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+**The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Marble Faun, by Hawthorne**
+Or The Romance of Monte Beni
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+Volume 1 of
+The Marble Faun
+Or The Romance of Monte Beni
+
+by Nathaniel Hawthorne
+
+May, 2000  [Etext #2181]
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+
+
+THE MARBLE FAUN
+
+or The Romance of Monte Beni
+
+Nathaniel Hawthorne
+
+In Two Volumes
+
+This is Volume One
+
+
+
+
+Contents
+
+Volume I
+
+ I       MIRIAM, HILDA, KENYON, DONATELLO
+ II      THE FAUN
+ III     SUBTERRANEAN REMINISCENCES
+ IV      THE SPECTRE OF THE CATACOMB
+ V       MIRIAM'S STUDIO
+ VI      THE VIRGIN'S SHRINE
+ VII     BEATRICE
+ VIII    THE SUBURBAN VILLA
+ IX      THE FAUN AND NYMPH
+ X       THE SYLVAN DANCE
+ XI      FRAGMENTARY SENTENCES
+ XII     A STROLL ON THE PINCIAN
+ XIII    A SCULPTOR'S STUDIO
+ XIV     CLEOPATRA
+ XV      AN AESTHETIC COMPANY
+ XVI     A MOONLIGHT RAMBLE
+ XVII    MIRIAM'S TROUBLE
+ XVIII   ON THE EDGE OF A PRECIPICE
+ XIX     THE FAUN'S TRANSFORMATION
+ XX      THE BURIAL CHANT
+ XXI     THE DEAD CAPUCHIN
+ XXII    THE MEDICI GARDENS
+ XXIII   MIRIAM AND HILDA
+
+
+Volume II
+
+ XXIV    THE TOWER AMONG THE APENNINES
+ XXV     SUNSHINE
+ XXVI    THE PEDIGREE OF MONTE BENI
+ XXVII   MYTHS
+ XXVIII  THE OWL TOWER
+ XXIX    ON THE BATTLEMENTS
+ XXX     DONATELLO'S BUST
+ XXXI    THE MARBLE SALOON
+ XXXII   SCENES BY THE WAY
+ XXXIII  PICTURED WINDOWS
+ XXXIV   MARKET-DAY IN PERUGIA
+ XXXV    THE BRONZE PONTIFF'S BENEDICTION
+ XXXVI   HILDA'S TOWER
+ XXXVII  THE EMPTINESS OF PICTURE GALLERIES
+ XXXVIII ALTARS AND INCENSE
+ XXXIX   THE WORLD'S CATHEDRAL
+ XL      HILDA AND A FRIEND
+ XLI     SNOWDROPS AND MAIDENLY DELIGHTS
+ XLII    REMINISCENCES OF MIRIAM
+ XLIII   THE EXTINCTION OF A LAMP
+ XLIV    THE DESERTED SHRINE
+ XLV     THE FLIGHT OF HILDA'S DOVES
+ XLVI    A WALK ON THE CAMPAGNA
+ XLVII   THE PEASANT AND CONTADINA
+ XLVIII  A SCENE IN THE CORSO
+ XLIX    A FROLIC OF THE CARNIVAL
+ L       MIRIAM, HILDA, KENYON, DONATELLO
+
+
+
+
+THE MARBLE FAUN
+
+
+
+
+Volume I
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+MIRIAM, HILDA, KENYON, DONATELLO
+
+
+Four individuals, in whose fortunes we should be glad to interest the
+reader, happened to be standing in one of the saloons of the
+sculpture-gallery in the Capitol at Rome.  It was that room (the first,
+after ascending the staircase) in the centre of which reclines the noble
+and most pathetic figure of the Dying Gladiator, just sinking into his
+death-swoon.  Around the walls stand the Antinous, the Amazon, the Lycian
+Apollo, the Juno; all famous productions of antique sculpture, and still
+shining in the undiminished majesty and beauty of their ideal life,
+although the marble that embodies them is yellow with time, and perhaps
+corroded by the damp earth in which they lay buried for centuries.  Here,
+likewise, is seen a symbol (as apt at this moment as it was two thousand
+years ago) of the Human Soul, with its choice of Innocence or Evil close
+at hand, in the pretty figure of a child, clasping a dove to her bosom,
+but assaulted by a snake.
+
+From one of the windows of this saloon, we may see a flight of broad stone
+steps, descending alongside the antique and massive foundation of the
+Capitol, towards the battered triumphal arch of Septimius Severus, right
+below.  Farther on, the eye skirts along the edge of the desolate Forum
+(where Roman washerwomen hang out their linen to the sun), passing over a
+shapeless confusion of modern edifices, piled rudely up with ancient brick
+and stone, and over the domes of Christian churches, built on the old
+pavements of heathen temples, and supported by the very pillars that once
+upheld them.  At a distance beyond--yet but a little way, considering how
+much history is heaped into the intervening space--rises the great sweep
+of the Coliseum, with the blue sky brightening through its upper tier of
+arches.  Far off, the view is shut in by the Alban Mountains, looking just
+the same, amid all this decay and change, as when Romulus gazed
+thitherward over his half finished wall.
+
+We glance hastily at these things,--at this bright sky, and those blue
+distant mountains, and at the ruins, Etruscan, Roman, Christian, venerable
+with a threefold antiquity, and at the company of world-famous statues in
+the saloon,--in the hope of putting the reader into that state of feeling
+which is experienced oftenest at Rome.  It is a vague sense of ponderous
+remembrances; a perception of such weight and density in a bygone life, of
+which this spot was the centre, that the present moment is pressed down or
+crowded out, and our individual affairs and interests are but half as real
+here as elsewhere.  Viewed through this medium, our narrative--into which
+are woven some airy and unsubstantial threads, intermixed with others,
+twisted out of the commonest stuff of human existence--may seem not widely
+different from the texture of all our lives.
+
+Side by side with the massiveness of the Roman Past, all matters that we
+handle or dream of nowadays look evanescent and visionary alike.
+
+It might be that the four persons whom we are seeking to introduce were
+conscious of this dreamy character of the present, as compared with the
+square blocks of granite wherewith the Romans built their lives.  Perhaps
+it even contributed to the fanciful merriment which was just now their
+mood.  When we find ourselves fading into shadows and unrealities, it
+seems hardly worth while to be sad, but rather to laugh as gayly as we may,
+and ask little reason wherefore.
+
+Of these four friends of ours, three were artists, or connected with art;
+and, at this moment, they had been simultaneously struck by a resemblance
+between one of the antique statues, a well-known masterpiece of Grecian
+sculpture, and a young Italian, the fourth member of their party.
+
+"You must needs confess, Kenyon," said a dark-eyed young woman, whom her
+friends called Miriam, "that you never chiselled out of marble, nor
+wrought in clay, a more vivid likeness than this, cunning a bust-maker as
+you think yourself.  The portraiture is perfect in character, sentiment,
+and feature.  If it were a picture, the resemblance might be half illusive
+and imaginary; but here, in this Pentelic marble, it is a substantial fact,
+and may be tested by absolute touch and measurement.  Our friend
+Donatello is the very Faun of Praxiteles.  Is it not true, Hilda?"
+
+"Not quite--almost--yes, I really think so," replied Hilda, a slender,
+brown-haired, New England girl, whose perceptions of form and expression
+were wonderfully clear and delicate.  "If there is any difference between
+the two faces, the reason may be, I suppose, that the Faun dwelt in woods
+and fields, and consorted with his like; whereas Donatello has known
+cities a little, and such people as ourselves.  But the resemblance is
+very close, and very strange."
+
+"Not so strange," whispered Miriam mischievously; "for no Faun in Arcadia
+was ever a greater simpleton than Donatello.  He has hardly a man's share
+of wit, small as that may be.  It is a pity there are no longer any of
+this congenial race of rustic creatures for our friend to consort with!"
+
+"Hush, naughty one!"  returned Hilda.  "You are very ungrateful, for you
+well know he has wit enough to worship you, at all events."
+
+"Then the greater fool he!"  said Miriam so bitterly that Hilda's quiet
+eyes were somewhat startled.
+
+"Donatello, my dear friend," said Kenyon, in Italian, "pray gratify us all
+by taking the exact attitude of this statue."
+
+The young man laughed, and threw himself into the position in which the
+statue has been standing for two or three thousand years.  In truth,
+allowing for the difference of costume, and if a lion's skin could have
+been substituted for his modern talma, and a rustic pipe for his stick,
+Donatello might have figured perfectly as the marble Faun, miraculously
+softened into flesh and blood.
+
+"Yes; the resemblance is wonderful," observed Kenyon, after examining the
+marble and the man with the accuracy of a sculptor's eye.  "There is one
+point, however, or, rather, two points, in respect to which our friend
+Donatello's abundant curls will not permit us to say whether the likeness
+is carried into minute detail."
+
+And the sculptor directed the attention of the party to the ears of the
+beautiful statue which they were contemplating.
+
+But we must do more than merely refer to this exquisite work of art; it
+must be described, however inadequate may be the effort to express its
+magic peculiarity in words.
+
+The Faun is the marble image of a young man, leaning his right arm on the
+trunk or stump of a tree; one hand hangs carelessly by his side; in the
+other he holds the fragment of a pipe, or some such sylvan instrument of
+music.  His only garment--a lion's skin, with the claws upon his
+shoulder--falls halfway down his back, leaving the limbs and entire front
+of the figure nude.  The form, thus displayed, is marvellously graceful,
+but has a fuller and more rounded outline, more flesh, and less of heroic
+muscle, than the old sculptors were wont to assign to their types of
+masculine beauty.  The character of the face corresponds with the figure;
+it is most agreeable in outline and feature, but rounded and somewhat
+voluptuously developed, especially about the throat and chin; the nose is
+almost straight, but very slightly curves inward, thereby acquiring an
+indescribable charm of geniality and humor.  The mouth, with its full yet
+delicate lips, seems so nearly to smile outright, that it calls forth a
+responsive smile.  The whole statue--unlike anything else that ever was
+wrought in that severe material of marble--conveys the idea of an amiable
+and sensual creature, easy, mirthful, apt for jollity, yet not incapable
+of being touched by pathos.  It is impossible to gaze long at this stone
+image without conceiving a kindly sentiment towards it, as if its
+substance were warm to the touch, and imbued with actual life.  It comes
+very close to some of our pleasantest sympathies.
+
+Perhaps it is the very lack of moral severity, of any high and heroic
+ingredient in the character of the Faun, that makes it so delightful an
+object to the human eye and to the frailty of the human heart.  The being
+here represented is endowed with no principle of virtue, and would be
+incapable of comprehending such; but he would be true and honest by dint
+of his simplicity.  We should expect from him no sacrifice or effort for
+an abstract cause; there is not an atom of martyr's stuff in all that
+softened marble; but he has a capacity for strong and warm attachment, and
+might act devotedly through its impulse, and even die for it at need.  It
+is possible, too, that the Faun might be educated through the medium of
+his emotions, so that the coarser animal portion of his nature might
+eventually be thrown into the background, though never utterly expelled.
+
+The animal nature, indeed, is a most essential part of the Faun's
+composition; for the characteristics of the brute creation meet and
+combine with those of humanity in this strange yet true and natural
+conception of antique poetry and art.  Praxiteles has subtly diffused
+throughout his work that mute mystery,which so hopelessly perplexes us
+whenever we attempt to gain an intellectual or sympathetic knowledge of
+the lower orders of creation.  The riddle is indicated, however, only by
+two definite signs: these are the two ears of the Faun, which are leaf
+shaped, terminating in little peaks, like those of some species of animals.
+Though not so seen in the marble, they are probably to be considered as
+clothed in fine, downy fur.  In the coarser representations of this class
+of mythological creatures, there is another token of brute kindred,--a
+certain caudal appendage; which, if the Faun of Praxiteles must be
+supposed to possess it at all, is hidden by the lion's skin that forms his
+garment.  The pointed and furry ears, therefore, are the sole indications
+of his wild, forest nature.
+
+Only a sculptor of the finest imagination, the most delicate taste, the
+sweetest feeling, and the rarest artistic skill--in a word, a sculptor and
+a poet too--could have first dreamed of a Faun in this guise, and then
+have succeeded in imprisoning the sportive and frisky thing in marble.
+Neither man nor animal, and yet no monster, but a being in whom both races
+meet on friendly ground.  The idea grows coarse as we handle it, and
+hardens in our grasp.  But, if the spectator broods long over the statue,
+he will be conscious of its spell; all the pleasantness of sylvan life,
+all the genial and happy characteristics of creatures that dwell in woods
+and fields, will seem to be mingled and kneaded into one substance, along
+with the kindred qualities in the human soul.  Trees, grass, flowers,
+woodland streamlets, cattle, deer, and unsophisticated man.  The essence
+of all these was compressed long ago, and still exists, within that
+discolored marble surface of the Faun of Praxiteles.
+
+And, after all, the idea may have been no dream, but rather a poet's
+reminiscence of a period when man's affinity with nature was more strict,
+and his fellowship with every living thing more intimate and dear.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+THE FAUN
+
+
+Donatello," playfully cried Miriam, "do not leave us in this perplexity!
+Shake aside those brown curls, my friend, and let us see whether this
+marvellous resemblance extends to the very tips of the ears.  If so, we
+shall like you all the better!"
+
+"No, no, dearest signorina," answered Donatello, laughing, but with a
+certain earnestness.  "I entreat you to take the tips of my ears for
+granted."  As he spoke, the young Italian made a skip and jump, light
+enough for a veritable faun; so as to place himself quite beyond the reach
+of the fair hand that was outstretched, as if to settle the matter by
+actual examination.  "I shall be like a wolf of the Apennines," he
+continued, taking his stand on the other side of the Dying Gladiator, "if
+you touch my ears ever so softly.  None of my race could endure it.  It
+has always been a tender point with my forefathers and me."
+
+He spoke in Italian, with the Tuscan rusticity of accent, and an unshaped
+sort of utterance, betokening that he must heretofore have been chiefly
+conversant with rural people.
+
+"Well, well," said Miriam, "your tender point--your two tender points, if
+you have them--shall be safe, so far as I am concerned.  But how strange
+this likeness is, after all!  and how delightful, if it really includes
+the pointed ears!  O, it is impossible, of course," she continued, in
+English, "with a real and commonplace young man like Donatello; but you
+see how this peculiarity defines the position of the Faun; and, while
+putting him where he cannot exactly assert his brotherhood, still disposes
+us kindly towards the kindred creature.  He is not supernatural, but just
+on the verge of nature, and yet within it.  What is the nameless charm of
+this idea, Hilda?  You can feel it more delicately than I."
+
+"It perplexes me," said Hilda thoughtfully, and shrinking a little;
+"neither do I quite like to think about it."
+
+"But, surely," said Kenyon, "you agree with Miriam and me that there is
+something very touching and impressive in this statue of the Faun.  In
+some long-past age, he must really have existed.  Nature needed, and still
+needs, this beautiful creature; standing betwixt man and animal,
+sympathizing with each, comprehending the speech of either race, and
+interpreting the whole existence of one to the other.  What a pity that
+he has forever vanished from the hard and dusty paths of life,--unless,"
+added the sculptor, in a sportive whisper, "Donatello be actually he!"
+
+"You cannot conceive how this fantasy takes hold of me," responded Miriam,
+between jest and earnest.  "Imagine, now, a real being, similar to this
+mythic Faun; how happy, how genial, how satisfactory would be his life,
+enjoying the warm, sensuous, earthy side of nature; revelling in the
+merriment of woods and streams; living as our four-footed kindred do,--as
+mankind did in its innocent childhood; before sin, sorrow or morality
+itself had ever been thought of!  Ah!  Kenyon, if Hilda and you and I--if
+I, at least--had pointed ears!  For I suppose the Faun had no conscience,
+no remorse, no burden on the heart, no troublesome recollections of any
+sort; no dark future either."
+
+"What a tragic tone was that last, Miriam!" said the sculptor; and,
+looking into her face, he was startled to behold it pale and tear-stained.
+"How suddenly this mood has come over you!"
+
+"Let it go as it came," said Miriam, "like a thunder-shower in this Roman
+sky.  All is sunshine again, you see!"
+
+Donatello's refractoriness as regarded his ears had evidently cost him
+something, and he now came close to Miriam's side, gazing at her with an
+appealing air, as if to solicit forgiveness.  His mute, helpless gesture
+of entreaty had something pathetic in it, and yet might well enough excite
+a laugh, so like it was to what you may see in the aspect of a hound when
+he thinks himself in fault or disgrace.  It was difficult to make out the
+character of this young man.  So full of animal life as he was, so joyous
+in his deportment, so handsome, so physically well-developed, he made no
+impression of incompleteness, of maimed or stinted nature.  And yet, in
+social intercourse, these familiar friends of his habitually and
+instinctively allowed for him, as for a child or some other lawless thing,
+exacting no strict obedience to conventional rules, and hardly noticing
+his eccentricities enough to pardon them.  There was an indefinable
+characteristic about Donatello that set him outside of rules.
+
+He caught Miriam's hand, kissed it, and gazed into her eyes without saying
+a word.  She smiled, and bestowed on him a little careless caress,
+singularly like what one would give to a pet dog when he puts himself in
+the way to receive it.  Not that it was so decided a caress either, but
+only the merest touch, somewhere between a pat and a tap of the finger; it
+might be a mark of fondness, or perhaps a playful pretence of punishment.
+At all events, it appeared to afford Donatello exquisite pleasure;
+insomuch that he danced quite round the wooden railing that fences in the
+Dying Gladiator.
+
+"It is the very step of the Dancing Faun," said Miriam, apart, to Hilda.
+"What a child, or what a simpleton, he is!  I continually find myself
+treating Donatello as if he were the merest unfledged chicken; and yet he
+can claim no such privileges in the right of his tender age, for he is at
+least--how old should you think him, Hilda?"
+
+"Twenty years, perhaps," replied Hilda, glancing at Donatello; "but,
+indeed, I cannot tell; hardly so old, on second thoughts, or possibly
+older.  He has nothing to do with time, but has a look of eternal youth in
+his face."
+
+"All underwitted people have that look," said Miriam scornfully.
+
+"Donatello has certainly the gift of eternal youth, as Hilda suggests,"
+observed Kenyon, laughing; "for, judging by the date of this statue, which,
+I am more and more convinced, Praxiteles carved on purpose for him, he
+must be at least twenty-five centuries old, and he still looks as young as
+ever."
+
+"What age have you, Donatello?"  asked Miriam.
+
+"Signorina, I do not know," he answered; "no great age, however; for I
+have only lived since I met you."
+
+"Now, what old man of society could have turned a silly compliment more
+smartly than that!"  exclaimed Miriam.  "Nature and art are just at one
+sometimes.  But what a happy ignorance is this of our friend Donatello!
+Not to know his own age!  It is equivalent to being immortal on earth.  If
+I could only forget mine!"
+
+"It is too soon to wish that," observed the sculptor; "you are scarcely
+older than Donatello looks."
+
+"I shall be content, then," rejoined Miriam, "if I could only forget one
+day of all my life." Then she seemed to repent of this allusion, and
+hastily added, "A woman's days are so tedious that it is a boon to leave
+even one of them out of the account."
+
+The foregoing conversation had been carried on in a mood in which all
+imaginative people, whether artists or poets, love to indulge.  In this
+frame of mind, they sometimes find their profoundest truths side by side
+with the idlest jest, and utter one or the other, apparently without
+distinguishing which is the most valuable, or assigning any considerable
+value to either.  The resemblance between the marble Faun and their living
+companion had made a deep, half-serious, half-mirthful impression on these
+three friends, and had taken them into a certain airy region, lifting up,
+as it is so pleasant to feel them lifted, their heavy earthly feet from
+the actual soil of life.  The world had been set afloat, as it were, for a
+moment, and relieved them, for just so long, of all customary
+responsibility for what they thought and said.
+
+It might be under this influence--or, perhaps, because sculptors always
+abuse one another's works--that Kenyon threw in a criticism upon the Dying
+Gladiator.
+
+"I used to admire this statue exceedingly," he remarked, "but, latterly, I
+find myself getting weary and annoyed that the man should be such a length
+of time leaning on his arm in the very act of death.  If he is so terribly
+hurt, why does he not sink down and die without further ado?  Flitting
+moments, imminent emergencies, imperceptible intervals between two breaths,
+ought not to be incrusted with the eternal repose of marble; in any
+sculptural subject, there should be a moral standstill, since there must
+of necessity be a physical one.  Otherwise, it is like flinging a block of
+marble up into the air, and, by some trick of enchantment, causing it to
+stick there.  You feel that it ought to come down, and are dissatisfied
+that it does not obey the natural law."
+
+"I see," said Miriam mischievously, "you think that sculpture should be a
+sort of fossilizing process.  But, in truth, your frozen art has nothing
+like the scope and freedom of Hilda's and mine.  In painting there is no
+similar objection to the representation of brief snatches of time,
+--perhaps because a story can be so much more fully told in picture, and
+buttressed about with circumstances that give it an epoch.  For instance,
+a painter never would have sent down yonder Faun out of his far antiquity,
+lonely and desolate, with no companion to keep his simple heart warm."
+
+"Ah, the Faun!"  cried Hilda, with a little gesture of impatience; "I have
+been looking at him too long; and now, instead of a beautiful statue,
+immortally young, I see only a corroded and discolored stone.  This change
+is very apt to occur in statues."
+
+"And a similar one in pictures, surely," retorted the sculptor.  "It is
+the spectator's mood that transfigures the Transfiguration itself.  I defy
+any painter to move and elevate me without my own consent and assistance."
+
+"Then you are deficient of a sense," said Miriam.
+
+The party now strayed onward from hall to hall of that rich gallery,
+pausing here and there, to look at the multitude of noble and lovely
+shapes, which have been dug up out of the deep grave in which old Rome
+lies buried.  And still, the realization of the antique Faun, in the
+person of Donatello, gave a more vivid character to all these marble
+ghosts.  Why should not each statue grow warm with life!  Antinous might
+lift his brow, and tell us why he is forever sad.  The Lycian Apollo might
+strike his lyre; and, at the first vibration, that other Faun in red
+marble, who keeps up a motionless dance, should frisk gayly forth, leading
+yonder Satyrs, with shaggy goat-shanks, to clatter their little hoofs upon
+the floor, and all join hands with Donatello!  Bacchus, too, a rosy flush
+diffusing itself over his time-stained surface, could come down from his
+pedestal, and offer a cluster of purple grapes to Donatello's lips;
+because the god recognizes him as the woodland elf who so often shared his
+revels.  And here, in this sarcophagus, the exquisitely carved figures
+might assume life, and chase one another round its verge with that wild
+merriment which is so strangely represented on those old burial coffers:
+though still with some subtile allusion to death, carefully veiled, but
+forever peeping forth amid emblems of mirth and riot.
+
+As the four friends descended the stairs, however, their play of fancy
+subsided into a much more sombre mood; a result apt to follow upon such
+exhilaration as that which had so recently taken possession of them.
+
+"Do you know," said Miriam confidentially to Hilda, "I doubt the reality
+of this likeness of Donatello to the Faun, which we have been talking so
+much about?  To say the truth, it never struck me so forcibly as it did
+Kenyon and yourself, though I gave in to whatever you were pleased to
+fancy, for the sake of a moment's mirth and wonder." "I was certainly in
+earnest, and you seemed equally so," replied Hilda, glancing back at
+Donatello, as if to reassure herself of the resemblance.  "But faces
+change so much, from hour to hour, that the same set of features has often
+no keeping with itself; to an eye, at least, which looks at expression
+more than outline.  How sad and sombre he has grown all of a sudden!"
+"Angry too, methinks!  nay, it is anger much more than sadness," said
+Miriam.  "I have seen Donatello in this mood once or twice before.  If you
+consider him well, you will observe an odd mixture of the bulldog, or some
+other equally fierce brute, in our friend's composition; a trait of
+savageness hardly to be expected in such a gentle creature as he usually
+is.  Donatello is a very strange young man.  I wish he would not haunt my
+footsteps so continually."
+
+"You have bewitched the poor lad," said the sculptor, laughing.  "You have
+a faculty of bewitching people, and it is providing you with a singular
+train of followers.  I see another of them behind yonder pillar; and it is
+his presence that has aroused Donatello's wrath."
+
+They had now emerged from the gateway of the palace; and partly concealed
+by one of the pillars of the portico stood a figure such as may often be
+encountered in the streets and piazzas of Rome, and nowhere else.  He
+looked as if he might just have stepped out of a picture, and, in truth,
+was likely enough to find his way into a dozen pictures; being no other
+than one of those living models, dark, bushy bearded, wild of aspect and
+attire, whom artists convert into saints or assassins, according as their
+pictorial purposes demand.
+
+"Miriam," whispered Hilda, a little startled, "it is your model!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+SUBTERRANEAN REMINISCENCES
+
+
+Miriam's model has so important a connection with our story, that it is
+essential to describe the singular mode of his first appearance, and how
+he subsequently became a self-appointed follower of the young female
+artist.  In the first place, however, we must devote a page or two to
+certain peculiarities in the position of Miriam herself.
+
+There was an ambiguity about this young lady, which, though it did not
+necessarily imply anything wrong, would have operated unfavorably as
+regarded her reception in society, anywhere but in Rome.  The truth was,
+that nobody knew anything about Miriam, either for good or evil.  She had
+made her appearance without introduction, had taken a studio, put her card
+upon the door, and showed very considerable talent as a painter in oils.
+Her fellow professors of the brush, it is true, showered abundant
+criticisms upon her pictures, allowing them to be well enough for the idle
+half-efforts of an amateur, but lacking both the trained skill and the
+practice that distinguish the works of a true artist.
+
+Nevertheless, be their faults what they might, Miriam's pictures met with
+good acceptance among the patrons of modern art.  Whatever technical merit
+they lacked, its absence was more than supplied by a warmth and
+passionateness, which she had the faculty of putting into her productions,
+and which all the world could feel.  Her nature had a great deal of color,
+and, in accordance with it, so likewise had her pictures.
+
+Miriam had great apparent freedom of intercourse; her manners were so far
+from evincing shyness, that it seemed easy to become acquainted with her,
+and not difficult to develop a casual acquaintance into intimacy.  Such,
+at least, was the impression which she made, upon brief contact, but not
+such the ultimate conclusion of those who really sought to know her.  So
+airy, free, and affable was Miriam's deportment towards all who came
+within her sphere, that possibly they might never be conscious of the fact,
+but so it was, that they did not get on, and were seldom any further
+advanced into her good graces to-day than yesterday.  By some subtile
+quality, she kept people at a distance, without so much as letting them
+know that they were excluded from her inner circle.  She resembled one of
+those images of light, which conjurers evoke and cause to shine before us,
+in apparent tangibility, only an arm's length beyond our grasp: we make a
+step in advance, expecting to seize the illusion, but find it still
+precisely so far out of our reach.  Finally, society began to recognize
+the impossibility of getting nearer to Miriam, and gruffly acquiesced.
+
+There were two persons, however, whom she appeared to acknowledge as
+friends in the closer and truer sense of the word; and both of these more
+favored individuals did credit to Miriam's selection.  One was a young
+American sculptor, of high promise and rapidly increasing celebrity; the
+other, a girl of the same country, a painter like Miriam herself, but in a
+widely different sphere of art.  Her heart flowed out towards these two;
+she requited herself by their society and friendship (and especially by
+Hilda's) for all the loneliness with which, as regarded the rest of the
+world, she chose to be surrounded.  Her two friends were conscious of the
+strong, yearning grasp which Miriam laid upon them, and gave her their
+affection in full measure; Hilda, indeed, responding with the fervency of
+a girl's first friendship, and Kenyon with a manly regard, in which there
+was nothing akin to what is distinctively called love.
+
+A sort of intimacy subsequently grew up between these three friends and a
+fourth individual; it was a young Italian, who, casually visiting Rome,
+had been attracted by the beauty which Miriam possessed in a remarkable
+degree.  He had sought her, followed her, and insisted, with simple
+perseverance, upon being admitted at least to her acquaintance; a boon
+which had been granted, when a more artful character, seeking it by a more
+subtle mode of pursuit, would probably have failed to obtain it.  This
+young man, though anything but intellectually brilliant, had many
+agreeable characteristics which won him the kindly and halfcontemptuous
+regard of Miriam and her two friends.  It was he whom they called
+Donatello, and whose wonderful resemblance to the Faun of Praxiteles forms
+the keynote of our narrative.
+
+Such was the position in which we find Miriam some few months after her
+establishment at Rome.  It must be added, however, that the world did not
+permit her to hide her antecedents without making her the subject of a
+good deal of conjecture; as was natural enough, considering the abundance
+of her personal charms, and the degree of notice that she attracted as an
+artist.  There were many stories about Miriam's origin and previous life,
+some of which had a very probable air, while others were evidently wild
+and romantic fables.  We cite a few, leaving the reader to designate them
+either under the probable or the romantic head.
+
+It was said, for example, that Miriam was the daughter and heiress of a
+great Jewish banker (an idea perhaps suggested by a certain rich Oriental
+character in her face), and had fled from her paternal home to escape a
+union with a cousin, the heir of another of that golden brotherhood; the
+object being to retain their vast accumulation of wealth within the family.
+Another story hinted that she was a German princess, whom, for reasons
+of state, it was proposed to give in marriage either to a decrepit
+sovereign, or a prince still in his cradle.  According to a third
+statement, she was the off-spring of a Southern American planter, who had
+given her an elaborate education and endowed her with his wealth; but the
+one burning drop of African blood in her veins so affected her with a
+sense of ignominy, that she relinquished all and fled her country.  By
+still another account she was the lady of an English nobleman; and, out of
+mere love and honor of art, had thrown aside the splendor of her rank, and
+come to seek a subsistence by her pencil in a Roman studio.
+
+In all the above cases, the fable seemed to be instigated by the large and
+bounteous impression which Miriam invariably made, as if necessity and she
+could have nothing to do with one another.  Whatever deprivations she
+underwent must needs be voluntary.  But there were other surmises, taking
+such a commonplace view as that Miriam was the daughter of a merchant or
+financier, who had been ruined in a great commercial crisis; and,
+possessing a taste for art, she had attempted to support herself by the
+pencil, in preference to the alternative of going out as governess.
+
+Be these things how they might, Miriam, fair as she looked, was plucked up
+out of a mystery, and had its roots still clinging to her.  She was a
+beautiful and attractive woman, but based, as it were, upon a cloud, and
+all surrounded with misty substance; so that the result was to render her
+sprite-like in her most ordinary manifestations.  This was the case even
+in respect to Kenyon and Hilda, her especial friends.  But such was the
+effect of Miriam's natural language, her generosity, kindliness, and
+native truth of character, that these two received her as a dear friend
+into their hearts, taking her good qualities as evident and genuine, and
+never imagining that what was hidden must be therefore evil.
+
+We now proceed with our narrative.
+
+The same party of friends, whom we have seen at the sculpture-gallery of
+the Capitol, chanced to have gone together, some months before, to the
+catacomb of St. Calixtus.  They went joyously down into that vast tomb,
+and wandered by torchlight through a sort of dream, in which reminiscences
+of church aisles and grimy cellars--and chiefly the latter--seemed to be
+broken into fragments, and hopelessly intermingled.  The intricate
+passages along which they followed their guide had been hewn, in some
+forgotten age, out of a dark-red, crumbly stone.  On either side were
+horizontal niches, where, if they held their torches closely, the shape of
+a human body was discernible in white ashes, into which the entire
+mortality of a man or woman had resolved itself.  Among all this extinct
+dust, there might perchance be a thigh-bone, which crumbled at a touch; or
+possibly a skull, grinning at its own wretched plight, as is the ugly and
+empty habit of the thing.
+
+Sometimes their gloomy pathway tended upward, so that, through a crevice,
+a little daylight glimmered down upon them, or even a streak of sunshine
+peeped into a burial niche; then again, they went downward by gradual
+descent, or by abrupt, rudely hewn steps, into deeper and deeper recesses
+of the earth.  Here and there the narrow and tortuous passages widened
+somewhat, developing themselves into small chapels;--which once, no doubt,
+had been adorned with marble-work and lighted with ever-burning lamps and
+tapers.  All such illumination and ornament, however, had long since been
+extinguished and stript away; except, indeed, that the low roofs of a few
+of these ancient sites of worship were covered with dingy stucco, and
+frescoed with scriptural scenes and subjects, in the dreariest stage of
+ruin.
+
+In one such chapel, the guide showed them a low arch, beneath which the
+body of St. Cecilia had been buried after her martyrdom, and where it lay
+till a sculptor saw it, and rendered it forever beautiful in marble.
+
+In a similar spot they found two sarcophagi, one containing a skeleton,
+and the other a shrivelled body, which still wore the garments of its
+former lifetime.
+
+"How dismal all this is!"  said Hilda, shuddering.  "I do not know why we
+came here, nor why we should stay a moment longer."
+
+"I hate it all!"  cried Donatello with peculiar energy.  "Dear friends,
+let us hasten back into the blessed daylight!"
+
+From the first, Donatello had shown little fancy for the expedition; for,
+like most Italians, and in especial accordance with the law of his own
+simple and physically happy nature, this young man had an infinite
+repugnance to graves and skulls, and to all that ghastliness which the
+Gothic mind loves to associate with the idea of death.  He shuddered, and
+looked fearfully round, drawing nearer to Miriam, whose attractive
+influence alone had enticed him into that gloomy region.
