now, but with some memory of the old days still lingering about the
delicately-twisted pillars, and the carved doorways, with their grotesque
animals, and laughing masks, and quaint heraldic devices, all reminding
one of a people who could not think life real till they had made it
fantastic. And above the village, and beyond the bend of the river, we
used to go in the afternoon, and sketch from one of the big barges that
bring the wine in autumn and the wood in winter down to the sea, or lie
in the long grass and make plans pour la gloire, et pour ennuyer les
philistins, or wander along the low, sedgy banks, 'matching our reeds in
sportive rivalry,' as comrades used in the old Sicilian days; and the
land was an ordinary land enough, and bare, too, when one thought of
Italy, and how the oleanders were robing the hillsides by Genoa in
scarlet, and the cyclamen filling with its purple every valley from
Florence to Rome; for there was not much real beauty, perhaps, in it,
only long, white dusty roads and straight rows of formal poplars; but,
now and then, some little breaking gleam of broken light would lend to
the grey field and the silent barn a secret and a mystery that were
hardly their own, would transfigure for one exquisite moment the peasants
passing down through the vineyard, or the shepherd watching on the hill,
would tip the willows with silver and touch the river into gold; and the
wonder of the effect, with the strange simplicity of the material, always
seemed to me to be a little like the quality of these the verses of my
friend.




MRS. LANGTRY AS HESTER GRAZEBROOK