streaked like a Ravenna mosaic with purple and green, shimmer the white
houses and walls, the steeple and towers, an enchanted Fata Morgana
city, of dim Porto Venere; ... and I mumble to myself the verse of
Catullus, but addressing a greater and more terrible goddess than he
did:--

"Procul a mea sit furor omnis, Hera, domo; alios; age incitatos, alios
age rabidos."

_March 25, 1887._

Yes; I will do everything in my power for your friends. Are you
well-bred folk as well bred as we, Republican _bourgeois,_ with
the coarse hands (though you once told me mine were psychic hands when
the mania of palmistry had not yet been succeeded by that of the
Reconciliation between Church and State), I wonder, that you should
apologize, you whose father fed me and housed me and clothed me in my
exile, for giving me the horrid trouble of hunting for lodgings? It is
like you, dear Donna Evelina, to have sent me photographs of my future
friend Waldemar's statue.... I have no love for modern sculpture, for
all the hours I have spent in Gibson's and Dupre's studio: 'tis a dead
art we should do better to bury. But your Waldemar has something of the
old spirit: he seems to feel the divineness of the mere body, the
spirituality of a limpid stream of mere physical life. But why among
these statues only men and boys, athletes and fauns? Why only the bust
of that thin, delicate-lipped little Madonna wife of his? Why no
wide-shouldered Amazon or broad-flanked Aphrodite?

_April 10, 1887._