+
+"What a child you are, poor Donatello!" she observed, with the freedom
+which she always used towards him.  "You are afraid of ghosts!"
+
+"Yes, signorina; terribly afraid!"  said the truthful Donatello.
+
+"I also believe in ghosts," answered Miriam, "and could tremble at them,
+in a suitable place.  But these sepulchres are so old, and these skulls
+and white ashes so very dry, that methinks they have ceased to be haunted.
+The most awful idea connected with the catacombs is their interminable
+extent, and the possibility of going astray into this labyrinth of
+darkness, which broods around the little glimmer of our tapers."
+
+"Has any one ever been lost here?"  asked Kenyon of the guide.
+
+"Surely, signor; one, no longer ago than my father's time," said the guide;
+and he added, with the air of a man who believed what he was telling,
+"but the first that went astray here was a pagan of old Rome, who hid
+himself in order to spy out and betray the blessed saints, who then dwelt
+and worshipped in these dismal places.  You have heard the story, signor?
+A miracle was wrought upon the accursed one; and, ever since (for fifteen
+centuries at least), he has been groping in the darkness, seeking his way
+out of the catacomb."
+
+"Has he ever been seen?"  asked Hilda, who had great and tremulous faith
+in marvels of this kind.
+
+"These eyes of mine never beheld him, signorina; the saints forbid!"
+answered the guide.  "But it is well known that he watches near parties
+that come into the catacomb, especially if they be heretics, hoping to
+lead some straggler astray.  What this lost wretch pines for, almost as
+much as for the blessed sunshine, is a companion to be miserable with him."
+
+"Such an intense desire for sympathy indicates something amiable in the
+poor fellow, at all events," observed Kenyon.
+
+They had now reached a larger chapel than those heretofore seen; it was of
+a circular shape, and, though hewn out of the solid mass of red sandstone,
+had pillars, and a carved roof, and other tokens of a regular
+architectural design.  Nevertheless, considered as a church, it was
+exceedingly minute, being scarcely twice a man's stature in height, and
+only two or three paces from wall to wall; and while their collected
+torches illuminated this one small, consecrated spot, the great darkness
+spread all round it, like that immenser mystery which envelops our little
+life, and into which friends vanish from us, one by one.  "Why, where is
+Miriam?"  cried Hilda.  The party gazed hurriedly from face to face, and
+became aware that one of their party had vanished into the great darkness,
+even while they were shuddering at the remote possibility of such a
+misfortune.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+THE SPECTRE OF THE CATACOMB
+
+
+Surely, she cannot be lost!"  exclaimed Kenyon.  "It is but a moment since
+she was speaking."
+
+"No, no!"  said Hilda, in great alarm.  "She was behind us all; and it is
+a long while since we have heard her voice!"
+
+"Torches!  torches!"  cried Donatello desperately.  "I will seek her, be
+the darkness ever so dismal!"
+
+But the guide held him back, and assured them all that there was no
+possibility of assisting their lost companion, unless by shouting at the
+very top of their voices.  As the sound would go very far along these
+close and narrow passages, there was a fair probability that Miriam might
+hear the call, and be able to retrace her steps.
+
+Accordingly, they all--Kenyon with his bass voice; Donatello with his
+tenor; the guide with that high and hard Italian cry, which makes the
+streets of Rome so resonant; and Hilda with her slender scream, piercing
+farther than the united uproar of the rest--began to shriek, halloo, and
+bellow, with the utmost force of their lungs.  And, not to prolong the
+reader's suspense (for we do not particularly seek to interest him in this
+scene, telling it only on account of the trouble and strange entanglement
+which followed), they soon heard a responsive call, in a female voice.
+
+"It was the signorina!"  cried Donatello joyfully.
+
+"Yes; it was certainly dear Miriam's voice," said Hilda.  "And here she
+comes!  Thank Heaven!  Thank Heaven!"
+
+The figure of their friend was now discernible by her own torchlight,
+approaching out of one of the cavernous passages.  Miriam came forward,
+but not with the eagerness and tremulous joy of a fearful girl, just
+rescued from a labyrinth of gloomy mystery.  She made no immediate
+response to their inquiries and tumultuous congratulations; and, as they
+afterwards remembered, there was something absorbed, thoughtful, and
+self-concentrated in her deportment.  She looked pale, as well she might,
+and held her torch with a nervous grasp, the tremor of which was seen in
+the irregular twinkling of the flame.  This last was the chief perceptible
+sign of any recent agitation or alarm.
+
+"Dearest, dearest Miriam," exclaimed Hilda, throwing her arms about her
+friend, "where have you been straying from us?  Blessed be Providence,
+which has rescued you out of that miserable darkness!"
+
+"Hush, dear Hilda!"  whispered Miriam, with a strange little laugh.  "Are
+you quite sure that it was Heaven's guidance which brought me back?  If so,
+it was by an odd messenger, as you will confess.  See; there he stands."
+
+Startled at Miriam's words and manner, Hilda gazed into the duskiness
+whither she pointed, and there beheld a figure standing just on the
+doubtful limit of obscurity, at the threshold of the small, illuminated
+chapel.  Kenyon discerned him at the same instant, and drew nearer with
+his torch; although the guide attempted to dissuade him, averring that,
+once beyond the consecrated precincts of the chapel, the apparition would
+have power to tear him limb from limb.  It struck the sculptor, however,
+when he afterwards recurred to these circumstances, that the guide
+manifested no such apprehension on his own account as he professed on
+behalf of others; for he kept pace with Kenyon as the latter approached
+the figure, though still endeavoring to restrain 'him.
+
+In fine, they both drew near enough to get as good a view of the spectre
+as the smoky light of their torches, struggling with the massive gloom,
+could supply.
+
+The stranger was of exceedingly picturesque, and even melodramatic aspect.
+He was clad in a voluminous cloak, that seemed to be made of a buffalo's
+hide, and a pair of those goat-skin breeches, with the hair outward, which
+are still commonly worn by the peasants of the Roman Campagna.  In this
+garb, they look like antique Satyrs; and, in truth, the Spectre of the
+Catacomb might have represented the last survivor of that vanished race,
+hiding himself in sepulchral gloom, and mourning over his lost life of
+woods and streams.
+
+Furthermore, he had on a broad-brimmed, conical hat, beneath the shadow of
+which a wild visage was indistinctly seen, floating away, as it were, into
+a dusky wilderness of mustache and beard.  His eyes winked, and turned
+uneasily from the torches, like a creature to whom midnight would be more
+congenial than noonday.
+
+On the whole, the spectre might have made a considerable impression on the
+sculptor's nerves, only that he was in the habit of observing similar
+figures, almost every day, reclining on the Spanish steps, and waiting for
+some artist to invite them within the magic realm of picture.  Nor, even
+thus familiarized with the stranger's peculiarities of appearance, could
+Kenyon help wondering to see such a personage, shaping himself so suddenly
+out of the void darkness of the catacomb.
+
+"What are you?"  said the sculptor, advancing his torch nearer.  "And how
+long have you been wandering here?"
+
+"A thousand and five hundred years!"  muttered the guide, loud enough to
+be heard by all the party.  "It is the old pagan phantom that I told you
+of, who sought to betray the blessed saints!"
+
+"Yes; it is a phantom!"  cried Donatello, with a shudder.  "Ah, dearest
+signorina, what a fearful thing has beset you in those dark corridors!"
+
+"Nonsense, Donatello," said the sculptor.  "The man is no more a phantom
+than yourself.  The only marvel is, how he comes to be hiding himself in
+the catacomb.  Possibly our guide might solve the riddle."
+
+The spectre himself here settled the point of his tangibility, at all
+events, and physical substance, by approaching a step nearer, and laying
+his hand on Kenyon's arm.
+
+"Inquire not what I am, nor wherefore I abide in the darkness," said he,
+in a hoarse, harsh voice, as if a great deal of damp were clustering in
+his throat.  "Henceforth, I am nothing but a shadow behind her footsteps.
+She came to me when I sought her not.  She has called me forth, and must
+abide the consequences of my reappearance in the world."
+
+"Holy Virgin!  I wish the signorina joy of her prize," said the guide,
+half to himself.  "And in any case, the catacomb is well rid of him."
+
+We need follow the scene no further.  So much is essential to the
+subsequent narrative, that, during the short period while astray in those
+tortuous passages, Miriam had encountered an unknown man, and led him
+forth with her, or was guided back by him, first into the torchlight,
+thence into the sunshine.
+
+It was the further singularity of this affair, that the connection, thus
+briefly and casually formed, did not terminate with the incident that gave
+it birth.  As if her service to him, or his service to her, whichever it
+might be, had given him an indefeasible claim on Miriam's regard and
+protection, the Spectre of the Catacomb never long allowed her to lose
+sight of him, from that day forward.  He haunted her footsteps with more
+than the customary persistency of Italian mendicants, when once they have
+recognized a benefactor.  For days together, it is true, he occasionally
+vanished, but always reappeared, gliding after her through the narrow
+streets, or climbing the hundred steps of her staircase and sitting at her
+threshold.
+
+Being often admitted to her studio, he left his features, or some shadow
+or reminiscence of them, in many of her sketches and pictures.  The moral
+atmosphere of these productions was thereby so influenced, that rival
+painters pronounced it a case of hopeless mannerism, which would destroy
+all Miriam's prospects of true excellence in art.
+
+The story of this adventure spread abroad, and made its way beyond the
+usual gossip of the Forestieri, even into Italian circles, where, enhanced
+by a still potent spirit of superstition, it grew far more wonderful than
+as above recounted.  Thence, it came back among the Anglo-Saxons, and was
+communicated to the German artists, who so richly supplied it with
+romantic ornaments and excrescences, after their fashion, that it became a
+fantasy worthy of Tieck or Hoffmann.  For nobody has any conscience about
+adding to the improbabilities of a marvellous tale.
+
+The most reasonable version of the incident, that could anywise be
+rendered acceptable to the auditors, was substantially the one suggested
+by the guide of the catacomb, in his allusion to the legend of Memmius.
+This man, or demon, or man-demon, was a spy during the persecutions of the
+early Christians, probably under the Emperor Diocletian, and penetrated
+into the catacomb of St. Calixtus, with the malignant purpose of tracing
+out the hiding-places of the refugees.  But, while he stole craftily
+through those dark corridors, he chanced to come upon a little chapel,
+where tapers were burning before an altar and a crucifix, and a priest was
+in the performance of his sacred office.  By divine indulgence, there was
+a single moment's grace allowed to Memmius, during which, had he been
+capable of Christian faith and love, he might have knelt before the cross,
+and received the holy light into his soul, and so have been blest forever.
+But he resisted the sacred impulse.  As soon, therefore, as that one
+moment had glided by, the light of the consecrated tapers, which represent
+all truth, bewildered the wretched man with everlasting error, and the
+blessed cross itself was stamped as a seal upon his heart, so that it
+should never open to receive conviction.
+
+Thenceforth, this heathen Memmius has haunted the wide and dreary
+precincts of the catacomb, seeking, as some say, to beguile new victims
+into his own misery; but, according to other statements, endeavoring to
+prevail on any unwary visitor to take him by the hand, and guide him out
+into the daylight.  Should his wiles and entreaties take effect, however,
+the man-demon would remain only a little while above ground.  He would
+gratify his fiendish malignity by perpetrating signal mischief on his
+benefactor, and perhaps bringing some old pestilence or other forgotten
+and long-buried evil on society; or, possibly, teaching the modern world
+some decayed and dusty kind of crime, which the antique Romans knew,--and
+then would hasten back to the catacomb, which, after so long haunting it,
+has grown his most congenial home.
+
+Miriam herself, with her chosen friends, the sculptor and the gentle Hilda,
+often laughed at the monstrous fictions that had gone abroad in reference
+to her adventure.  Her two confidants (for such they were, on all ordinary
+subjects) had not failed to ask an explanation of the mystery, since
+undeniably a mystery there was, and one sufficiently perplexing in itself,
+without any help from the imaginative faculty.  And, sometimes responding
+to their inquiries with a melancholy sort of playfulness, Miriam let her
+fancy run off into wilder fables than any which German ingenuity or
+Italian superstition had contrived.
+
+For example, with a strange air of seriousness over all her face, only
+belied by a laughlng gleam in her.  dark eyes, she would aver that the
+spectre (who had been an artist in his mortal lifetime)had promised to
+teach her a long-lost, but invaluable secret of old Roman fresco painting.
+The knowledge of this process would place Miriam at the head of modern
+art; the sole condition being agreed upon, that she should return with him
+into his sightless gloom, after enriching a certain extent of stuccoed
+wall with the most brilliant and lovely designs.  And what true votary of
+art would not purchase unrivalled excellence, even at so vast a sacrifice!
+
+Or, if her friends still solicited a soberer account, Miriam replied, that,
+meeting the old infidel in one of the dismal passages of the catacomb,
+she had entered into controversy with him, hoping to achieve the glory and
+satisfaction of converting him to the Christian faith.  For the sake of
+so excellent a result; she had even staked her own salvation against his,
+binding herself to accompany him back into his penal gloom, if, within a
+twelvemonth's space, she should not have convinced him of the errors
+through which he had so long groped and stumbled.  But, alas!  up to the
+present time, the controversy had gone direfully in favor of the man-demon;
+and Miriam (as she whispered in Hilda's ear) had awful forebodings, that,
+in a few more months, she must take an eternal farewell of the sun!
+
+It was somewhat remarkable that all her romantic fantasies arrived at this
+self-same dreary termination,--it appeared impossible for her even to
+imagine any other than a disastrous result from her connection with her
+ill-omened attendant.
+
+This singularity might have meant nothing, however, had it not suggested a
+despondent state of mind, which was likewise indicated by many other
+tokens.  Miriam's friends had no difficulty in perceiving that, in one way
+or another, her happiness was very seriously compromised.  Her spirits
+were often depressed into deep melancholy.  If ever she was gay, it was
+seldom with a healthy cheerfulness.  She grew moody, moreover, and subject
+to fits of passionate ill temper; which usually wreaked itself on the
+heads of those who loved her best.  Not that Miriam's indifferent
+acquaintances were safe from similar outbreaks of her displeasure,
+especially if they ventured upon any allusion to the model.  In such cases,
+they were left with little disposition to renew the subject, but inclined,
+on the other hand, to interpret the whole matter as much to her discredit
+as the least favorable coloring of the facts would allow.
+
+It may occur to the reader, that there was really no demand for so much
+rumor and speculation in regard to an incident, Which might well enough
+have been explained without going many steps beyond the limits of
+probability.  The spectre might have been merely a Roman beggar, whose
+fraternity often harbor in stranger shelters than the catacombs; or one of
+those pilgrims, who still journey from remote countries to kneel and
+worship at the holy sites, among which these haunts of the early
+Christians are esteemed especially sacred.  Or, as was perhaps a more
+plausible theory, he might be a thief of the city, a robber of the
+Campagna, a political offender, or an assassin, with blood upon his hand;
+whom the negligence or connivance of the police allowed to take refuge in
+those subterranean fastnesses, where such outlaws have been accustomed to
+hide themselves from a far antiquity downward.  Or he might have been a
+lunatic, fleeing instinctively from man, and making it his dark pleasure
+to dwell among the tombs, like him whose awful cry echoes afar to us from
+Scripture times.
+
+And, as for the stranger's attaching himself so devotedly to Miriam, her
+personal magnetism might be allowed a certain weight in the explanation.
+For what remains, his pertinacity need not seem so very singular to those
+who consider how slight a link serves to connect these vagabonds of idle
+Italy with any person that may have the ill-hap to bestow charity, or be
+otherwise serviceable to them, or betray the slightest interest in their
+fortunes.
+
+Thus little would remain to be accounted for, except the deportment of
+Miriam herself; her reserve, her brooding melancholy, her petulance, and
+moody passion.  If generously interpreted, even these morbid symptoms
+might have sufficient cause in the stimulating and exhaustive influences
+of imaginative art, exercised by a delicate young woman, in the nervous
+and unwholesome atmosphere of Rome.  Such, at least, was the view of the
+case which Hilda and Kenyon endeavored to impress on their own minds, and
+impart to those whom their opinions might influence.
+
+One of Miriam's friends took the matter sadly to heart.  This was the
+young Italian.  Donatello, as we have seen, had been an eyewitness of the
+stranger's first appearance, and had ever since nourished a singular
+prejudice against the mysterious, dusky, death-scented apparition.  It
+resembled not so much a human dislike or hatred, as one of those
+instinctive, unreasoning antipathies which the lower animals sometimes
+display, and which generally prove more trustworthy than the acutest
+insight into character.  The shadow of the model, always flung into the
+light which Miriam diffused around her, caused no slight trouble to
+Donatello.  Yet he was of a nature so remarkably genial and joyous, so
+simply happy, that he might well afford to have something subtracted from
+his comfort, and make tolerable shift to live upon what remained.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+MIRIAM'S STUDIO
+
+
+The courtyard and staircase of a palace built three hundred years ago are
+a peculiar feature of modern Rome, and interest the stranger more than
+many things of which he has heard loftier descriptions.  You pass through
+the grand breadth and height of a squalid entrance-way, and perhaps see a
+range of dusky pillars, forming a sort of cloister round the court, and in
+the intervals, from pillar to pillar, are strewn fragments of antique
+statues, headless and legless torsos, and busts that have invariably lost
+what it might be well if living men could lay aside in that unfragrant
+atmosphere--the nose.  Bas-reliefs, the spoil of some far older palace,
+are set in the surrounding walls, every stone of which has been ravished
+from the Coliseum, or any other imperial ruin which earlier barbarism had
+not already levelled with the earth.  Between two of the pillars, moreover,
+stands an old sarcophagus without its lid, and with all its more
+prominently projecting sculptures broken off; perhaps it once held famous
+dust, and the bony framework of some historic man, although now only a
+receptacle for the rubbish of the courtyard, and a half-worn broom.
+
+In the centre of the court, under the blue Italian sky, and with the
+hundred windows of the vast palace gazing down upon it from four sides,
+appears a fountain.  It brims over from one stone basin to another, or
+gushes from a Naiad's urn, or spurts its many little jets from the mouths
+of nameless monsters, which were merely grotesque and artificial when
+Bernini, or whoever was their unnatural father, first produced them; but
+now the patches of moss, the tufts of grass, the trailing maiden-hair, and
+all sorts of verdant weeds that thrive in the cracks and crevices of moist
+marble, tell us that Nature takes the fountain back into her great heart,
+and cherishes it as kindly as if it were a woodland spring.  And hark, the
+pleasant murmur, the gurgle, the plash!  You might hear just those
+tinkling sounds from any tiny waterfall in the forest, though here they
+gain a delicious pathos from the stately echoes that reverberate their
+natural language.  So the fountain is not altogether glad, after all its
+three centuries at play!
+
+In one of the angles of the courtyard, a pillared doorway gives access to
+the staircase, with its spacious breadth of low marble steps, up which, in
+former times, have gone the princes and cardinals of the great Roman
+family who built this palace.  Or they have come down, with still grander
+and loftier mien, on their way to the Vatican or the Quirinal, there to
+put off their scarlet hats in exchange for the triple crown.  But, in fine,
+all these illustrious personages have gone down their hereditary
+staircase for the last time, leaving it to be the thoroughfare of
+ambassadors, English noblemen, American millionnaires, artists, tradesmen,
+washerwomen, and people of every degree,--all of whom find such gilded and
+marble-panelled saloons as their pomp and luxury demand, or such homely
+garrets as their necessity can pay for, within this one multifarious abode.
+Only, in not a single nook of the palace (built for splendor, and the
+accommodation of a vast retinue, but with no vision of a happy fireside or
+any mode of domestic enjoyment) does the humblest or the haughtiest
+occupant find comfort.
+
+Up such a staircase, on the morning after the scene at the sculpture
+gallery, sprang the light foot of Donatello.  He ascended from story to
+story, passing lofty doorways, set within rich frames of sculptured marble,
+and climbing unweariedly upward, until the glories of the first piano and
+the elegance of the middle height were exchanged for a sort of Alpine
+region, cold and naked in its aspect.  Steps of rough stone, rude wooden
+balustrades, a brick pavement in the passages, a dingy whitewash on the
+walls; these were here the palatial features.  Finally, he paused before
+an oaken door, on which was pinned a card, bearing the name of Miriam
+Schaefer, artist in oils.  Here Donatello knocked, and the door
+immediately fell somewhat ajar; its latch having been pulled up by means
+of a string on the inside.  Passing through a little anteroom, he found
+himself in Miriam's presence.
+
+"Come in, wild Faun," she said, "and tell me the latest news from Arcady!"
+
+The artist was not just then at her easel, but was busied with the
+feminine task of mending a pair of gloves.
+
+There is something extremely pleasant, and even touching,--at least, of
+very sweet, soft, and winning effect,--in this peculiarity of needlework,
+distinguishing women from men.  Our own sex is incapable of any such
+by-play aside from the main business of life; but women--be they of what
+earthly rank they may, however gifted with intellect or genius, or endowed
+with awful beauty--have always some little handiwork ready to fill the
+tiny gap of every vacant moment.  A needle is familiar to the fingers of
+them all.  A queen, no doubt, plies it on occasion; the woman poet can use
+it as adroitly as her pen; the woman's eye, that has discovered a new star,
+turns from its glory to send the polished little instrument gleaming
+along the hem of her kerchief, or to darn a casual fray in her dress.  And
+they have greatly the advantage of us in this respect.  The slender thread
+of silk or cotton keeps them united with the small, familiar, gentle
+interests of life, the continually operating influences of which do so
+much for the health of the character, and carry off what would otherwise
+be a dangerous accumulation of morbid sensibility.  A vast deal of human
+sympathy runs along this electric line, stretching from the throne to the
+wicker chair of the humblest seamstress, and keeping high and low in a
+species of communion with their kindred beings.  Methinks it is a token of
+healthy and gentle characteristics, when women of high thoughts and
+accomplishments love to sew; especially as they are never more at home
+with their own hearts than while so occupied.
+
+And when the work falls in a woman's lap, of its own accord, and the
+needle involuntarily ceases to fly, it is a sign of trouble, quite as
+trustworthy as the throb of the heart itself.  This was what happened to
+Miriam.  Even while Donatello stood gazing at her, she seemed to have
+forgotten his presence, allowing him to drop out of her thoughts, and the
+torn glove to fall from her idle fingers.  Simple as he was, the young man
+knew by his sympathies that something was amiss.
+
+"Dear lady, you are sad," said he, drawing close to her.
+
+"It is nothing, Donatello," she replied, resuming her work; "yes; a little
+sad, perhaps; but that is not strange for us people of the ordinary world,
+especially for women.  You are of a cheerfuller race, my friend, and know
+nothing of this disease of sadness.  But why do you come into this shadowy
+room of mine?"
+
+"Why do you make it so shadowy?"  asked he.
+
+"We artists purposely exclude sunshine, and all but a partial light," said
+Miriam, "because we think it necessary to put ourselves at odds with
+Nature before trying to imitate her.  That strikes you very strangely,
+does it not?  But we make very pretty pictures sometimes with our artfully
+arranged lights and shadows.  Amuse yourself with some of mine, Donatello,
+and by and by I shall be in the mood to begin the portrait we were talking
+about."
+
+The room had the customary aspect of a painter's studio; one of those
+delightful spots that hardly seem to belong to the actual world, but
+rather to be the outward type of a poet's haunted imagination, where there
+are glimpses, sketches, and half-developed hints of beings and objects
+grander and more beautiful than we can anywhere find in reality.  The
+windows were closed with shutters, or deeply curtained, except one, which
+was partly open to a sunless portion of the sky, admitting only from high
+upward that partial light which, with its strongly marked contrast of
+shadow, is the first requisite towards seeing objects pictorially.
+Pencil-drawings were pinned against the wall or scattered on the tables.
+Unframed canvases turned their backs on the spectator, presenting only a
+blank to the eye, and churlishly concealing whatever riches of scenery or
+human beauty Miriam's skill had depicted on the other side.
+
+In the obscurest part of the room Donatello was half startled at
+perceiving duskily a woman with long dark hair, who threw up her arms with
+a wild gesture of tragic despair, and appeared to beckon him into the
+darkness along with her.
+
+"Do not be afraid, Donatello," said Miriam, smiling to see him peering
+doubtfully into the mysterious dusk.  "She means you no mischief, nor
+could perpetrate any if she wished it ever so much.  It is a lady of
+exceedingly pliable disposition; now a heroine of romance, and now a
+rustic maid; yet all for show; being created, indeed, on purpose to wear
+rich shawls and other garments in a becoming fashion.  This is the true
+end of her being, although she pretends to assume the most varied duties
+and perform many parts in life, while really the poor puppet has nothing
+on earth to do.  Upon my word, I am satirical unawares, and seem to be
+describing nine women out of ten in the person of my lay-figure.  For most
+purposes she has the advantage of the sisterhood.  Would I were like her!"
+
+"How it changes her aspect," exclaimed Donatello, "to know that she is but
+a jointed figure!  When my eyes first fell upon her, I thought her arms
+moved, as if beckoning me to help her in some direful peril."
+
+"Are you often troubled with such sinister freaks of fancy?"  asked Miriam.
+"I should not have supposed it."
+
+"To tell you the truth, dearest signorina," answered the young Italian, "I
+am apt to be fearful in old, gloomy houses, and in the dark.  I love no
+dark or dusky corners, except it be in a grotto, or among the thick green
+leaves of an arbor, or in some nook of the woods, such as I know many in
+the neighborhood of my home.  Even there, if a stray sunbeam steal in, the
+shadow is all the better for its cheerful glimmer."
+
+"Yes; you are a Faun, you know," said the fair artist, laughing at the
+remembrance of the scene of the day before.  "But the world is sadly
+changed nowadays; grievously changed, poor Donatello, since those happy
+times when your race used to dwell in the Arcadian woods, playing hide and
+seek with the nymphs in grottoes and nooks of shrubbery.  You have
+reappeared on earth some centuries too late."
+
+"I do not understand you now," answered Donatello, looking perplexed;
+"only, signorina, I am glad to have my lifetime while you live; and where
+you are, be it in cities or fields, I would fain be there too."
+
+"I wonder whether I ought to allow you to speak in this way," said Miriam,
+looking thoughtfully at him.  "Many young women would think it behooved
+them to be offended.  Hilda would never let you speak so, I dare say.
+But he is a mere boy," she added, aside, "a simple boy, putting his boyish
+heart to the proof on the first woman whom he chances to meet.  If yonder
+lay-figure had had the luck to meet him first, she would have smitten him
+as deeply as I."
+
+"Are you angry with me?"  asked Donatello dolorously.
+
+"Not in the least," answered Miriam, frankly giving him her hand.  "Pray
+look over some of these sketches till I have leisure to chat with you a
+little.  I hardly think I am in spirits enough to begin your portrait
+to-day."
+
+Donatello was as gentle and docile as a pet spaniel; as playful, too, in
+his general disposition, or saddening with his mistress's variable mood
+like that or any other kindly animal which has the faculty of bestowing
+its sympathies more completely than men or women can ever do.
+Accordingly, as Miriam bade him, he tried to turn his attention to a great
+pile and confusion of pen and ink sketches and pencil drawings which lay
+tossed together on a table.  As it chanced, however, they gave the poor
+youth little delight.
+
+The first that he took up was a very impressive sketch, in which the
+artist had jotted down her rough ideas for a picture of Jael driving the
+nail through the temples of Sisera.  It was dashed off with remarkable
+power, and showed a touch or two that were actually lifelike and deathlike,
+as if Miriam had been standing by when Jael gave the first stroke of her
+murderous hammer, or as if she herself were Jael, and felt irresistibly
+impelled to make her bloody confession in this guise.
+
+Her first conception of the stern Jewess had evidently been that of
+perfect womanhood, a lovely form, and a high, heroic face of lofty beauty;
+but, dissatisfied either with her own work or the terrible story itself,
+Miriam had added a certain wayward quirk of her pencil, which at once
+converted the heroine into a vulgar murderess.  It was evident that a Jael
+like this would be sure to search Sisera's pockets as soon as the breath
+was out of his body.
+
+In another sketch she had attempted the story of Judith, which we see
+represented by the old masters so often, and in such various styles.
+Here, too, beginning with a passionate and fiery conception of the subject
+in all earnestness, she had given the last touches in utter scorn, as it
+were, of the feelings which at first took such powerful possession of her
+hand.  The head of Holofernes (which, by the bye, had a pair of twisted
+mustaches, like those of a certain potentate of the day) being fairly cut
+off, was screwing its eyes upward and twirling its features into a
+diabolical grin of triumphant malice, which it flung right in Judith's
+face.  On her part, she had the startled aspect that might be conceived of
+a cook if a calf's head should sneer at her when about to be popped into
+the dinner-pot.
+
+Over and over again, there was the idea of woman, acting the part of a
+revengeful mischief towards man.  It was, indeed, very singular to see how
+the artist's imagination seemed to run on these stories of bloodshed, in
+which woman's hand was crimsoned by the stain; and how, too,--in one form
+or another, grotesque or sternly sad,--she failed not to bring out the
+moral, that woman must strike through her own heart to reach a human life,
+whatever were the motive that impelled her.
+
+One of the sketches represented the daughter of Herodias receiving the
+head of John the Baptist in a charger.  The general conception appeared to
+be taken from Bernardo Luini's picture, in the Uffizzi Gallery at Florence;
+but Miriam had imparted to the saint's face a look of gentle and heavenly
+reproach, with sad and blessed eyes fixed upward at the maiden; by the
+force of which miraculous glance, her whole womanhood was at once awakened
+to love and endless remorse.
+
+These sketches had a most disagreeable effect on Donatello's peculiar
+temperament.  He gave a shudder; his face assumed a look of trouble, fear,
+and disgust; he snatched up one sketch after another, as if about to tear
+it in pieces.  Finally, shoving away the pile of drawings, he shrank back
+from the table and clasped his hands over his eyes.
+
+"What is the matter, Donatello?"  asked Miriam, looking up from a letter
+which she was now writing.  "Ah!  I did not mean you to see those drawings.
+They are ugly phantoms that stole out of my mind; not things that I
+created, but things that haunt me.  See!  here are some trifles that
+perhaps will please you better."
+
+She gave him a portfolio, the sketches in which indicated a happier mood
+of mind, and one, it is to be hoped, more truly characteristic of the
+artist.  Supposing neither of these classes of subject to show anything of
+her own individuality, Miriam had evidently a great scope of fancy, and a
+singular faculty of putting what looked like heart into her productions.
+The latter sketches were domestic and common scenes, so finely and
+subtilely idealized that they seemed such as we may see at any moment, and
+eye,where; while still there was the indefinable something added, or taken
+away, which makes all the difference between sordid life and an earthly
+paradise.  The feeling and sympathy in.  all of them were deep and true.
+There was the scene, that comes once in every life, of the lover winning
+the soft and pure avowal of bashful affection from the maiden whose
+slender form half leans towards his arm, half shrinks from it, we know not
+which.  There was wedded affection in its successive stages, represented
+in a series of delicately conceived designs, touched with a holy fire,
+that burned from youth to age in those two hearts, and gave one identical
+beauty to the faces throughout all the changes of feature.
+
+There was a drawing of an infant's shoe, half worn out, with the airy
+print of the blessed foot within; a thing that would make a mother smile
+or weep out of the very depths of her heart; and yet an actual mother
+would not have been likely to appreciate the poetry of the little shoe,
+until Miriam revealed it to her.  It was wonderful, the depth and force
+with which the above, and other kindred subjects, were depicted, and the
+profound significance which they often acquired.  The artist, still in her
+fresh youth, could not probably have drawn any of these dear and rich
+experiences from her own life; unless, perchance, that first sketch of all,
+the avowal of maiden affection, were a remembered incident, and not a
+prophecy.  But it is more delightful to believe that, from first to last,
+they were the productions of a beautiful imagination, dealing with the
+warm and pure suggestions of a woman's heart, and thus idealizing a truer
+and lovelier picture of the life that belongs to woman, than an actual
+acquaintance with some of its hard and dusty facts could have inspired.
+So considered, the sketches intimated such a force and variety of
+imaginative sympathies as would enable Miriam to fill her life richly with
+the bliss and suffering of womanhood, however barren it might individually
+be.
+
+There was one observable point, indeed, betokening that the artist
+relinquished, for her personal self, the happiness which she could so
+profoundly appreciate for others.  In all those sketches of common life,
+and the affections that spiritualize it, a figure was portrayed apart, now
+it peeped between the branches of a shrubbery, amid which two lovers sat;
+now it was looking through a frosted window, from the outside, while a
+young wedded pair sat at their new fireside within; and once it leaned
+from a chariot, which six horses were whirling onward in pomp and pride,
+and gazed at a scene of humble enjoyment by a cottage door.  Always it was
+the same figure, and always depicted with an expression of deep sadness;
+and in every instance, slightly as they were brought out, the face and
+form had the traits of Miriam's own.
