robs the depth of its significance, strips poor humanity of any
semblance of impressive or attractive meaning, at night the effect is
just the reverse. What a fairy-world is this opening out beneath our
feet, with its golden glowing squares and circles and palaces, with its
lamplit gardens and pagodas! and who are these gay and beautiful beings
flitting hither and thither, and passing from one bright garden to
another on the stream of pleasure? If this many-coloured, passionate
dream be really human life, let us hasten to be down amongst it once
more! And, after all, is not this flattering night aspect of the world
more true than that disheartening countenance of it in the daylight?
Those golden squares and glowing gardens and flashing waters are, of
course, an illusion of the magician Kiralfy's, yet what power could the
illusion have upon us without the realities of beauty and love and
pleasure it attracts there?




THE BURIAL OF ROMEO AND JULIET


One morning of all mornings the citizens of Verona were startled by
strange news. Tragic forces, to which they had been accustomed to pay
little heed, had been at work in their city during the dark hours, and
young Romeo of the Montagues, handsome, devil-may-care lad as they had
known him, and little Juliet of the Capulets, that madcap, merry, gentle
young mistress, lay dead, side by side in the church of Santa Maria.

Death! surely they were used to death! and Love, flower of the clove!
they were used to _love_. But here were love and death, that somehow