quickened the brain. He might go and look in at the Art Gallery, where
he hadn't been for a long while, and see the new picture the morning
paper was talking about. It was by a painter whose poems he already knew
and loved. That might inspire him. So, by an accident of idleness, he
presently found himself standing rapt before the most wonderful picture
he had ever seen,--a picture to see which, he said to himself, men would
make pilgrimages to Tyre, when Tyre was a moss-grown, ruinous seaport,
from which the traffic of the world had long since passed away.

Henry at this time had visited none of the great galleries and, except
in a few reproductions, knew nothing of the great Italian masters.
Therefore to him this picture was Italy, the Renaissance, and
Catholicism, all concentrated into one enthralling canvas. But it was
something greater than that. It was the terrible meeting of Youth and
Love and Death in one tremendous moment of infinite loss. Infinite
passion and infinite loss were here pictured, in a medium which
combined all that was spiritual and all that was sensual in a harmony
of beauty that was in the same moment delirium and peace. The
irresistible cry of the colour to the senses, the spheral call of the
theme and its agony to the soul. Beatrice dead, and Dante taken in a
dream across the strewn poppies of her death-chamber, to look his last
on the sleeping face, yet a little smiling in the after-glow of life;
her soul already carried by angels far over the curved and fluted roofs
of the Florentine houses, on its way to Paradise. Little Beatrice! Not
till they meet again in Paradise shall he see again that holy face. In a
dream of loss he gazes upon her, as the angels lift up the
flower-garnished sheet; and not only her face, but every detail of that
room of death is etched in tears upon his eyes,--the distant winding
stair, the pallid death-lamps, the intruding light of day. All Passion
and all Loss, all Youth, all Love, and all Death met together in an