+
+"Do you like these sketches better, Donatello?"  asked Miriam.  "Yes,"
+said Donatello rather doubtfully.  "Not much, I fear," responded she,
+laughing.  "And what should a boy like you--a Faun too,--know about the
+joys and sorrows, the intertwining light and shadow, of human life?  I
+forgot that you were a Faun.  You cannot suffer deeply; therefore you can
+but half enjoy.  Here, now, is a subject which you can better appreciate."
+
+The sketch represented merely a rustic dance, but with such extravagance
+of fun as was delightful to behold; and here there was no drawback, except
+that strange sigh and sadness which always come when we are merriest.
+
+"I am going to paint the picture in oils," said the artist; "and I want
+you, Donatello, for the wildest dancer of them all.  Will you sit for me,
+some day?--or, rather, dance for me?"
+
+"O, most gladly, signorina!"  exclaimed Donatello.  "See; it shall be like
+this."
+
+And forthwith he began to dance, and flit about the studio, like an
+incarnate sprite of jollity, pausing at last on the extremity of one toe,
+as if that were the only portion of himself whereby his frisky nature
+could come in contact with the earth.  The effect in that shadowy chamber,
+whence the artist had so carefully excluded the sunshine, was as
+enlivening as if one bright ray had contrived to shimmer in and.  frolic
+around the walls, and finally rest just in the centre of the floor.
+
+"That was admirable!"  said Miriam, with an approving smile.  "If I can
+catch you on my canvas, it will be a glorious picture; only I am afraid
+you will dance out of it, by the very truth of the representation, just
+when I shall have given it the last touch.  We will try it one of these
+days.  And now, to reward you for that jolly exhibition, you shall see
+what has been shown to no one else."
+
+She went to her easel, on which was placed a picture with its back turned
+towards the spectator.  Reversing the position, there appeared the
+portrait of a beautiful woman, such as one sees only two or three, if even
+so many times, in all a lifetime; so beautiful, that she seemed to get
+into your consciousness and memory, and could never afterwards be shut out,
+but haunted your dreams, for pleasure or for pain; holding your inner
+realm as a conquered territory, though without deigning to make herself at
+home there.
+
+She was very youthful, and had what was usually thought to be a Jewish
+aspect; a complexion in which there was no roseate bloom, yet neither was
+it pale; dark eyes, into which you might look as deeply as your glance
+would go, and still be conscious of a depth that you had not sounded,
+though it lay open to the day.  She had black, abundant hair, with none
+of the vulgar glossiness of other women's sable locks; if she were really
+of Jewish blood, then this was Jewish hair, and a dark glory such as
+crowns no Christian maiden's head.  Gazing at this portrait, you saw what
+Rachel might have been, when Jacob deemed her worth the wooing seven years,
+and seven more; or perchance she might ripen to be what Judith was, when
+she vanquished Holofernes with her beauty, and slew him for too much
+adoring it.
+
+Miriam watched Donatello's contemplation of the picture, and seeing his
+simple rapture, a smile of pleasure brightened on her face, mixed with a
+little scorn; at least, her lips curled, and her eyes gleamed, as if she
+disdained either his admiration or her own enjoyment of it.
+
+"Then you like the picture, Donatello?" she asked.
+
+"O, beyond what I can tell!"  he answered.  "So beautiful!--so beautiful!"
+
+"And do you recognize the likeness?"
+
+"Signorina," exclaimed Donatello, turning from the picture to the artist,
+in astonishment that she should ask/:he question, "the resemblance is as
+little to be mistaken as if you had bent over the smooth surface of a
+fountain, and possessed the witchcraft to call forth the image that you
+made there!  It is yourself!"
+
+Donatello said the truth; and we forebore to speak descriptively of
+Miriam's beauty earlier in our narrative, because we foresaw this occasion
+to bring it perhaps more forcibly before the reader.
+
+We know not whether the portrait were a flattered likeness; probably not,
+regarding it merely as the delineation of a lovely face; although Miriam,
+like all self-painters, may have endowed herself with certain graces which
+Other eyes might not discern.  Artists are fond of painting their own
+portraits; and, in Florence, there is a gallery of hundreds of them,
+including the most illustrious, in all of which there are autobiographical
+characteristics, so to speak,--traits, expressions, loftinesses, and
+amenities, which would have been invisible, had they not been painted from
+within.  Yet their reality and truth are none the less.  Miriam, in like
+manner, had doubtless conveyed some of the intimate results of her heart
+knowledge into her own.portrait, and perhaps wished to try whether they
+would be perceptible to so simple and natural an observer as Donatello.
+
+"Does the expression please you?"  she asked.
+
+"Yes," said Donatello hesitatingly; "if it would only smile so like the
+sunshine as you sometimes do.  No, it is sadder than I thought at first.
+Cannot you make yourself smile a little, signorina?"
+
+"A forced smile is uglier than a frown," said Miriam, a bright, natural
+smile breaking out over her face even as she spoke.
+
+"O, catch it now!"  cried Donatello, clapping his hands.  "Let it shine
+upon the picture! There!  it has vanished already!  And you are sad again,
+very sad; and the picture gazes sadly forth at me, as if some evil had
+befallen it in the little time since I looked last."
+
+"How perplexed you seem, my friend!" answered Miriam.  "I really half
+believe you are a Faun, there is such a mystery and terror for you in
+these dark moods, which are just as natural as daylight to us people of
+ordinary mould.  I advise you, at all events, to look at other faces with
+those innocent and happy eyes, and never more to gaze at mine!"
+
+"You speak in vain," replied the young man, with a deeper emphasis than
+she had ever before heard in his voice; "shroud yourself in what gloom you
+will, I must needs follow you."
+
+"Well, well, well," said Miriam impatiently; "but leave me now; for to
+speak plainly, my good friend, you grow a little wearisome.  I walk this
+afternoon in the Borghese grounds.  Meet me there, if it suits your
+pleasure."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+THE VIRGIN'S SHRINE
+
+
+After Donatello had left the studio, Miriam herself came forth, and taking
+her way through some of the intricacies of the city, entered what might be
+called either a widening of a street, or a small piazza.  The neighborhood
+comprised a baker's oven, emitting the usual fragrance of sour bread; a
+shoe shop; a linen-draper's shop; a pipe and cigar shop; a lottery office;
+a station for French soldiers, with a sentinel pacing in front; and a
+fruit-stand, at which a Roman matron was selling the dried kernels of
+chestnuts, wretched little figs, and some bouquets of yesterday.  A church,
+of course, was near at hand, the facade of which ascended into lofty
+pinnacles, whereon were perched two or three winged figures of stone,
+either angelic or allegorical, blowing stone trumpets in close vicinity to
+the upper windows of an old and shabby palace.  This palace was
+distinguished by a feature not very common in the architecture of Roman
+edifices; that is to say, a mediaeval tower, square, massive, lofty, and
+battlemented and machicolated at the summit.
+
+At one of the angles of the battlements stood a shrine of the Virgin, such
+as we see everywhere at the street corners of Rome, but seldom or never,
+except in this solitary, instance, at a height above the ordinary level of
+men's views and aspirations.  Connected with this old tower and its lofty
+shrine, there is a legend which we cannot here pause to tell; but for
+centuries a lamp has been burning before the Virgin's image, at noon, at
+midnight, and at all hours of the twenty-four, and must be kept burning
+forever, as long as the tower shall stand; or else the tower itself, the
+palace, and whatever estate belongs to it, shall pass from its hereditary
+possessor, in accordance with an ancient vow, and become the property of
+the Church.
+
+As Miriam approached, she looked upward, and saw,--not, indeed, the flame
+of the neverdying lamp, which was swallowed up in the broad sunlight that
+brightened the shrine, but a flock of white doves, skimming, fluttering,
+and wheeling about the topmost height of the tower, their silver wings
+flashing in the pure transparency of the air.  Several of them sat on the
+ledge of the upper window, pushing one another off by their eager struggle
+for this favorite station, and all tapping their beaks and flapping their
+wings tumultuously against the panes; some had alighted in the street, far
+below, but flew hastily upward, at the sound of the window being thrust
+ajar, and opening in the middle, on rusty hinges, as Roman windows do.
+
+A fair young girl, dressed in white, showed herself at the aperture for a
+single instant, and threw forth as much as her two small hands could hold
+of some kind of food, for the flock of eleemosynary doves.  It seemed
+greatly to the taste of the feathered people; for they tried to snatch
+beakfuls of it from her grasp, caught it in the air, and rushed downward
+after it upon the pavement.
+
+"What a pretty scene this is," thought Miriam, with a kindly smile, "and
+how like a dove she is herself, the fair, pure creature!  The other doves
+know her for a sister, I am sure."
+
+Miriam passed beneath the deep portal of the palace, and turning to the
+left, began to mount flight after flight of a staircase, which, for the
+loftiness of its aspiration, was worthy to be Jacob's ladder, or, at all
+events, the staircase of the Tower of Babel.  The city bustle, which is
+heard even in Rome, the rumble of wheels over the uncomfortable
+paving-stones, the hard harsh cries reechoing in the high and narrow
+streets, grew faint and died away; as the turmoil of the world will always
+die, if we set our faces to climb heavenward.  Higher, and higher still;
+and now, glancing through the successive windows that threw in their
+narrow light upon the stairs, her view stretched across the roofs of the
+city, unimpeded even by the stateliest palaces.  Only the domes of
+churches ascend into this airy region, and hold up their golden crosses on
+a level with her eye; except that, out of the very heart of Rome, the
+column of Antoninus thrusts itself upward, with St. Paul upon its summit,
+the sole human form that seems to have kept her company.
+
+Finally, the staircase came to an end; save that, on one side of the
+little entry where it terminated, a flight of a dozen steps gave access to
+the roof of the tower and the legendary shrine.  On the other side was a
+door, at which Miriam knocked, but rather as a friendly announcement of
+her presence than with any doubt of hospitable welcome; for, awaiting no
+response, she lifted the latch and entered.
+
+"What a hermitage you have found for yourself, dear Hilda!"  she,
+exclaimed.  "You breathe sweet air, above all the evil scents of Rome; and
+even so, in your maiden elevation, you dwell above our vanities and
+passions, our moral dust and mud, with the doves and the angels for your
+nearest neighbors.  I should not wonder if the Catholics were to make a
+saint of you, like your namesake of old; especially as you have almost
+avowed yourself of their religion, by undertaking to keep the lamp alight
+before the Virgin's shrine."
+
+"No, no, Miriam!"  said Hilda, who had come joyfully forward to greet her
+friend.  "You must not call me a Catholic.  A Christian girl--even a
+daughter of the Puritans--may surely pay honor to the idea of divine
+Womanhood, without giving up the faith of her forefathers.  But how kind
+you are to climb into my dove-cote!"
+
+"It is no trifling proof of friendship, indeed," answered Miriam; "I
+should think there were three hundred stairs at least."
+
+"But it will do you good," continued Hilda.  "A height of some fifty feet
+above the roofs of Rome gives me all the advantages that I could get from
+fifty miles of distance.  The air so exhilarates my spirits, that
+sometimes I feel half inclined to attempt a flight from the top of my
+tower, in the faith that I should float upward."
+
+"O, pray don't try it!"  said Miriam, laughing; "If it should turn out
+that you are less than an angel, you would find the stones of the Roman
+pavement very hard; and if an angel, indeed, I am afraid you would never
+come down among us again."
+
+This young American girl was an example of the freedom of life which it is
+possible for a female artist to enjoy at Rome.  She dwelt in her tower, as
+free to descend into the corrupted atmosphere of the city beneath, as one
+of her companion doves to fly downward into the street;--all alone,
+perfectly independent, under her own sole guardianship, unless watched
+over by the Virgin, whose shrine she tended; doing what she liked without
+a suspicion or a shadow upon the snowy whiteness of her fame.  The customs
+of artist life bestow such liberty upon the sex, which is elsewhere
+restricted within so much narrower limits; and it is perhaps an indication
+that, whenever we admit women to a wider scope of pursuits and professions,
+we must also,remove the shackles of our present conventional rules, which
+would then become an insufferable restraint on either maid or wife.  The
+system seems to work unexceptionably in Rome; and in many other cases, as
+in Hilda's, purity of heart and life are allowed to assert themselves, and
+to be their own proof and security, to a degree unknown in the society of
+other cities.
+
+Hilda, in her native land, had early shown what was pronounced by
+connoisseurs a decided genius for the pictorial art.  Even in her
+schooldays--still not so very distant--she had produced sketches that were
+seized upon by men of taste, and hoarded as among the choicest treasures
+of their portfolios; scenes delicately imagined, lacking, perhaps, the
+reality which comes only from a close acquaintance with life, but so
+softly touched with feeling and fancy that you seemed to be looking at
+humanity with angels' eyes.  With years and experience she might be
+expected to attain a darker and more forcible touch, which would impart to
+her designs the relief they needed.  Had Hilda remained in her own country,
+it is not improbable that she might have produced original works worthy
+to hang in that gallery of native art which, we hope, is destined to
+extend its rich length through many future centuries.  An orphan, however,
+without near relatives, and possessed of a little property, she had found
+it within her possibilities to come to Italy; that central clime, whither
+the eyes and the heart of every artist turn, as if pictures could not be
+made to glow in any other atmosphere, as if statues could not assume grace
+and expression, save in that land of whitest marble.
+
+Hilda's gentle courage had brought her safely over land and sea; her mild,
+unflagging perseverance had made a place for her in the famous city, even
+like a flower that finds a chink for itself, and a little earth to grow in,
+on whatever ancient wall its slender roots may fasten.  Here she dwelt,
+in her tower, possessing a friend or two in Rome, but no home companion
+except the flock of doves, whose cote was in a ruinous chamber contiguous
+to her own.  They soon became as familiar with the fair-haired Saxon girl
+as if she were a born sister of their brood; and her customary white robe
+bore such an analogy to their snowy plumage that the confraternity of
+artists called Hilda the Dove, and recognized her aerial apartment as the
+Dovecote.  And while the other doves flew far and wide in quest of what
+was good for them, Hilda likewise spread her wings, and sought such
+ethereal and imaginative sustenance as God ordains for creatures of her
+kind.
+
+We know not whether the result of her Italian studies, so far as it could
+yet be seen, will be accepted as a good or desirable one.  Certain it is,
+that since her arrival in the pictorial land, Hilda seemed to have
+entirely lost the impulse of original design, which brought her thither.
+No doubt the girl's early dreams had been of sending forms and hues of
+beauty into the visible world out of her own mind; of compelling scenes of
+poetry and history to live before men's eyes, through conceptions and by
+methods individual to herself.  But more and more, as she grew familiar
+with the miracles of art that enrich so many galleries in Rome, Hilda had
+ceased to consider herself as an original artist.  No, wonder that this
+change should have befallen her.  She was endowed with a deep and
+sensitive faculty of appreciation; she had the gift of discerning and
+worshipping excellence in a most unusual measure.  No other person, it is
+probable, recognized so adequately, and enjoyed with such deep delight,
+the pictorial wonders that were here displayed.  She saw no, not saw, but
+felt through and through a picture; she bestowed upon it all the warmth
+and richness of a woman's sympathy; not by any intellectual effort, but by
+this strength of heart, and this guiding light of sympathy, she went
+straight to the central point, in which the master had conceived his work.
+Thus she viewed it, as it were, with his own eyes, and hence her
+comprehension of any picture that interested her was perfect.
+
+This power and depth of appreciation depended partly upon Hilda's physical
+organization, which was at once healthful and exquisitely delicate; and,
+connected with this advantage, she had a command of hand, a nicety and
+force of touch, which is an endowment separate from pictorial genius,
+though indispensable to its exercise.
+
+It has probably happened in many other instances, as it did in Hilda's
+case, that she ceased to aim at original achievement in consequence of the
+very gifts which so exquisitely fitted her to profit by familiarity with
+the works of the mighty old masters.  Reverencing these wonderful men so
+deeply, she was too grateful for all they bestowed upon her, too loyal,
+too humble, in their awful presence, to think of enrolling herself in
+their society.  Beholding the miracles of beauty which they had achieved,
+the world seemed already rich enough in original designs, and nothing more
+was so desirable as to diffuse those self-same beauties more widely among
+mankind.  All the youthful hopes and ambitions, the fanciful ideas which
+she had brought from home, of great pictures to be conceived in her
+feminine mind, were flung aside, and, so far as those most intimate with
+her could discern, relinquished without a sigh.  All that she would
+henceforth attempt and that most reverently, not to say religiously was to
+catch and reflect some of the glory which had been shed upon canvas from
+the immortal pencils of old.
+
+So Hilda became a copyist: in the Pinacotheca of the Vatican, in the
+galleries of the Pam-fili-Doria palace, the Borghese, the Corsini, the
+Sciarra, her easel was set up before many a famous picture by Guido,
+Domenichino, Raphael, and the devout painters of earlier schools than
+these.  Other artists and visitors from foreign lands beheld the slender,
+girlish figure in front of some world-known work, absorbed, unconscious of
+everything around her, seeming to live only in what she sought to do.
+They smiled, no doubt, at the audacity which led her to dream of copying
+those mighty achievements.  But, if they paused to look over her shoulder,
+and had sensibility enough to understand what was before their eyes, they
+soon felt inclined to believe that the spirits of the old masters were
+hovering over Hilda, and guiding her delicate white hand.  In truth, from
+whatever realm of bliss and many colored beauty those spirits might
+descend, it would have been no unworthy errand to help so gentle and pure
+a worshipper of their genius in giving the last divine touch to her
+repetitions of their works.
+
+Her copies were indeed marvellous.  Accuracy was not the phrase for them;
+a Chinese copy is accurate.  Hilda's had that evanescent and ethereal
+life--that flitting fragrance, as it were, of the originals--which it is
+as difficult to catch and retain as it would be for a sculptor to get the
+very movement and varying color of a living man into his marble bust.
+Only by watching the efforts of the most skilful copyists--men who spend a
+lifetime, as some of them do, in multiplying copies of a single
+picture--and observing how invariably they leave out just the indefinable
+charm that involves the last, inestimable value, can we understand the
+difficulties of the task which they undertake.
+
+It was not Hilda's general practice to attempt reproducing the whole of a
+great picture, but to select some high, noble, and delicate portion of it,
+in which the spirit and essence of the picture culminated: the Virgin's
+celestial sorrow, for example, or a hovering angel, imbued with immortal
+light, or a saint with the glow of heaven in his dying face,--and these
+would be rendered with her whole soul.  If a picture had darkened into an
+indistinct shadow through time and neglect, or had been injured by
+cleaning, or retouched by some profane hand, she seemed to possess the
+faculty of seeing it in its pristine glory.  The copy would come from her
+hands with what the beholder felt must be the light which the old master
+had left upon the original in bestowing his final and most ethereal touch.
+In some instances even (at least, so those believed who best appreciated
+Hilda's power and sensibility) she had been enabled to execute what the
+great master had conceived in his imagination, but had not so perfectly
+succeeded in putting upon canvas; a result surely not impossible when such
+depth of sympathy as she possessed was assisted by the delicate skill and
+accuracy of her slender hand.  In such cases the girl was but a finer
+instrument, a more exquisitely effective piece of mechanism,.by the help
+of which the spirit of some great departed painter now first achieved his
+ideal, centuries after his own earthly hand, that other tool, had turned
+to dust.
+
+Not to describe her as too much a wonder, however, Hilda, or the Dove, as
+her well-wishers half laughingly delighted to call her, had been
+pronounced by good judges incomparably the best copyist in Rome.  After
+minute examination of her works, the most skilful artists declared that
+she had been led to her results by following precisely the same process
+step by step through which the original painter had trodden to the
+development of his idea.  Other copyists--if such they are worthy to be
+called--attempt only a superficial imitation.  Copies of the old masters
+in this sense are produced by thousands; there are artists, as we have
+said, who spend their lives in painting the works, or perhaps one single
+work, of one illustrious painter over and over again: thus they convert
+themselves into Guido machines, or Raphaelic machines.  Their performances,
+it is true, are often wonderfully deceptive to a careless eye; but
+working entirely from the outside, and seeking only to reproduce the
+surface, these men are sure to leave out that indefinable nothing, that
+inestimable something, that constitutes the life and soul through which
+the picture gets its immortality.  Hilda was no such machine as this; she
+wrought religiously, and therefore wrought a miracle.
+
+It strikes us that there is something far higher and nobler in all this,
+in her thus sacrificing herself to the devout recognition of the highest
+excellence in art, than there would have been in cultivating her not
+inconsiderable share of talent for the production of works from her own
+ideas.  She might have set up for herself, and won no ignoble name; she
+might have helped to fill the already crowded and cumbered world with
+pictures, not destitute of merit, but falling short, if by ever so little,
+of the best that has been done; she might thus have gratified some tastes
+that were incapable of appreciating Raphael.  But this could be done only
+by lowering the standard of art to the comprehension of the spectator.
+She chose the better and loftier and more unselfish part, laying her
+individual hopes, her fame, her prospects of enduring remembrance, at the
+feet of those great departed ones whom she so loved and venerated; and
+therefore the world was the richer for this feeble girl.
+
+Since the beauty and glory of a great picture are confined within itself,
+she won out that glory by patient faith and self-devotion, and multiplied
+it for mankind.  From the dark, chill corner of a gallery,--from some
+curtained chapel in a church, where the light came seldom and aslant,
+--from the prince's carefully guarded cabinet, where not one eye in
+thousands was permitted to behold it, she brought the wondrous picture
+into daylight, and gave all its magic splendor for the enjoyment of the
+world.  Hilda's faculty of genuine admiration is one of the rarest to be
+found in human nature; and let us try to recompense her in kind by
+admiring her generous self-surrender, and her brave, humble magnanimity in
+choosing to be the handmaid of those old magicians, instead of a minor
+enchantress within a circle of her own.
+
+The handmaid of Raphael, whom she loved with a virgin's love!  Would it
+have been worth Hilda's while to relinquish this office for the sake of
+giving the world a picture or two which it would call original; pretty
+fancies of snow and moonlight; the counterpart in picture of so many
+feminine achievements in literature!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+BEATRICE
+
+
+Miriam was glad to find the Dove in her turret-home; for being endowed
+with an infinite activity, and taking exquisite delight in the sweet labor
+of which her life was full, it was Hilda's practice to flee abroad betimes,
+and haunt the galleries till dusk.  Happy were those (but they were very
+few) whom she ever chose to be the companions of her day; they saw the art
+treasures of Rome, under her guidance, as they had never seen them before.
+Not that Hilda could dissertate, or talk learnedly about pictures; she
+would probably have been puzzled by the technical terms of her own art.
+Not that she had much to say about what she most profoundly admired; but
+even her silent sympathy was so powerful that it drew your own along with
+it, endowing you with a second-sight that enabled you to see excellences
+with almost the depth and delicacy of her own perceptions.
+
+All the Anglo-Saxon denizens of Rome, by this time, knew Hilda by sight.
+Unconsciously, the poor child had become one of the spectacles of the
+Eternal City, and was often pointed out to strangers, sitting at her easel
+among the wild-bearded young men, the white-haired old ones, and the
+shabbily dressed, painfully plain women, who make up the throng of
+copyists.  The old custodes knew her well, and watched over her as their
+own child.  Sometimes a young artist, instead of going on with a copy of
+the picture before which he had placed his easel, would enrich his canvas
+with an original portrait of Hilda at her work.  A lovelier subject could
+not have been selected, nor one which required nicer skill and insight in
+doing it anything like justice.  She was pretty at all times, in our
+native New England style, with her light-brown ringlets, her delicately
+tinged, but healthful cheek, her sensitive, intelligent, yet most feminine
+and kindly face.  But, every few moments, this pretty and girlish face
+grew beautiful and striking, as some inward thought and feeling brightened,
+rose to the surface, and then, as it were, passed out of sight again; so
+that, taking into view this constantly recurring change, it really seemed
+as if Hilda were only visible by the sunshine of her soul.
+
+In other respects, she was a good subject for a portrait, being
+distinguished by a gentle picturesqueness, which was perhaps unconsciously
+bestowed by some minute peculiarity of dress, such as artists seldom fail
+to assume.  The effect was to make her appear like an inhabitant of
+pictureland, a partly ideal creature, not to be handled, nor even
+approached too closely.  In her feminine self, Hilda was natural, and of
+pleasant deportment, endowed with a mild cheerfulness of temper, not
+overflowing with animal spirits, but never long despondent.  There was a
+certain simplicity that made every one her friend, but it was combined
+with a subtile attribute of reserve, that insensibly kept those at a
+distance who were not suited to her sphere.
+
+Miriam was the dearest friend whom she had ever known.  Being a year or
+two the elder, of longer acquaintance with Italy, and better fitted to
+deal with its crafty and selfish inhabitants, she had helped Hilda to
+arrange her way of life, and had encouraged her through those first weeks,
+when Rome is so dreary to every newcomer.
+
+"But how lucky that you are at home today," said Miriam, continuing the
+conversation which was begun, many pages back.  "I hardly hoped to find
+you, though I had a favor to ask,--a commission to put into your charge.
+But what picture is this?"
+
+"See!  "said Hilda, taking her friend's hand, and leading her in front of
+the easel.  "I wanted your opinion of it."
+
+"If you have really succeeded," observed Miriam, recognizing the picture
+at the first glance, "it will be the greatest miracle you have yet
+achieved."
+
+The picture represented simply a female head; a very youthful, girlish,
+perfectly beautiful face, enveloped in white drapery, from beneath which
+strayed a lock or two of what seemed a rich, though hidden luxuriance of
+auburn hair.  The eyes were large and brown, and met those of the
+spectator, but evidently with a strange, ineffectual effort to escape.
+There was a little redness about the eyes, very slightly indicated, so
+that you would question whether or no the girl had been weeping.  The
+whole face was quiet; there was no distortion or disturbance of any single
+feature; nor was it easy to see why the expression was not cheerful, or
+why a single touch of the artist's pencil should not brighten it into
+joyousness.  But, in fact, it was the very saddest picture ever painted or
+conceived; it involved an unfathomable depth of sorrow, the sense of which
+came to the observer by a sort of intuition.  It was a sorrow that removed
+this beautiful girl out of the sphere of humanity, and set her in a
+far-off region, the remoteness of which--while yet her face is so close
+before us--makes us shiver as at a spectre.
+
+"Yes, Hilda," said her friend, after closely examining the picture," you
+have done nothing else so wonderful as this.  But by what unheard-of
+solicitations or secret interest have you obtained leave to copy Guido's
+Beatrice Cenci? It is an unexampled favor; and the impossibility of
+getting a genuine copy has filled the Roman picture shops with Beatrices,
+gay, grievous, or coquettish, but never a true one among them."
+
+"There has been one exquisite copy, I have heard," said Hilda, "by an
+artist capable of appreciating the spirit of the picture.  It was Thompson,
+who brought it away piecemeal, being forbidden (like the rest of us) to
+set up his easel before it.  As for me, I knew the Prince Barberini would
+be deaf to all entreaties; so I had no resource but to sit down before the
+picture, day after day, and let it sink into my heart.  I do believe it
+is now photographed there.  It is a sad face to keep so close to one's
+heart; only what is so very beautiful can never be quite a pain.  Well;
+after studying it in this way, I know not how many times, I came home, and
+have done my best to transfer the image to canvas."
+
+"Here it is, then," said Miriam, contemplating Hilda's work with great
+interest and delight, mixed with the painful sympathy that the picture
+excited.  "Everywhere we see oil-paintings, crayon sketches, cameos,
+engravings, lithographs, pretending to be Beatrice, and representing the
+poor girl with blubbered eyes, a leer of coquetry, a merry look as if she
+were dancing, a piteous look as if she were beaten, and twenty other modes
+of fantastic mistake.  But here is Guido's very Beatrice; she that slept
+in the dungeon, and awoke, betimes, to ascend the scaffold, And now that
+you have done it, Hilda, can you interpret what the feeling is, that gives
+this picture such a mysterious force?  For my part, though deeply sensible
+of its influence, I cannot seize it."
+
+"Nor can I, in words," replied her friend.  "But while I was painting her,
+I felt all the time as if she were trying to escape from my gaze.  She
+knows that her sorrow is so strange and so immense, that she ought to be
+solitary forever, both for the world's sake and her own; and this is the
+reason we feel such a distance between Beatrice and ourselves, even when
+our eyes meet hers.  It is infinitely heart-breaking to meet her glance,
+and to feel that nothing can be done to help or comfort her; neither does
+she ask help or comfort, knowing the hopelessness of her case better than
+we do.  She is a fallen angel,--fallen, and yet sinless; and it is only
+this depth of sorrow, with its weight and darkness, that keeps her down
+upon earth, and brings her within our view even while it sets her beyond
+our reach."
+
+"You deem her sinless?"  asked Miriam; "that is not so plain to me.  If I
+can pretend to see at all into that dim region, whence she gazes so
+strangely and sadly at us, Beatrice's own conscience does not acquit her
+of something evil, and never to be forgiven!"
+
+"Sorrow so black as hers oppresses her very nearly as sin would," said
+Hilda.
+
+"Then," inquired Miriam, "do you think that there was no sin in the deed
+for which she suffered?"
+
+"Ah!"  replied Hilda, shuddering," I really had quite forgotten Beatrice's
+history, and was thinking of her only as the picture seems to reveal her
+character.  Yes, yes; it was terrible guilt, an inexpiable crime, and she
+feels it to be so.  Therefore it is that the forlorn creature so longs to
+elude our eyes, and forever vanish away into nothingness!  Her doom is
+just!"
+
+"O Hilda, your innocence is like a sharp steel sword!"  exclaimed her
+friend.  "Your judgments are often terribly severe, though you seem all
+made up of gentleness and mercy.  Beatrice's sin may not have been so
+great: perhaps it was no sin at all, but the best virtue possible in the
+circumstances.  If she viewed it as a sin, it may have been because her
+nature was too feeble for the fate imposed upon her.  Ah!" continued
+Miriam passionately, "if I could only get within her consciousness!--if I
+could but clasp Beatrice Cenci's ghost, and draw it into myself!  I would
+give my life to know whether she thought herself innocent, or the one
+great criminal since time began."
+
+As Miriam gave utterance to these words, Hilda looked from the picture
+into her face, and was startled to observe that her friend's expression
+had become almost exactly that of the pottrait; as if her passionate wish
+and struggle to penetrate poor Beatrice's mystery had been successful.
+
+"O, for Heaven's sake, Miriam, do not look so!"  she cried.  "What an
+actress you are! And I never guessed it before.  Ah!  now you are yourself
+again!"  she added, kissing her.  "Leave Beatrice to me in future."
+
+"Cover up your magical picture, then," replied her friend, "else I never
+can look away from it.  It is strange, dear Hilda, how an innocent,
+delicate, white soul like yours has been able to seize the subtle mystery
+of this portrait; as you surely must, in order to reproduce it so
+perfectly.  Well; we will not talk of it any more.  Do you know, I have
+come to you this morning on a small matter of business.  Will you
+undertake it for me?"
+
+"O, certainly," said Hilda, laughing; "if you choose to trust me with
+business."
+
+"Nay, it is not a matter of any difficulty," answered Miriam; "merely to
+take charge of this packet, and keep it for me awhile."
+
+"But why not keep it yourself?"  asked Hilda.
+
+"Partly because it will be safer in your charge," said her friend.  "I am
+a careless sort of person in ordinary things; while you, for all you dwell
+so high above the world, have certain little housewifely ways of accuracy
+and order.  The packet is of some slight importance; and yet, it may be,
+I shall not ask you for it again.  In a week or two, you know, I am
+leaving Rome.  You, setting at defiance the malarial fever, mean to stay
+here and haunt your beloved galleries through the summer.  Now, four
+months hence, unless you hear more from me, I would have you deliver the
+packet according to its address."
+
+Hilda read the direction; it was to Signore Luca Barboni, at the Plazzo
+Cenci, third piano.
+
+"I will deliver it with my own hand," said she, "precisely four months
+from to-day, unless you bid me to the contrary.  Perhaps I shall meet the
+ghost of Beatrice in that grim old palace of her forefathers."
+
+"In that case," rejoined Miriam, "do not fail to speak to her, and try to
+win her confidence.  Poor thing!  she would be all the better for pouring
+her heart out freely, and would be glad to do it, if she were sure of
+sympathy.  It irks my brain and heart to think of her, all shut up within
+herself."  She withdrew the cloth that Hilda had drawn over the picture,
+and took another long look at it.  "Poor sister Beatrice! for she was
+still a woman, Hilda, still a sister, be her sin or sorrow what they might.
+How well you have done it, Hilda!  I knot not whether Guido will thank
+you, or be jealous of
+
+your rivalship."
+
+"Jealous, indeed!"  exclaimed Hilda.  "If Guido had not wrought through me,
+my pains would have been thrown away."
+
+"After all," resumed Miriam, "if a woman had painted the original picture,
+there might have been something in it which we miss now.  I have a great
+mind to undertake a copy myself; and try to give it what it lacks.  Well;
+goodby.  But, stay!  I am going for a little airing to the grounds of the
+Villa Borghese this afternoon.  You will think it very foolish, but I
+always feel the safer in your company, Hilda, slender little maiden as you
+are.  Will you come?"
+
+"Ah, not to-day, dearest Miriam," she replied; "I have set my heart on
+giving another touch or two to this picture, and shall not stir abroad
+till nearly sunset."
