rep resentative seemed the clipt and emasculated nature of the park of Versailles; a language aways kept clean - shaven, ruffled , starched, powdered, in the blue and -gold of Louis XIV. uniform ; à gay, sprightly, godless, prosaic people, full of insouciance and empty of responsibility. Truly, no light -armed opponents ! It might well be a labor to frighten the stoutest hearted. Chénier went almost unconsciously to work , following the bent of his nature, doing all the more successfully from absence of purpose what two hundred years of stock - jobbing with the “ vieilles filles d'Olympe " had come far short of. ANDRÉ CHÉNIER. 275 a . ancient usage. To the foreigner there is still a little stiffness, a little flesh about some of these poems. We see the elabo rately friseured heads of the tritons of the Grandes Eaux, the belted and sworded sea -monsters spouting rivers of water from throats that belong to Middle Age griffins. It is hard for the orthodox Gaul to cast off the incubus of the age of Louis Quatorze ; it sits upon the whole literature like a monster owl -a sort of Michel- Ange dome hovering over St. Peter's. Until this pitiless bugbear is ousted with huge outcry and wing-flapping, Frenchmen will always write as if they had Boileau's knife at their throats. There is no end to the worshipers of this portentous bird that nods its spectral head at every innovation, and breaks into wild laughter when the young owlets depart from the Starving penny -a - liners refer with pride and regret to the Grand Monarque, to the ampli tude and bounty of the royal hand, to the mighty folios of the accountant- general, wherein stand armies of pensioners and beneficiaries, among whom good, dear, stupid Chapelain gets thousands of crowns, and poor Molière this notice : “ Sa morale est bonne, et il n'a qu'à se garder de sa scurrilité. ” Almost the solitary instance of independence of mind in that century came from Richelieu, who suggested to the poet Colletet to change the word s'humecter for the picturesque verb barbotter in the monologue to a tirade on the king's palace ( Les Tuileries). « La canne s'humecter de la bourbe de l'eau ! " Such novelty, such use of the right word in the right place was never heard of before. Poor Colletet almost swooned and stuck closer than a brother to his non 276 ANDRE CHÉNIER. sense. > 66 un. The hankering of the French mind after an epic has caused the world untold misery. Every French poetaster with an ounce of genius considered an epos of twelve thousand verses absolutely essential to his salvation . It is said there are no less than two dozen in the frightful period between Chapelain and Voltaire. So the " La Pucelles, the " Franciades," the “ Henriades ” the very mention of which creates a yawn. Chénier happily confined himself to more modest themes. For twenty- five years he remained an edited glory ." M. Latouche, in his touching notice of Chénier's life, recounts the difficulties that he ex perienced in obtaining the MSS. that contained his literary remains. Little was published during the life time of the poet : he shrank from venturing his thought before the world during that era of madness and fanaticism , as if the delicate blossoms would wither under the breath of revolution . The bad of misgov ernment had become the worse of anarchy and re bellion. It was a spectacle for men and angels -- this great France, with its sunny vineyards, its happy tempers, its eloquent past, its bright social philosophy, suddenly in wan eclipse, sun -darkened , tempest-tossed, weltering in blood, the fable of nations, the victim of the malign Eumenides. It is inconceivable to us to day, even under the blaze of a hundred histories. In the first days of the Terror, Chénier was prevailed upon to quit Paris and withdraw to Rouen. He had made himself odious to the reigning party bya stern and vigorous opposition to the principles of the Jacobins ; he had celebrated Charlotte Corday in verse ; he had attacked Robespierre ; he had even entered the lists ANDRE CHÉNIER. 277 for the amiable and defenseless king. Through the “ Journal de Paris," established by himself and his friends, he continually preached tolerance, concord, for bearance ; he was equally averse to democratic violence and feudal iniquities, to brigands with pikes and brig ands with red heels, the tyranny of patriots and the tyranny of Bastilles, the privileges of court - dames and the prerogatives of market -women . Enlightened, just, dispassionate, he did everything to ward off the sombre policy of the Red Club and its irremediable consequence. Bleeding as it were from being torn so rudely from his beloved studies, he threw himself with glowing feeling into the van-guard of those who had France earnestly at heart, and wrought with en thusiasm for the maintenance of order. Nothing could be more uppalatable to the “friends of the constitu tion." At Rouen and Versailles he remained quiet for a while, when the sudden news that one of his friends had been arrested at Passy made him fly to Paris. Here he was surprised, detained, judged suspect, and dragged to prison. Paris, we are told, was meanwhile in mourning through the decrees of the revolutionary tri bunal. The only safety for prisoners, saysM.Latouche, was the oblivion into which they fell by reason of their very multitude. Chénier's brother, the author of the history of French literature, had become the object of Robespierre's particular hatred . There was therefore no hope for André himself after he had set foot within the fateful precincts of St. Lazare. In prison he retouched many of his poems, and composed others through which we see heaven's light as through the 278 ANDRÉ CHÉNIER. loop - hole of a dungeon. Even here that marvelous serenity was preserved, a store of which he seems to have laid up from his tranquil and noble intercourse with the ancients. There are few sights more affecting than this young poet giving in prison and in heaviness the last touches to a fame that has since won for itself such tender sympathy. We are reminded of many examples where immortal works have gone on despite misery and depression : Diderot at Vincennes, Voltaire in the Bastille, Bunyan in Bedford Jail, Cervantes in Barbary ; none affects us like this. Heroism has seldom given an instance of more generous or more high -born fortitude. He left three portfolios of MSS. , which have been published by the great Faubourg St. Germain house of Charpentier. The first in their unachieved state might be likened to the legends cut with pain and tears into the solid walls of prisons ; abrupt, pregnant, a story that has no visible end, unfinished from very weariness ; à date, a name, a strange, sharp cry that wrings the heart, a line from some forgotten book, a sentence that ended with its author on the scaffold or the rack . They shut like a sensitive plant when you attempt to upriddle their meaning. In these brief elliptical sketches lie the materials for the lapidary that, like the opal, as some one says, owe their chief beauty to a defect. Brief as they are, they have “ the grace of Lafontaine, the fire of Tibullus, the delicacy of. Theocritus." The second portfolio is the half-open flower, more than the bud, less than the blossom in its radiant ample ness ; a little dew, a little sunlight, a few whiffs of امتحانات ANDRE CHÉNIER. 279 warm vaporous summer would push apart the leaflets and unveil the throbbing and sweet- breathed interior. But the wan prison -light did not suffice ; the fair summer- time did not come ; the pale little verselets remained embryonic, like the tiny angels in Correggio's frescoes that only have heads and wings. Of these might be enumerated the idyllic fragments, many of the elegies, the philosophic poem “ Hermes” in imitation of Lucretius, and others, all replete with striking imagery, keen realistic painting, strong feeling for the objective, vivid reproduction of fact. There are some through which the moonshine trembles as through the Coliseum on an August night, full of glow -worms, full of mystery and tenderness. They come in contact with life at a thousand points and sparkle wherever they touch it. At times you stumble upon a little fragment that may prove to be a piece of a Roman amphitheatre, or a column with flowered capital, or a frieze covered with bassi - relievi. It is always worth while to stop and examine. This division of Chénier's work forms a museum, a Hôtel de Cluny, where ob jects stand not so much in their rightful places as massed together for class - effect. There is more than antiquarian research, more than mere display of ar chæological vanity ; there is genius, order, informing spirit. The statues all stand in living and breathing attitudes, as if they had just ceased the most delightful of revels on your entrance and were still palpitating with secret happiness ; the faun dances, the Graces cling lovingly together, the pallid huntresses have their bows bent, the drapery is just slipping from the vol uptuous limbs of a bathing nymph, the wealth of 280 ANDRÉ CHÉNIER. us turreted curling hair has just burst the fillet and is streaming down over the shoulders of the Bacchante all is abandon, frolic, lissome