grey tomb in Flanders with a strange legend on it, making one think how,
perhaps, passion does live on after death; a necklace of blue and amber
beads and a broken mirror found in a girl's grave at Rome, a marble image
of a boy habited like Eros, and with the pathetic tradition of a great
king's sorrow lingering about it like a purple shadow,--over all these
the tired spirit broods with that calm and certain joy that one gets when
one has found something that the ages never dull and the world cannot
harm; and with it comes that desire of Greek things which is often an
artistic method of expressing one's desire for perfection; and that
longing for the old dead days which is so modern, so incomplete, so
touching, being, in a way, the inverted torch of Hope, which burns the
hand it should guide; and for many things a little sadness, and for all
things a great love; and lastly, in the pinewood by the sea, once more
the quick and vital pulse of joyous youth leaping and laughing in every
line, the frank and fearless freedom of wave and wind waking into fire
life's burnt-out ashes and into song the silent lips of pain,--how
clearly one seems to see it all, the long colonnade of pines with sea and
sky peeping in here and there like a flitting of silver; the open place
in the green, deep heart of the wood with the little moss-grown altar to
the old Italian god in it; and the flowers all about, cyclamen in the
shadowy places, and the stars of the white narcissus lying like
snow-flakes over the grass, where the quick, bright-eyed lizard starts by
the stone, and the snake lies coiled lazily in the sun on the hot sand,
and overhead the gossamer floats from the branches like thin, tremulous
threads of gold,--the scene is so perfect for its motive, for surely
here, if anywhere, the real gladness of life might be revealed to one's
youth--the gladness that comes, not from the rejection, but from the
absorption, of all passion, and is like that serene calm that dwells in
the faces of the Greek statues, and which despair and sorrow cannot
touch, but intensify only.