+
+"Farewell, then," said her visitor.  "I leave you in your dove-cote.  What
+a sweet, strange life you lead here; conversing with the souls of the old
+masters, feeding and fondling your sister doves, and trimming the Virgin's
+lamp!  Hilda, do you ever pray to the Virgin while you tend her shrine?"
+
+"Sometimes I have been moved to do so," replied the Dove, blushing, and
+lowering her eyes; "she was a woman once.  Do you think it would be
+wrong?"
+
+"Nay, that is for you to judge," said Miriam; "but when you pray next,
+dear friend, remember me!"
+
+She went down the long descent of the lower staircase, and just as she
+reached the street the flock of doves again took their hurried flight from
+the pavement to the topmost window.  She threw her eyes upward and beheld
+them hovering about Hilda's head; for, after her friend's departure, the
+girl had been more impressed than before by something very sad and
+troubled in her manner.  She was, therefore, leaning forth from her airy
+abode, and flinging down a kind, maidenly kiss, and a gesture of farewell,
+in the hope that these might alight upon Miriam's heart, and comfort its
+unknown sorrow a little.  Kenyon the sculptor, who chanced to be passing
+the head of the street, took note of that ethereal kiss, and wished that
+he could have caught it in the air and got Hilda's leave to keep it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+THE SUBURBAN VILLA
+
+
+Donatello, while it was still a doubtful question betwixt afternoon and
+morning, set forth to keep the appointment which Miriam had carelessly
+tendered him in the grounds of the Villa Borghese.  The entrance to these
+grounds (as all my readers know, for everybody nowadays has been in Rome)
+is just outside of the Porta del Popolo.  Passing beneath that not very
+impressive specimen of Michael Angelo's architecture, a minute's walk will
+transport the visitor from the small, uneasy, lava stones of the Roman
+pavement into broad, gravelled carriage-drives, whence a little farther
+stroll brings him to the soft turf of a beautiful seclusion.  A seclusion,
+but seldom a solitude; for priest, noble, and populace, stranger and
+native, all who breathe Roman air, find free admission, and come hither to
+taste the languid enjoyment of the day-dream that they call life.
+
+But Donatello's enjoyment was of a livelier kind.  He soon began to draw
+long and delightful breaths among those shadowy walks.  Judging by the
+pleasure which the sylvan character of the scene excited in him, it might
+be no merely fanciful theory to set him down as the kinsman, not far
+remote, of that wild, sweet, playful, rustic creature, to whose marble
+image he bore so striking a resemblance.  How mirthful a discovery would
+it be (and yet with a touch of pathos in it), if the breeze which sported
+fondly with his clustering locks were to waft them suddenly aside, and
+show a pair of leaf-shaped, furry ears!  What an honest strain of wildness
+would it indicate!  and into what regions of rich mystery would it extend
+Donatello's sympathies, to be thus linked (and by no monstrous chain) with
+what we call the inferior trioes of being, whose simplicity, mingled with
+his human intelligence, might partly restore what man has lost of the
+divine!
+
+The scenery amid which the youth now strayed was such as arrays itself in
+the imagination when we read the beautiful old myths, and fancy a brighter
+sky, a softer turf, a more picturesque arrangement of venerable trees,
+than we find in the rude and untrained landscapes of the Western world.
+The ilex-trees, so ancient and time-honored were they, seemed to have
+lived for ages undisturbed, and to feel no dread of profanation by the axe
+any more than overthrow by the thunder-stroke.  It had already passed out
+of their dreamy old memories that only a few years ago they were
+grievously imperilled by the Gaul's last assault upon the walls of Rome.
+As if confident in the long peace of their lifetime, they assumed
+attitudes of indolent repose.  They leaned over the green turf in
+ponderous grace, throwing abroad their great branches without danger of
+interfering with other trees, though other majestic trees grew near enough
+for dignified society, but too distant for constraint.  Never was there a
+more venerable quietude than that which slept among their sheltering
+boughs; never a sweeter sunshine than that now gladdening the gentle gloom
+which these leafy patriarchs strove to diffuse over the swelling and
+subsiding lawns.
+
+In other portions of the grounds the stone-pines lifted their dense clump
+of branches upon a slender length of stem, so high that they looked like
+green islands in the air, flinging down a shadow upon the turf so far off
+that you hardly knew which tree had made it.  Again, there were avenues
+of cypress, resembling dark flames of huge funeral candles, which spread
+dusk and twilight round about them instead of cheerful radiance.  The more
+open spots were all abloom, even so early in the season, with anemones of
+wondrous size, both white and rose-colored, and violets that betrayed
+themselves by their rich fragrance, even if their blue eyes failed to meet
+your own.  Daisies, too, were abundant, but larger than the modest little
+English flower, and therefore of small account.
+
+These wooded and flowery lawns are more beautiful than the finest of
+English park scenery, more touching, more impressive, through the neglect
+that leaves Nature so much to her own ways and methods.  Since man seldom
+interferes with her, she sets to work in her quiet way and makes herself
+at home.  There is enough of human care, it is true, bestowed, long ago
+and still bestowed, to prevent wildness from growing into deformity; and
+the result is an ideal landscape, a woodland scene that seems to have been
+projected out of the poet's mind.  If the ancient Faun were other than a
+mere creation of old poetry, and could have reappeared anywhere, it must
+have been in such a scene as this.
+
+In the openings of the wood there are fountains plashing into marble
+basins, the depths of which are shaggy with water-weeds; or they tumble
+like natural cascades from rock to rock, sending their murmur afar, to
+make the quiet and silence more appreciable.  Scattered here and there
+with careless artifice, stand old altars bearing Roman inscriptions.
+Statues, gray with the long corrosion of even that soft atmosphere, half
+hide and half reveal themselves, high on pedestals, or perhaps fallen and
+broken on the turf.  Terminal figures, columns of marble or granite
+porticos, arches, are seen in the vistas of the wood-paths, either
+veritable relics of antiquity, or with so exquisite a touch of artful ruin
+on them that they are better than if really antique.  At all events, grass
+grows on the tops of the shattered pillars, and weeds and flowers root
+themselves in the chinks of the massive arches and fronts of temples, and
+clamber at large over their pediments, as if this were the thousandth
+summer since their winged seeds alighted there.
+
+What a strange idea--what a needless labor--to construct artificial ruins
+in Rome, the native soil of ruin!  But even these sportive imitations,
+wrought by man in emulation of what time has done to temples and palaces,
+are perhaps centuries old, and, beginning as illusions, have grown to be
+venerable in sober earnest.  The result of all is a scene, pensive, lovely,
+dreamlike, enjoyable and sad, such as is to be found nowhere save in
+these princely villa-residences in the neighborhood of Rome; a scene that
+must have required generations and ages, during which growth, decay, and
+man's intelligence wrought kindly together, to render it so gently wild as
+we behold it now.
+
+The final charm is bestowed by the malaria.  There is a piercing,
+thrilling, delicious kind of regret in the idea of so much beauty thrown
+away, or only enjoyable at its half-development, in winter and early
+spring, and never to be dwelt amongst, as the home scenery of any human
+being.  For if you come hither in summer, and stray through these glades
+in the golden sunset, fever walks arm in arm with you, and death awaits
+you at the end of the dim vista.  Thus the scene is like Eden in its
+loveliness; like Eden, too, in the fatal spell that removes it beyond the
+scope of man's actual possessions.  But Donatello felt nothing of this
+dream-like melancholy that haunts the spot.  As he passed among the sunny
+shadows, his spirit seemed to acquire new elasticity.  The flicker of the
+sunshine, the sparkle of the fountain's gush, the dance of the leaf upon
+the bough, the woodland fragrance, the green freshness, the old sylvan
+peace and freedom, were all intermingled in those long breaths which he
+drew.
+
+The ancient dust, the mouldiness of Rome, the dead atmosphere in which he
+had wasted so many months, the hard pavements, the smell of ruin and
+decaying generations, the chill palaces, the convent bells, the heavy
+incense of altars, the life that he had led in those dark, narrow streets,
+among priests, soldiers, nobles, artists, and women,--all the sense of
+these things rose from the young man's consciousness like a cloud which
+had darkened over him without his knowing how densely.
+
+He drank in the natural influences of the scene, and was intoxicated as by
+an exhilarating wine.  He ran races with himself along the gleam and
+shadow of the wood-paths.  He leapt up to catch the overhanging bough of
+an ilex, and swinging himself by it alighted far onward, as if he had
+flown thither through the air.  In a sudden rapture he embraced the trunk
+of a sturdy tree, and seemed to imagine it a creature worthy of affection
+and capable of a tender response; he clasped it closely in his arms, as a
+Faun might have clasped the warm feminine grace of the nymph, whom
+antiquity supposed to dwell within that rough, encircling rind.  Then, in
+order to bring himself closer to the genial earth, with which his kindred
+instincts linked him so strongly, he threw himself at full length on the
+turf, and pressed down his lips, kissing the violets and daisies, which
+kissed him back again, though shyly, in their maiden fashion.
+
+While he lay there, it was pleasant to see how the green and blue lizards,
+who had beta basking on some rock or on a fallen pillar that absorbed the
+warmth of the sun, scrupled not to scramble over him with their small feet;
+and how the birds alighted on the nearest twigs and sang their little
+roundelays unbroken by any chirrup of alarm; they recognized him, it may
+be, as something akin to themselves, or else they fancied that he was
+rooted and grew there; for these wild pets of nature dreaded him no more
+in his buoyant life than if a mound of soil and grass and flowers had long
+since covered his dead body, converting it back to the sympathies from
+which human existence had estranged it.
+
+All of us, after a long abode in cities, have felt the blood gush more
+joyously through our veins with the first breath of rural air; few could
+feel it so much as Donatello, a creature of simple elements, bred in the
+sweet sylvan life of Tuscany, and for months back dwelling amid the mouldy
+gloom and dim splendor of old Rome.  Nature has been shut out for
+numberless centuries from those stony-hearted streets, to which he had
+latterly grown accustomed; there is no trace of her, except for what
+blades of grass spring out of the pavements of the less trodden piazzas,
+or what weeds cluster and tuft themselves on the cornices of ruins.
+Therefore his joy was like that of a child that had gone astray from home,
+and finds him suddenly in his mother's arms again.
+
+At last, deeming it full time for Miriam to keep her tryst, he climbed to
+the tiptop of the tallest tree, and thence looked about him, swaying to
+and fro in the gentle breeze, which was like the respiration of that great
+leafy, living thing.  Donatello saw beneath him the whole circuit of the
+enchanted ground; the statues and columns pointing upward from among the
+shrubbery, the fountains flashing in the sunlight, the paths winding
+hither and thither, and continually finding out some nook of new and
+ancient pleasantness.  He saw the villa, too, with its marble front
+incrusted all over with basreliefs, and statues in its many niches.  It
+was as beautiful as a fairy palace, and seemed an abode in which the lord
+and lady of this fair domain might fitly dwell, and come forth each
+morning to enjoy as sweet a life as their happiest dreams of the past
+night could have depicted.  All this he saw, but his first glance had
+taken in too wide a sweep, and it was not till his eyes fell almost
+directly beneath him, that Donatello beheld Miriam just turning into the
+path that led across the roots of his very tree.
+
+He descended among the foliage, waiting for her to come close to the trunk,
+and then suddenly dropped from an impending bough, and alighted at her
+side.  It was as if the swaying of the branches had let a ray of sunlight
+through.  The same ray likewise glimmered among the gloomy meditations
+that encompassed Miriam, and lit up the pale, dark beauty of her face,
+while it responded pleasantly to Donatello's glance.
+
+"I hardly know," said she, smiling, "whether you have sprouted out of the
+earth, or fallen from the clouds.  In either case you are welcome."
+
+And they walked onward together.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+
+THE FAUN AND NYMPH
+
+
+Mirian's sadder mood, it might be, had at first an effect on Donatello s
+spirits.  It checked the joyous ebullition into which they would otherwise
+have effervesced when he found himself in her society, not, as heretofore,
+in the old gloom of Rome, but under that bright soft sky and in those
+Arcadian woods.  He was silent for a while; it being, indeed, seldom
+Donatello's impulse to express himself copiously in words.  His usual
+modes of demonstration were by the natural language of gesture, the
+instinctive movement of his agile frame, and the unconscious play of his
+features, which, within a limited range of thought and emotion, would
+speak volumes in a moment.
+
+By and by, his own mood seemed to brighten Miriam's, and was reflected
+back upon himself.  He began inevitably, as it were, to dance along the
+wood-path; flinging himself into attitudes of strange comic grace.  Often,
+too, he ran a little way in advance of his companion, and then stood to
+watch her as she approached along the shadowy and sun-fleckered path.
+With every step she took, he expressed his joy at her nearer and nearer
+presence by what might be thought an extravagance of gesticulation, but
+which doubtless was the language of the natural man, though laid aside and
+forgotten by other men, now that words have been feebly substituted in the
+place of signs and symbols.  He gave Miriam the idea of a being not
+precisely man, nor yet a child, but, in a high and beautiful sense, an
+animal, a creature in a state of development less than what mankind has
+attained, yet the more perfect within itself for that very deficiency.
+This idea filled her mobile imagination with agreeable fantasies, which,
+after smiling at them herself, she tried to cofivey to the young man.
+
+"What are you, my friend?"  she exclaimed, always keeping in mind his
+singular resemblance to the Faun of the Capitol.  "If you are, in good
+truth, that wild and pleasant creature whose face you wear, pray make me
+known to your kindred.  They will be found hereabouts, if anywhere.  Knock
+at the rough rind of this ilex-tree, and summon forth the Dryad!  Ask the
+water-nymph to rise dripping from yonder fountain, and exchange a moist
+pressure of the hand with me!  Do not fear that I shall shrink; even if
+one of your rough cousins, a hairy Satyr, should come capering on his
+goat-legs out of the haunts of far antiquity, and propose to dance with me
+among these lawns!  And will not Bacchus,--with whom you consorted so
+familiarly of old, and who loved you so well,--will he not meet us here,
+and squeeze rich grapes into his cup for you and me?"
+
+Donatello smiled; he laughed heartily, indeed, in sympathy with the mirth
+that gleamed out of Miriam's deep, dark eyes.  But he did not seem quite
+to understand her mirthful talk, nor to be disposed to explain what kind
+of creature he was, or to inquire with what divine or poetic kindred his
+companion feigned to link him.  He appeared only to know that Miriam was
+beautiful, and that she smiled graciously upon him; that the present
+moment was very sweet, and himself most happy, with the sunshine, the
+sylvan scenery, and woman's kindly charm, which it enclosed within its
+small circumference.  It was delightful to see the trust which he reposed
+in Miriam, and his pure joy in her propinquity; he asked nothing, sought
+nothing, save to be near the beloved object, and brimmed over with ecstasy
+at that simple boon.  A creature of the happy tribes below us sometimes
+shows the capacity of this enjoyment; a man, seldom or never.
+
+"Donatello," said Miriam, looking at him thoughtfully, but amused, yet not
+without a shade of sorrow, "you seem very happy; what makes you so?"
+
+"Because I love you!"  answered Donatello.
+
+He made this momentous confession as if it were the most natural thing in
+the world; and on her part,--such was the contagion of his simplicity,-
+Miriam heard it without anger or disturbance, though with no responding
+emotion.  It was as if they had strayed across the limits of Arcadia; and
+come under a civil polity where young men might avow their passion with as
+little restraint as a bird pipes its note to a similar purpose.
+
+"Why should you love me, foolish boy?" said she.  "We have no points of
+sympathy at all.  There are not two creatures more unlike, in this wide
+world, than you and I!"
+
+"You are yourself, and I am Donatello," replied he.  "Therefore I love you!
+There needs no other reason."
+
+Certainly, there was no better or more explicable reason.  It might have
+been imagined that Donatello's unsophisticated heart would be more readily
+attracted to a feminine nature of clear simplicity like his own, than to
+one already turbid with grief or wrong, as Miriam's seemed to be.  Perhaps,
+On the other hand, his character needed the dark element, which it found
+in her.  The force and energy of will, that sometimes flashed through her
+eyes, may have taken him captive; or, not improbably, the varying lights
+and shadows of her temper, now so mirthful, and anon so sad with
+mysterious gloom, had bewitched the youth.  Analyze the matter as we may,
+the reason assigned by Donatello himself was as satisfactory as we are
+likely to attain.
+
+Miriam could not think seriously of the avowal that had passed.  He held
+out his love so freely, in his open palm, that she felt it could be
+nothing but a toy, which she might play with for an instant, and give back
+again.  And yet Donatello's heart was so fresh a fountain, that, had
+Miriam been more world-worn than she was, she might have found it
+exquisite to slake her thirst with the feelings that welled up and brimmed
+over from it.  She was far, very far, from the dusty mediaeval epoch, when
+some women have a taste for such refreshment.  Even for her, however,
+there was an inexpressible charm in the simplicity that prompted
+Donatello's words and deeds; though, unless she caught them in precisely
+the true light, they seemed but folly, the offspring of a maimed or
+imperfectly developed intellect.  Alternately, she almost admired, or
+wholly scorned him, and knew not which estimate resulted from the deeper
+appreciation.  But it could not, she decided for herself, be other than an
+innocent pastime, if they two--sure to be separated by their different
+paths in life, to-morrow--were to gather up some of the little pleasures
+that chanced to grow about their feet, like the violets and wood-anemones,
+to-day.
+
+Yet an impulse of rectitude impelled Miriam to give him what she still
+held to be a needless warning against an imaginary peril.
+
+"If you were wiser, Donatello, you would think me a dangerous person,"
+said she, "If you follow my footsteps, they will lead you to no good.  You
+ought to be afraid of me."
+
+"I would as soon think of fearing the air we breathe," he replied.
+
+"And well you may, for it is full of malaria," said Miriam; she went on,
+hinting at an intangible confession, such as persons with overburdened
+hearts often make to children or dumb animals, or to holes in the earth,
+where they think their secrets may be at once revealed and buried.  "Those
+who come too near me are in danger of great mischiefs, I do assure you.
+Take warning, therefore!  It is a sad fatality that has brought you from
+your home among the Apennines,--some rusty old castle, I suppose, with a
+village at its foot, and an Arcadian environment of vineyards, fig-trees,
+and olive orchards,--a sad mischance, I say, that has transported you to
+my side.  You have had a happy life hitherto, have you not, Donatello?"
+
+"O, yes," answered the young man; and, though not of a retrospective turn,
+he made the best effort he could to send his mind back into the past.  "I
+remember thinking it happiness to dance with the contadinas at a village
+feast; to taste the new, sweet wine at vintage-time, and the old, ripened
+wine, which our podere is famous for, in the cold winter evenings; and to
+devour great, luscious figs, and apricots, peaches, cherries, and melons.
+I was often happy in the woods, too, with hounds and horses, and very
+happy in watching all sorts, of creatures and birds that haunt the leafy
+solitudes.  But never half so happy as now!"
+
+"In these delightful groves?"  she asked.
+
+"Here, and with you," answered Donatello.  "Just as we are now."
+
+"What a fulness of content in him!  How silly, and how delightful!"  said
+Miriam to herself.  Then addressing him again: "But, Donatello, how long
+will this happiness last?"
+
+"How long!"  he exclaimed; for it perplexed him even more to think of the
+future than to remember the past.  "Why should it have any end?  How long!
+Forever!  forever! forever!"
+
+"The child!  the simpleton!"  said Miriam, with sudden laughter, and
+checking it as suddenly.  "But is he a simpleton indeed?  Here, in those
+few natural words, he has expressed that deep sense, that profound
+conviction of its own immortality, which genuine love never fails to bring.
+He perplexes me,--yes, and bewitches me,--wild, gentle, beautiful
+creature that he is! It is like playing with a young greyhound!"
+
+Her eyes filled with tears, at the same time that a smile shone out of
+them.  Then first she became sensible of a delight and grief at once, in
+feeling this zephyr of a new affection, with its untainted freshness, blow
+over her weary, stifled heart, which had no right to be revived by it.
+The very exquisiteness of the enjoyment made her know that it ought to be
+a forbidden one.
+
+"Donatello," she hastily exclaimed, "for your own sake, leave me!  It is
+not such a happy thing as you imagine it, to wander in these woods with me,
+a girl from another land, burdened with a doom that she tells to none.
+I might make you dread me,--perhaps hate me,--if I chose; and I must
+choose, if I find you loving me too well!"
+
+"I fear nothing!"  said Donatello, looking into her unfathomable eyes with
+perfect trust.  "I love always!"
+
+"I speak in vain," thought Miriam within herself.
+
+"Well, then, for this one hour, let me be such as he imagines me.
+To-morrow will be time enough to come back to my reality.  My reality!
+what is it?  Is the past so indestructible?  the future so immitigable?
+Is the dark dream, in which I walk, of such solid, stony substance, that
+there can be no escape out of its dungeon?  Be it so!  There is, at least,
+that ethereal quality in my spirit, that it can make me as gay as
+Donatello himself,--for this one hour!"
+
+And immediately she brightened up, as if an inward flame, heretofore
+stifled, were now permitted to fill her with its happy lustre, glowing
+through her cheeks and dancing in her eye-beams.
+
+Donatello, brisk and cheerful as he seemed before, showed a sensibility to
+Miriam's gladdened mood by breaking into still wilder and ever-varying
+activity.  He frisked around her, bubbling over with joy, which clothed
+itself in words that had little individual meaning, and in snatches of
+song that seemed as natural as bird notes.  Then they both laughed
+together, and heard their own laughter returning in the echoes, and
+laughed again at the response, so that the ancient and solemn grove became
+full of merriment for these two blithe spirits.  A bird happening to sing
+cheerily, Donatello gave a peculiar call, and the little feathered
+creature came fluttering about his head, as if it had known him through
+many summers.
+
+"How close he stands to nature!"  said Miriam, observing this pleasant
+familiarity between her companion and the bird.  "He shall make me as
+natural as himself for this one hour."
+
+As they strayed through that sweet wilderness, she felt more and more the
+influence of his elastic temperament.  Miriam was an impressible and
+impulsive creature, as unlike herself, in different moods, as if a
+melancholy maiden and a glad one were both bound within the girdle about
+her waist, and kept in magic thraldom by the brooch that clasped it.
+Naturally, it is true, she was the more inclined to melancholy, yet fully
+capable of that high frolic of the spirits which richly compensates for
+many gloomy hours; if her soul was apt to lurk in the darkness of a cavern,
+she could sport madly in the sunshine before the cavern's mouth.  Except
+the freshest mirth of animal spirits, like Donatello's, there is no
+merriment, no wild exhilaration, comparable to that of melancholy people
+escaping from the dark region m which it is their custom to keep
+themselves imprisoned.
+
+So the shadowy Miriam almost outdid Donatello on his own ground.  They ran
+races with each other, side by side, with shouts and laughter; they pelted
+one another with early flowers, and gathering them up twined them with
+green leaves into garlands for both their heads.  They played together
+like children, or creatures of immortal youth.  So much had they flung
+aside the sombre habitudes of daily life, that they seemed born to be
+sportive forever, and endowed with eternal mirthfulness instead of any
+deeper joy.  It was a glimpse far backward into Arcadian life, or, further
+still, into the Golden Age, before mankind was burdened with sin and
+sorrow, and before pleasure had been darkened with those shadows that
+bring it into high relief, and make it happiness.
+
+"Hark!"  cried Donatello, stopping short, as he was about to bind Miriam's
+fair hands with flowers, and lead her along in triumph, "there is music
+somewhere in the grove!"
+
+"It is your kinsman, Pan, most likely," said Miriam, "playing on his pipe.
+Let us go seek him, and make him puff out his rough cheeks and pipe his
+merriest air!  Come; the strain of music will guide us onward like a gayly
+colored thread of silk."
+
+"Or like a chain of flowers," responded Donatello, drawing her along by
+that which he had twined.  "This way!--Come!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+
+THE SYLVAN DANCE
+
+
+As the music came fresher on their ears, they danced to its cadence,
+extemporizing new steps and attitudes.  Each varying movement had a grace
+which might have been worth putting into marble, for the long delight of
+days to come, but vanished with the movement that gave it birth, and was
+effaced from memory by another.  In Miriam's motion, freely as she flung
+herself into the frolic of the hour, there was still an artful beauty; in
+Donatello's, there was a charm of indescribable grotesqueness hand in hand
+with grace; sweet, bewitching, most provocative of laughter, and yet akin
+to pathos, so deeply did it touch the heart.  This was the ultimate
+peculiarity, the final touch, distinguishing between the sylvan creature
+and the beautiful companion at his side.  Setting apart only this, Miriam
+resembled a Nymph, as much as Donatello did a Faun.
+
+There were flitting moments, indeed, when she played the sylvan character
+as perfectly as he.  Catching glimpses of her, then, you would have
+fancied that an oak had sundered its rough bark to let her dance freely
+forth, endowed with the same spirit in her human form as that which
+rustles in the leaves; or that she had emerged through the pebbly bottom
+of a fountain, a water-nymph, to play and sparkle in the sunshine,
+flinging a quivering light around her, and suddenly disappearing in a
+shower of rainbow drops.
+
+As the fountain sometimes subsides into its basin, so in Miriam there were
+symptoms that the frolic of her spirits would at last tire itself out.
+
+"Ah!  Donatello," cried she, laughing, as she stopped to take a breath;
+"you have an unfair advantage over me!  I am no true creature of the woods;
+while you are a real Faun, I do believe.  When your curls shook just now,
+methought I had a peep at the pointed ears."
+
+Donatello snapped his fingers above his head, as fauns and satyrs taught
+us first to do, and seemed to radiate jollity out of his whole nimble
+person.  Nevertheless, there was a kind of dim apprehension in his face,
+as if he dreaded that a moment's pause might break the spell, and snatch
+away the sportive companion whom he had waited for through so many dreary
+months.
+
+"Dance!  dance!"  cried he joyously.  "If we take breath, we shall be as
+we were yesterday.  There, now, is the music, just beyond this clump of
+trees.  Dance, Miriam, dance!"
+
+They had now reached an open, grassy glade (of which there are many in
+that artfully constructed wilderness), set round with stone seats, on
+which the aged moss had kindly essayed to spread itself instead of
+cushions.  On one of the stone benches sat the musicians, whose strains
+had enticed our wild couple thitherward.  They proved to be a vagrant band,
+such as Rome, and all Italy, abounds with; comprising a harp, a flute,
+and a violin, which, though greatly the worse for wear, theperformers had
+skill enough to provoke and modulate into tolerable harmony.  It chanced
+to be a feast-day; and, instead of playing in the sun-scorched piazzas of
+the city, or beneath the windows of some unresponsive palace, they had
+bethought themselves to try the echoes of these woods; for, on the festas
+of the Church, Rome scatters its merrymakers all abroad, ripe for the
+dance or any other pastime.
+
+As Miriam and Donatello emerged from among the trees, the musicians
+scraped, tinkled, or blew, each according to his various kind of
+instrument, more inspiringly than ever.  A darkchecked little girl, with
+bright black eyes, stood by, shaking a tambourine set round with tinkling
+bells, and thumping it on its parchment head.  Without interrupting his
+brisk, though measured movement, Donatello snatched away this unmelodious
+contrivance, and, flourishing it above his head, produced music of
+indescribable potency, still dancing with frisky step, and striking the
+tambourine, and ringing its little bells, all in one jovial act.
+
+It might be that there was magic in the sound, or contagion, at least, in
+the spirit which had got possession of Miriam and himself, for very soon a
+number of festal people were drawn to the spot, and struck into the dance,
+singly or in pairs, as if they were all gone mad with jollity.  Among them
+were some of the plebeian damsels whom we meet bareheaded in the Roman
+streets, with silver stilettos thrust through their glossy hair; the
+contadinas, too, from the Campagna and the villages, with their rich and
+picturesque costumes of scarlet and all bright hues, such as fairer
+maidens might not venture to put on.  Then came the modern Roman from
+Trastevere, perchance, with his old cloak drawn about him like a toga,
+which anon, as his active motion heated him, he flung aside.  Three French
+soldiers capered freely into the throng, in wide scarlet trousers, their
+short swords dangling at their sides; and three German artists in gray
+flaccid hats and flaunting beards; and one of the Pope's Swiss guardsmen
+in the strange motley garb which Michael Angelo contrived for them.  Two
+young English tourists (one of them a lord) took contadine partners and
+dashed in, as did also a shaggy man in goat-skin breeches, who looked like
+rustic Pan in person, and footed it as merrily as he.  Besides the above
+there was a herdsman or two from the Campagna, and a few peasants in
+sky-blue jackets, and small-clothes tied with ribbons at the knees;
+haggard and sallow were these last, poor serfs, having little to eat and
+nothing but the malaria to breathe; but still they plucked up a momentary
+spirit and joined hands in Donatello's dance.
+
+Here, as it seemed, had the Golden Age come back again within the
+Precincts of this sunny glade, thawing mankind out of their cold
+formalities, releasing them from irksome restraint, mingling them together
+in such childlike gayety that new flowers (of which the old bosom of the
+earth is full) sprang up beneath their footsteps.  The sole exception to
+the geniality of the moment, as we have understood, was seen in a
+countryman of our own, who sneered at the spectacle, and declined to
+compromise his dignity by making part of it.
+
+The harper thrummed with rapid fingers; the violin player flashed his bow
+back and forth across the strings; the flautist poured his breath in quick
+puffs of jollity, while Donatello shook the tambourine above his head, and
+led the merry throng with unweariable steps.  As they followed one another
+in a wild ring of mirth, it seemed the realization of one of those
+bas-reliefs where a dance of nymphs, satyrs, or bacchanals is twined
+around the circle of an antique vase; or it was like the sculptured scene
+on the front and sides of a sarcophagus, where, as often as any other
+device, a festive procession mocks the ashes and white bones that are
+treasured up within.  You might take it for a marriage pageant; but after
+a while, if you look at these merry-makers, following them from end to end
+of the marble coffin, you doubt whether their gay movement is leading them
+to a happy close.  A youth has suddenly fallen in the dance; a chariot is
+overturned and broken, flinging the charioteer headlong to the ground; a
+maiden seems to have grown faint or weary, and is drooping on the bosom of
+a friend.  Always some tragic incident is shadowed forth or thrust
+sidelong into the spectacle; and when once it has caught your eye you can
+look no more at the festal portions of the scene, except with reference to
+this one slightly suggested doom and sorrow.
+
+As in its mirth, so in the darker characteristic here alluded to, there
+was an analogy between the sculptured scene on the sarcophagus and the
+wild dance which we have been describing.  In the midst of its madness and
+riot Miriam found herself suddenly confronted by a strange figure that
+shook its fantastic garments in the air, and pranced before her on its
+tiptoes, almost vying with the agility of Donatello himself.  It was the
+model.
+
+A moment afterwards Donatello was aware that she had retired from the
+dance.  He hastened towards her, and flung himself on the grass beside the
+stone bench on which Miriam was sitting.  But a strange distance and
+unapproachableness had all at once enveloped her; and though he saw her
+within reach of his arm, yet the light of her eyes seemed as far off as
+that of a star, nor was there any warmth in the melancholy smile with
+which she regarded him.
+
+"Come back!"  cried he.  "Why should this happy hour end so soon?"
+
+"It must end here, Donatello," said she, in answer to his words and
+outstretched hand; "and such hours, I believe, do not often repeat
+themselves in a lifetime.  Let me go, my friend; let me vanish from you
+quietly among the shadows of these trees.  See, the companions of our
+pastime are vanishing already!"
+
+Whether it was that the harp-strings were broken, the violin out of tune,
+or the flautist out of breath, so it chanced that the music had ceased,
+and the dancers come abruptly to a pause.  All that motley throng of
+rioters was dissolved as suddenly as it had been drawn together.  In
+Miriam's remembrance the scene had a character of fantasy.  It was as if a
+company of satyrs, fauns, and nymphs, with Pan in the midst of them, had
+been disporting themselves in these venerable woods only a moment ago; and
+now in another moment, because some profane eye had looked at them too
+closely, or some intruder had cast a shadow on their mirth, the sylvan
+pageant had utterly disappeared.  If a few of the merry-makers lingered
+among the trees, they had hidden their racy peculiarities under the garb
+and aspect of ordinary people, and sheltered themselves in the weary
+commonplace of daily life.  Just an instant before it was Arcadia and the
+Golden Age.  The spell being broken, it was now only that old tract of
+pleasure ground, close by the people's gat:e of Rome,--a tract where the
+crimes and calamities of ages, the many battles, blood recklessly poured
+out, and deaths of myriads, have corrupted all the soil, creating an
+influence that makes the air deadly to human lungs.
+
+"You must leave me," said Miriam to Donatello more imperatively than
+before; "have I not said it?  Go; and look not behind you."
+
+"Miriam," whispered Donatello, grasping her hand forcibly, "who is it that
+stands in the shadow yonder, beckoning you to follow him?"
+
+"Hush; leave me!"  repeated Miriam.  "Your hour is past; his hour has
+come."
+
+Donatello still gazed in the direction which he had indicated, and the
+expression of his face was fearfully changed, being so disordered, perhaps
+with terror,--at all events with anger and invincible repugnance,--that
+Miriam hardly knew him.  His lips were drawn apart so as to disclose his
+set teeth, thus giving him a look of animal rage, which we seldom see
+except in persons of the simplest and rudest natures.  A shudder seemed to
+pass through his very bones.