merriment. The third portfolio holds what is most interesting to the fruit, the flower expanded into a cup for all sweet dews and odors to dwell in. There is the Pyrrha sub antro, the tomb of Vergil overlooking the blue Neapolitan sea, the tell - tale jar that smells of stolen Falernian . Even the antique has seldom reached extremer beauty than is found in “ The Blind Man " ( L'Aveugle), perhaps scarcely the noble hymn to Apollo itself. “ Oaristys ” might be rendered into Doric and pass for a Sicilian pastoral. “ The Young Patient” ( Le Jeune Malade) is a simple, bright, touch ing picture thrown off by an adroit hand ; no meagre silhouette, but a canvas full of bright profiles. “ The Beggar ” is himself an eloquent alms to literature. It was claimed for Chénier that he did for France what Horace did for Rome : as a translator he equals the original. In Horace we see the sunken " piers, the broad Greek basis on which the superstructure rests -- the luminous perspective of poet behind poet, as in the Valley of Tessin mountain beyond mountain . We enjoy a double feast : there is a remote sweetness that is wafted to us from the maker of the poem, faint, delightful; then the nearer and intenser enjoyment which the translator conveys through his own kindled sense —the hurrying rapture of possession and com munication. So in Chénier's verse. You see the little Memories ever busy at his elbow ; but they are clad in light. There is no anger at such genial appropriations. It is a joy to see the “ Student Anselmus coming out ANDRÉ CHÉNIER. 281 66 an acorn . of his bottle." The smirking marionettes that used to trip forth with their wooden legs and courtesy to the world as 60 Muse ! ” in the invocations to heroic poems, bave lost their wooden souls and become trans formed into a troop of sparkling sylvan creatures of the gloaming fresh from some quest of Pan. We are grateful for the transformation . It is the magic of sympathetic talent creative in spite of itself, sprinkling the juice of love- in - idleness into our eyes and transport ing us to a pagan fairy - land. So round a poor, paltry “ Pyramus and Thisbe” gathers the bewitchingly quaint elfin drama, leaping from it like a sprite from So from a handful of commonplace fables Chénier deftly evokes a swarm of lovely images that float airily around us and tickle the imagination like a straw. Chénier accompanied the Comte de la Luzerne to England, where, like Heine, he passed many despond ent weeks. He did not fancy the English, whom he sad as their cloud -girt sky. ” The “ sweet name of France was always on his lips.” Ever since that tender plaint Adieu, plaisant pays de France, O ma patrie La plus chérie, Qui a nourri ma jeune enfance." this longing has been coining itself into golden ballads. So with De Musset. What is there in this plaisant pays” that is so attractive ? Even in the prison of St. Lazare Chénier felt it, heard the ranz des vaches, was smitten with a strange yearning to be free. Vain efforts were made by his gray-haired father to secure calls as 282 ANDRE CHÉNIER. his release. On the 7th Thermidor, 1794, only two days before France became free forever from the do minion of Robespierre, his death - warrant was signed. He appeared before the tribunal, says M. Latouche, without deigning to speak or defend himself. He was declared the “ people's enemy, " convicted of having written " against liberty " and defended “ tyranny, " and was finally accused of the crime of trying to escape. There were some of the noblest of France in the car that bore him forth to the guillotine -Montalembert, De Montmorency, Baron de Trenck , and Loiserolles, who died to save his son. On the way their last talk was about poetry, "for them the most beautiful thing on earth ." Racine was the subject of this last conver sation . They began to repeat favorite passages from the tragedies. André thought of the first scene in the “ Andromaque ; " he died with this in his heart. 66 ALFRED DE MUSSET. 2 MANY years ago there appeared a small volume of poems whose frequent grace and passion elicited an eloquent critique from the highest literary tribunal of France. This volume contained the poems of Alfred de Musset. The author, in his “ Premières Poé sies," had given strong evidence of a power to sing no commonplace song. His mission seemed to be that purest of all missions, simply to give the world the music that was in him, and through delicate whimsi cality of fancy, the glow of passion, the beauty of sim plicity, the sportiveness of a muse in which grace and tenderness alternately borrowed the girdle of Venus and the ivy -leaf of Dionysos, to make for himself a resting-place in the heart and the sympathies of men. It would be rash to say that this graceful yearning has been absolutely accomplished. De Musset was scarcely a poet like Béranger, to speak words so keen and so pregnant that they should never slip from the memory of contemporaries ; nor was his an epic genius, whose lays could be bequeathed from tongue to tongue and become intimately blended , as the lays of the Niebe lungen and of Homer have done, with the most famil iar life of a long series of generations. But if two or three first -rate poets suffice for our consummation, as . 284 ALFRED DE MUSSET. has been said, there is no limit to be set to the Poeta Minores, whose tendrils may intertwine with our daily life and form a shelter for the precious fruits that spring up in the intimate seclusion of the heart. The ancients had their Béranger - their poet of wine and love, summer light and tender sadness - in Anacreon, side by side with the sublime old age of the Homeric. poems and the Homerids ; and it is possible that the grasshoppers of Anacreon, those incarnations of sum mer joyousness and evanescence , spoke no less tenderly to the Greek mind than the decrepitude that gradually creeps like an ice through the grand limbs of the heroes of the Hiad. At least we are as much moved to -day by the brimming gladness of the Poet of Teos, through which we catch the shimmer of the Ægean and the golden light of early Greece, as by the mighty beakers which Ulysses and his comrades quaff when they sit down to tell their stories. It cannot therefore be amiss in an age which has produced such consum mate artists as George Sand and Lamartine chastened by the retrospection of Morris and the mysti cal perplexities of the Laureate -to note that the age lives and has its minor representatives face to face with the crushing superiority of these famous names. Sel dom has an age indeed been so rich in poets not en tirely great, having missed the mark by such fine hair breadths, having failed of attainment with such beautiful monuments to attest the failure. It would be no easy task to decide how poor our world would be without these failures, how thin our soil would show itself with out the noble wrecks of these shattered ambitions. We are the richer if the product be no greater than the an age ALFRED DE MUSSET. 285 . ... three notes of a Gregorian chant. It would be a cu rious inquiry to institute as to what poets of the pres ent century would take a place in the anthologies of the future, in what artistic work, in what poems the times to come shall most infallibly recognize the in stinct of immortality, the poem into which the longest breath, the most enduring melody, the tenderest grace has been breathed by the cherishing artistic instincts of the poet. A few songs from the “ Princess,” a hand ful of fragments from the “ Méditations, " a score of lines from the “ Earthly Paradise," the noble conclu sion of “ Portia, " not a little of the glistening sensuous ness of “ Laus Veneris , " two or three sweet lyric strophes of Longfellow -these perhaps would or would not be gleaned by some Brunck or Bergk and edited with immortal regrets that so much that was inimitable should have perished. With what curious learning ( supposing some such literary cataclysm as happened to the Alexandrian library) would such Analecta such gleanings of crumbs that fell from deliciously heaped tables -- be garnished, elucidated, exhausted with Variantes, overwhelmed ! There would doubt less be gaps as wide as those which in Bergk’s “ Poetæ Lyrici” lie between the names of Theognis and Archi lochus -lacune brimming with the tears of those who worship the harmonious beauty of pagan genius, and year after year give forth desperate editions of frag ments in the futile hope of recovering something from the pitiless worm . Of none of the lesser poets could it be affirmed with less peri] to true literature that his name would stand in this collection than of Alfred de Musset. De Musset appeared at a time when France 286 ALFRED DE MUSSET. was enjoying the doubtful benefits of a Bourbon resto- . ration . The clangor, the sharp frantic struggle of the Hundred Days, had died away like dissolving circles in the water ; Napoleon slept under the willows at Long wood ; old heroic memories were lapsing into the bab ble of grandmothers; the apathy of ultra -montanism and Bourbon Charles brooded over the realm ; when the Revolution of July brought fresh hope to the Or leanist party , and with it fresh intellectual stores to replace what had perished in the Empire or been be numbed by the Restoration. Perhaps no revolution was ever heralded by a more varied, a more immense intellectual movement. In Germany there was the supreme reigning influence of Goethe, wonderfully rousing indeed, but at the same time prone to absolu tism and autocracy ; in England the adoration of Mid dle Age art, pageantry , barbaric gorgeousness was filling the romances of Scott, and crystallizing into a worship of the glories of feudalism far from auspicious to free development in other departments. In France alone it appeared that there was ample vantage ground for the rearing and the struggle of young talent what ever might be its symbol. A great critic has truly re marked of a period somewhat nearer our own, that when in 1832 Germany gave up her one great man, and at the same time a similar blow carried off the de lightful story -teller who in himself embodied for Eng land the renaissance of the Renaissance, France began to exhibit a wealth of intellectual resource, a plenitude of young virile power, which was welcomed with ac clamation, and seemed in singular contrast with the double night that had fallen over the neighboring a a . ALFRED DE MUSSET. 