feet. She was still young, and from her dark, sad face her eyes met mine
with that fixed look of the hopeless poor, now grown familiar; the
child, half naked, gazed up at me as he held his mother's hand. What
brought her there at that hour, alone with her child? She seemed the
epitome of the human life I was leaving behind, come forth to bid
farewell; and she passed on under the shadows of the dawn. The last star
faded as I went down the hollow between the spurs. Etna gleamed white
and vast over the shoulder of the ravine, and, as I dipped down, was
gone.




A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY


There was an old cry, Return to Nature! Let us rather return unto the
soul. Nature is great, and her science marvellous; but it is man who
knows it. In what he knows it is partial and subsidiary. Know thyself,
was the first command of reason; and wisdom was an ancient thing when
the sweet influences of the Pleiades and the path of Arcturus with his
sons were young in human thought. These late conquests of the mind in
the material infinities of the universe, its exploring of stellar space,
its exhuming of secular time, its harnessing of invisible forces, this
new mortal knowledge, its sudden burst, its brilliancy and amplitude of
achievement, thought winnowing the world as with a fan; the vivid
spectacle of vast and beneficent changes wrought by this means in human
welfare, the sense of the increase of man's power springing from
unsuspected and illimitable resources,--all this has made us forgetful
of truth that is the oldest heirloom of the race. In the balances of