+
+"I hate him!"  muttered he.
+
+"Be satisfied; I hate him too!"  said Miriam.
+
+She had no thought of making this avowal, but was irresistibly drawn to it
+by the sympathy of the dark emotion in her own breast with that so
+strongly expressed by Donatello.  Two drops of water or of blood do not
+more naturally flow into each other than did her hatred into his.
+
+"Shall I clutch him by the throat?"  whispered Donatello, with a savage
+scowl.  "Bid me do so, and we are rid of him forever."
+
+"In Heaven's name, no violence!"  exclaimed Miriam, affrighted out of the
+scornful control which she had hitherto held over her companion, by the
+fierceness that he so suddenly developed.  "O, have pity on me, Donatello,
+if for nothing else, yet because in the midst of my wretchedness I let
+myself be your playmate for this one wild hour!  Follow me no farther.
+Henceforth leave me to my doom.  Dear friend,--kind, simple, loving
+friend,--make me not more wretched by the remembrance of having thrown
+fierce hates or loves into the wellspring of your happy life!"
+
+"Not follow you!"  repeated Donatello, soothed from anger into sorrow,
+less by the purport of what she said, than by the melancholy sweetness of
+her voice,--"not follow you! What other path have I?"
+
+"We will talk of it once again," said Miriam still soothingly;
+"soon--to-morrow when you will; only leave me now."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+
+FRAGMENTARY SENTENCES
+
+
+In the Borghese Grove, so recently uproarious with merriment and music,
+there remained only Miriam and her strange follower.
+
+A solitude had suddenly spread itself around them.  It perhaps symbolized
+a peculiar character in the relation of these two, insulating them, and
+building up an insuperable barrier between their life-streams and other
+currents, which might seem to flow in close vicinity.  For it is one of
+the chief earthly incommodities of some species of misfortune, or of a
+great crime, that it makes the actor in the one, or the sufferer of the
+other, an alien in the world, by interposing a wholly unsympathetic medium
+betwixt himself and those whom he yearns to meet.
+
+Owing, it may be, to this moral estrangement,--this chill remoteness of
+their position,--there have come to us but a few vague whisperings of what
+passed in Miriam's interview that afternoon with the sinister personage
+who had dogged her footsteps ever since the visit to the catacomb.  In
+weaving these mystic utterances into a continuous scene, we undertake a
+task resembling in its perplexity that of gathering up and piecing
+together the fragments ora letter which has been torn and scattered to the
+winds.  Many words of deep significance, many entire sentences, and those
+possibly the most important ones, have flown too far on the winged breeze
+to be recovered.  If we insert our own conjectural amendments, we perhaps
+give a purport utterly at variance with the true one.  Yet unless we
+attempt something in this way, there must remain an unsightly gap, and a
+lack of continuousness and dependence in our narrative; so that it would
+arrive at certain inevitable catastrophes without due warning of their
+imminence.
+
+Of so much we are sure, that there seemed to be a sadly mysterious
+fascination in the influence of this ill-omened person over Miriam; it was
+such as beasts and reptiles of subtle and evil nature sometimes exercise
+upon their victims.  Marvellous it was to see the hopelessness with which
+being naturally of so courageous a spirit she resigned herself to the
+thraldom in which he held her.  That iron chain, of which some of the
+massive links were round her feminine waist, and the others in his
+ruthless hand,--or which, perhaps, bound the pair together by a bond
+equally torturing to each,--must have been forged in some such unhallowed
+furnace as is only kindled by evil passions, and fed by evil deeds.
+
+Yet, let us trust, there may have been no crime in Miriam, but only one of
+those fatalities which are among the most insoluble riddles propounded to
+mortal comprehension; the fatal decree by which every crime is made to be
+the agony of many innocent persons, as well as of the single guilty one.
+
+It was, at any rate, but a feeble and despairing kind of remonstrance
+which she had now the energy to oppose against his persecution.
+
+"You follow me too closely," she said, in low, faltering accents; "you
+allow me too scanty room to draw my breath.  Do you know what will be the
+end of this?" "I know well what must be the end," he replied.
+
+"Tell me, then," said Miriam, "that I may compare your foreboding with my
+own.  Mine is a very dark one."
+
+"There can be but one result, and that soon," answered the model.  "You
+must throw off your present mask and assume another.  You must vanish out
+of the scene: quit Rome with me, and leave no trace whereby to follow you.
+It is in my power, as you well know, to compel your acquiescence in my
+bidding.  You are aware of the penalty of a refusal."
+
+"Not that penalty with which you would terrify me," said Miriam; "another
+there may be, but not so grievous." "What is that other?"  he inquired.
+"Death!  simply death!"  she answered.  "Death," said her persecutor, "is
+not so simple and opportune a thing as you imagine.  You are strong and
+warm with life.  Sensitive and irritable as your spirit is, these many
+months of trouble, this latter thraldom in which I hold you, have scarcely
+made your cheek paler than I saw it in your girlhood.  Miriam,--for I
+forbear to speak another name, at which these leaves would shiver above
+our heads,--Miriam, you cannot die!"
+
+"Might not a dagger find my heart?"  said she, for the first time meeting
+his eyes.  "Would not poison make an end of me?  Will not the Tiber drown
+me?"
+
+"It might," he answered; "for I allow that you are mortal.  But, Miriam,
+believe me, it is not your fate to die while there remains so much to be
+sinned and suffered in the world.  We have a destiny which we must needs
+fulfil together.  I, too, have struggled to escape it.  I was as anxious
+as yourself to break the tie between us,--to bury the past in a fathomless
+grave,--to make it impossible that we should ever meet, until you confront
+me at the bar of Judgment!  You little can imagine what steps I took to
+render all this secure; and what was the result?  Our strange interview in
+the bowels of the earth convinced me of the futility of my design."
+
+"Ah, fatal chance!"  cried Miriam, covering her face with her hands.
+
+"Yes, your heart trembled with horror when you recognized me," rejoined he;
+"but you did not guess that there was an equal horror in my own!"
+
+"Why would not the weight of earth above our heads have crumbled down upon
+us both, forcing us apart, but burying us equally?"  cried Miriam, in a
+burst of vehement passion.  "O, that we could have wandered in those
+dismal passages till we both perished, taking opposite paths in the
+darkness, so that when we lay down to die, our last.breaths might not
+mingle!"
+
+"It were vain to wish it," said the model.  "In all that labyrinth of
+midnight paths, we should have found one another out to live or die
+together.  Our fates cross and are entangled.  The threads are twisted
+into a strong cord, which is dragging us to an evil doom.  Could the knots
+be severed, we might escape.  But neither can your slender fingers untie
+these knots, nor my masculine force break them.  We must submit!"
+
+"Pray for rescue, as I have," exclaimed Miriam.  "Pray for deliverance
+from me, since I am your evil genius, as you mine.  Dark as your life has
+been, I have known you to pray in times past!"
+
+At these words of Miriam, a tremor and horror appeared to seize upon her
+persecutor, insomuch that he shook and grew ashy pale before her eyes.  In
+this man's memory there was something that made it awful for him to think
+of prayer; nor would any torture be more intolerable than to be reminded
+of such divine comfort and succor as await pious souls merely for the
+asking; This torment was perhaps the token of a native temperament deeply
+susceptible of religious impressions, but which had been wronged, violated,
+and debased, until, at length, it was capable only of terror from the
+sources that were intended for our purest and loftiest consolation.  He
+looked so fearfully at her, and with such intense pain struggling in his
+eyes, that Miriam felt pity.
+
+And now, all at once, it struck her that he might be mad.  It was an idea
+that had never before seriously occurred to her mind, although, as soon as
+suggested, it fitted marvellously into many circumstances that lay within
+her knowledge.  But, alas!  such was her evil fortune, that, whether mad
+or no, his power over her remained the same, and was likely to be used
+only the more tyrannously, if exercised by a lunatic.
+
+I would not give you pain," she said, soothingly; "your faith allows you
+the consolations of penance and absolution.  Try what help there may be in
+these, and leave me to myself."
+
+"Do not think it, Miriam," said he; "we are bound together, and can never
+part again." "Why should it seem so impossible?"  she rejoined.  "Think
+how I had escaped from all the past!  I had made for myself a new sphere,
+and found new friends, new occupations, new hopes and enjoyments.  My
+heart, methinks, was almost as unburdened as if there had been no
+miserable life behind me.  The human spirit does not perish of a single
+wound, nor exhaust itself in a single trial of life.  Let us but keep
+asunder, and all may go well for both." "We fancied ourselves forever
+sundered," he replied.  "Yet we met once, in the bowels of the earth; and,
+were we to part now, our fates would fling us together again in a desert,
+on a mountain-top, or in whatever spot seemed safest.  You speak in vain,
+therefore."
+
+"You mistake your own will for an iron necessity," said Miriam; "otherwise,
+you might have suffered me to glide past you like a ghost, when we met
+among those ghosts of ancient days.  Even now you might bid me pass as
+freely."
+
+"Never!"  said he, with unmitigable will; "your reappearance has destroyed
+the work of years.  You know the power that I have over you.  Obey my
+bidding; or, within a short time, it shall be exercised: nor will I cease
+to haunt you till the moment comes."
+
+"Then," said Miriam more calmly," I foresee the end, and have already
+warned you of it.  It will be death!"
+
+"Your own death, Miriam,--or mine?"  he asked, looking fixedly at her.
+
+"Do you imagine me a murderess?"  said she, shuddering; "you, at least,
+have no right to think me so!"
+
+"Yet," rejoined he, with a glance of dark meaning, "men have said that
+this white hand had once a crimson stain."  He took her hand as he spoke,
+and held it in his own, in spite of the repugnance, amounting to nothing
+short of agony, with which she struggled to regain it.  Holding it up to
+the fading light (for there was already dimness among the trees), he
+appeared to examine it closely, as if to discover the imaginary
+blood-stain with which he taunted her.  He smiled as he let it go.  "It
+looks very white," said he; "but I have known hands as white, which all
+the water in the ocean would not have washed clean."
+
+"It had no stain," retorted Miriam bitterly, "until you grasped it in your
+own."
+
+The wind has blown away whatever else they may have spoken.
+
+They went together towards the town, and, on their way, continued to make
+reference, no doubt, to some strange and dreadful history of their former
+life, belonging equally to this dark man and to the fair and youthful
+woman whom he persecuted.  In their words, or in the breath that uttered
+them, there seemed to be an odor of guilt, and a scent of blood.  Yet, how
+can we imagine that a stain of ensanguined crime should attach to Miriam!
+Or how, on the other hand, should spotless innocence be subjected to a
+thraldom like that which she endured from the spectre, whom she herself
+had evoked out of the darkness!  Be this as it might, Miriam, we have
+reason to believe, still continued to beseech him, humbly, passionately,
+wildly, only to go his way, and leave her free to follow her own sad path.
+
+Thus they strayed onward through the green wilderness of the Borghese
+grounds, and soon came near the city wall, where, had Miriam raised her
+eyes, she might have seen Hilda and the sculptor leaning on the parapet.
+But she walked in a mist of trouble, and could distinguish little beyond
+its limits.  As they came within public observation, her persecutor fell
+behind, throwing off the imperious manner which he had assumed during
+their solitary interview.  The Porta del Popolo swarmed with life.  The
+merry-makers, who had spent the feast-day outside the walls, were now
+thronging in; a party of horsemen were entering beneath the arch; a
+travelling carriage had been drawn up just within the verge, and was
+passing through the villainous ordeal of the papal custom-house.  In the
+broad piazza, too, there was a motley crowd.
+
+But the stream of Miriam's trouble kept its way through this flood of
+human life, and neither mingled with it nor was turned aside.  With a sad
+kind of feminine ingenuity, she found a way to kneel before her tyrant
+undetected, though in full sight of all the people, still beseeching him
+for freedom, and in vain.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+
+A STROLL ON THE PINCIAN
+
+
+Hilda, after giving the last touches to the picture of Beatrice Cenci, had
+flown down from her dove-cote, late in the afternoon, and gone to the
+Pincian Hill, in the hope of hearing a strain or two of exhilarating music.
+There, as it happened, she met the sculptor, for, to say the truth,
+Kenyon had well noted the fair artist's ordinary way of life, and was
+accustomed to shape his own movements so as to bring him often within her
+sphere.
+
+The Pincian Hill is the favorite promenade of the Roman aristocracy.  At
+the present day, however, like most other Roman possessions, it belongs
+less to the native inhabitants than to the barbarians from Gaul, Great
+Britain, anti beyond the sea, who have established a peaceful usurpation
+over whatever is enjoyable or memorable in the Eternal City.  These
+foreign guests are indeed ungrateful, if they do not breathe a prayer for
+Pope Clement, or whatever Holy Father it may have been, who levelled the
+summit of the mount so skilfully, and bounded it with the parapet of the
+city wall; who laid out those broad walks and drives, and overhung them
+with the deepening shade of many kinds of tree; who scattered the flowers,
+of all seasons and of every clime, abundantly over those green, central
+lawns; who scooped out hollows in fit places, and, setting great basins of
+marble in them, caused ever-gushing fountains to fill them to the brim;
+who reared up the immemorial obelisk out of the soil that had long hidden
+it; who placed pedestals along the borders of the avenues, and crowned
+them with busts of that multitude of worthies--statesmen, heroes, artists,
+men of letters and of song--whom the whole world claims as its chief
+ornaments, though Italy produced them all.  In a word, the Pincian garden
+is one of the things that reconcile the stranger (since he fully
+appreciates the enjoyment, and feels nothing of the cost) to the rule of
+an irresponsible dynasty of Holy Fathers, who seem to have aimed at making
+life as agreeable an affair as it can well be.
+
+In this pleasant spot, the red-trousered French soldiers are always to be
+seen; bearded and grizzled veterans, perhaps with medals of Algiers or the
+Crimea on their breasts.  To them is assigned the peaceful duty of seeing
+that children do not trample on the flower beds, nor any youthful lover
+rifle them of their fragrant blossoms to stick in the beloved one's hair.
+Here sits (drooping upon some marble bench, in the treacherous sunshine)
+the consumptive girl, whose friends have brought her, for cure, to a
+climate that instils poison into its very purest breath.  Here, all day,
+come nursery-maids, burdened with rosy English babies, or guiding the
+footsteps of little travellers from the far Western world.  Here, in the
+sunny afternoons, roll and rumble all kinds of equipages, from the
+cardinal's old-fashioned and gorgeous purple carriage to the gay barouche
+of modern date.  Here horsemen gallop on thoroughbred steeds.  Here, in
+short, all the transitory population of Rome, the world's great
+watering-place, rides, drives, or promenades!  Here are beautiful sunsets;
+and here, whichever way you turn your eyes, are scenes as well worth
+gazing at, both in themselves and for their historic interest, as any that
+the sun ever rose and set upon.  Here, too, on certain afternoons of the
+week, a French military band flings out rich music over the poor old city,
+floating her with strains as loud as those of her own echoless triumphs.
+
+Hilda and the sculptor (by the contrivance of the latter, who loved best
+to be alone with his young countrywoman) had wandered beyond the throng of
+promenaders, whom they left in a dense cluster around the music.  They
+strayed, indeed, to the farthest point of the Pincian Hill, and leaned
+over the parapet, looking down upon the Muro Torto, a massive fragment of
+the oldest Roman wall, which juts over, as if ready to tumble down by its
+own weight, yet seems still the most indestructible piece of work that
+men's hands ever piled together.  In the blue distance rose Soracte, and
+other heights, which have gleamed afar, to our imaginations, but look
+scarcely real to our bodily eyes, because, being dreamed about so much,
+they have taken the aerial tints which belong only to a dream.  These,
+nevertheless, are the solid framework of hills that shut in Rome, and its
+wide surrounding Campagna,--no land of dreams, but the broadest page of
+history, crowded so full with memorable events that one obliterates
+another; as if Time had crossed and recrossed his own records till they
+grew illegible.
+
+But, not to meddle with history,--with which our narrative is no otherwise
+concerned, than that the very dust of Rome is historic, and inevitably
+settles on our page and mingles with our ink,--we will return to our two
+friends, who were still leaning over the wall.  Beneath them lay the broad
+sweep of the Borghese grounds, covered with trees, amid which appeared the
+white gleam of pillars and statues, and the flash of an upspringing
+fountain, all to be overshadowed at a later period of the year by the
+thicker growth of foliage.
+
+The advance of vegetation, in this softer climate, is less abrupt than the
+inhabitant of the cold North is accustomed to observe.  Beginning earlier,
+--even in February,--Spring is not compelled to burst into Summer with
+such headlong haste; there is time to dwell upon each opening beauty, and
+to enjoy the budding leaf, the tender green, the sweet youth and freshness
+of the year; it gives us its.  maiden charm, before, settling into the
+married Summer, which, again, does not so soon sober itself into matronly
+Autumn.  In our own country, the virgin Spring hastens to its bridal too
+abruptly.  But here, after a month or two of kindly growth, the leaves of
+the young trees, which cover that portion of the Borghese grounds nearest
+the city wall, were still in their tender halfdevelopment.
+
+In the remoter depths, among the old groves of ilex-trees, Hilda and
+Kenyon heard the faint sound of music, laughter, and mingling voices.  It
+was probably the uproar--spreading even so far as the walls of Rome, and
+growing faded and melancholy in its passage--of that wild sylvan merriment,
+which we have already attempted to describe.  By and by it
+ceased--although the two listeners still tried to distinguish it between
+the bursts of nearer music from the military band.  But there was no
+renewal of that distant mirth.  Soon afterwards they saw a solitary figure
+advancing along one of the paths that lead from the obscurer part of the
+ground towards the gateway.
+
+"Look!  is it not Donatello?"  said Hilda.
+
+"He it is, beyond a doubt," replied the sculptor.  "But how gravely he
+walks, and with what long looks behind him!  He seems either very weary,
+or very sad.  I should not hesitate to call it sadness, if Donatello were
+a creature capable of the sin and folly of low spirits.  In all these
+hundred paces, while we have been watching him, he has not made one of
+those little caprioles in the air which are characteristic of his natural
+gait.  I begin to doubt whether he is a veritable Faun."
+
+"Then," said Hilda, with perfect simplicity, "you have thought him--and do
+think him--one of that strange, wild, happy race of creatures, that used
+to laugh and sport in the woods, in the old, old times?  So do I, indeed!
+But I never quite believed, till now, that fauns existed anywhere but in
+poetry."
+
+The sculptor at first merely smiled.  Then, as the idea took further
+possession of his mind, he laughed outright, and wished from the bottom of
+his heart (being in love with Hilda, though he had never told her so) that
+he could have rewarded or punished her for its pretty absurdity with a
+kiss.
+
+"O Hilda, what a treasure of sweet faith and pure imagination you hide
+under that little straw hat!"  cried he, at length.  "A Faun!  a Faun!
+Great Pan is not dead, then, after all!  The whole tribe of mythical
+creatures yet live in the moonlit seclusion of a young girl's fancy, and
+find it a lovelier abode and play-place, I doubt not, than their Arcadian
+haunts of yore.  What bliss, if a man of marble, like myself, could stray
+thither, too!"
+
+"Why do you laugh so?"  asked Hilda, reddening; for she was a little
+disturbed at Kenyon's ridicule, however kindly expressed.  "What can I
+have said, that you think so very foolish?"
+
+"Well, not foolish, then," rejoined the sculptor, "but wiser, it may be,
+than I can fathom.  Really, however, the idea does strike one as
+delightfully fresh, when we consider Donatello's position and external
+environment.  Why, my dear Hilda, he is a Tuscan born, of an old noble
+race in that part of Italy; and he has a moss-grown tower among the
+Apennines, where he and his forefathers have dwelt, under their own vines
+and fig-trees, from an unknown antiquity.  His boyish passion for Miriam
+has introduced him familiarly to our little circle; and our republican and
+artistic simplicity of intercourse has included this young Italian, on the
+same terms as one of ourselves.  But, if we paid due respect to rank and
+title, we should bend reverentially to Donatello, and salute him as his
+Excellency the Count di Monte Beni."
+
+"That is a droll idea, much droller than his being a Faun!"  said Hilda,
+laughing in her turn.  "This does not quite satisfy me, however,
+especially as you yourself recognized and acknowledged his wonderful
+resemblance to the statue."
+
+"Except as regards the pointed ears," said Kenyon; adding, aside, "and one
+other little peculiarity, generally observable in the statues of fauns."
+
+"As for his Excellency the Count di Monte Beni's ears," replied Hilda,
+smiling again at the dignity with which this title invested their playful
+friend, "you know we could never see their shape, on account of his
+clustering curls.  Nay, I remember, he once started back, as shyly as a
+wild deer, when Miriam made a pretence of examining them.  How do you
+explain that?"
+
+"O, I certainly shall not contend against such a weight of evidence, the
+fact of his faunship being otherwise so probable," answered the sculptor,
+still hardly retaining his gravity.  "Faun or not, Donatello or the Count
+di Monte Beni--is a singularly wild creature, and, as I have remarked on
+other occasions, though very gentle, does not love to be touched.
+Speaking in no harsh sense, there is a great deal of animal nature in him,
+as if he had been born in the woods, and had run wild all his childhood,
+and were as yet but imperfectly domesticated.  Life, even in our day, is
+very simple and unsophisticated in some of the shaggy nooks of the
+Apennines."
+
+"It annoys me very much," said Hilda, "this inclination, which most people
+have, to explain away the wonder and the mystery out of everything.  Why
+could not you allow me--and yourself, too--the satisfaction of thinking
+him a Faun?"
+
+"Pray keep your belief, dear Hilda, if it makes you any happier," said the
+sculptor; "and I shall do my best to become a convert.  Donatello has
+asked me to spend the summer with him, in his ancestral tower, where I
+purpose investigating the pedigree of these sylvan counts, his forefathers;
+and if their shadows beckon me into dreamland, I shall willingly follow.
+By the bye, speaking of Donatello, there is a point on which I should like
+to be enlightened."
+
+"Can I help you, then?"  said Hilda, in answer to his look.
+
+"Is there the slightest chance of his winning Miriam's affections?"
+suggested Kenyon.
+
+"Miriam!  she, so accomplished and gifted!" exclaimed Hilda; "and he, a
+rude, uncultivated boy!  No, no, no!"
+
+"It would seem impossible," said the sculptor.  "But, on the other hand, a
+gifted woman flings away her affections so unaccountably, sometimes!
+Miriam of late has been very morbid and miserable, as we both know.  Young
+as she is, the morning light seems already to have faded out of her life;
+and now comes Donatello, with natural sunshine enough for himself and her,
+and offers her the opportunity of making her heart and life all new and
+cheery again.  People of high intellectual endowments do not require
+similar ones in those they love.  They are just the persons to appreciate
+the wholesome gush of natural feeling, the honest affection, the simple
+joy, the fulness of contentment with what he loves, which Miriam sees in
+Donatello.  True; she may call him a simpleton.  It is a necessity of the
+case; for a man loses the capacity for this kind of affection, in
+proportion as he cultivates and refines himself."
+
+"Dear me!"  said Hilda, drawing imperceptibly away from her companion.
+"Is this the penalty of refinement?  Pardon me; I do not believe it.  It
+is because you are a sculptor, that you think nothing can be finely
+wrought except it be cold and hard, like the marble in which your ideas
+take shape.  I am a painter, and know that the most delicate beauty may be
+softened and warmed throughout."
+
+"I said a foolish thing, indeed," answered the sculptor.  "It surprises me,
+for I might have drawn a wiser knowledge out of my own experience.  It is
+the surest test of genuine love, that it brings back our early simplicity
+to the worldliest of us."
+
+Thus talking, they loitered slowly along beside the parapet which borders
+the level summit of the Pincian with its irregular sweep.  At intervals
+they looked through the lattice-work of their thoughts at the varied
+prospects that lay before and beneath them.
+
+From the terrace where they now stood there is an abrupt descent towards
+the Piazza del Popolo; and looking down into its broad space they beheld
+the tall palatial edifices, the church domes, and the ornamented gateway,
+which grew and were consolidated out of the thought of Michael Angelo.
+They saw, too, the red granite obelisk, oldest of things, even in Rome,
+which rises in the centre of the piazza, with a fourfold fountain at its
+base.  All Roman works and ruins (whether of the empire, the far-off
+republic, or the still more distant kings) assume a transient, visionary,
+and impalpable character when we think that this indestructible monument
+supplied one of the recollections which Moses and the Israelites bore from
+Egypt into the desert.  Perchance, on beholding the cloudy pillar and the
+fiery column, they whispered awestricken to one another, "In its shape it
+is like that old obelisk which we and our fathers have so often seen on
+the borders of the Nile." And now that very obelisk, with hardly a trace
+of decay upon it, is the first thing that the modern traveller sees after
+entering the Flaminian Gate!
+
+Lifting their eyes, Hilda and her companion gazed westward, and saw beyond
+the invisible Tiber the Castle of St. Angelo; that immense tomb of a pagan
+emperor, with the archangel at its summit.
+
+Still farther off appeared a mighty pile of buildings, surmounted by the
+vast dome, which all of us have shaped and swelled outward, like a huge
+bubble, to the utmost Scope of our imaginations, long before we see it
+floating over the worship of the city.  It may be most worthily seen from
+precisely the point where our two friends were now standing.  At any
+nearer view the grandeur of St. Peter's hides itself behind the immensity
+of its separate parts,--so that we see only the front, only the sides,
+only the pillared length and loftiness of the portico, and not the mighty
+whole.  But at this distance the entire outline of the world's cathedral,
+as well as that of the palace of the world's chief priest, is taken in at
+once.  In such remoteness, moreover, the imagination is not debarred from
+lending its assistance, even while we have the reality before our eyes,
+and helping the weakness of human sense to do justice to so grand an
+object.  It requires both faith and fancy to enable us to feel, what is
+nevertheless so true, that yonder, in front of the purple outline of hills,
+is the grandest edifice ever built by man, painted against God's
+loveliest sky.
+
+After contemplating a little while a scene which their long residence in
+Rome had made familiar to them, Kenyon and Hilda again let their glances
+fall into the piazza at their feet.  They there beheld Miriam, who had
+just entered the Porta del Popolo, and was standing by the obelisk and
+fountain.  With a gesture that impressed Kenyon as at once suppliant and
+imperious, she seemed to intimate to a figure which had attended her thus
+far, that it was now her desire to be left alone.  The pertinacious model,
+however, remained immovable.
+
+And the sculptor here noted a circumstance, which, according to the
+interpretation he might put upon it, was either too trivial to be
+mentioned, or else so mysteriously significant that he found it difficult
+to believe his eyes.  Miriam knelt down on the steps of the fountain; so
+far there could be no question of the fact.  To other observers, if any
+there were, she probably appeared to take this attitude merely for the
+convenience of dipping her fingers into the gush of water from the mouth
+of one of the stone lions.  But as she clasped her hands together after
+thus bathing them, and glanced upward at the model, an idea took strong
+possession of Kenyon's mind that Miriam was kneeling to this dark follower
+there in the world's face!
+
+"Do you see it?"  he said to Hilda.
+
+"See what?"  asked she, surprised at the emotion of his tone.  "I see
+Miriam, who has just bathed her hands in that delightfully cool water.  I
+often dip my fingers into a Roman fountain, and think of the brook that
+used to be one of my playmates in my New England village."
+
+"I fancied I saw something else," said Kenyon; "but it was doubtless a
+mistake."
+
+But, allowing that he had caught a true glimpse into the hidden
+significance of Miriam's gesture, what a terrible thraldom did it suggest!
+Free as she seemed to be,--beggar as he looked,--the nameless vagrant
+must then be dragging the beautiful Miriam through the streets of Rome,
+fettered and shackled more cruelly than any captive queen of yore
+following in an emperor's triumph.  And was it conceivable that she would
+have been thus enthralled unless some great error--how great Kenyon dared
+not think--or some fatal weakness had given this dark adversary a vantage
+ground?
+
+"Hilda," said he abruptly, "who and what is Miriam?  Pardon me; but are
+you sure of her?"
+
+"Sure of her!"  repeated Hilda, with an angry blush, for her friend's sake.
+"I am sure that she is kind, good, and generous; a true and faithful
+friend, whom I love dearly, and who loves me as well!  What more than this
+need I be sure of?"
+
+"And your delicate instincts say all this in her favor?--nothing against
+her?"  continued the sculptor, without heeding the irritation of Hilda's
+tone.  "These are my own impressions, too.  But she is such a mystery!  We
+do not even know whether she is a countrywoman of ours, or an Englishwoman,
+or a German.  There is Anglo-Saxon blood in her veins, one would say, and
+a right English accent on her tongue, but much that is not English
+breeding, nor American.  Nowhere else but in Rome, and as an artist, could
+she hold a place in society without giving some clew to her past life."
+
+"I love her dearly," said Hilda, still with displeasure in her tone, "and
+trust her most entirely."
+
+"My heart trusts her at least, whatever my head may do," replied Kenyon;
+"and Rome is not like one of our New England villages, where we need the
+permission of each individual neighbor for every act that we do, every
+word that we utter, and every friend that we make or keep.  In these
+particulars the papal despotism allows us freer breath than our native air;
+and if we like to take generous views of our associates, we can do so, to
+a reasonable extent, without ruining ourselves."
+
+"The music has ceased," said Hilda; "I am going now."
+
+There are three streets that, beginning close beside each other, diverge
+from the Piazza del Popolo towards the heart of Rome: on the left, the Via
+del Babuino; on the right, the Via della Ripetta; and between these two
+that worldfamous avenue, the Corso.  It appeared that Miriam and her
+strange companion were passing up the first mentioned of these three, and
+were soon hidden from Hilda and the sculptor.
+
+The two latter left the Pincian by the broad and stately walk that skirts
+along its brow.  Beneath them, from the base of the abrupt descent, the
+city spread wide away in a close contiguity of red-earthen roofs, above
+which rose eminent the domes of a hundred churches, beside here and there
+a tower, and the upper windows of some taller or higher situated palace,
+looking down on a multitude of palatial abodes.  At a distance, ascending
+out of the central mass of edifices, they could see the top of the
+Antonine column, and near it the circular roof of the Pantheon looking
+heavenward with its ever-open eye.
+
+Except these two objects, almost everything that they beheld was mediaeval,
+though built, indeed, of the massive old stones and indestructible bricks
+of imperial Rome; for the ruins of the Coliseum, the Golden House, and
+innumerable temples of Roman gods, and mansions of Caesars and senators,
+had supplied the material for all those gigantic hovels, and their walls
+were cemented with mortar of inestimable cost, being made of precious
+antique statues, burnt long ago for this petty purpose.
+
+Rome, as it now exists, has grown up under the Popes, and seems like
+nothing but a heap of broken rubbish, thrown into the great chasm between
+our own days and the Empire, merely to fill it up; and, for the better
+part of two thousand years, its annals of obscure policies, and wars, and
+continually recurring misfortunes, seem also but broken rubbish, as
+compared with its classic history.
+
+If we consider the present city as at all connected with the famous one of
+old, it is only because we find it built over its grave.  A depth of
+thirty feet of soil has covered up the Rome of ancient days, so that it
+lies like the dead corpse of a giant, decaying for centuries, with no
+survivor mighty enough even to bury it, until the dust of all those years
+has gathered slowly over its recumbent form and made a casual sepulchre.
+
+We know not how to characterize, in any accordant and compatible terms,
+the Rome that lies before us; its sunless alleys, and streets of palaces;
+its churches, lined with the gorgeous marbles that were originally
+polished for the adornment of pagan temples; its thousands of evil smells,
+mixed up with fragrance of rich incense, diffused from as many censers;
+its little life, deriving feeble nutriment from what has long been dead.
+Everywhere, some fragment of ruin suggesting the magnificence of a former
+epoch; everywhere, moreover, a Cross,--and nastiness at the foot of it.
+As the sum of all, there are recollections that kindle the soul, and a
+gloom and languor that depress it beyond any depth of melancholic
+sentiment that can be elsewhere known.
+
+Yet how is it possible to say an unkind or irreverential word of Rome?
+The city of ail time, and of all the world!  The spot for which man's
+great life and deeds have done so much, and for which decay has done
+whatever glory and dominion could not do!  At this moment, the evening
+sunshine is flinging its golden mantle over it, making all that we thought
+mean magnificent; the bells of all the churches suddenly ring out, as if
+it were a peal of triumph because Rome is still imperial.
+
+"I sometimes fancy," said Hilda, on whose susceptibility the scene always
+made a strong impression, "that Rome--mere Rome--will crowd everything
+else out of my heart."
+
+"Heaven forbid!"  ejaculated the sculptor.  They had now reached the
+grand stairs that ascend from the Piazza di Spagna to the hither brow of
+the Pincian Hill.  Old Beppo, the millionnaire of his ragged fraternity,
+it is a wonder that no artist paints him as the cripple whom St. Peter
+heals at the Beautiful Gate of the Temple,--was just mounting his donkey
+to depart, laden with the rich spoil of the day's beggary.