287 countries. It is well that death , even with both hands, cannot at one sweep compass the whole of human genius. The Empire had been laughed to sleep by the charm ing songs of Désaugiers ; the dinner- parties of the Restoration had grown witty and wise over the won derful little lyrics of Citoyen Béranger ; the “ Genius of Christianity” had seen several coronations come and go. Suddenly, in a corner of Paris, with the un obtrusiveness of all great and permanent steps in human progress, there sprang up a school of poets who have. exercised since a notable influence on the popular liter ature. To this school belonged more than one name that has become celebrated in our day. There was in this movement no insensible gradation from classic to romantic such as lies between Cowper and the rigorous classicists by whom he was preceded ; no subtle father hood of light to shadow , no dainty unfolding by which in one shadow and one light you can trace the pedigree of another, an ancestry of shadows and lights up to the founder of the line, a process by which the saints and martyrs, the wide -eyed still Madonnas of Van Eyck and Fra Angelico come leaping before us in the rosy, garlanded, perfect children of Rubens, through whom a divine mirth palpitates. With one leap the Roman ticists cleared the gulf hitherto deemed impassable, and abandoned all connection with the “ mythological pup pets,” the tedious canons of Boileau and Delille. Vic tor Hugo in the early promise of his magnificent youth was one of the first to put into words the vast distance between the satire, the pompous monarchical tragédie of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the 288 ALFRED DE MUSSET. thousand - tinted woof of modern poetic thought. The Romantic movement began curiously about 1823, “ the dazzling Pindaric moment of the Restoration. " Half a dozen men of letters who were thoroughly pervaded by the spirit of the Moyen Age, who studied its archi tecture, its music, its great Gothic imagination, its hemisphere of legends that shine like a hemisphere of dark phosphoric sea, its wild, intensely colored, chival ric modes of existence, who gave themselves up wholly to its fantastic beauty and strove to reproduce it in works in which the same hectic spot quivers, assembled in the evening and read to each other for criticism the productions which had ripened in the interim of their meetings. A more brilliant circle of ideal heads never gathered than in these accidental meetings — meetings destined to scatter through the land the seed of a peren nial harvest. Precisely in evenings like these, in chance intimacies, in magnetic chains of genius or asso ciation , originate those superb advances in scientific or philosophical culture which have given to every epoch or group of epochs its distinctive excellence. Witness the salons of Aspasia, of the Hotel de Rambouillet, of De Staël and Recamier, of Lady Holland ; witness those unpretentious symposia from which grew the Académie Française and the Royal Society ; witness all those associations from which encyclopedic action of all sorts --- the circle and crown of harmoniously re lated power --- has proceeded proceeded.. So from the poetic sympathies of a small band of singers, without reputa tion and without works, sprang forth like a company of joyous masqueraders the great palpitating, eloquent, breathless company of Romantic poets, to whom we ALFRED DE MUSSET. 289 66 " 6 was owe the whitening fields of harvests that spread be yond the sight and will multiply beyond imagination. Alfred de Vigny, Emile Deschamps, Jules de Resség nier, a few graceful and gifted women , formed with Hugo the soul of this Parisian Utopia, the memorable period of “ La Muse Française," a period instinct with vague sentimentality, and illustrated by the closest per sonal friendships between those who gave birth to it. It Emile, " “ Jules,,"” “ Aglaé,” “ Alfred.” After the dissolution of this cercle ( for it melted apart insen sibly through political differences ), there was a lull in the Romantic camp, a break in the symphony. In 1828 another chance association more permanent in re sult, more definite in purpose, less founded upon mere intimacies of the heart. Of this were born those lovely sunset poems, “ Les Orientales, " the tender visionary sweetness of which was distilled from the ineffable gold and purple of setting suns. To the long evening walks and talks which Hugo and his friends used to indulge in as they explored the suburbs or watched the sun go down from the towers of Notre Dame, Sainte - Beuve owed much of the dreamy grace and glory that float about his early verses. There were sculptors and painters too who associated themselves and their arts with these quiet meetings of the Cénacle. During this period gathered those stores of passion and elo quence, developed those “ wonderful dramatic instincts which in a twelve-month bathed France in emotion >> 66 Hernani ” and “ Marion Delorme. " It is a point peculiarly difficult to connect De Musset with these individuals and individual centres, for though essentially a Romantic poet, he eagerly disclaimed any > > over 19 290 ALFRED DE MUSSET. debt to the party which they constituted, and by studied negligence of composition endeavored to get as far as possible from the finical correctness, the précieux spirit in which they gloried. Alfred de Vigny's poems were smooth, crystal wavelets breaking in from the mysteri ous sea of Klopstock and Ossian, regular, daintily mu sical, luminously cold ; Victor Hugo's had the bronzing of a Spanish sky ; Sainte-Beuve imitated with incom parable skill the marble lineaments, the classic Greek beauty of earlier forms. None of these appealed with force to the sensitive and precocious genius ofDe Musset. Born in 1810, he grew up with that astonishing pre cocity of talent which seems to be native to a certain order of tropical natures, ripened by an unseen sun , drinking in an unseen sap, mysteriously efflorescent be fore they have passed the equatorial line of childhood. His ambition diverged early into several currents. First he applied himself to medicine, and, following Sainte- Beuve, attended lectures on anatomy and phys iology ; abandoning this, art attracted him , and he be came powerfully inoculated with enthusiasm for the pencil ; to crown all, the need of poetic expression stirred within him , and the consciousness of it was re ceived with solemn renunciation of everything else. Seldom has any man been so plenteously furnished with scrip and purse for a life-work, seldom has a quiver been so surcharged with arrows as in the case of De Musset. There still exists a medallion of that time with a wreath of young poets' heads encircling it, among which is found the exquisite, ringleted, in tellectual head of our author, of extreme symme try and tenderness, ideal, large, imaginative, recalling ALFRED DE MUSSET, 291 as to his biographers an antique severed from the shoulders of a youthful god. · No guest who frequented the parlors of the Restoration danced with more nimble ness ; no causeur prattled with more amiability and verve that indescribable small talk which in France has become a science, and has thrown a veil of lilies Madame Michelet would say - 'over the wickedness of mere malice. For pictures he had a delicate sense of enjoyment, ready appreciation, often profound crit icism an intuitional knowledge of those rare points where the painter and his theme interblend and become one in some puissant stroke of genius. It is just at these points the artist becomes no longer a remote and impalpable individuality, but like the famous courtesan who suggested to Apelles his Venus. Anadyomene, the Venus rising from the far purple seas, he loosens his hair and bathes in the sea palpable to all. It has been said with some show of fact that De Musset was a young Greek dreaming under the frescoes of Raffaelle. There was a curious streak of Christianized paganism in him, more than a