should have been kept a sacred refuge from all the sorrows and wrongs
of the world, became the most dreadful of its prisons. It is no wonder
that the literature of these people should have been so filled with
the patriotic passion of their life; and I am not sure that literature
is not as nobly employed in exciting men to heroism and martyrdom for
a great cause as in the purveyance of mere intellectual delights. What
it was in Italy when it made this its chief business we may best learn
from an inquiry that I have at last found somewhat amusing. It will
lead us over vast meadows of green baize enameled with artificial
flowers, among streams that do nothing but purl. In this region the
shadows are mostly brown, and the mountains are invariably horrid;
there are tumbling floods and sighing groves; there are naturally
nymphs and swains; and the chief business of life is to be in love
and not to be in love; to burn and to freeze without regard to the
mercury. Need I say that this region is Arcady?




ARCADIAN SHEPHERDS


One day, near the close of the seventeenth century, a number of
ladies and gentlemen--mostly poets and poetesses according to their
thinking were assembled on a pleasant hill in the neighborhood of
Rome. As they lounged upon the grass, in attitudes as graceful and
picturesque as they could contrive, and listened to a sonnet or an
ode with the sweet patience of their race,--for they were all
Italians,--it occurred to the most conscious man among them that here
was something uncommonly like the Golden Age, unless that epoch had