faults or weaknesses which your criticisms pointed out; I believe because
they are in unison with my own nature, which yearns for harmony, and,
finding that, rests contented. I shrink from violent contrasts, and can
discover nothing tame and insipid in a continuance of sweetness and
serenity. But it was not till after I had read "La Gerusalemme" again
and again, and then sat and brooded over it, that I recognized the main
charm of the poem in the religion which clings to it as the perfume
clings to a flower,--a religion sometimes melancholy, but never to me
sad. Hope always pervades it. Surely if, as you said, "Hope is twin-
born with art," it is because art at its highest blends itself
unconsciously with religion, and proclaims its affinity with hope by its
faith in some future good more perfect than it has realized in the past.

Be this as it may, it was in this poem so pre-eminently Christian that I
found the something which I missed and craved for in modern French
masterpieces; even yours,--a something spiritual, speaking to my own
soul, calling it forth; distinguishing it as an essence apart from mere
human reason; soothing, even when it excited; making earth nearer to
heaven. And when I ran on in this strain to you after my own wild
fashion, you took my head between your hands and kissed me, and said,
"Happy are those who believe! long may that happiness be thine!" Why did
I not feel in Dante the Christian charm that I felt in Tasso? Dante in
your eyes, as in those of most judges, is infinitely the greater genius;
but reflected on the dark stream of that genius the stars are so
troubled, the heaven so threatening.

Just as my year of holiday was expiring, I turned to English literature;
and Shakspeare, of course, was the first English poet put into my hands.
It proves how childlike my mind still was, that my earliest sensation in
reading him was that of disappointment. It was not only that, despite my