feeble reminiscence of Greek art profoundly felt love for the beautiful polytheists who made of every wood and stream a Midsummer Night's Dream of warbling goddesses, fleet- footed sprites, divine and human loves, groups of laughing idealized human ity, queues of eldritch goblins who lived on moonshine, honey, and flower -dew . There is still more of the elf and the Undine, of the Goth and the Gothic, of the mistletoe and the greensward, of the pretty garrulous ness of Shakespearean fairies who flit through the twi light to Oberon's horn. In Chénier there is the solemn rhymeless chant, the freezing anapestic dirge, the 292 ALFRED DE MUSSET. a pagan Miserere of a chorus of Sophocles ; in De Musset the echo of the same, expanded and glorified into an Io triumphe ! by rich young voices of our time. He is no Paganini, drawing inimitable melody from one string ; he rather recalls a rare Cremona violin , made to give forth delicate and intense harmonies by a master -hand, harmonies crimsoned, so to speak, by passion , then again full of golden cheerfulness, full of variableness and shadow , full of tuneful extravagance. Never was there an artist in whom mood prepon derated more, the changeful iridescent hue of the mo ment, the tyranny of a caprice that resembles the span gles thrown by sunlit water on the wall, or the umbra with which a caravan of summer -cloud passing over sprinkles the April fields. Over field and flower, over lake and hillside, over heathery down or Tyrolese senne sweeps the airy Tyrian skirt of cloud, throwing its be nign shadow everywhere. So with the shadows of this poet's nature, so tender and benignant, having in it something sumptuous like the ebon lustre of rosewood or damask, possessing sequestered corners through which, as through a Spanish ogive, the pansied light creeps. In these sweet secret cells there is always to be seen the silvery tremble of a lamp, an alabaster box of ointment, a mandora vibrating itself to rest, shedding the threefold glory of perfume, light, and sound . To find an analogy that shall perfectly re produce to the reader the warm sensuousness, the sheeny silken texture of De Musset's style, resort would have to be had to the shores of the Mediterranean : it has the fire, the delicate ephemeral grace of a Provençal troubadour, those singers of plume and page, falcon ALFRED DE MUSSET. 293 and noble châtelaine ; then there flits before the eye a pageant of olive gardens and quaint Moorish towers, the Hall of the Abencerrages, the Fountain of Lions, the stealing, winning pathos of Zingara music ; the scene changes : it is Venice with the great lion lifting his brazen paw over the serene horizon, the antique palaces and grave porticoes, the canal, and the pillared bridge with halbarded guards watching over the Doge's sleep as the moon hangs over the quiet steeples “ like a dot over an i ; ” then a strange outburst of Parisian revelry, melodious, ribald , witless, smelling of flagon and carousal , to -day's merry-making, to-morrow's sui cide. All these elements singularly commingle, singu larly arabesque and cross, intertangle and interline, as in a fresco of Cornelius, throughout the length and breadth of his genius. There is an Alexandrian eclec ticism, there are both chaos and cosmos in this jubi lant head, in this Stoic and Epicurean, in this laugh ing philosopher with eyes full of tears, in this dying Socrates and living Momus. Furthermore, all this at eighteen ! De Musset was only eighteen when his « Premières Poésies were published, when it was declared of him that there was no corner of the human heart that he had not searched and fathomed, bringing up the sea-weed or the pearl, the mud at the bottom, the foam at the top , the swollen corpse or the shining torso of mermaiden. Not less precocious than his genius was his acquaintance with vice. In this as in everything else he was a seven -month child . Nowhere does he touch impurity however, ---- be it said in the interests of art, -without bringing even from it a pale phosphorescent beauty, without clothing it in rai > 294 ALFRED DE MUSSET. - ment of his own, among which there is always a purple rag, without filling the nest with swan’s -down against the sweet season of motherhood and song. Many of his verses would be unpalatable to an Anglo-Saxon conscience for the same reason that travellers usually protest against what is most national and characteristic in an alien cuisine. There is a spice foreign to their taste, a sauce which spoils their temper, a savor to which Anglo -Saxon tongues and nostrils object, a mode of manufacture, dressing, serving-up repugnant to the roast -beef and plum -pudding constitution . In the coun tries to which the dish is native nothing is more de licious, more genuinely enjoyed , more reiteratedly called for, more graciously supplied. Through all the royal Salian feast of German philosophy and art, - through Kant as through Kaulbach, -- there is the ghost of the four unchangeable courses, the odors of Frankfurter, the cream of Rhenish . Through all the Lucullian dîners at which Attic wit and Faubourg St. Germain humor sparkle and froth with dainty bouquet, there is the paté, the vol- au -vent, the tiny twisted glass of liqueur, the immaculate garçon, the. unchangeable pour boire. And who would exact the contrary ? It is well to prate about “ universality ” in art, but who would be swamped in universal benevolence, in ar tistic pantheism , in the vague universality of oceanic currents , in the Spinozism of thought, in a word, in intellectual nihilism ? The scent of violets to the traveller in lands where violets were rare carried his heart homeward with the cry of a wild swan , back from dreary spaces of Indian ea to the spot where a group of exquisite individualities made theold home > ALFRED DE MUSSET. 295 sweet for him, administered for him the gracious offices of every -day life. Away then with this democratic universalism that would devour the noble purpose of single-hearted genius and thrust upon art a great col lapsing balloon of gassy generalities ! De Musset re mained himself to the last. Not so Lamartine, his rival and opposite, who shifted his telescope from in dividual life to regions of abstract humanity, to the planets, to the fixed stars, if you will, to grand com monplaces ; a poetic Pyrrhonist seeking tranquillity in vagueness, distrusting particulars, a believing skeptic, a singer of universal rest. There was none of this Eastern gymnosophy in De Musset. Direct, militant, aggressive, he drew perhaps his chief force from the intensity of his personality, from the vigor with which, like his own Spanish cavaliers, he wielded his in dividual glaive. Nor was there to be seen here the perversion, the fantastic instinct of evil which grew up like an Indian aloe in the heart of Baudelaire, shooting forth thorn and blossom , deformity and beauty side by side. Baudelaire resembles the French bandit who was found on capture to have tattooed upon his body a complete admiral's suit, ribbon and decoration in cluded : a palimpsest, one thing to the eye, but some thing profounder and richer to the understanding hearts for there might be ancient tragedy or comedy, divine elegies of Moschus, an idyll of Theocritus, a poem of Corinna. For the diver there was the pearl in the sea trembling all over with the caress of Iris ; in the river was the lovely drowned body of Ophelia, from which the witless song, the tender life had just departed. It is not always well to be scared by the willows that 296 ALFRED DE MUSSET. overhang the “ Fleurs du Mal.” We are apt to mistake a knot of grave sweet flowers on which the live dew shakes, for a funerary wreath of immortelles, a marble bath for the sarcophagus of a Roman beauty, a picture of dancing mutilated Pompejan fauns for a Dance of Death. So continually we are thrusting our Gothic imagination into the pute joyous sphere of antique art. We do not discover in De Musset as in Casimir De lavigne the fervent wine of French restorations in the classic amphora of a Greek Olympiad. The new pearling wine of newer civilizations throbs in him in at farthest those frost- like dreams of Gothic fancy, those fairy creations of Puck and his contemporaries, Vene tian glasses redolent of Venice, showing the wonderful forms which the poet has imprinted on them as in a passionate kiss, crooning of the Adriatic and the boule vard, the guitar and the serenade -glasses such as Peasblossom might have offered on the tips of his fingers to Hermia in the enchanted wood. Again, André Chénier is an urn of Parian marble on which Athenian priests have thrown masses of fragrant fire, sending up glory and praise from the altar of Diana. His tongue perpetually babbled of the distant splen dors of Greek literature, was wholly wedded to the lyrical and idyllic side of the ancients, to the people who filled one extremity of the Middle Sea with such princely civilization, in honor of whom he could com pose incomparable elegies and idylls when the minions of Robespierre were dragging him to the Place de Grève. Imitation did not petrify into soulless mimicry in this " pure et charmante glorie." There was a voice - ALFRED DE MUSSET. 