+
+Up the stairs, drawing his tattered cloak about his face, came the model,
+at whom Beppo looked askance, jealous of an encroacher on his rightful
+domain.  The figure passed away, however, up the Via Sistina.  In the
+piazza below, near the foot of the magnificent steps, stood Miriam, with
+her eyes bent on the ground, as if she were counting those little, square,
+uncomfortable paving-stones, that make it a penitential pilgrimage to walk
+in Rome.  She kept this attitude for several minutes, and when, at last,
+the importunities of a beggar disturbed her from it, she seemed bewildered
+and pressed her hand upon her brow.
+
+"She has been in some sad dream or other, poor thing!"  said Kenyon
+sympathizingly; "and even now she is imprisoned there in a kind of cage,
+the iron bars of which are made of her own thoughts."
+
+"I fear she is not well," said Hilda.  "I am going down the stairs, and
+will join Miriam."
+
+"Farewell, then," said the sculptor.  "Dear Hilda, this is a perplexed and
+troubled world! It soothes me inexpressibly to think of you in your tower,
+with white doves and white thoughts for your companions, so high above us
+all, and With the Virgin for your household friend.  You know not how far
+it throws its light, that lamp which you keep burning at her shrine!  I
+passed beneath the tower last night, and the ray cheered me, because you
+lighted it."
+
+"It has for me a religious significance," replied Hilda quietly, "and yet
+I am no Catholic."
+
+They parted, and Kenyon made haste along the Via Sistina, in the hope of
+overtaking the model, whose haunts and character he was anxious to
+investigate, for Miriam's sake.  He fancied that he saw him a long way in
+advance, but before he reached the Fountain of the Triton the dusky figure
+had vanished.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+
+A SCULPTOR'S STUDIO
+
+
+About this period, Miriam seems to have been goaded by a weary
+restlessness that drove her abroad on any errand or none.  She went one
+morning to visit Kenyon in his studio, whither he had invited her to see a
+new statue, on which he had staked many hopes, and which was now almost
+completed in the clay.  Next to Hilda, the person for whom Miriam felt
+most affection and confidence was Kenyon; and in all the difficulties that
+beset her life, it was her impulse to draw near Hilda for feminine
+sympathy, and the sculptor for brotherly counsel.
+
+Yet it was to little purpose that she approached the edge of the voiceless
+gulf between herself and them.  Standing on the utmost verge of that dark
+chasm, she might stretch out her hand, and never clasp a hand of theirs;
+she might strive to call out, "Help, friends!  help!" but, as with
+dreamers when they shout, her voice would perish inaudibly in the
+remoteness that seemed such a little way.  This perception of an infinite,
+shivering solitude, amid which we cannot come close enough to human beings
+to be warmed by them, and where they turn to cold, chilly shapes of mist,
+is one of the most forlorn results of any accident, misfortune, crime, or
+peculiarity of character, that puts an individual ajar with the world.
+Very often, as in Miriam's case, there is an insatiable instinct that
+demands friendship, love, and intimate communion, but is forced to pine in
+empty forms; a hunger of the heart, which finds only shadows to feed upon.
+
+Kenyon's studio was in a cross-street, or, rather, an ugly and dirty
+little lane, between the Corso and the Via della Ripetta; and though chill,
+narrow, gloomy, and bordered with tall and shabby structures, the lane
+was not a whit more disagreeable than nine tenths of the Roman streets.
+Over the door of one of the houses was a marble tablet, bearing an
+inscription, to the purport that the sculpture-rooms within had formerly
+been occupied by the illustrious artist Canova.  In these precincts (which
+Canova's genius was not quite of a character to render sacred, though it
+certainly made them interesting) the young American sculptor had now
+established himself.
+
+The studio of a sculptor is generally but a rough and dreary-looking place,
+with a good deal the aspect, indeed, of a stone-mason's workshop.  Bare
+floors of brick or plank, and plastered walls,--an old chair or two, or
+perhaps only a block of marble (containing, however, the possibility of
+ideal grace within it) to sit down upon; some hastily scrawled sketches of
+nude figures on the whitewash of the wall.  These last are probably the
+sculptor's earliest glimpses of ideas that may hereafter be solidified
+into imperishable stone, or perhaps may remain as impalpable as a dream.
+Next there are a few very roughly modelled little figures in clay or
+plaster, exhibiting the second stage of the idea as it advances towards a
+marble immortality; and then is seen the exquisitely designed shape of
+clay, more interesting than even the final marble, as being the intimate
+production of the sculptor himself, moulded throughout with his loving
+hands, and nearest to his imagination and heart.  In the plaster-cast,
+from this clay model, the beauty of the statue strangely disappears, to
+shine forth again with pure white radiance, in the precious marble of
+Carrara.  Works in all these stages of advancement, and some with the
+final touch upon them, might be found in Kenyon's studio.
+
+Here might be witnessed the process of actually chiselling the marble,
+with which (as it is not quite satisfactory to think) a sculptor in these
+days has very little to do.  In Italy, there is a class of men whose
+merely mechanical skill is perhaps more exquisite than was possessed by
+the ancient artificers, who wrought out the designs of Praxiteles; or,
+very possibly, by Praxiteles himself.  Whatever of illusive representation
+can be effected in marble, they are capable of achieving, if the object be
+before their eyes.  The sculptor has but to present these men with a
+plaster-cast of his design, and a sufficient block of marble, and tell
+them that the figure is imbedded in the stone, and must be freed from its
+encumbering superfluities; and, in due time, without the necessity of his
+touching the work with his own finger, he will see before him the statue
+that is to make him renowned.  His creative power has wrought it with a
+word.
+
+In no other art, surely, does genius find such effective instruments, and
+so happily relieve itself of the drudgery, of actual performance; doing
+wonderfully nice things by the hands of other people, when it may be
+suspected they could not always be done by the sculptor's own.  And how
+much of the admiration which our artists get for their buttons and
+buttonholes, their shoe-ties, their neckcloths,--and these, at our present
+epoch of taste, make a large share of the renown,--would be abated, if we
+were generally aware that the sculptor can claim no credit for such pretty
+performances, as immortalized in marble!  They are not his work, but that
+of some nameless machine in human shape.
+
+Miriam stopped an instant in an antechamber, to look at a half-finished
+bust, the features of which seemed to be struggling out of the stone; and,
+as it were, scattering and dissolving its hard substance by the glow of
+feeling and intelligence.  As the skilful workman gave stroke after stroke
+of the chisel with apparent carelessness, but sure effect, it was
+impossible not to think that the outer marble was merely an extraneous
+environment; the human countenance within its embrace must have existed
+there since the limestone ledges of Carrara were first made.  Another
+bust was nearly completed, though still one of Kenyon's most trustworthy
+assistants was at work, giving delicate touches, shaving off an impalpable
+something, and leaving little heaps of marble dust to attest it.
+
+"As these busts in the block of marble," thought Miriam, "so does our
+individual fate exist in the limestone of time.  We fancy that we carve it
+out; but its ultimate shape is prior to all our action."
+
+Kenyon was in the inner room, but, hearing a step in the antechamber, he
+threw a veil over what he was at work upon, and came out to receive his
+visitor.  He was dressed in a gray blouse, with a little cap on the top of
+his head; a costume which became him better than tho formal garments which
+he wore whenever he passed out of his own domains.  The sculptor had a
+face which, when time had done a little more for it, would offer a worthy
+subject for as good an artist as himself: features finely cut, as if
+already marble; an ideal forehead, deeply set eyes, and a mouth much
+hidden in a lightbrown beard, but apparently sensitive and delicate.
+
+"I will not offer you my hand," said he; "it is grimy with Cleopatra's
+clay."
+
+"No; I will not touch clay; it is earthy and human," answered Miriam.  "I
+have come to try whether there is any calm and coolness among your marbles.
+My own art is too nervous, too passionate, too full of agitation, for me
+to work at it whole days together, without intervals of repose.  So, what
+have you to show me?"
+
+"Pray look at everything here," said Kenyon.  "I love to have painters see
+my work.  Their judgment is unprejudiced, and more valuable than that of
+the world generally, from the light which their own art throws on mine.
+More valuable, too, than that of my brother sculptors, who never judge me
+fairly,--nor I them, perhaps."
+
+To gratify him, Miriam looked round at the specimens in marble or plaster,
+of which there were several in the room, comprising originals or casts of
+most of the designs that Kenyon had thus far produced.  He was still too
+young to have accumulated a large gallery of such things.  What he had to
+show were chiefly the attempts and experiments, in various directions, of
+a beginner in art, acting as a stern tutor to himself, and profiting more
+by his failures than by any successes of which he was yet capable.  Some
+of them, however, had great merit; and in the pure, fine glow of the new
+marble, it may be, they dazzled the judgment into awarding them higher
+praise than they deserved.  Miriam admired the statue of a beautiful youth,
+a pearlfisher; who had got entangled in the weeds at the bottom of the
+sea, and lay dead among the pearl-oysters, the rich shells, and the
+seaweeds, all of like value to him now.
+
+"The poor young man has perished among the prizes that he sought,"
+remarked she.  "But what a strange efficacy there is in death!  If we
+cannot all win pearls, it causes an empty shell to satisfy us just as well.
+I like this statue, though it is too cold and stern in its moral lesson;
+and, physically, the form has not settled itself into sufficient repose."
+
+In another style, there was a grand, calm head of Milton, not copied from
+any one bust or picture, yet more authentic than any of them, because all
+known representations of the poet had been profoundly studied, and solved
+in the artist's mind.  The bust over the tomb in Grey Friars Church, the
+original miniatures and pictures, wherever to be found, had mingled each
+its special truth in this one work; wherein, likewise, by long perusal and
+deep love of the Paradise Lost, the Comus, the Lycidas, and L'Allegro, the
+sculptor had succeeded, even better than he knew, in spiritualizing his
+marble with the poet's mighty genius.  And this was a great thing to have
+achieved, such a length of time after the dry bones and dust of Milton
+were like those of any other dead man.
+
+There were also several portrait-busts, comprising those of two or three
+of the illustrious men of our own country, whom Kenyon, before he left
+America, had asked permission to model.  He had done so, because he
+sincerely believed that, whether he wrought the busts in marble or bronze,
+the one would corrode and the other crumble in the long lapse of time,
+beneath these great men's immortality.  Possibly, however, the young
+artist may have underestimated the durability of his material.  Other
+faces there were, too, of men who (if the brevity of their remembrance,
+after death, can be augured from their little value in life) should have
+been represented in snow rather than marble.  Posterity will be puzzled
+what to do with busts like these, the concretions and petrifactions of a
+vain selfestimate; but will find, no doubt, that they serve to build into
+stone walls, or burn into quicklime, as well as if the marble had never
+been blocked into the guise of human heads.
+
+But it is an awful thing, indeed, this endless endurance, this almost
+indestructibility, of a marble bust!  Whether in our own case, or that of
+other men, it bids us sadly measure the little, little time during which
+our lineaments are likely to be of interest to any human being.  It is
+especially singular that Americans should care about perpetuating
+themselves in this mode.  The brief duration of our families, as a
+hereditary household, renders it next to a certainty that the
+great-grandchildren will not know their father's grandfather, and that
+half a century hence at furthest, the hammer of the auctioneer will thump
+its knock-down blow against his blockhead, sold at so much for the pound
+of stone!  And it ought to make us shiver, the idea of leaving our
+features to be a dusty-white ghost among strangers of another generation,
+who will take our nose between their thumb and fingers (as we have seen
+men do by Caesar's), and infallibly break it off if they can do so without
+detection!
+
+"Yes," said Miriam, who had been revolving some such thoughts as the above,
+"it is a good state of mind for mortal man, when he is content to leave
+no more definite memorial than the grass, which will sprout kindly and
+speedily over his grave, if we do not make the spot barren with marble.
+Methinks, too, it will be a fresher and better world, when it flings off
+this great burden of stony memories, which the ages have deemed it a piety
+to heap upon its back."
+
+"What you say," remarked Kenyon, "goes against my whole art.  Sculpture,
+and the delight which men naturally take in it, appear to me a proof that
+it is good to work with all time before our view."
+
+"Well, well," answered Miriam, "I must not quarrel with you for flinging
+your heavy stones at poor Posterity; and, to say the truth, I think you
+are as likely to hit the mark as anybody.  These busts, now, much as I
+seem to scorn them, make me feel as if you were a magician..  You turn
+feverish men into cool, quiet marble.  What a blessed change for them!
+Would you could do as much for me!"
+
+"O, gladly!"  cried Kenyon, who had long wished to model that beautiful
+and most expressive face.  "When will you begin to sit?"
+
+"Poh!  that was not what I meant," said Miriam.  "Come, show me something
+else."
+
+"Do you recognize this?"  asked the sculptor.
+
+He took out of his desk a little old-fashioned ivory coffer, yellow with
+age; it was richly carved with antique figures and foliage; and had Kenyon
+thought fit to say that Benvenuto Cellini wrought this precious box, the
+skill and elaborate fancy of the work would by no means have discredited
+his word, nor the old artist's fame.  At least, it was evidently a
+production of Benvenuto's school and century, and might once have been the
+jewel-case of some grand lady at the court of the De' Medici.
+
+Lifting the lid, however, no blaze of diamonds was disclosed, but only,
+lapped in fleecy cotton, a small, beautifully shaped hand, most delicately
+sculptured in marble.  Such loving care and nicest art had been lavished
+here, that the palm really seemed to have a tenderness in its very
+substance.  Touching those lovely fingers,--had the jealous sculptor
+allowed you to touch,--you could hardly believe that a virgin warmth would
+not steal from them into your heart.
+
+"Ah, this is very beautiful!"  exclaimed Miriam, with a genial smile.  "It
+is as good in its way as Loulie's hand with its baby-dimples, which Powers
+showed me at Florence, evidently valuing it as much as if he had wrought
+it out of a piece of his great heart.  As good as Harriet Hosmer's clasped
+hands of Browning and his wife, symbolizing the individuality and heroic
+union of two high, poetic lives!  Nay, I do not question that it is better
+than either of those, because you must have wrought it passionately, in
+spite of its maiden palm and dainty fingertips."
+
+"Then you do recognize it?"  asked Kenyon.
+
+"There is but one right hand on earth that could have supplied the model,"
+answered Miriam; "so small and slender, so perfectly symmetrical, and yet
+with a character of delicate energy.  I have watched it a hundred times at
+its work; but I did not dream that you had won Hilda so far!  How have you
+persuaded that shy maiden to let you take her hand in marble?"
+
+"Never!  She never knew it!"  hastily replied Kenyon, anxious to vindicate
+his mistress's maidenly reserve.  "I stole it from her.  The hand is a
+reminiscence.  After gazing at it so often, and even holding it once for
+an instant, when Hilda was not thinking of me, I should be a bungler
+indeed, if I could not now reproduce it to something like the life."
+
+"May you win the original one day!"  said Miriam kindly.
+
+"I have little ground to hope it," answered the sculptor despondingly;
+"Hilda does not dwell in our mortal atmosphere; and gentle and soft as she
+appears, it will be as difficult to win her heart as to entice down a
+white bird from its sunny freedom in the sky.  It is strange, with all her
+delicacy and fragility, the impression she makes of being utterly
+sufficient to herself.  No; I shall never win her.  She is abundantly
+capable of sympathy, and delights to receive it, but she has no need of
+love."
+
+"I partly agree with you," said Miriam.  "It is a mistaken idea, which men
+generally entertain, that nature has made women especially prone to throw
+their whole being into what is technically called love.  We have, to say
+the least, no more necessity for it than yourselves; only we have nothing
+else to do with our hearts.  When women have other objects in life, they
+are not apt to fall in love.  I can think of many women distinguished in
+art, literature, and science,--and multitudes whose hearts and minds find
+good employment in less ostentatious ways,--who lead high, lonely lives,
+and are conscious of no sacrifice so far as your sex is concerned."
+
+"And Hilda will be one of these!"  said Kenyon sadly; "the thought makes
+me shiver for myself, and and for her, too."
+
+"Well," said Miriam, smiling, "perhaps she may sprain the delicate wrist
+which you have sculptured to such perfection.  In that case you may hope.
+These old masters to whom she has vowed herself, and whom her slender hand
+and woman's heart serve so faithfully, are your only rivals."
+
+The sculptor sighed as he put away the treasure of Hilda's marble hand
+into the ivory coffer, and thought how slight was the possibility that he
+should ever feel responsive to his own the tender clasp of the original.
+He dared not even kiss the image that he himself had made: it had assumed
+its share of Hilda's remote and shy divinity.
+
+"And now," said Miriam, "show me the new statue which you asked me hither
+to see."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+
+CLEOPATRA
+
+
+My new statue!"  said Kenyon, who had positively forgotten it in the
+thought of Hilda; "here it is, under this veil." "Not a nude figure, I
+hope," observed Miriam.  "Every young sculptor seems to think that he must
+give the world some specimen of indecorous womanhood, and call it Eve,
+Venus, a Nymph, or any name that may apologize for a lack of decent
+clothing.  I am weary, even more than I am ashamed, of seeing such things.
+Nowadays people are as good as born in their clothes, and there is
+practically not a nude human being in existence.  An artist, therefore, as
+you must candidly confess, cannot sculpture nudity with a pure heart, if
+only because he is compelled to steal guilty glimpses at hired models.
+The marble inevitably loses its chastity under such circumstances.  An old
+Greek sculptor, no doubt, found his models in the open sunshine, and among
+pure and princely maidens, and thus the nude statues of antiquity are as
+modest as violets, and sufficiently draped in their own beauty.  But as
+for Mr. Gibson's colored Venuses (stained, I believe, with tobacco juice),
+and all other nudities of to-day, I really do not understand what they
+have to say to this generation, and would be glad to see as many heaps of
+quicklime in their stead."
+
+"You are severe upon the professors of my art," said Kenyon, half smiling,
+half seriously; "not that you are wholly wrong, either.  We are bound to
+accept drapery of some kind, and make the best of it.  But what are we to
+do? Must we adopt the costume of to-day, and carve, for example, a Venus
+in a hoop-petticoat?"
+
+"That would be a boulder, indeed!"  rejoined Miriam, laughing.  "But the
+difficulty goes to confirm me in my belief that, except for portrait-busts,
+sculpture has no longer a right to claim any place among living arts.  It
+has wrought itself out, and come fairly to an end.  There is never a new
+group nowadays; never even so much as a new attitude.  Greenough (I take
+my examples among men of merit) imagined nothing new; nor Crawford either,
+except in the tailoring line.  There are not, as you will own, more than
+half a dozen positively original statues or groups in the world, and these
+few are of immemorial antiquity.  A person familiar with the Vatican, the
+Uffizzi Gallery, the Naples Gallery, and the Louvre, will at once refer
+any modern production to its antique prototype; which, moreover, had begun
+to get out of fashion, even in old Roman days."
+
+"Pray stop, Miriam," cried Kenyon, "or I shall fling away the chisel
+forever!"
+
+"Fairly own to me, then, my friend," rejoined Miriam, whose disturbed mind
+found a certain relief in this declamation, "that you sculptors are, of
+necessity, the greatest plagiarists in the world."
+
+"I do not own it," said Kenyon, "yet cannot utterly contradict you, as
+regards the actual state of the art.  But as long as the Carrara quarries
+still yield pure blocks, and while my own country has marble mountains,
+probably as fine in quality, I shall steadfastly believe that future
+sculptors will revive this noblest of the beautiful arts, and people the
+world with new shapes of delicate grace and massive grandeur.  Perhaps,"
+he added, smiling, "mankind will consent to wear a more manageable costume;
+or, at worst, we sculptors shall get the skill to make broadcloth
+transparent, and render a majestic human character visible through the
+coats and trousers of the present day."
+
+"Be it so!"  said Miriam; "you are past my counsel.  Show me the veiled
+figure, which, I am afraid, I have criticised beforehand.  To make amends,
+I am in the mood to praise it now."
+
+But, as Kenyon was about to take the cloth off the clay model, she laid
+her hand on his arm.
+
+"Tell me first what is the subject," said she, "for I have sometimes
+incurred great displeasure from members of your brotherhood by being too
+obtuse to puzzle out the purport of their productions.  It is so difficult,
+you know, to compress and define a character or story, and make it patent
+at a glance, within the narrow scope attainable by sculpture!  Indeed, I
+fancy it is still the ordinary habit with sculptors, first to finish their
+group of statuary,--in such development as the particular block of marble
+will allow,--and then to choose the subject; as John of Bologna did with
+his Rape of the Sabines.  Have you followed that good example?"
+
+"No; my statue is intended for Cleopatra," replied Kenyon, a little
+disturbed by Miriam's raillery.  "The special epoch of her history you
+must make out for yourself."
+
+He drew away the cloth that had served to keep the moisture of the clay
+model from being exhaled.  The sitting figure of a woman was seen.  She
+was draped from head to foot in a costume minutely and scrupulously
+studied from that of ancient Egypt, as revealed by the strange sculpture
+of that country, its coins, drawings, painted mummy-cases, and whatever
+other tokens have been dug out of its pyramids, graves, and catacombs.
+Even the stiff Egyptian head-dress was adhered to, but had been softened
+into a rich feminine adornment, without losing a particle of its truth.
+Difficulties that might well have seemed insurmountable had been
+courageously encountered and made flexible to purposes of grace and
+dignity; so that Cleopatra sat attired in a garb proper to her historic
+and queenly state, as a daughter of the Ptolemies, and yet such as the
+beautiful woman would have put on as best adapted to heighten the
+magnificence of her charms, and kindle a tropic fire in the cold eyes of
+Octavius.
+
+A marvellous repose--that rare merit in statuary, except it be the lumpish
+repose native to the block of stone--was diffused throughout the figure.
+The spectator felt that Cleopatra had sunk down out of the fever and
+turmoil of her life, and for one instant--as it were, between two pulse
+throbs--had relinquished all activity, and was resting throughout every
+vein and muscle.  It was the repose of despair, indeed; for Octavius had
+seen her, and remained insensible to her enchantments.  But still there
+was a great smouldering furnace deep down in the woman's heart.  The
+repose, no doubt, was as complete as if she were never to stir hand or
+foot again; and yet, such was the creature's latent energy and fierceness,
+she might spring upon you like a tigress, and stop the very breath that
+you were now drawing midway in your throat.
+
+The face was a miraculous success.  The sculptor had not shunned to give
+the full Nubian lips, and other characteristics of the Egyptian
+physiognomy.  His courage and integrity had been abundantly rewarded; for
+Cleopatra's beauty shone out richer, warmer, more triumphantly beyond
+comparison, than if, shrinking timidly from the truth, he had chosen the
+tame Grecian type.  The expression was of profound, gloomy, heavily
+revolving thought; a glance into her past life and present emergencies,
+while her spirit gathered itself up for some new struggle, or was getting
+sternly reconciled to impending doom.  In one view, there was a certain
+softness and tenderness,--how breathed into the statue, among so many
+strong and passionate elements, it is impossible to say.  Catching another
+glimpse, you beheld her as implacable as a stone and cruel as fire.
+
+In a word, all Cleopatra--fierce, voluptuous, passionate, tender, wicked,
+terrible, and full of poisonous and rapturous enchantment--was kneaded
+into what, only a week or two before, had been a lump of wet clay from the
+Tiber.  Soon, apotheosized in an indestructible material, she would be
+one of the images that men keep forever, finding a heat in them which does
+not cool down, throughout the centuries?
+
+"What a woman is this!"  exclaimed Miriam, after a long pause.  "Tell me,
+did she ever try, even while you were creating her, to overcome you with
+her fury or her love?  Were you not afraid to touch her, as she grew more
+and more towards hot life beneath your hand? My dear friend, it is a great
+work!  How have you learned to do it?"
+
+"It is the concretion of a good deal of thought, emotion, and toil of
+brain and hand," said Kenyon, not without a perception that his work was
+good; "but I know not how it came about at last.  I kindled a great fire
+within my mind, and threw in the material,--as Aaron threw the gold of the
+Israelites into the furnace,--and in the midmost heat uprose Cleopatra, as
+you see her."
+
+"What I most marvel at," said Miriam, "is the womanhood that you have so
+thoroughly mixed up with all those seemingly discordant elements.  Where
+did you get that secret?  You never found it in your gentle Hilda, yet I
+recognize its truth."
+
+"No, surely, it was not in Hilda," said Kenyon.  "Her womanhood is of the
+ethereal type, and incompatible with any shadow of darkness or evil."
+
+"You are right," rejoined Miriam; "there are women of that ethereal type,
+as you term it, and Hilda is one of them.  She would die of her first
+wrong-doing,--supposing for a moment that she could be capable of doing
+wrong.  Of sorrow, slender as she seems, Hilda might bear a great burden;
+of sin, not a feather's weight.  Methinks now, were it my doom, I could
+bear either, or both at once; but my conscience is still as white as
+Hilda's.  Do you question it?"
+
+"Heaven forbid, Miriam!"  exclaimed the sculptor.
+
+He was startled at the strange turn which she had so suddenly given to the
+conversation.  Her voice, too,--so much emotion was stifled rather than
+expressed in it, sounded unnatrural.
+
+"O, my friend," cried she, with sudden passion, "will you be my friend
+indeed?  I am lonely, lonely, lonely!  There is a secret in my heart that
+burns me,--that tortures me! Sometimes I fear to go mad of it; sometimes I
+hope to die of it; but neither of the two happens.  Ah, if I could but
+whisper it to only one human soul!  And you--you see far into womanhood;
+you receive it widely into your large view.  Perhaps--perhaps, but Heaven
+only knows, you might understand me!  O, let me speak!"
+
+"Miriam, dear friend," replied the sculptor, "if I can help you, speak
+freely, as to a brother."
+
+"Help me?  No!"  said Miriam.
+
+Kenyon's response had been perfectly frank and kind; and yet the subtlety
+of Miriam's emotion detected a certain reserve and alarm in his warmly
+expressed readiness to hear her story.  In his secret soul, to say the
+truth, the sculptor doubted whether it were well for this poor, suffering
+girl to speak what she so yearned to say, or for him to listen.  If there
+were any active duty of friendship to be performed, then, indeed, he would
+joyfully have come forward to do his best.  But if it were only a pent-up
+heart that sought an outlet?  in that case it was by no means so certain
+that a confession would do good.  The more her secret struggled and fought
+to be told, the more certain would it be to change all former relations
+that had subsisted between herself and the friend to whom she might reveal
+it.  Unless he could give her all the sympathy, and just the kind of
+sympathy that the occasion required, Miriam would hate him by and by, and
+herself still more, if he let her speak.
+
+This was what Kenyon said to himself; but his reluctance, after all, and
+whether he were conscious of it or no, resulted from a suspicion that had
+crept into his heart and lay there in a dark corner.  Obscure as it was,
+when Miriam looked into his eyes, she detected it at once.
+
+"Ah, I shall hate you!"  cried she, echoing the thought which he had not
+spoken; she was half choked with the gush of passion that was thus turned
+back upon her.  "You are as cold and pitiless as your own marble."
+
+"No; but full of sympathy, God knows!" replied he.
+
+In truth, his suspicions, however warranted by the mystery in which Miriam
+was enveloped, had vanished in the earnestness of his kindly and sorrowful
+emotion.  He was now ready to receive her trust.
+
+"Keep your sympathy, then, for sorrows that admit of such solace," said
+she, making a strong effort to compose herself.  "As for my griefs, I know
+how to manage them.  It was all a mistake: you can do nothing for me,
+unless you petrify me into a marble companion for your Cleopatra there;
+and I am not of her sisterhood, I do.  assure you.  Forget this foolish
+scene, my friend, and never let me see a reference to it in your eyes when
+they meet mine hereafter."
+
+"Since you desire it, all shall be forgotten," answered the sculptor,
+pressing her hand as she departed; "or, if ever I can serve you, let my
+readiness to do so be remembered.  Meanwhile, dear Miriam, let us meet in
+the same clear, friendly light as heretofore."
+
+"You are less sincere than I thought you," said Miriam, "if you try to
+make me think that there will be no change."
+
+As he attended her through the antechamber, she pointed to the statue of
+the pearl-diver.
+
+"My secret is not a pearl," said she; "yet a man might drown himself in
+plunging after it."
+
+After Kenyon had closed the door, she went wearily down the staircase, but
+paused midway, as if debating with herself whether to return.
+
+"The mischief was done," thought she; "and I might as well have had the
+solace that ought to come with it.  I have lost,--by staggering a little
+way beyond the mark, in the blindness of my distress, I have lost, as we
+shall hereafter find, the genuine friendship of this clear-minded,
+honorable, true-hearted young man, and all for nothing.  What if I should
+go back this moment and compel him to listen?"
+
+She ascended two or three of the stairs, but again paused, murmured to
+herself, and shook her head.
+
+"No, no, no," she thought; "and I wonder how I ever came to dream of it.
+Unless I had his heart for my own,--and that is Hilda's, nor would I steal
+it from her,--it should never be the treasure Place of my secret.  It is
+no precious pearl, as I just now told him; but my dark-red carbuncle--red
+as blood--is too rich a gem to put into a stranger's casket."
+
+She went down the stairs, and found her shadow waiting for her in the
+street.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+
+AN AESTHETIC COMPANY
+
+
+On the evening after Miriam's visit to Kenyon's studio, there was an
+assemblage composed almost entirely of Anglo-Saxons, and chiefly of
+American artists, with a sprinkling of their English brethren; and some
+few of the tourists who still lingered in Rome, now that Holy Week was
+past.  Miriam, Hilda, and the sculptor were all three present, and with
+them Donatello, whose life was so far turned from fits natural bent that,
+like a pet spaniel, he followed his beloved mistress wherever he could
+gain admittance.
+
+The place of meeting was in the palatial, but somewhat faded and gloomy
+apartment of an eminent member of the aesthetic body.  It was no more
+formal an occasion than one of those weekly receptions, common among the
+foreign residents of Rome, at which pleasant people--or disagreeable ones,
+as the case may be--encounter one another with little ceremony.
+
+If anywise interested in art, a man must be difficult to please who cannot
+find fit companionship among a crowd of persons, whose ideas and pursuits
+all tend towards the general purpose of enlarging the world's stock of
+beautiful productions.
+
+One of the chief causes that make Rome the favorite residence of
+artists--their ideal home which they sigh for in advance, and are so loath
+to migrate from, after once breathing its enchanted air--is, doubtless,
+that they there find themselves in force, and are numerous enough to
+create a congenial atmosphere.  In every other clime they are isolated
+strangers; in this land of art, they are free citizens.
+
+Not that, individually, or in the mass, there appears to be any large
+stock of mutual affection among the brethren of the chisel and the pencil.
+On the contrary, it will impress the shrewd observer that the jealousies
+and petty animosities, which the poets of our day have flung aside, still
+irritate and gnaw into the hearts of this kindred class of imaginative men.
+It is not difficult to suggest reasons why this should be the fact.  The
+public, in whose good graces lie the sculptor's or the painter's prospects
+of success, is infinitely smaller than the public to which literary men
+make their appeal.  It is composed of a very limited body of wealthy
+patrons; and these, as the artist well knows, are but blind judges in
+matters that require the utmost delicacy of perception.  Thus, success in
+art is apt to become partly an affair of intrigue; and it is almost
+inevitable that even a gifted artist should look askance at his gifted
+brother's fame, and be chary of the good word that might help him to sell
+still another statue or picture.  You seldom hear a painter heap generous
+praise on anything in his special line of art; a sculptor never has a
+favorable eye for any marble but his own.
+
+Nevertheless, in spite of all these professional grudges, artists are
+conscious of a social warmth from each other's presence and contiguity.
+They shiver at the remembrance of their lonely studios in the
+unsympathizing cities of their native land.  For the sake of such
+brotherhood as they can find, more than for any good that they get from
+galleries, they linger year after year in Italy, while their originality
+dies out of them, or is polished away as a barbarism.
+
+The company this evening included several men and women whom the world has
+heard of, and many others, beyond all question, whom it ought to know.  It
+would be a pleasure to introduce them upon our humble pages, name by name,
+and had we confidence enough in our own taste--to crown each
+well-deserving brow according to its deserts.  The opportunity is tempting,
+but not easily manageable, and far too perilous, both in respect to those
+individuals whom we might bring forward, and the far greater number that
+must needs be left in the shade.  Ink, moreover, is apt to have a
+corrosive quality, and might chance to raise a blister, instead of any
+more agreeable titillation, on skins so sensitive as those of artists.  We
+must therefore forego the delight of illuminating this chapter with
+personal allusions to men whose renown glows richly on canvas, or gleams
+in the white moonlight of marble.
+
+OtherWise we might point to an artist who has studied Nature with such
+tender love that she takes him to her intimacy, enabling him to reproduce
+her in landscapes that seem the reality of a better earth, and yet are but
+the truth of the very scenes around us, observed by the painter's insight
+and interpreted for us by his skill.  By his magic, the moon throws her
+light far out of the picture, and the crimson of the summer night
+absolutely glimmers on the beholder's face.  Or we might indicate a
+poetpainter, whose song has the vividness of picture, and whose canvas is
+peopled with angels, fairies, and water sprites, done to the ethereal life,
+because he saw them face to face in his poetic mood.  Or we might bow
+before an artist, who has wrought too sincerely, too religiously, with too
+earnest a feeling, and too delicate a touch, for the world at once to
+recognize how much toil and thought are compressed into the stately brow
+of Prospero, and Miranda's maiden loveliness; or from what a depth within
+this painter's heart the Angel is leading forth St.  Peter.
