Proserpine, meant nothing more than an eighteenth century poet when he
called Dolly or Betty Cynthia or Amaryllis; that the lady who damned
poor Tannhaeuser was not Venus, but a mere little Suabian mountain
sprite; in fact, that poetry is only the invention of poets, and that
that rogue, Heinrich Heine, is entirely responsible for the existence
of _Dieux en Exil_.... My poor manuscript can only tell you what
St. Augustine, Tertullian, and sundry morose old Bishops thought about
the loves of Father Zeus and the miracles of the Lady Isis, none of
which is much worth your attention.... Reality, my dear Lady Evelyn, is
always prosaic: at least when investigated into by bald old gentlemen
like me.

And yet, it does not look so. The world, at times, seems to be playing
at being poetic, mysterious, full of wonder and romance. I am writing,
as usual, by my window, the moonlight brighter in its whiteness than my
mean little yellow-shining lamp. From the mysterious greyness, the
olive groves and lanes beneath my terrace, rises a confused quaver of
frogs, and buzz and whirr of insects: something, in sound, like the
vague trails of countless stars, the galaxies on galaxies blurred into
mere blue shimmer by the moon, which rides slowly across the highest
heaven. The olive twigs glisten in the rays: the flowers of the
pomegranate and oleander are only veiled as with bluish mist in their
scarlet and rose. In the sea is another sea, of molten, rippled silver,
or a magic causeway leading to the shining vague offing, the luminous
pale sky-line, where the islands of Palmaria and Tino float like
unsubstantial, shadowy dolphins. The roofs of Montemirto glimmer among
the black, pointing cypresses: farther below, at the end of that
half-moon of land, is San Massimo: the Genoese fort inhabited by our
friends is profiled black against the sky. All is dark: our fisher-folk
go to bed early; Gertrude and the little ones are asleep: they at least