297 behind the persona , a far-away echo of Eleusinian mysteries, the distant baying of Pentheus' dogs, the footsteps of furious Bacchanals, the snow-crowned summits of Thessaly and Peloponnese in the back ground. While the classic bee, the melissa of the Phædo, does not hum through the works of Alfred de Musset, there is its wild descendant, the sylvan toiler who stores up nectar in the cleft of the rock, in the arms of venerable oaks beneath which Druidical priests have slept. The honey is not the less delightful be cause it smells of wild thyme, of Shakespearean eglan tine and rosemary, of the perfumed handkerchiefs which Boccaccio's dainty Florentines wave during their charming recitals, of the wandering flowerets which Don Juan gathered in his travels, of the Reine des Abeilles on the Boulevard des Capucines. A sharp critical nostril can discern all these simples in the luxrious result as we have it in the 6 Contes d’Es pagne et d'Italie , " the Caprices, the Nuits, and the Poésies diverses of this interesting writer. At one time it is Shakespeare in the bold metaphor, the flash of splendid imagery, the exquisite prattle and child talk in which the pages abound ; then it is Dante and Petrarch or the gay eloquence of Boccace ; Spanish romancer with a streak of dark -purple blood across his face ; then Beppo and Lara, and the whole throng, joyous or saturnine, of Byronic revelers. . From each he has taken a limb or a feature, and yet managed to attain more than the fate of Memnon, for the statue is the goddess whom the poet de scribes " then a 298 ALFRED DE MUSSET. " Quelque Venus dormant encore , Et la pourpre qui te colore Te vient du sang qu'elle a versé." Few things could be imagined more full of pleasantry and grace than the little comedies in which De Musset has skimmed the cream of social wit and charm , and whipt it into a sort of mead for the delectation of the world . Outside of his gift of song , the fatal interest that always clings to dissipated men of genius at tached itself to him . It is La Morgue behind the church of Notre Dame, A few abundant harvests seemed to exhaust the soil that was based on an al luvium outwardly so deep. Paris killed him , as 80 many others have been killed, by the endless toil of Babylonian pleasures. Throughout the half-dozen volumes in which as in a casket lie embalmed the most precious spiritual life of this poet, the love of pleasure, strong, intoxicating, physical, throbs like a fever. There was this toad in the sepulchre of the Pharaohs. More beaming pages than we have from him would be hard to find in all the annals of literature ; it would , however, be difficult to find a talent which on the whole, to use a term of Sainte -Beuve's, was less “ spherical, ” less rounded, less perfect in the final result. And it is the final result to which posterity ruthlessly looks. All through this nature we see, as in the wars of Napoleon, horses stabled in glorious cathe drals, temples where the light and the tenderness of im- , memorial religion have dwelt, turned into cattle- pens. No vitality, however exuberant it might be, could stand the stress of the constant dissipation that sullied the career of the author of " Namouna. ” It gave out, > ALFRED DE MUSSET. 299 and with it vanished the inspiration with which nature had so often replenished him. The wounded and outraged divinity shook the dust from his feet and left him. There were years of De Musset's life which give no response to the most anxious investigation , which are speechless because they had nothing to say. Toward the end (which happened in 1857) there were stormy supplications, unavailing prayers to the deity that had abandoned him. The fount of inspired thought which in early youth so naturally surrounded itself with the foliage and the fruit of poetry, had sent forth the last drop for the hand that squandered it. The worker is so closely connected with his work that in discussing him it has been thought a double purpose would be served. His poems are his other self. The same breath, the same largeness and expansiveness of constitution, the same enthusiasm and intensity exist in the one as in the other. We feel the dance, the grace , the wit, the melody of a large physical presence, the open-heartedness of the happy boulevardier, the hope of a future existence which from the rank disbelief of the “ Premières Poèsies ” has in the later writings melted into something like tranquil and benign acceptance. The grace of spontaneousness has not often been more fully possessed . He has the same passion for describing rich'interiors as Keats ; they bud forth from beneath his pen with an ease as striking as their pic torial effect. You seem to be looking into one of the luxurious chambers of Van Mieris, where a Flemish lady of rank sits in fur and satin , with a bright-feath ered parrot on her wrist and elegant tambour- frame beside a Renaissance armoir. So with “ Rolla ,” “ Don 300 ALFRED DE MUSSET. > Paëz;,"" “ Portia, " “ Namouna ," in the latter of which is the humor and bravado of the Italian naturalistic school. In others the minute touches, the finish , the careful elaboration remind of the brilliant miniaturist Hans Memling, or a basket of flowers by Van Huysum . De Musset was excelled by Béranger alone as a chan sonnier, in the song that breaks from the lips and mem ories of bons vivants in the genialities of after -dinner . He caught the true Bacchic spirit of the old Gaulois songs of Chapelle’s and Lafontaine's time, the songs which were devoted to “ Lisette, la paresse, et le vin," songs which descended by right of primogeniture from Molière, Crébillon fils, Deschamps, through the leisure of the Empire and the first Restoration to Béranger and himself. It was a boast of Malherbe that his whole vocabulary was derived from the porters of the Haymarket. De Musset is replete with the idiom and the suavity of the high life wherein he moved. He was no less distinguished in prose. His romance, “ Confessions of a Child of the Time," is written with great and uncommon excellence ; his smaller prose stories and comedies overflow with archness and fancy. Negligences now and then betray his antagonism to the formal school of Romanticists, but he was in rapport if not with their correctness at least with their ten dencies. The cheerful realism of the man has made him almost as great a favorite as Reuter with his coun trymen beyond the Rhine . More than any French author he recalls Goethe, strangely enough ; then a gleam of Rabelaisian fun reveals his intimacy with the humorists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. i Sainte - Beuve. ALFRED DE MUSSET. 301 It is of course impossible in the limits of a brief article to make any adequate citations from his works. An effort at rendering them from the original would recall the naturalist who, having impaled an iris-winged in sect upon his stilet, wondered that the life had gone from it. The spirit is as hard to catch as a butterfly in May; the golden thing is there all full of animation and color, and when your hand is stretched forth to seize it, it is —gone. Of single poems “ Malibran, ” “ Portia ,," " La Nuit d'Octobre, " are among the finest. To the lover of Catullus the “ Au Lecteur " of the 6 Premières Poésies ” will recall, in artlessness and point, the beautiful little address, Quoi dono lepidum novum libellum , with which the Roman poet introduces us to his little book. And how this little book has charmed the world ! There are numerous sonnets in which, like a Paternoster written upon a shilling, is written the whole life of the man in miniature. The Charpentiers ofParis have issued a noble edition of the “ Euvres complètes ” of De Musset, ornamented with twenty -eight engravings by Bida, in ten volumes. It is the first time, they tell us, that legislation has per mitted the publication of the whole. a BAUDELAIRE. - WHEN the beauty of a sonnet extorted from Sainte Beuve the inquiry why its author had not written it in Greek and let it be placed among the Erotica of the Anthology, it is fair to think the critic had conceived a high expectation. Of this expectation Charles Bau delaire was the object. In periods very rich in litera ture - Alexandrian, Victorian, Elizabethan, or Peri clean - by a very common process the larger fames throw over the smaller undue eclipse, and evoke a one-sidedness of view which in more than one in stance has run into some permanent plastic antipathy or neglect. Precisely as Egyptian superstition pro scribed free study of the human frame, and for centu ries, as a result, repeated its crude shapeless goddesses and gods, so the proscription which such men as Shake speare or Lamartine exercised over minor contempo raries, by the very glory of their gift left the public taste crude and unresponsive to other phases of art. We cannot catch the weaker lustres of heaven when heaven is filled from east to west by one great presence. But to be true to our age and to the many- sidedness which through broadened civilization and higher cult ure has expanded the thin but noble material of an tique thought, we must cast an eye on subordinate BAUDELAIRE. 