like a saint of old, who, on the last verge of the desert, turns and
smiles upon the world he conquered.

"The great night collects and advances in shadow; and wandering
vapour, taking fire in the darkness, rolls, tumbling over and over
like fiery serpents, through loneliness and reeds.

"But in the eternal sunshine of the South flowers have not become
extinct; winds have carried seeds hither and thither, and the earth
has waxed lovely, and the calm of the spiritual evenings of the
Adriatic descend upon eternal perfume and the songs of birds. Symbol
of pain or joy there is none, and the august silence is undisturbed
by tears. From rotting hangings in Venice rats run, and that idle
wave of palace-stairs laps in listless leisure the fallen glories of
Veronese. As it is with painters so it is with poets, and wolf cubs
tear the pages of the last _Divine Comedy_ in the world. Rome is his
great agony, her shameful history falls before his eyes like a
painted curtain. All the inner nature of life is revealed to him, and
he sees into the heart of things as did Christ in the Garden of
Gethsemane--Christ, that most perfect symbol of the denial of the
will to live; and, like Christ, he cries that the world may pass from
him.

"But in resignation, hatred and horror vanish, and he muses again on
the more than human redemption, the great atonement that man has made
for his shameful life's history; and standing amid the orange and
almond trees, amid a profusion of bloom that the world seems to have
brought for thank-offering, amid an apparent and glorious victory of
inanimate nature, he falls down in worship of his race that had
freely surrendered all, knowing it to be nothing, and in surrender