+
+Thus it would be easy to go on, perpetrating a score of little
+epigrammatical allusions, like the above, all kindly meant, but none of
+them quite hitting the mark, and often striking where they were not aimed.
+It may be allowable to say, however, that American art is much better
+represented at Rome in the pictorial than in the sculpturesque department.
+Yet the men of marble appear to have more weight with the public than the
+men of canvas; perhaps on account of the greater density and solid
+substance of the material in which they work, and the sort of physical
+advantage which their labors thus acquire over the illusive unreality of
+color.  To be a sculptor seems a distinction in itself; whereas a painter
+is nothing, unless individually eminent.
+
+One sculptor there was, an Englishman, endowed with a beautiful fancy, and
+possessing at his fingers' ends the capability of doing beautiful things.
+He was a quiet, simple, elderly personage, with eyes brown and bright,
+under a slightly impending brow, and a Grecian profile, such as he might
+have cut with his own chisel.  He had spent his life, for forty years, in
+making Venuses, Cupids, Bacchuses, and a vast deal of other marble progeny
+of dreamwork, or rather frostwork: it was all a vapory exhalation out of
+the Grecian mythology, crystallizing on the dull window-panes of to-day.
+Gifted with a more delicate power than any other man alive, he had
+foregone to be a Christian reality, and perverted himself into a Pagan
+idealist, whose business or efficacy, in our present world, it would be
+exceedingly difficult to define.  And, loving and reverencing the pure
+material in which he wrought, as surely this admirable sculptor did, he
+had nevertheless robbed the marble of its chastity, by giving it an
+artificial warmth of hue.  Thus it became a sin and shame to look at his
+nude goddesses.  They had revealed themselves to his imagination, no doubt,
+with all their deity about them; but, bedaubed with buff color, they
+stood forth to the eyes of the profane in the guise of naked women.  But,
+whatever criticism may be ventured on his style, it was good to meet a man
+so modest and yet imbued with such thorough and simple conviction of his
+own right principles and practice, and so quietly satisfied that his kind
+of antique achievement was all that sculpture could effect for modern life.
+
+
+This eminent person's weight and authority among his artistic brethren
+were very evident; for beginning unobtrusively to utter himself on a topic
+of art, he was soon the centre of a little crowd of younger sculptors.
+They drank in his wisdom, as if it would serve all the purposes of
+original inspiration; he, meanwhile, discoursing with gentle calmness, as
+if there could possibly be no other side, and often ratifying, as it were,
+his own conclusions by a mildly emphatic "Yes."
+
+The veteran Sculptor's unsought audience was composed mostly of our own
+countrymen.  It is fair to say, that they were a body of very dexterous
+and capable artists, each of whom had probably given the delighted public
+a nude statue, or had won credit for even higher skill by the nice carving
+of buttonholes, shoe-ties, coat-seams, shirt-bosoms, and other such
+graceful peculiarities of modern costume.  Smart, practical men they
+doubtless were, and some of them far more than this, but still not
+precisely what an uninitiated person looks for in a sculptor.  A sculptor,
+indeed, to meet the demands which our preconceptions make upon him, should
+be even more indispensably a poet than those who deal in measured verse
+and rhyme.  His material, or instrument, which serves him in the stead of
+shifting and transitory language, is a pure, white, undecaying substance.
+It insures immortality to whatever is wrought in it, and therefore makes
+it a religious obligation to commit no idea to its mighty guardianship,
+save such as may repay the marble for its faithful care, its incorruptible
+fidelity, by warming it with an ethereal life.  Under this aspect, marble
+assumes a sacred character; and no man should dare to touch it unless he
+feels within himself a certain consecration and a priesthood, the only
+evidence of which, for the public eye, will he the high treatment of
+heroic subjects, or the delicate evolution of spiritual, through material
+beauty.
+
+No ideas such as the foregoing--no misgivings suggested by them probably,
+troubled the self-complacency of most of these clever sculptors.  Marble,
+in their view, had no such sanctity as we impute to it.  It was merely a
+sort of white limestone from Carrara, cut into convenient blocks, and
+worth, in that state, about two or three dollars per pound; and it was
+susceptible of being wrought into certain shapes (by their own mechanical
+ingenuity, or that of artisans in their employment) which would enable
+them to sell it again at a much higher figure.  Such men, on the strength
+of some small knack in handling clay, which might have been fitly employed
+in making wax-work, are bold to call themselves sculptors.  How terrible
+should be the thought that the nude woman whom the modern artist patches
+together, bit by bit, from a dozen heterogeneous models, meaning nothing
+by her, shall last as long as the Venus of the Capitol!--that his group
+of--no matter what, since it has no moral or intellectual existence will
+not physically crumble any sooner than the immortal agony of the Laocoon!
+
+Yet we love the artists, in every kind; even these, whose merits we are
+not quite able to appreciate.  Sculptors, painters, crayon sketchers, or
+whatever branch of aesthetics they adopted, were certainly pleasanter
+people, as we saw them that evening, than the average whom we meet in
+ordinary society.  They were not wholly confined within the sordid compass
+of practical life; they had a pursuit which, if followed faithfully out,
+would lead them to the beautiful, and always had a tendency thitherward,
+even if they lingered to gather up golden dross by the wayside.  Their
+actual business (though they talked about it very much as other men talk
+of cotton, politics, flour barrels, and sugar) necessarily illuminated
+their conversation with something akin to the ideal.  So, when the guests
+collected themselves in little groups, here and there, in the wide saloon,
+a cheerful and airy gossip began to be heard.  The atmosphere ceased to be
+precisely that of common life; a hint, mellow tinge, such as we see in
+pictures, mingled itself with the lamplight.
+
+This good effect was assisted by many curious little treasures of art,
+which the host had taken care to strew upon his tables.  They were
+principally such bits of antiquity as the soil of Rome and its
+neighborhood are still rich in; seals, gems, small figures of bronze,
+mediaeval carvings in ivory; things which had been obtained at little cost,
+yet might have borne no inconsiderable value in the museum of a virtuoso.
+
+As interesting as any of these relics was a large portfolio of old
+drawings, some of which, in the opinion of their possessor, bore evidence
+on their faces of the touch of master-hands.  Very ragged and ill
+conditioned they mostly were, yellow with time, and tattered with rough
+usage; and, in their best estate, the designs had been scratched rudely
+with pen and ink, on coarse paper, or, if drawn with charcoal or a pencil,
+were now half rubbed out.  You would not anywhere see rougher and homelier
+things than these.  But this hasty rudeness made the sketches only the
+more valuable; because the artist seemed to have bestirred himself at the
+pinch of the moment, snatching up whatever material was nearest, so as to
+seize the first glimpse of an idea that might vanish in the twinkling of
+an eye.  Thus, by the spell of a creased, soiled, and discolored scrap of
+paper, you were enabled to steal close to an old master, and watch him in
+the very effervescence of his genius.
+
+According to the judgment of several con-, noisseurs, Raphael's own hand
+had communidated its magnetism to one of these sketches; and, if genuine,
+it was evidently his first conception of a favorite Madonna, now hanging
+in the private apartment of the Grand Duke, at Florence.  Another drawing
+was attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, and appeared to be a somewhat varied
+design for his picture of Modesty and Vanity, in the Sciarra Palace.
+There were at least half a dozen others, to which the owner assigned as
+high an origin.  It was delightful to believe in their authenticity, at
+all events; for these things make the spectator more vividly sensible of a
+great painter's power, than the final glow and perfected art of the most
+consummate picture that may have been elaborated from them.  There is an
+effluence of divinity in the first sketch; and there, if anywhere, you
+find the pure light of inspiration, which the subsequent toil of the
+artist serves to bring out in stronger lustre, indeed, but likewise
+adulterates it with what belongs to an inferior mood.  The aroma and
+fragrance of new thoughts were perceptible in these designs, after three
+centuries of wear and tear.  The charm lay partly in their very
+imperfection; for this is suggestive, and sets the imagination at work;
+whereas, the finished picture, if a good one, leaves the spectator nothing
+to do, and, if bad, confuses, stupefies, disenchants, and disheartens him.
+
+Hilda was greatly interested in this rich portfolio.  She lingered so long
+over one particular sketch, that Miriam asked her what discovery she had
+made.
+
+"Look at it carefully," replied Hilda, putting the sketch into her hands.
+"If you take pains to disentangle the design from those pencil~ marks that
+seem to have been scrawled over it, I think you will see something very
+curious."
+
+"It is a hopeless affair, I am afraid," said Miriam.  "I have neither your
+faith, dear Hilda, nor your perceptive faculty.  Fie!  what a blurred
+scrawl it is indeed!"
+
+The drawing had originally been very slight, and had suffered more from
+time and hard usage than almost any other in the collection; it appeared,
+too, that there had been an attempt (perhaps by the very hand that drew
+it) to obliterate the design.  By Hilda's help, however, Miriam pretty
+distinctly made out a winged figure with a drawn sword, and a dragon, or a
+demon, prostrate at his feet.
+
+"I am convinced," said Hilda in a low, reverential tone," that Guido's own
+touches are on that ancient scrap of paper!  If so, it must be his
+original sketch for the picture of the Archangel Michael setting his foot
+upon the demon, in the Church of the Cappuccini.  The composition and
+general arrangement of the sketch are the same with those of the picture;
+the only difference being, that the demon has a more upturned face, and
+scowls vindictively at the Archangel, who turns away his eyes in painful
+disgust."
+
+"No wonder!"  responded Miriam.  "The expression suits the daintiness of
+Michael's character, as Guido represents him.  He never could have looked
+the demon in the face!"
+
+"Miriam!"  exclaimed her friend reproachfully, "you grieve me, and you
+know it, by pretending to speak contemptuously of the most beautiful and
+the divinest figure that mortal painter ever drew."
+
+"Forgive me, Hilda!"  said Miriam.  "You take these matters more
+religiously than I can, for my life.  Guido's Archangel is a fine picture,
+of course, but it never impressed me as it does yOU."
+
+"Well; we will not talk of that," answered Hilda.  "What I wanted you to
+notice, in this sketch, is the face of the demon.  It is entirely unlike
+the demon of the finished picture.  Guido, you know, always affirmed that
+the resemblance to Cardinal Pamfili was either casual or imaginary.  Now,
+here is the face as he first conceived it."
+
+"And a more energetic demon, altogether, than that of the finished picture,"
+said Kenyon, taking the sketch into his hand.  "What a spirit is
+conveyed into the ugliness of this strong, writhing, squirming dragon,
+under the Archangel's foot!  Neither is the face an impossible one.  Upon
+my word, I have seen it somewhere, and on the shoulders of a living man!"
+
+"And so have I," said Hilda.  "It was what struck me from the first."
+
+"Donatello, look at this face!"  cried Kenyon.
+
+The young Italian, as may be supposed, took little interest in matters of
+art, and seldom or never ventured an opinion respecting them.  After
+holding the sketch a single instant in his hand, he flung it from him with
+a shudder of disgust and repugnance, and a frown that had all the
+bitterness of hatred.
+
+"I know the face well!"  whispered he.  "It is Miriam's model!"
+
+It was acknowledged both by Kenyon and Hilda that they had detected, or
+fancied, the resemblance which Donatello so strongly affirmed; and it
+added not a little to the grotesque and weird character which, half
+playfully, half seriously, they assigned to Miriam's attendant, to think
+of him as personating the demon's part in a picture of more than two
+centuries ago.  Had Guido, in his effort to imagine the utmost of sin and
+misery, which his pencil could represent, hit ideally upon just this face?
+Or was it an actual portrait of somebody, that haunted the old master, as
+Miriam was haunted now?  Did the ominous shadow follow him through all the
+sunshine of his earlier career, and into the gloom that gathered about its
+close?  And when Guido died, did the spectre betake himself to those
+ancient sepulchres, there awaiting a new victim, till it was Miriam's
+ill-hap to encounter him?
+
+"I do not acknowledge the resemblance at all," said Miriam, looking
+narrowly at the sketch; "and, as I have drawn the face twenty times, I
+think you will own that I am the best judge."
+
+A discussion here arose, in reference to Guido's Archangel, and it was
+agreed that these four friends should visit the Church of the Cappuccini
+the next morning, and critically examine the picture in question; the
+similarity between it and the sketch being, at all events, a very curious
+circumstance.
+
+It was now a little past ten o'clock, when some of the company, who had
+been standing in a balcony, declared the moonlight to be resplendent.
+They proposed a ramble through the streets, taking in their way some of
+those scenes of ruin which produced their best effects under the splendor
+of the Italian moon.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+
+A MOONLIGHT RAMBLE
+
+
+The proposal for a moonlight ramble was received with acclamation by all
+the younger portion of the company.  They immediately set forth and
+descended from story to story, dimly lighting their way by waxen tapers,
+which are a necessary equipment to those whose thoroughfare, in the
+night-time, lies up and down a Roman staircase.  Emerging from the
+courtyard of the edifice, they looked upward and saw the sky full of light,
+which seemed to have a delicate purple or crimson lustre, or, at least
+some richer tinge than the cold, white moonshine of other skies.  It
+gleamed over the front of the opposite palace, showing the architectural
+ornaments of its cornice and pillared portal, as well as the ironbarred
+basement windows, that gave such a prison-like aspect to the structure,
+and the shabbiness and Squalor that lay along its base.  A cobbler was
+just shutting up his little shop, in the basement of the palace; a cigar
+vender's lantern flared in the blast that came through the archway; a
+French sentinel paced to and fro before the portal; a homeless dog, that
+haunted thereabouts, barked as obstreperously at the party as if he were
+the domestic guardian of the precincts.
+
+The air was quietly full of the noise of falling water, the cause of which
+was nowhere visible, though apparently near at hand.  This pleasant,
+natural sound, not unlike that of a distant cascade in the forest, may be
+heard in many of the Roman streets and piazzas, when the tumult of the
+city is hushed; for consuls, emperors, and popes, the great men of every
+age, have found no better way of immortalizing their memories than by the
+shifting, indestructible, ever new, yet unchanging, upgush and downfall of
+water.  They have written their names in that unstable.element, and proved
+it a more durable record than brass or marble.
+
+"Donatello, you had better take one of those gay, boyish artists for your
+companion," said Miriam, when she found the Italian youth at her side.  "I
+am not now in a merry mood, as when we set all the world a-dancing the
+other afternoon, in the Borghese grounds."
+
+"I never wish to dance any more," answered Donatello.
+
+"What a melancholy was in that tone!"  exclaimed Miriam.  "You are getting
+spoilt in this dreary Rome, and will be as wise and as wretched as all the
+rest of mankind, unless you go back soon to your Tuscan vineyards.  Well;
+give me your arm, then!  But take care that no friskiness comes over you.
+We must walk evenly and heavily to-night!"
+
+The party arranged itself according to its natural affinities or casual
+likings; a sculptor generally choosing a painter, and a painter a
+sculp--tor, for his companion, in preference to brethren of their own art.
+Kenyon would gladly have taken Hilda to himself, and have drawn her a
+little aside from the throng of merry wayfarers.  But she kept near
+Miriam, and seemed, in her gentle and quiet way, to decline a separate
+alliance either with him or any other of her acquaintances.
+
+So they set forth, and had gone but a little way, when the narrow street
+emerged into a piazza, on one side of which, glistening and dimpling in
+the moonlight, was the most famous fountain in Rome.  Its murmur--not to
+say its uproar--had been in the ears of the company, ever since they came
+into the open air.  It was the Fountain of Trevi, which draws its
+precious water from a source far beyond the walls, whence it flows
+hitherward through old subterranean aqueducts, and sparkles forth as pure
+as the virgin who first led Agrippa to its well-spring, by her father's
+door.
+
+"I shall sip as much of this water as the hollow of my hand will hold,"
+said Miriam.
+
+"I am leaving Rome in a few days; and the tradition goes, that a parting
+draught at the Fountain of Trevi insures the traveller's return, whatever
+obstacles and improbabilities may seem to beset him.  Will you drink,
+Donatello?"
+
+"Signorina, what you drink, I drink," said the youth.
+
+They and the rest of the party descended some steps to the water's brim,
+and, after a sip or two, stood gazing at the absurd design of the fountain,
+where some sculptor of Bernini's school had gone absolutely mad in marble.
+It was a great palace front, with niches and many bas-reliefs, out of
+which looked Agrippa's legendary virgin, and several of the allegoric
+sisterhood; while, at the base, appeared Neptune, with his floundering
+steeds, and Tritons blowing their horns about him, and twenty other
+artificial fantasies, which the calm moonlight soothed into better taste
+than was native to them.
+
+And, after all, it was as magnificent a piece of work as ever human skill
+contrived.  At the foot of the palatial facade was strewn, with careful
+art and ordered irregularity, a broad and broken heap of massive rock,
+looking is if it might have lain there since the deluge.  Over a central
+precipice fell the water, in a semicircular cascade; and from a hundred
+crevices, on all sides, snowy jets gushed up, and streams spouted out of
+the mouths and nostrils of stone monsters, and fell in glistening drops;
+while other rivulets, that had run wild, came leaping from one rude step
+to another, over stones that were mossy, slimy, and green with sedge,
+because, in a Century of their wild play, Nature had adopted the Fountain
+of Trevi, with all its elaborate devices, for her own.  Finally, the water,
+tumbling, sparkling, and dashing, with joyous haste and never-ceasing
+murmur, poured itself into a great marble-brimmed reservoir, and filled it
+with a quivering tide; on which was seen, continually, a snowy semicircle
+of momentary foam from the principal cascade, as well as a multitude of
+snow points from smaller jets.  The basin occupied the whole breadth of
+the piazza, whence flights of steps descended to its border.  A boat
+might float, and make voyages from one shore to another in this mimic lake.
+
+
+In the daytime, there is hardly a livelier scene in Rome than the
+neighborhood of the Fountain of Trevi; for the piazza is then filled with
+the stalls of vegetable and fruit dealers, chestnut roasters, cigar
+venders, and other people, whose petty and wandering traffic is transacted
+in the open air.  It is likewise thronged with idlers, lounging over the
+iron railing, and with Forestieri, who came hither to see the famous
+fountain.  Here, also, are seen men with buckets, urchins with cans, and
+maidens (a picture as old as the patriarchal times) bearing their pitchers
+upon their heads.  For the water of Trevi is in request, far and wide, as
+the most refreshing draught for feverish lips, the pleasantest to mingle
+with wine, and the wholesomest to drink, in its native purity, that can
+anywhere be found.  But now, at early midnight, the piazza was a solitude;
+and it was a delight to behold this untamable water, sporting by itself in
+the moonshine, and compelling all the elaborate trivialities of art to
+assume a natural aspect, in accordance with its own powerful simplicity.
+
+"What would be done with this water power," suggested an artist, "if we
+had it in one of our American cities?  Would they employ it to turn the
+machinery of a cotton mill, I wonder?"
+
+"The good people would pull down those rampant marble deities," said
+Kenyon, "and, possibly, they would give me a commission to carve the
+one-and-thirty (is that the number?) sister States, each pouring a silver
+stream from a separate can into one vast basin, which should represent the
+grand reservoir of national prosperity."
+
+"Or, if they wanted a bit of satire," remarked an English artist, "you
+could set those same one-and-thirty States to cleansing the national flag
+of any stains that it may have incurred.  The Roman washerwomen at the
+lavatory yonder, plying their labor in the open air, would serve admirably
+as models."
+
+"I have often intended to visit this fountain by moonlight,", said Miriam,
+"because it was here that the interview took place between Corinne and
+Lord Neville, after their separation and temporary estrangement.  Pray
+come behind me, one of you, and let me try whether the face can be
+recognized in the water."
+
+Leaning over the stone brim of the basin, she heard footsteps stealing
+behind her, and knew that somebody was looking over her shoulder.  The
+moonshine fell directly behind Miriam, illuminating the palace front and
+the whole scene of statues and rocks, and filling the basin, as it were,
+with tremulous and palpable light.  Corinne, it will be remembered, knew
+Lord Neville by the reflection of his face in the water.  In Miriam's case,
+however (owing to the agitation of the water, its transparency, and the
+angle at which she was compelled to lean over), no reflected image
+appeared; nor, from the same causes, would it have been possible for the
+recognition between Corinne and her lover to take place.  The moon, indeed,
+flung Miriam's shadow at the bottom of the basin, as well as two more
+shadows of persons who had followed her, on either side,
+
+"Three shadows!"  exclaimed Miriam--"three separate shadows, all so black
+and heavy that they sink in the water!  There they lie on the bottom, as
+if all three were drowned together.  This shadow on my right is Donatello;
+I know him by his curls, and the turn of his head.  My left-hand
+companion puzzles me; a shapeless mass, as indistinct as the premonition
+of calamity!  Which of you can it be?  Ah!"
+
+She had turned round, while speaking, and saw beside her the strange
+creature whose attendance on her was already familiar, as a marvel and a
+jest; to the whole company of artists.  A general burst of laughter
+followed the recognition; while the model leaned towards Miriam, as she
+shrank from him, and muttered something that was inaudible to those who
+witnessed the scene.  By his gestures, however, they concluded that he was
+inviting her to bathe her hands.
+
+"He cannot be an Italian; at least not a Roman," observed an artist.  "I
+never knew one of them to care about ablution.  See him now!  It is as if
+he were trying to wash off' the time-stains and earthly soil of a thousand
+years!"
+
+Dipping his hands into the capacious washbowl before him, the model rubbed
+them together with the utmost vehemence.  Ever and anon, too, he peeped
+into the water, as if expecting to see the whole Fountain of Trevi turbid
+with the results of his ablution.  Miriam looked at him, some little time,
+with an aspect of real terror, and even imitated him by leaning over to
+peep into the basin.  Recovering herself, she took up some of the water in
+the hollow of her hand, and practised an old form of exorcism by flinging
+it in her persecutor's face.
+
+"In the name of all the Saints," cried she, "vanish, Demon, and let me be
+free of you now and forever!"
+
+"It will not suffice," said some of the mirthful party, "unless the
+Fountain of Trevi gushes with holy water."
+
+In fact, the exorcism was quite ineffectual upon the pertinacious demon,
+or whatever the apparition might be.  Still he washed his brown, bony
+talons; still he peered into the vast basin, as if all the water of that
+great drinking-cup of Rome must needs be stained black or sanguine; and
+still he gesticulated to Miriam to follow his example.  The spectators
+laughed loudly, but yet with a kind of constraint; for the creature's
+aspect was strangely repulsive and hideous.
+
+Miriam felt her arm seized violently by Donatello.  She looked at him, and
+beheld a tigerlike fury gleaming from his wild eyes.
+
+"Bid me drown him!"  whispered he, shuddering between rage and horrible
+disgust.  "You shall hear his death gurgle in another instant!"
+
+"Peace, peace, Donatello!"  said Miriam soothingly, for this naturally
+gentle and sportive being seemed all aflame with animal rage.  "Do him no
+mischief!  He is mad; and we are as mad as he, if we suffer ourselves to
+be disquieted by his antics.  Let us leave him to bathe his hands till the
+fountain run dry, if he find solace and pastime in it.  What is it to you
+or me, Donatello?  There, there!  Be quiet, foolish boy!"
+
+Her tone and gesture were such as she might have used in taming down the
+wrath of a faithful hound, that had taken upon himself to avenge some
+supposed affront to his mistress.  She smoothed the young man's curls
+(for his fierce and sudden fury seemed to bristle among his hair), and
+touched his cheek with her soft palm, till his angry mood was a little
+assuaged.
+
+"Signorina, do I look as when you first knew me?"  asked he, with a heavy,
+tremulous sigh, as they went onward, somewhat apart from their companions.
+"Methinks there has been a change upon me, these many months; and more
+and more, these last few days.  The joy is gone out of my life; all gone!
+all gone!  Feel my hand!  Is it not very hot?  Ah; and my heart burns
+hotter still!"
+
+"My poor Donatello, you are ill!"  said Miriam, with deep sympathy and
+pity.  "This melancholy and sickly Rome is stealing away the rich, joyous
+life that belongs to you.  Go back, my dear friend, to your home among the
+hills, where (as I gather from what you have told me) your days were
+filled with simple and blameless delights.  Have you found aught in the
+world that is worth' what you there enjoyed? Tell me truly, Donatello!"
+
+"Yes!"  replied the young man.
+
+"And what, in Heaven's name?"  asked she.
+
+"This burning pain in my heart," said Donatello; "for you are in the midst
+of it."
+
+By this time, they had left the Fountain of Trevi considerably behind them.
+Little further allusion was made to the scene at its margin; for the
+party regarded Miriam's persecutor as diseased in his wits, and were
+hardly to be surprised by any eccentricity in his deportment.
+
+Threading several narrow streets, they passed through the Piazza of the
+Holy Apostles, and soon came to Trajan's Forum.  All over the surface of
+what once was Rome, it seems to be the effort of Time to bury up the
+ancient city, as if it were a corpse, and he the sexton; so that, in
+eighteen centuries, the soil over its grave has grown very deep, by the
+slow scattering of dust, and the accumulation of more modern decay upon
+older ruin.
+
+This was the fate, also, of Trajan's Forum, until some papal antiquary, a
+few hundred years ago, began to hollow it out again, and disclosed the
+full height of the gigantic column wreathed round with bas-reliefs of the
+old emperor's warlike deeds.  In the area before it stands a grove of
+stone, consisting of the broken and unequal shafts of a vanished temple,
+still keeping a majestic order, and apparently incapable of further
+demolition.  The modern edifices of the piazza (wholly built, no doubt,
+out of the spoil of its old magnificence) look down into the hollow space
+whence these pillars rise.
+
+One of the immense gray granite shafts lay in the piazza, on the verge of
+the area.  It was a great, solid fact of the Past, making old Rome
+actually sensible to the touch and eye; and no study of history, nor force
+of thought, nor magic of song, could so vitally assure us that Rome once
+existed, as this sturdy specimen of what its rulers and people wrought.
+
+"And see!"  said Kenyon, laying his hand upon it, "there is still a polish
+remaining on the hard substance of the pillar; and even now, late as it is,
+I can feel very sensibly the warmth of the noonday sun, which did its
+best to heat it through.  This shaft will endure forever.  The polish of
+eighteen centuries ago, as yet but half rubbed off, and the heat of
+to-day's sunshine, lingering into the night, seem almost equally ephemeral
+in relation to it."
+
+"There is comfort to be found in the pillar," remarked Miriam, "hard and
+heavy as it is.  Lying here forever, as it will, it makes all human
+trouble appear but a momentary annoyance."
+
+"And human happiness as evanescent too," observed Hilda, sighing; "and
+beautiful art hardly less so!  I do not love to think that this dull stone,
+merely by its massiveness, will last infinitely longer than any picture,
+in spite of the spiritual life that ought to give it immortality!"
+
+"My poor little Hilda," said Miriam, kissing her compassionately, "would
+you sacrifice this greatest mortal consolation, which we derive from the
+transitoriness of all things, from the right of saying, in every
+conjecture, 'This, too, will pass away,' would you give up this
+unspeakable boon, for the sake of making a picture eternal?"
+
+Their moralizing strain was interrupted by a demonstration from the rest
+of the party, who, after talking and laughing together, suddenly joined
+their voices, and shouted at full pitch,
+
+"Trajan!  Trajan!"
+
+"Why do you deafen us with such an uproar?"  inquired Miriam.
+
+In truth, the whole piazza had been filled with their idle vociferation;
+the echoes from the surrounding houses reverberating the cry of "Trajan,"
+on all sides; as if there was a great search for that imperial personage,
+and not so much as a handful of his ashes to be found.
+
+"Why, it was a good opportunity to air our voices in this resounding
+piazza," replied one of the artists.  "Besides, we had really some hopes
+of summoning Trajan to look at his column, which, you know, he never saw
+in his lifetime.  Here is your model (who, they say, lived and sinned
+before Trajan's death) still wandering about Rome; and why not the Emperor
+Trajan?"
+
+"Dead emperors have very little delight in their columns, I am afraid,"
+observed Kenyon.  "All that rich sculpture of Trajan's bloody warfare,
+twining from the base of the pillar to its capital, may be but an ugly
+spectacle for his ghostly eyes, if he considers that this huge, storied
+shaft must be laid before the judgment-seat, as a piece of the evidence of
+what he did in the flesh.  If ever I am employed to sculpture a hero's
+monument, I shall think of this, as I put in the bas-reliefs of the
+pedestal!"
+
+"There are sermons in stones," said Hilda thoughtfully, smiling at
+Kenyon's morality; "and especially in the stones of Rome."
+
+The party moved on, but deviated a little from the straight way, in order
+to glance at the ponderous remains of the temple of Mars Ultot, within
+which a convent of nuns is now established,--a dove-cote, in the war-god's
+mansion.  At only a little distance, they passed the portico of a Temple
+of Minerva, most rich and beautiful in architecture, but woefully gnawed
+by time and shattered by violence, besides being buried midway in the
+accumulation of soil, that rises over dead Rome like a flood tide.  Within
+this edifice of antique sanctity, a baker's shop was now established, with
+an entrance on one side; for, everywhere, the remnants of old grandeur and
+divinity have been made available for the meanest necessities of today.
+
+"The baker is just drawing his loaves out of the oven," remarked Kenyon.
+"Do you smell how sour they are?  I should fancy that Minerva (in revenge
+for the desecration of her temple) had slyly poured vinegar into the batch,
+if I did not know that the modern Romans prefer their bread in the
+acetous fermentation."
+
+They turned into the Via Alessandria, and thus gained the rear of the
+Temple of Peace, and, passing beneath its great arches, pursued their way
+along a hedge-bordered lane.  In all probability, a stately Roman street
+lay buried beneath that rustic-looking pathway; for they had now emerged
+from the close and narrow avenues of the modern city, and were treading on
+a soil where the seeds of antique grandeur had not yet produced the
+squalid crop that elsewhere sprouts from them.  Grassy as the lane was, it
+skirted along heaps of shapeless ruin, and the bare site of the vast
+temple that Hadrian planned and built.  It terminated on the edge of a
+somewhat abrupt descent, at the foot of which, with a muddy ditch between,
+rose, in the bright moonlight, the great curving wall and multitudinous
+arches of the Coliseum.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+
+MIRIAM'S TROUBLE
+
+
+As usual of a moonlight evening, several carriages stood at the entrance
+of this famous ruin, and the precincts and interior were anything but a
+solitude.  The French sentinel on duty beneath the principal archway eyed
+our party curiously, but offered no obstacle to their admission.  Within,
+the moonlight filled and flooded the great empty space; it glowed upon
+tier above tier of ruined, grass-grown arches, and made them even too
+distinctly visible.  The splendor of the revelation took away that
+inestimable effect of dimness and mystery by which the imagination might
+be assisted to build a grander structure than the Coliseum, and to shatter
+it with a more picturesque decay.  Byron's celebrated description is
+better than the reality.  He beheld the scene in his mind's eye, through
+the witchery of many intervening years, and faintly illuminated it as if
+with starlight instead of this broad glow of moonshine.
+
+The party of our friends sat down, three or four of them on a prostrate
+column, another on a shapeless lump of marble, once a Roman altar; others
+on the steps of one of the Christian shrines.  Goths and barbarians though
+they were, they chatted as gayly together as if they belonged to the
+gentle and pleasant race of people who now inhabit Italy.  There was much
+pastime and gayety just then in the area of the Coliseum, where so many
+gladiators and Wild beasts had fought and died, and where so much blood of
+Christian martyrs had been lapped up by that fiercest of wild beasts, the
+Roman populace of yore.  Some youths and maidens were running merry races
+across the open space, and playing at hide and seek a little way within
+the duskiness of the ground tier of arches, whence now and then you could
+hear the half-shriek, halflaugh of a frolicsome girl, whom the shadow had
+betrayed into a young man's arms.  Elder groups were seated on the
+fragments of pillars and blocks of marble that lay round the verge of the
+arena, talking in the quick, short ripple of the Italian tongue.  On the
+steps of the great black cross in the centre of the Coliseum sat a party
+singing scraps of songs, with much laughter and merriment between the
+stanzas.
+
+It was a strange place for song and mirth.  That black cross marks one of
+the special blood-spots of the earth where, thousands of times over, the
+dying gladiator fell, and more of human agony has been endured for the
+mere pastime of the multitude than on the breadth of many battlefields.
+From all this crime and suffering, however, the spot has derived a more
+than common sanctity.  An inscription promises seven years' indulgence,
+seven years of remission from the pains of purgatory, and earlier
+enjoyment of heavenly bliss, for each separate kiss imprinted on the black
+cross.  What better use could be made of life, after middle age, when the
+accumulated sins are many and the remaining temptations few, than to spend
+it all in kissing the black cross of the Coliseum!
+
+Besides its central consecration, the whole area has been made sacred by a
+range of shrines, which are erected round the circle, each commemorating
+some scene or circumstance of the Saviour's passion and suffering.  In
+accordance with an ordinary custom, a pilgrim was making his progress from
+shrine to shrine upon his knees, and saying a penitential prayer at each.
+Light-footed girls ran across the path along which he crept, or sported
+with their friends close by the shrines where he was kneeling.  The
+pilgrim took no heed, and the girls meant no irreverence; for in Italy
+religion jostles along side by side with business and sport, after a
+fashion of its own, and people are accustomed to kneel down and pray, or
+see others praying, between two fits of merriment, or between two sins.