303 growths, and strive through them to attain an unbroken circle of thought. No literature offers more numerous instances of neg lect than the French. When the national life leapt up into some passionate individuality, it was forgotten that this very height was conditioned by individualities lower indeed, by artists less intense, but not a whit less exponents of contemporary thought. When Lamar tine in 1820 stood at the door of Firmin- Didot with his “ Méditations Poétiques” under his arm those cries of a loving and tender adolescence -- the mighty shadow of Châteaubriand lay over the fields ; “ René," “ Atala ,” were in all hearts ; the literary posterity of “ Werther ” and “ La Nouvelle Héloïse ” had multi plied like an evil progeny of Jocasta ; and the graceful young Greek face of André Chénier had been forced to withdraw into the mists of French terrorism. There appeared to be no place for the author of " Jocelyn ,” however melodious his appeal might be. It resembled the summons of foolish virgins whose lamps were with out oil, and who had no right to disturb the supreme possession within . So when the sweetness of Lamar tine's verse had wrought a channel for itself, more art fully and more disintegratingly than the keenest acid , into the intellectual associations of the Restoration, it was found that this lordly tree shed a twilight which menaced with blight the whole poetical growth of France. Careful observers, however reverent glean - could detect many a rich talent that had noise lessly developed under the shadow of the preponderant There were Casimir Delavigne, Alfred de Mus set, Alfred de Vigny, three lovely singers, not to men ers one 304 BAUDELAIRE. > tion others three nightingales ( to resort to the favor ite metaphor of the Minnesänger ), who were singing songs of delicate sweetness and tenderness while all the world was breathlessly absorbed in the great auto crat ; who sang just because they could not help it, from the pure rapture which the singing gave their own sympathetic souls, whether the world listened or not. Now we can never think of a Catullus and his band as writing their marvelous little bits of sensuality or grace without a compliment, a plaudite, which the antique world exacted of even unwilling audiences. But in “ Moise, ” in “ Eloa,” in “ Rolla, " in " Les Sept Messéniennes,” who can help fancying the wings of the poet's own heart fluttering in rapture at his own performance, the hands of his own spirit clapping in glee over the wonderful beauty it had called into be ing ? In the anthologies, Brunck's “ Analecta " for example, we have remnants of song so sweet, honey from such undoubted Hyblas, that we almost reproach the great poets of antiquity for being so great and so completely extinguishing those delicate fires by the light of their own pitiless genius. No doubt Greece had Alfred de Mussets and André Chéniers enough if we had but record of them . And it is precisely to these minor poets, to these ripples rather than rivers, who feed a national life, to whom we look most dili gently for interpretation of their epoch , for translation of national sentiment into current tongues, for clear discs on which lie figured the subtlest phases of con temporary life. Among the poets who were born, grew up and died, who in birth , life, and death were embraced by the gen BAUDELAIRE . 305 poet. Our has grown erous amplitude of days accorded to Lamartine, was the poet whose name heads this paper. Of intellectual type most unique, the characterization of the man, the mind, and the literary fate demands an analysis more exact than is usually allotted the personality of the age indifferent to the pose in which Victor Hugo places his thought, to the odd acrobatic feats which his imagination, like an actor on the trapèze of the Cirque des Champs Elysées, period ically rehearses ; but with the queer, cold, ghostly music of the Poet of Evil, with this Manichean in art, it will be a long time before the world feels itself on intimate terms. It would be difficult for the most searching criticism to define the salient angle of this nature, or rather, just the environment which com pressed an originally fair poetic nature into the mask in which the world sees it. Baudelaire's circumstances. were good. He was born in wealth and respectability , he was surrounded by appreciative and powerful friends, he had had rare advantages of travel ; yet nothing could erase from his nature the deep underscoring of incurable malady. The melancholy which had come with Jean - Jacques, and which had flowed in a dark, sullen stream through De Staël, Châteaubriand, St. Pierre, Sénancour, was bequeathed to him, only in tensified, embittered, pessimistic. The three mystical sisters of De Quincey, the “ Mater Lacrymarum ,” the “ Mater Suspiriorum " and the " Mater Tenebrarum ," had been the fairy godmothers who presided at his birth and enriched him with their fatal gifts. To these was added the “ Mater Malorum , ” the Mother of Evil, a sinister Israfel of the sweet lute. The entire litera 20 306 BAUDELAIRE . ture of France of his time is impregnated with sighs, wet with tears, rent with the divine wound of grief, imbued with the eloquence which the idea that every thing is in decline communicates; there is a voluptuous sadness, such as melts through poetry when the poets have become a mere luxury of a complicated and spiritual civilization . In Baudelaire this sadness, this sweet reverie, took an acrid turn, and resulted in a nausea at the very evil which he commemorates more frequently than any other theme. Not that he was misanthropic ; it is a simple impossibility for him to see good in anything. Not that he saw good and misinterpreted it to the purposes of malice ; with him it was the old legend of color the blind. It was his destiny ( the saddest of all) not to technicalize a vague perversity and label it " original sin,” as the theologians have done, but simply to open his eyes, and open them on evil alone. It was with him a mathematical result, a dominant mental state, a color ing inherent, not adherent. In him was exhibited as a young man that remarkable quality which often dis plays itself in elderly painters -- an organic defect in the vision which makes them see things differently from other people, and differently from themselves at earlier stages -a persistent yellow or blue hanging like gauze between them and nature and spreading , unknown to themselves, a jaundice over their artistic activity.

It was towards the year 1849 that Baudelaire first became known known, that is, to a small knot of celebrated men whose acquaintance was fame. In a quarter of Paris not specially remote there was an hôtel which, although not famous then, has become so since - . It was here - [[Hôtel Pimodan - in one of those quaint but gorgeous salons of the purest Louis XIV. style, with its nymphs and satyrs, its vast chim ney -piece, its fauteuils and sofas rich with pictorial tapestry, its great rococo clock, its Frencbified mytho logical imprint everywhere, delicious to the heart of Watteau's marquis and marquises, that the Hashisch club met, rendered so notable since by the charming arti cles of Gautier in the “ Revue des deux Mondes.” Here were assembled famous men and women women who had sat as models for immortal marbles, women who had given to Ary Scheffer the exquisite suggestion of his “ Mignon "” — poets, critics, artists, testing the mysteri ous drug, and providing for themselves while under its influence a rarer æsthetic séance by the luxury of the surroundings. It was the Cénacle in its exaltation . Among these choice spirits Baudelaire was at first known only as a morbidly eccentric dreamer, propound ing, as Gautier says, with the utmost naturalness theo ries whose Satanic damnableness chilled the blood and shook even the bold visionaries of Hashisch. His manner was curiously impressive, insisting, pertina cious ; to his syllables a strange emphasis clung; every other word was an enclitic doubling the accent, more sharply accentuating the lines, freighted not only with unusual thought but with all the supernumeraries of it, voice, gesture, the rhetoric of tone. There were sacred letters in his words - letters which were scarcely breathed above a whisper for the awe or the passion that lay coiled within them. It was further remarked that there was an exo savor, an Oriental peculiarity or other about him which gave to all he said a yet more 308 BAUDELAIRE. un - European expression. Baudelaire travelled much in the Indian seas ; he had visited the isle which St. Pierre has made illustrious ; and like all really great Frenchmen who have travelled like Joinville, Frois sart, Châteaubriand, De Tocqueville -- he brought back with him the haunting genius loci, an abiding home sickness for the lands he had visited. This lurked about him like an indefinable perfume, restless, pene trating, canceling, so to speak , his letters of naturaliza tion, producing in him moral expatriation. He brooded continually over the land of the sun, the richness of vegetation that is the malady of the East, the fantastic scenery, the great languorous sea, the perfumes of the flowers that create swoon and vertigo, the graceful half naked Hindoo women with their voluptuousness, their fire, and their indolence. Constantly through his sad dest as through his sunniest poems the beautiful exotic life, the deathful jungles of the Orient croon mysteri ously up. So on antique pedestals whereon dance or writhe or supplicate antique gladiators or gods, there are garlands of smiling child - faces in relief, flowers, or Cupids, or acanthus- leaves as a sort of æsthetic in demnification. So in the old masters wreaths of cherub countenances stir in legions round some episode of martyrdom or triumph, as if to shadow forth the pity of genius in the beauty of little children . This gave him , in whatever company he might be, an air of isola tion , an abstraction , which, in the incessant flash and eagerness, rivalry and vivacity of French social life, at times made him a bore and a dead-weight. So in his early academic examinations he had never been noted for quickness or brilliancy, for his nature had little of BAUDELAIRE . 309 - that sparkling upgush which we commonly attribute to all the literary grandchildren of Voltaire ; but his friends saw in the unequaled flame of his eye a warmth and a resource which were invisible to others. He was tranquilly ripening to the harvest, slowly imbibing like yellowing wheat just the mellowness and sound , ness which will fit it afterward for the king's granaries. He is described as of marked personal beauty, neat to finicalness in attire and habit, a genuine Moham medan in his love of water, and inclined to dandy ism —like Lord Byron —by the rigorous call of a nature craving all the riches of sensuous forms. No nature perhaps was ever more fully imbued with artifi. ciality, or was ever in more perfect discord with the great figures of the Pagan past ; save in a few exquisite lines he openly disclaimed all allegiance to them . He admired them as he would have admired figures cloven from the eternal marble, but he infinitely preferred their manifold progeny as it developed in the Byzan tine and late Roman era. He could even delight curi ously in the Mediæval Latin , in the old hymnologies, in the crude and multiple diction of Apuleius and Pe tronius rather than in the music of the Vergilian and Ciceronian period. It is this radical modernness in deed that singles him out from the classical brother hood by whom he was surrounded ; from the essentially pagan genius -pagan by sympathy, imagery, subject - of Chénier;; from the exquisite Attic suavity of Sainte- Beuve ; from the statuesque classical form of Casimir Delavigne ; from everything which one would think prearranged to paganize a substance so plastic as a poet's brain. For on all sides —in history, criti 310 BAUDELAIRE. > cism , philosophy, belles- lettres there were streams of influence bearing directly on him and deriving their most frequent inspiration from the shores of the Ægean. There was the great critic of the “ Revue des deux Mondes ; there was the great philologian who courts and dallies with Homer as with a lover, M. Littré ; there was Renan with his queer Oriental instincts ; there were the Institut and the Académie Française, the very Areopagus of classicism ; there were personal friends like Gautier, Boissard, De Banville, full of the reading of the ancients : but none of these could check that in ordinate passion for the literature of decadence which had stamped its signet on the mind of Baudelaire. There is even pathos in the tenacity with which he clung to the corrupt and luxurious literatures of the latest form of Greek thought or Latin philosophy, as if the language of the great models were too thin a medium to convey the abounding thought of a modern. He utters himself boldly on this point. “ Does it not appear to the reader ,” says he, " as to me, that the lan guage of the latest Latin decadence sigh of a strong man already transformed and prepared for the spiritual life — is singularly proper for express ing passion such as the poetic modern world has con ceived and felt it ? The words, taken in a new sense, reveal the charming maladroitness of the Northern barbarian on his knees before Roman beauty. ” Thus by ingenious quibbling even he made haste to acknowl edge no debt to the ancients, and to break the golden bowl of classical tradition . The book by which Baudelaire is best known is his translation of the tales and poems of Edgar Poe, a - the supreme BAUDELAIRE. 311 translations so skillfully inwrought into the current phraseology and idiom of French thought that the works of the American writer seem new works in their foreign garb. Poe has even been claimed as a “ talent ” peculiarly French ; but should we grant what the Germans claim from us Hawthorne, Longfellow , Emerson — together with what the French, we should have little left that is distinctively American. It is not too much to say that Baudelaire owes to Poe a good moiety of his inspiration. Whole fields of thought, entire phrases, the phylacteries which Poe wore as his proudest claim to originality, the secret subsoil that underlies and makes peculiar all which has been regarded as most intensely Baudelairean, came over the seas from the keen-witted American contemporary. It is somewhat singular that M. Gautier, in his notice on M. Baudelaire's life, prefixed to the Lévy edition, quotes with approbation as characteris tically his friend's, whole pages that teem with Poe's grotesque theories. Poe's “ Essay on the Poetic Prin ciple” has furnished Baudelaire with the idea that is ever-recurrent with him : that the will is the supreme literary agent ; that the destiny of poetry is neither didactic nor exegetical truth, but like virtue it is its own highest consummation. In common with Baude laire, this was the theory of Balzac. As with Poe, so with Baudelaire there are mysterious ideal women - all moonshine and melancholy -flitting across the vision ; lovely, wan apparitions, ideally sweet, per plexingly vague, gifted with strange magnetic eyes that fix themselves on the reader and exercise over him a weird spell. There is a hush, too, in his style as if G 312 BAUDELAIRE. the ear were listening for mysterious footfalls in the night, and all that accompaniment of indefinable pomp, muffled music, vapory splendor, torturing anxiety that gather at the threshold of Poe's stories and escort the reader into their mazes. To the lines “ To Helen " it is thought, be traced the mystic fondness that Baude laire has for describing eyes, eyes that peer out like gargoyles at the most unexpected points coupled with epithets most quaint. There are other oddities which , like the monkish devices in old manuscripts, signalize the individuality of the writer, if they do not mark certain nervous idiosyncrasies of his. M. Gautier no tices, among other curious traits, the predilection which his friend had for cats - their velvety ways, the sphinx like attitude they assume in repose, the strange per fume that seems to emanate from them, the ready sympathy they show sedentary folk , the gentle elegance of their demeanor, and the sinister night-side to their lives when with mysterious cries they seem to enter into communion with the supernatural. He had ad dressed many beautiful lines to them . may , “ Chat séraphique, chat étrange, En qui tout est comme en un ange, Aussi subtil qu' harmonieux ." Among a people so selfish and so exclusive in their views of art, it cannot be doubted that the wonderfu fictions of Poe, when once they had been insinuated through the clever translations of Baudelaire, caused a sensation. The hit was decided. It is curious thus to track an influence that steals over the Atlantic and makes itself at home in a consciousness so void of all Germanic taint. BAUDELAIRE. 313 > If Baudelaire is read by the general public chiefly as the editor of an alien author, there is a more special circle to whom he has commended himself by his compositions in verse. Sainte- Beuve, in divining the motive that prompted Baudelaire to choose such fan tastic and horrible themes, represented the poet as so liloquizing thus : “ I will find poetry , and find it where nobody else had thought' of gathering or utter ing it. ” This was on the dung -hill, the gibbet, in the haunts of degradation, in people at whom society had hurled its malediction , in sympathetic horror, poison, serpents, the burial of a cursed poet, the prayer of a pagan , the love of lying, in dim Parisian wanderings and dreams, in condemned women, wine, death, exotic perfume, the albatross, the anterior life, the Madonna of the pierced heart, in idealized spleen , morbid self search , wistful evening light, tears, blood, ennui, pain . It would be hard to find a quainter repertory of titles, a more unique treatment, a greater faultlessness of rhythm , a daintier coying with debatable grounds be tween positive immorality and the noble missionary instinct of the poet to regenerate and to cleanse. Af ter describing with appalling minuteness a heap of rottenness which he had observed in one of his walks, he lets fall upon it a ray of celestial light ; it is heaven opening upon the Jews that stoned Stephen. The reader is satisfied ; for in all this impurity there is a kernel of sweetness, a nucleus of fine indignation for what he sees. The book opens with a benediction and closes with a curse ; and never book had stranger en titlement: “ Flowers of Evil.” The parts into which it is divided bear out the singularity of this general 1 a 314 BAUDELAIRE. 1 appellation : " Spleen and Ideal," " Parisian Pictures," Wine,,"" “ Flowers of Evil, " “ Revolt," “ Death ." The book is the last blossom of an intellectual movement, into the very marrow of which has distilled the poison of melancholy with cruel sundering force. The author sees nothing good but the devil. The refined diabolism of some of his expressions would lead us to think that the spirit of the Semitic race had taken possession of him with all its voluptuous badness. For the devil was always a genial spirit until the fierceness of a Southern fancy stripped him of his powder and rib bons. Among the pieces coming under the caption Spleen and Ideal ” are many fine, many tender, and many powerful ones. In the great sobbing Alex andrines in which many of these weep out their bit terness and grief, we recognize a device to convey both by form and meaning the burdened sense of what was in the writer. He seldom indulges in short jubilant lyric forms, for he is seldom gay, and what gayety he has is content with the plaintive roll of octosyllabic It is a sort of sonnet that he prefers. He shared Poe's whim in regard to succinctness in poetical work . There are no long poems in the volume. In the opening piece he has this weird stanza : " Sur l'oreiller du mal c'est Satan Trismégiste Qui berce longuement notre esprit enchanté, Et le riche métal de notre volonté , Est tout vaporisé par ce savant chimiste ." He compares the poet to the albatross, the prince of the clouds, that haunts the tempest and smiles at the archer, but when exiled amid derision to the earth , his giant wings hinder him from moving. There are measures. BAUDELAIRE. 315 perfumes, he says, fresh as children's flesh , sweet as hautboys, green as meadows; others having within them infinite things like amber, musk, incense, singing the rapture of the heart and the senses. Then there is a most lovely cluster of lines, full of Hybla and Hy mettus, which sing the beauty of youth : “ A la sainte jeunesse, à l'air simple, au doux front, A l'ạil limpide et clair ainsi qu'une eau courante, Et qui va repandant sur tout, insouciante Comme l'azur du ciel , les oiseaux et les fleurs, Ses parfums, ses chansons et ses douces chaleurs! " > There is in these lines an unction like a bath of nard and rose-water. In the piece “ L'Ennemi” we hear the muffled tread of Manfred , and through him, of Faust. In “ La Vie Antérieure ” breaks forth India in all her royal charm , the stately calm , the deep blue skies, the lazy radiance of the sea, the naked slaves macerated with spices, fanning the poet with fans of palm , and striving as their only solicitude to fathom the pain gnawing, like the worm in the over -ripe fruit, at his heart. Then the vast savage sea as it struggles with the human will , attracts his attention, both limit less, both untamable, both beautiful. He writes of “ Don Juan on the Styx," a noble tragic irony pervad ing the poem, like a sneer in bronze . To use an image already employed : it resembles the king in the Arabian Nights who was changed to marble to the waist while his shoulders bled still under the torture of his enemy. This strangely solemn poem is half marble, but it bleeds at the heart. He confesses farther on that Lady Macbeth —“ a dream of Æschylus budding at the North's is his ideal, or one of the sublime monumen 316 BAUDELAIRE. a > tal women of Michael Angelo. In “ La Masque,” a poem that has the sly, languorous glance of the serpent in it, he sees a blasphemy on art, for he stands before a statue representing a woman of divine form , promising happiness," but terminating in a bicephalous monster ; the one a masque thievish ornament, a face lit up with grimace exquisite ; " the other a beautiful weep ing female. He then invokes Beauty, "' fairy of the velvet eyes, rhythm , perfume, only queen .” “ Parfum Exotique ” carries him with shut eyes to " an idle isle where nature yields strange trees and savory fruits, " while “ perfume of green tamarinds fills the nostrils, trembles on the air, ” mingled with the song of mariners. “ As other spirits float on music, mine floats on per fume, ” he adds in “ La Chevelure," a poem of strange Eastern grace ; the lock of hair, he says “ transports him to the Orient, " contains " a dazzling dream of sails and gondoliers, of masts and pennants," " an infinite rocking of balmy idleness," “ blue hair,'pavilion of out stretched darkness. ” The oil of coco, gourd, and musk breathes through these palpitating lines. From " Sed Non Satiata ” we get more than a hint at a passion Baudelaire conceived early in life for å 66 Sorcière au flanc d'ébène, enfant des noirs minuits. " Addressing one of his myth -like women he says, “ her eyes are like polished minerals ; in this heart symbolic, strange , where all is steel, and gold, and light, and diamonds, shines ever like a useless star the frozen majesty of childless womanhood.” He is “ certain that the tomb will understand the poet, ” and in some very sweet verses, invoking “ the mother of souvenirs, mistress of mistresses ,” he says , “ Methought I breathed the per a " >

BAUDELAIRE. 317 66 fume of her blood ." “ Let my deep heart feed full upon a lie, and swooning on thine eyes as into dreams, dream long beneath the shadow of thy lids. " There is in “ Confession” a Tennysonian richness of tint : the moon is shining ; Paris is asleep ; two lovers are walk ing together ; suddenly from the voice of the beloved, “ clear and joyous as a trump at sparkling morn,” breaks a plaintive cry ," a note fantastic, that nothing here be low is certain , no building on strong hearts, both love and beauty go ." “ Harmonie du Soir " is the soul of impalpable music going forth as the purpling dusk spreads over the world. Who but Baudelaire ever thought of " pleasures sharper than ice or iron, " " con fidences sobbed at the confessional of the heart, " “ rhymes of crystal," " a dais of empurpled trees and palms, where idleness rains upon the eyes, a tear iris'd like aa piece of opal ; " " the gold- besprinkled eyes of cats, ” “ thy floating dreams are full of humming birds," " love, the grain of musk that lies unseen within Eternity ; eyes through which flies and filters some thing sweet as Night, ” “ the ceaseless plaint that sobs within the fountain ,” “ the metal throats of clocks speak every language ; " “ the sun that fills both brain and hive with honey," " rocks where holy Anthony saw surge like lava naked breasts, purple with tempta tions ;” “ making a honey of grief," " vague glances white as twilight flash from upturn'd eyes," " the child less prostitute that looks death in the face like new born children, — hateless, without remorse ; 66't is Death that mounts in riot to the brain and gives us heart to march till eventide” ? It is only after re peated reading that the whole force of this eccentric 9 66 " 6 " " " 318 BAUDELAIRE. " genius dawns upon the reader. At first the prepon derant emotion is surprise, horror, repugnance ; the gauze of allegory is between you and the author ; the leaves conceal the fruit ; there is but vague relish for the metaphysical environment ; the ideal hovers in starry faintness before the eye. But at the second reading all clears up, the autumn mists roll away, the violet depths unveil in all their serenity. It is then only that Baudelaire becomes a favorite ; you must toil for it ; but the reward is sweet. You have become conscious of a new set of emotions; Baudelaire has found his poetry ; the wager is won. After studying such pieces as “ Tristresse de la Lune," " Le Cygne," “ L'Invitation au Voyage, " " La Madonne," “ Un Voy age à Cythere," " Les Vins, " we come to the conclusion that no greater beauty lies within the compass of the entire French language. Every mood of this extraor dinary artist, doubtless, does not please ; but there is a serene sweetness beyond the horror that he paints, a blossom beside the reptile, a tender music through all the discord. Like Iphigenia, the poet is mysteriously stolen away before the sacrifice is finished, before he has uttered words that cannot be recalled ; there is al ways a white stag at the last to redeem our wounded sense, to claim the “ maker ” in triumph. Tennyson, Longfellow , Bryant, Poe, Heine, were favorite authors with Baudelaire. “ Thanatopsis, " " A Vision of Fair Women,” have found echoes in the 6 Flowers of Evil.” Our author also translated De Quincey's “ Opium -eater," and wrote a book called " Artificial Paradises.” His “ Little Poems in Prose,” have become celebrated as dainty little statuettes or " BAUDELAIRE. 319 bits of fifteenth century carving. They are in the manner of Aloysius Brand. In summing up his literary career, it would be well to remember that Charles Baudelaire was neither an iconoclast nor a mourner over the beauty of pagan types. He was the child and the servant of his age, innocently sensuous, bril liantly new, faithful in his work . 22 AP 76 USEUM

22