+
+To make an end of our description, a red twinkle of light was visible amid
+the breadth of shadow that fell across the upper part of the Coliseum.
+Now it glimmered through a line of arches, or threw a broader gleam as it
+rose out of some profound abyss of ruin; now it was muffled by a heap of
+shrubbery which had adventurously clambered to that dizzy height; and so
+the red light kept ascending to loftier and loftier ranges of the
+structure, until it stood like a star where the blue sky rested against
+the Coliseum's topmost wall.  It indicated a party of English or Americans
+paying the inevitable visit by moonlight, and exalting themselves with
+raptures that were Byron's, not their own.
+
+Our company of artists sat on the fallen column, the pagan altar, and the
+steps of the Christian shrine, enjoying the moonlight and shadow, the
+present gayety and the gloomy reminiscences of the scene, in almost equal
+share.  Artists, indeed, are lifted by the ideality of their pursuits a
+little way off the earth, and are therefore able to catch the evanescent
+fragrance that floats in the atmosphere of life above the heads of the
+ordinary crowd.  Even if they seem endowed with little imagination
+individually, yet there is a property, a gift, a talisman, common to their
+class, entitling them to partake somewhat more bountifully than other
+people in the thin delights of moonshine and romance.
+
+"How delightful this is!"  said Hilda; and she sighed for very pleasure.
+
+"Yes," said Kenyon, who sat on the column, at her side.  "The Coliseum is
+far more delightful, as we enjoy it now, than when eighty thousand persons
+sat squeezed together, row above row, to see their fellow creatures torn
+by lions and tigers limb from limb.  What a strange thought that the
+Coliseum was really built for us, and has not come to its best uses till
+almost two thousand years after it was finished!"
+
+"The Emperor Vespasian scarcely had us in his mind," said Hilda, smiling;
+"but I thank him none the less for building it."
+
+"He gets small thanks, I fear, from the people whose bloody instincts he
+pampered," rejoined Kenyon.  "Fancy a nightly assemblage of eighty
+thousand melancholy and remorseful ghosts, looking down from those tiers
+of broken arches, striving to repent of the savage pleasures which they
+once enjoyed, but still longing to enjoy them over again."
+
+"You bring a Gothic horror into this peaceful moonlight scene," said Hilda.
+
+
+"Nay, I have good authority for peopling the Coliseum with phantoms,"
+replied the sculptor.  "Do you remember that veritable scene in Benvenuto
+Cellini's autobiography, in which a necromancer of his acquaintance draws
+a magic circle--just where the black cross stands now, I suppose--and
+raises myriads of demons? Benvenuto saw them with his own eyes,--giants,
+pygmies, and other creatures of frightful aspect, capering and dancing on
+yonder walls.  Those spectres must have been Romans, in their lifetime,
+and frequenters of this bloody amphitheatre."
+
+"I see a spectre, now!"  said Hilda, with a little thrill of uneasiness.
+"Have you watched that pilgrim, who is going round the whole circle of
+shrines, on his knees, and praying with such fervency at every one?  Now
+that he has revolved so far in his orbit, and has the moonshine on his
+face as he turns towards us, methinks I recognize him!"
+
+"And so do I," said Kenyon.  "Poor Miriam!  Do you think she sees him?"
+
+They looked round, and perceived that Miriam had risen from the steps of
+the shrine and disappeared.  She had shrunk back, in fact, into the deep
+obscurity of an arch that opened just behind them.
+
+Donatello, whose faithful watch was no more to be eluded than that of a
+hound, had stolen after her, and became the innocent witness of a
+spectacle that had its own kind of horror.  Unaware of his presence, and
+fancying herself wholly unseen, the beautiful Miriam began to gesticulate
+extravagantly, gnashing her teeth, flinging her arms wildly abroad,
+stamping with her foot.
+
+It was as if she had stepped aside for an instant, solely to snatch the
+relief of a brief fit of madness.  Persons in acute trouble, or laboring
+under strong excitement, with a necessity for concealing it, are prone to
+relieve their nerves in this wild way; although, when practicable, they
+find a more effectual solace in shrieking aloud.
+
+Thus, as soon as she threw off her self-control, under the dusky arches of
+the Coliseum, we may consider Miriam as a mad woman, concentrating the
+elements of a long insanity into that instant.
+
+"Signorina!  signorina!  have pity on me!" cried Donatello, approaching
+her; "this is too terrible!"
+
+"How dare you look, at me!"  exclaimed Miriam, with a start; then,
+whispering below her breath, "men have been struck dead for a less offence!"
+
+"If you desire it, or need it," said Donatello humbly, "I shall not be
+loath to die."
+
+"Donatello," said Miriam, coming close to the young man, and speaking low,
+but still the almost insanity of the moment vibrating in her voice, "if
+you love yourself; if you desire those earthly blessings, such as you, of
+all men, were made for; if you would come to a good old age among your
+olive orchards and your Tuscan vines, as your forefathers did; if you
+would leave children to enjoy the same peaceful, happy, innocent life,
+then flee from me.  Look not behind you!  Get you gone without another
+word."  He gazed sadly at her, but did not stir.  "I tell you," Miriam
+went on, "there is a great evil hanging over me!  I know it; I see it in
+the sky; I feel it in the air!  It will overwhelm me as utterly as if this
+arch should crumble down upon our heads!  It will crush you, too, if you
+stand at my side!  Depart, then; and make the sign of the cross, as your
+faith bids you, when an evil spirit is nigh.  Cast me off, or you are lost
+forever."
+
+A higher sentiment brightened upon Donatello's face than had hitherto
+seemed to belong to its simple expression and sensuous beauty.
+
+"I will never quit you," he said; "you cannot drive me from you."
+
+"Poor Donatello!"  said Miriam in a changed tone, and rather to herself
+than him.  "Is there no other that seeks me out, follows me,--is obstinate
+to share my affliction and my doom,--but only you!  They call me
+beautiful; and I used to fancy that, at my need, I could bring the whole
+world to my feet.  And lo!  here is my utmost need; and my beauty and my
+gifts have brought me only this poor, simple boy.  Half-witted, they call
+him; and surely fit for nothing but to be happy.  And I accept his aid!
+To-morrow, to-morrow, I will tell him all!  Ah! what a sin to stain his
+joyous nature with the blackness of a woe like mine!"
+
+She held out her hand to him, and smiled sadly as Donatello pressed it to
+his lips.  They were now about to emerge from the depth of the arch; but
+just then the kneeling pilgrim, in his revolution round the orbit of the
+shrines, had reached the one on the steps of which Miriam had been sitting.
+There, as at the other shrines, he prayed, or seemed to pray.  It struck
+Kenyon, however,--who sat close by, and saw his face distinctly, that the
+suppliant was merely performing an enjoined penance, and without the
+penitence that ought to have given it effectual life.  Even as he knelt,
+his eyes wandered, and Miriam soon felt that he had detected her, half
+hidden as she was within the obscurity of the arch.
+
+"He is evidently a good Catholic, however," whispered one of the party.
+"After all, I fear we cannot identify him with the ancient pagan who
+haunts the catacombs."
+
+"The doctors of the Propaganda may have converted him," said another;
+"they have had fifteen hundred years to perform the task."
+
+The company now deemed it time to continue their ramble.  Emerging from a
+side entrance of the Coliseum, they had on their left the Arch of
+Constantine, and above it the shapeless ruins of the Palace of the Caesars;
+portions of which have taken shape anew, in mediaeval convents and modern
+villas.  They turned their faces cityward, and, treading over the broad
+flagstones of the old Roman pavement, passed through the Arch of Titus.
+The moon shone brightly enough within it to show the seven-branched Jewish
+candlestick, cut in the marble of the interior.  The original of that
+awful trophy lies buried, at this moment, in the yellow mud of the Tiber;
+and, could its gold of Ophir again be brought to light, it would be the
+most precious relic of past ages, in the estimation of both Jew and
+Gentile.
+
+Standing amid so much ancient dust, it is difficult to spare the reader
+the commonplaces of enthusiasm, on which hundreds of tourists have already
+insisted.  Over this half-worn pavement, and beneath this Arch of Titus,
+the Roman armies had trodden in their outward march, to fight battles a
+world's width away.  Returning victorious, with royal captives and
+inestimable spoil, a Roman triumph, that most gorgeous pageant of earthly
+pride, had streamed and flaunted in hundred-fold succession over these
+same flagstones, and through this yet stalwart archway.  It is politic,
+however, to make few allusions to such a past; nor, if we would create an
+interest in the characters of our story, is it wise to suggest how
+Cicero's foot may have stepped on yonder stone, or how Horace was wont to
+stroll near by, making his footsteps chime with the measure of the ode
+that was ringing in his mind.  The very ghosts of that massive and stately
+epoch have so much density that the actual people of to-day seem the
+thinner of the two, and stand more ghost-like by the arches and columns,
+letting the rich sculpture be discerned through their ill-compacted
+substance.
+
+The party kept onward, often meeting pairs and groups of midnight
+strollers like themselves.  On such a moonlight night as this, Rome keeps
+itself awake and stirring, and is full of song and pastime, the noise of
+which mingles with your dreams, if you have gone betimes to bed.  But it
+is better to be abroad, and take our own share of the enjoyable time; for
+the languor that weighs so heavily in the Roman atmosphere by day is
+lightened beneath the moon and stars.
+
+They had now reached the precincts of the Forum.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+
+ON THE EDGE OF A PRECIPICE
+
+
+"Let us settle it," said Kenyon, stamping his foot firmly down, "that this
+is precisely the spot where the chasm opened, into which Curtius
+precipitated his good steed and himself.  Imagine the great, dusky gap,
+impenetrably deep, and with half-shaped monsters and hideous faces looming
+upward out of it, to the vast affright of the good citizens who peeped
+over the brim!  There, now, is a subject, hitherto unthought of, for a
+grim and ghastly story, and, methinks, with a moral as deep as the gulf
+itself.  Within it, beyond a question, there were prophetic visions,
+--intimations of all the future calamities of Rome,--shades of Goths, and
+Gauls, and even of the French soldiers of to-day.  It was a pity to close
+it up so soon!  I would give much for a peep into such a chasm."
+
+"I fancy," remarked Miriam, "that every person takes a peep into it in
+moments of gloom and despondency; that is to say, in his moments of
+deepest insight."
+
+"Where is it, then?"  asked Hilda.  "I never peeped into it."
+
+"Wait, and it will open for you," replied her friend.  "The chasm was
+merely one of the orifices of that pit of blackness that lies beneath us,
+everywhere.  The firmest substance of human happiness is but a thin crust
+spread over it, with just reality enough to bear up the illusive stage
+scenery amid which we tread.  It needs no earthquake to open the chasm.  A
+footstep, a little heavier than ordinary, will serve; and we must step
+very daintily, not to break through the crust at any moment.  By and by,
+we inevitably sink!  It was a foolish piece of heroism in Curtius to
+precipitate himself there, in advance; for all Rome, you see, has been
+swallowed up in that gulf, in spite of him.  The Palace of the Caesars has
+gone down thither, with a hollow, rumbling sound of its fragments!  All
+the temples have tumbled into it; and thousands of statues have been
+thrown after!  All the armies and the triumphs have marched into the great
+chasm, with their martial music playing, as they stepped over the brink.
+All the heroes, the statesmen, and the poets!  All piled upon poor Curtius,
+who thought to have saved them all!  I am loath to smile at the
+self-conceit of that gallant horseman, but cannot well avoid it."
+
+"It grieves me to hear you speak thus, Miriam," said Hilda, whose natural
+and cheerful piety was shocked by her friend's gloomy view of human
+destinies.  "It seems to me that there is no chasm, nor any hideous
+emptiness under our feet, except what the evil within us digs.  If there
+be such a chasm, let us bridge it over with good thoughts and deeds, and
+we shall tread safely to the other side.  It was the guilt of Rome, no
+doubt, that caused this gulf to open; and Curtius filled it up with his
+heroic self-sacrifice and patriotism, which was the best virtue that the
+old Romans knew.  Every wrong thing makes the gulf deeper; every right one
+helps to fill it up.  As the evil of Rome was far more than its good, the
+whole commonwealth finally sank into it, indeed, but of no original
+necessity."
+
+"Well, Hilda, it came to the same thing at last," answered Miriam
+despondingly.
+
+"Doubtless, too," resumed the sculptor (for his imagination was greatly
+excited by the idea of this wondrous chasm), "all the blood that the
+Romans shed, whether on battlefields, or in the Coliseum, or on the cross,
+--in whatever public or private murder,--ran into this fatal gulf, and
+formed a mighty subterranean lake of gore, right beneath our feet.  The
+blood from the thirty wounds in Caesar's breast flowed hitherward, and
+that pure little rivulet from Virginia's bosom, too!  Virginia, beyond all
+question, was stabbed by her father, precisely where we are standing."
+
+"Then the spot is hallowed forever!"  said Hilda.
+
+"Is there such blessed potency in bloodshed?"  asked Miriam.  "Nay, Hilda,
+do not protest!  I take your meaning rightly."
+
+They again moved forward.  And still, from the Forum and the Via Sacra,
+from beneath the arches of the Temple of Peace on one side, and the
+acclivity of the Palace of the Caesars on the other, there arose singing
+voices of parties that were strolling through the moonlight.  Thus, the
+air was full of kindred melodies that encountered one.another, and twined
+themselves into a broad, vague music, out of which no single strain could
+be disentangled.  These good examples, as well as the harmonious
+influences of the hour, incited our artist friends to make proof of their
+own vocal powers.  With what skill and breath they had, they set up a
+choral strain,--"Hail, Columbia!"  we believe, which those old Roman
+echoes must have found it exceeding difficult to repeat aright.  Even
+Hilda poured the slender sweetness of her note into her country's song.
+Miriam was at first silent, being perhaps unfamiliar with the air and
+burden.  But suddenly she threw out such a swell and gush of sound, that
+it seemed to pervade the whole choir of other voices, and then to rise
+above them all, and become audible in what would else have been thee
+silence of an upper region.  That volume of melodious voice was one of the
+tokens of a great trouble.  There had long been an impulse upon
+her--amounting, at last, to a necessity to shriek aloud; but she had
+struggled against it, till the thunderous anthem gave her an opportunity
+to relieve her heart by a great cry.
+
+They passed the solitary Column of Phocas, and looked down into the
+excavated space, where a confusion of pillars, arches, pavements, and
+shattered blocks and shafts--the crumbs of various ruin dropped from the
+devouring maw of Time stand, or lie, at the base of the Capitoline Hill.
+That renowned hillock (for it is little more) now arose abruptly above
+them.  The ponderous masonry, with which the hillside is built up, is as
+old as Rome itself, and looks likely to endure while the world retains any
+substance or permanence.  It once sustained the Capitol, and now bears up
+the great pile which the mediaeval builders raised on the antique
+foundation, and that still loftier tower, which looks abroad upon a larger
+page of deeper historic interest than any other scene can show.  On the
+same pedestal of Roman masonry, other structures will doubtless rise, and
+vanish like ephemeral things.
+
+To a spectator on the spot, it is remarkable that the events of Roman
+history, and Roman life itself, appear not so distant as the Gothic ages
+which succeeded them.  We stand in the Forum, or on the height of the
+Capitol, and seem to see the Roman epoch close at hand.  We forget that a
+chasm extends between it and ourselves, in which lie all those dark, rude,
+unlettered centuries, around the birth-time of Christianity, as well as
+the age of chivalry and romance, the feudal system, and the infancy of a
+better civilization than that of Rome.  Or, if we remember these mediaeval
+times, they look further off than the Augustan age.  The reason may be,
+that the old Roman literature survives, and creates for us an intimacy
+with the classic ages, which we have no means of forming with the
+subsequent ones.
+
+The Italian climate, moreover, robs age of its reverence and makes it look
+newer than it is.  Not the Coliseum, nor the tombs of the Appian Way, nor
+the oldest pillar in the Forum, nor any other Roman ruin, be it as
+dilapidated as it may, ever give the impression of venerable antiquity
+which we gather, along with the ivy, from the gray walls of an English
+abbey or castle.  And yet every brick or stone, which we pick up among the
+former, had fallen ages before the foundation of the latter was begun.
+This is owing to the kindliness with which Natures takes an English ruin
+to her heart, covering it with ivy, as tenderly as Robin Redbreast covered
+the dead babes with forest leaves.  She strives to make it a part of
+herself, gradually obliterating the handiwork of man, and supplanting it
+with her own mosses and trailing verdure, till she has won the whole
+structure back.  But, in Italy, whenever man has once hewn a stone, Nature
+forthwith relinquishes her right to it, and never lays her finger on it
+again.  Age after age finds it bare and naked, in the barren sunshine,
+and leaves it so.  Besides this natural disadvantage, too, each succeeding
+century, in Rome, has done its best to ruin the very ruins, so far as
+their picturesque effect is concerned, by stealing away the marble and
+hewn stone, and leaving only yellow bricks, which never can look venerable.
+
+
+The party ascended the winding way that leads from the Forum to the Piazza
+of the Campidoglio on the summit of the Capitoline Hill.  They stood
+awhile to contemplate the bronze equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius.
+The moonlight glistened upon traces of the gilding which had once covered
+both rider and steed; these were almost gone, but the aspect of dignity
+was still perfect, clothing the figure as it were with an imperial robe of
+light.  It is the most majestic representation of the kingly character
+that ever the world has seen.  A sight of the old heathen emperor is
+enough to create an evanescent sentiment of loyalty even in a democratic
+bosom, so august does he look, so fit to rule, so worthy of man's
+profoundest homage and obedience, so inevitably attractive of his love.
+He stretches forth his hand with an air of grand beneficence and unlimited
+authority, as if uttering a decree from which no appeal was permissible,
+but in which the obedient subject would find his highest interests
+consulted; a command that was in itself a benediction.
+
+"The sculptor of this statue knew what a king should be," observed Kenyon,
+"and knew, likewise, the heart of mankind, and how it craves a true ruler,
+under whatever title, as a child its father"
+
+"O, if there were but one such man as this?" exclaimed Miriam.  "One such
+man in an age, and one in all the world; then how speedily would the
+strife, wickedness, and sorrow of us poor creatures be relieved.  We would
+come to him with our griefs, whatever they might be,--even a poor, frail
+woman burdened with her heavy heart,--and lay them at his feet, and never
+need to take them up again.  The rightful king would see to all."
+
+"What an idea of the regal office and duty!" said Kenyon, with a smile.
+"It is a woman's idea of the whole matter to perfection.  It is Hilda's,
+too, no doubt?"
+
+"No," answered the quiet Hilda; "I should never look for such assistance
+from an earthly king."
+
+"Hilda, my religious Hilda," whispered Miriam, suddenly drawing the girl
+close to her, "do you know how it is with me?  I would give all I have or
+hope--my life, O how freely--for one instant of your trust in God!  You
+little guess my need of it.  You really think, then, that He sees and
+cares for us?"
+
+"Miriam, you frighten me."
+
+"Hush, hush?  do not let them hear yet!" whispered Miriam.  "I frighten
+you, you say; for Heaven's sake, how?  Am I strange?  Is there anything
+wild in my behavior?"
+
+"Only for that moment," replied Hilda, "because you seemed to doubt God's
+providence."
+
+"We will talk of that another time," said her friend.  "Just now it is
+very dark to me."
+
+On the left of the Piazza of the Campidoglio, as you face cityward, and at
+the head of the long and stately flight of steps descending from the
+Capitoline Hill to the level of lower Rome, there is a narrow lane or
+passage.  Into this the party of our friends now turned.  The path
+ascended a little, and ran along under the walls of a palace, but soon
+passed through a gateway, and terminated in a small paved courtyard.  It
+was bordered by a low parapet.
+
+The spot, for some reason or other, impressed them as exceedingly lonely.
+On one side was the great height of the palace, with the moonshine falling
+over it, and showing all the windows barred and shuttered.  Not a human
+eye could look down into the little courtyard, even if the seemingly
+deserted palace had a tenant.  On all other sides of its narrow compass
+there was nothing but the parapet, which as it now appeared was built
+right on the edge of a steep precipice.  Gazing from its imminent brow,
+the party beheld a crowded confusion of roofs spreading over the whole
+space between them and the line of hills that lay beyond the Tiber.  A
+long, misty wreath, just dense enough to catch a little of the moonshine,
+floated above the houses, midway towards the hilly line, and showed the
+course of the unseen river.  Far away on the right, the moon gleamed on
+the dome of St. Peter's as well as on many lesser and nearer domes.
+
+"What a beautiful view of the city!"  exclaimed Hilda; "and I never saw
+Rome from this point before."
+
+"It ought to afford a good prospect," said the sculptor; "for it was from
+this point--at least we are at liberty to think so, if we choose--that
+many a famous Roman caught his last glimpse of his native city, and of all
+other earthly things.  This is one of the sides of the Tarpeian Rock.
+Look over the parapet, and see what a sheer tumble there might still be
+for a traitor, in spite of the thirty feet of soil that have accumulated
+at the foot of the precipice."
+
+They all bent over, and saw that the cliff fell perpendicularly downward
+to about the depth, or rather more, at which the tall palace rose in
+height above their heads.  Not that it was still the natural, shaggy front
+of the original precipice; for it appeared to be cased in ancient
+stonework, through which the primeval rock showed its face here and there
+grimly and doubtfully.  Mosses grew on the slight projections, and little
+shrubs sprouted out of the crevices, but could not much soften the stern
+aspect of the cliff.  Brightly as the Italian moonlight fell adown the
+height, it scarcely showed what portion of it was man's work and what was
+nature's, but left it all in very much the same kind of ambiguity and
+half-knowledge in which antiquarians generally leave the identity of Roman
+remains.
+
+The roofs of some poor-looking houses, which had been built against the
+base and sides of the cliff, rose nearly midway to the top; but from an
+angle of the parapet there was a precipitous plunge straight downward into
+a stonepaved court.
+
+"I prefer this to any other site as having been veritably the Traitor's
+Leap," said Kenyon, "because it was so convenient to the Capitol.  It was
+an admirable idea of those stern old fellows to fling their political
+criminals down from the very summit on which stood the Senate House and
+Jove's Temple, emblems of the institutions which they sought to violate.
+It symbolizes how sudden was the fall in those days from the utmost height
+of ambition to its profoundest ruin."
+
+"Come, come; it is midnight," cried another artist, "too late to be
+moralizing here.  We are literally dreaming on the edge of a precipice.
+Let us go home."
+
+"It is time, indeed," said Hilda.
+
+The sculptor was not without hopes that he might be favored with the sweet
+charge of escorting Hilda to the foot of her tower.  Accordingly, when the
+party prepared to turn back, he offered her his arm.  Hilda at first
+accepted it; but when they had partly threaded the passage between the
+little courtyard and the Piazza del Campidoglio, she discovered that
+Miriam had remained behind.
+
+"I must go back," said she, withdrawing her arm from Kenyon's; "but pray
+do not come with me.  Several times this evening I have had a fancy that
+Miriam had something on her mind, some sorrow or perplexity, which,
+perhaps, it would relieve her to tell me about.  No, no; do not turn back!
+Donatello will be a sufficient guardian for Miriam and me."
+
+The sculptor was a good deal mortified, and perhaps a little angry: but he
+knew Hilda's mood of gentle decision and independence too well not to obey
+her.  He therefore suffered the fearless maiden to return alone.
+
+Meanwhile Miriam had not noticed the departure of the rest of the company;
+she remained on the edge of the precipice and Donatello along with her.
+
+"It would be a fatal fall, still," she said to herself, looking over the
+parapet, and shuddering as her eye measured the depth.  "Yes; surely yes!
+Even without the weight of an overburdened heart, a human body would fall
+heavily enough upon those stones to shake all its joints asunder.  How
+soon it would be over!"
+
+Donatello, of whose presence she was possibly not aware, now pressed
+closer to her side; and he, too, like Miriam, bent over the low parapet
+and trembled violently.  Yet he seemed to feel that perilous fascination
+which haunts the brow of precipices, tempting the unwary one to fling
+himself over for the very horror of the thing; for, after drawing hastily
+back, he again looked down, thrusting himself out farther than before.  He
+then stood silent a brief space, struggling, perhaps, to make himself
+conscious of the historic associations of the scene.
+
+"What are you thinking of, Donatello?" asked Miriam.
+
+"Who are they," said he, looking earnestly in her face, "who have been
+flung over here in days gone by?"
+
+"Men that cumbered the world," she replied.  "Men whose lives were the
+bane of their fellow creatures.  Men who poisoned the air, which is the
+common breath of all, for their own selfish purposes.  There was short
+work with such men in old Roman times.  Just in the moment of their
+triumph, a hand, as of an avenging giant, clutched them, and dashed the
+wretches down this precipice."
+
+"Was it well done?"  asked the young man.
+
+"It was well done," answered Miriam; "innocent persons were saved by the
+destruction of a guilty one, who deserved his doom."
+
+While this brief conversation passed, Donatello had once or twice glanced
+aside with a watchful air, just as a hound may often be seen to take
+sidelong note of some suspicious object, while he gives his more direct
+attention to something nearer at, hand.  Miriam seemed now first to become
+aware of the silence that had followed upon the cheerful talk and laughter
+of a few moments before.
+
+Looking round, she perceived that all her company of merry friends had
+retired, and Hilda, too, in whose soft and quiet presence she had always
+an indescribable feeling of security.  All gone; and only herself and
+Donatello left hanging over the brow of the ominous precipice.
+
+Not so, however; not entirely alone!  In the basement wall of the palace,
+shaded from the moon, there was a deep, empty niche, that had probably
+once contained a statue; not empty, either; for a figure now came forth
+from it and approached Miriam.  She must have had cause to dread some
+unspeakable evil from this strange persecutor, and to know that this was
+the very crisis of her calamity; for as he drew near, such a cold, sick
+despair crept over her that it impeded her breath, and benumbed her
+natural promptitude of thought.  Miriam seemed dreamily to remember
+falling on her knees; but, in her whole recollection of that wild moment,
+she beheld herself as in a dim show, and could not well distinguish what
+was done and suffered; no, not even whether she were really an actor and
+sufferer in the scene.
+
+Hilda, meanwhile, had separated herself from the sculptor, and turned back
+to rejoin her friend.  At a distance, she still heard the mirth of her
+late companions, who were going down the cityward descent of the
+Capitoline Hill; they had set up a new stave of melody, in which her own
+soft voice, as well as the powerful sweetness of Miriam's, was sadly
+missed.
+
+The door of the little courtyard had swung upon its hinges, and partly
+closed itself.  Hilda (whose native gentleness pervaded all her movements)
+was quietly opening it, when she was startled, midway, by the noise of a
+struggle within, beginning and ending all in one breathless instant.
+Along with it, or closely succeeding it, was a loud, fearful cry, which
+quivered upward through the air, and sank quivering downward to the earth.
+Then, a silence!  Poor Hilda had looked into the court-yard, and saw the
+whole quick passage of a deed, which took but that little time to grave
+itself in the eternal adamant.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+
+THE FAUN'S TRANSFORMATION
+
+
+The door of the courtyard swung slowly, and closed itself of its own
+accord.  Miriam and Donatello were now alone there.  She clasped her hands,
+and looked wildly at the young man, whose form seemed to have dilated,
+and whose eyes blazed with the fierce energy that had suddenly inspired
+him.  It had kindled him into a man; it had developed within him an
+intelligence which was no native characteristic of the Donatello whom we
+have heretofore known.  But that simple and joyous creature was gone
+forever.
+
+"What have you done?"  said Miriam, in a horror-stricken whisper.
+
+The glow of rage was still lurid on Donatello's face, and now flashed out
+again from his eyes.
+
+"I did what ought to be done to a traitor!" he replied.  "I did what your
+eyes bade me do, when I asked them with mine, as I held the wretch over
+the precipice!"
+
+These last words struck Miriam like a bullet.  Could it be so?  Had her
+eyes provoked or assented to this deed?  She had not known it.  But, alas!
+looking back into the frenzy and turmoil of the scene just acted, she
+could not deny--she was not sure whether it might be so, or no--that a
+wild joy had flamed up in her heart, when she beheld her persecutor in his
+mortal peril.  Was it horror?--or ecstasy? or both in one?  Be the emotion
+what it might, it had blazed up more madly, when Donatello flung his
+victim off the cliff, and more and more, while his shriek went quivering
+downward.  With the dead thump upon the stones below had come an
+unutterable horror.
+
+"And my eyes bade you do it!"  repeated she.
+
+They both leaned over the parapet, and gazed downward as earnestly as if
+some inestimable treasure had fallen over, and were yet recoverable.  On
+the pavement below was a dark mass, lying in a heap, with little or
+nothing human in its appearance, except that the hands were stretched out,
+as if they might have clutched for a moment at the small square stones.
+But there was no motion in them now.  Miriam watched the heap of mortality
+while she could count a hundred, which she took pains to do.  No stir;
+not a finger moved!
+
+"You have killed him, Donatello!  He is quite dead!"  said she.  "Stone
+dead!  Would I were so, too!"
+
+"Did you not mean that he should die?" sternly asked Donatello, still in
+the glow of that intelligence which passion had developed in him.  "There
+was short time to weigh the matter; but he had his trial in that breath or
+two while I held him over the cliff, and his sentence in that one glance,
+when your eyes responded to mine!  Say that I have slain him against your
+will,--say that he died without your whole consent,--and, in another
+breath, you shall see me lying beside him."
+
+"O, never!"  cried Miriam.  "My one, own friend!  Never, never, never!"
+
+She turned to him,--the guilty, bloodstained, lonely woman,--she turned to
+her fellow criminal, the youth, so lately innocent, whom she had drawn
+into her doom.  She pressed him close, close to her bosom, with a clinging
+embrace that brought their two hearts together, till the horror and agony
+of each was combined into one emotion, and that a kind of rapture.
+
+"Yes, Donatello, you speak the truth!"  said she; "my heart consented to
+what you did.  We two slew yonder wretch.  The deed knots us together,
+for time and eternity, like the coil of a serpent!"
+
+They threw one other glance at the heap of death below, to assure
+themselves that it was there; so like a dream was the whole thing.  Then
+they turned from that fatal precipice, and came out of the courtyard, arm
+in arm, heart in heart.  Instinctively, they were heedful not to sever
+themselves so much as a pace or two from one another, for fear of the
+terror and deadly chill that would thenceforth wait for them m solitude.
+Their deed--the crime which Donatello wrought, and Miriam accepted on the
+instant--had wreathed itself, as she said, like a serpent, in inextricable
+links about both their souls, and drew them into one, by its terrible
+contractile power.  It was closer than a marriage bond.  So intimate, in
+those first moments, was the union, that it seemed as if their new
+sympathy annihilated all other ties, and that they were released from the
+chain of humanity; a new sphere, a special law, had been created for them
+alone.  The world could not come near them; they were safe!
+
+When they reached the flight of steps leading downward from the Capitol,
+there was a faroff noise of singing and laughter.  Swift, indeed, had been
+the rush of the crisis that was come and gone!  This was still the
+merriment of the party that had so recently been their companions.  They
+recognized the voices which, a little while ago, had accorded and sung in
+cadence with their own.  But they were familiar voices no more; they
+sounded strangely, and, as it were, out of the depths of space; so remote
+was all that pertained to the past life of these guilty ones, in the moral
+seclusion that had suddenly extended itself around them.  But how close,
+and ever closer, did the breath of the immeasurable waste, that lay
+between them and all brotherhood or sisterhood, now press them one within
+the other!
+
+"O friend!"  cried Miriam, so putting her soul into the word that it took
+a heavy richness of meaning, and seemed never to have been spoken before,
+"O friend, are you conscious, as I am, of this companionshiP that knits
+our heart-strings together?"
+
+"I feel it, Miriam," said Donatello.  "We draw one breath; we live one
+life!"
+
+"Only yesterday," continued Miriam; "nay, only a short half-hour ago, I
+shivered in an icy solitude.  No friendship, no sisterhood, could come
+near enough to keep the warmth within my heart.  In an instant all is
+changed!  There can be no more loneliness!"
+
+"None, Miriam!"  said Donatello.
+
+"None, my beautiful one!"  responded Miriam, gazing in his face, which had
+taken a higher, almost an heroic aspect, from the strength of passion.
+"None, my innocent one!  Surely, it is no crime that we have committed.
+One wretched and worthless life has been sacrificed to cement two other
+lives for evermore."
+
+"For evermore, Miriam!"  said Donatello; "cemented with his blood!"
+
+The young man started at the word which he had himself spoken; it may be
+that it brought home, to the simplicity of his imagination, what he had
+not before dreamed of,--the ever-increasing loathsomeness of a union that
+consists in guilt.  Cemented with blood, which would corrupt and grow more
+noisome forever and forever, but bind them none the less strictly for that.
+
+
+"Forget it!  Cast it all behind you!"  said Miriam, detecting, by her
+sympathy, the pang that was in his heart.  "The deed has done its office,
+and has no existence any more."
+
+They flung the past behind them, as she counselled, or else distilled from
+it a fiery, intoxication, which sufficed to carry them triumphantly
+through those first moments of their doom.  For guilt has its moment of
+rapture too.  The foremost result of a broken law is ever an ecstatic
+sense of freedom.  And thus there exhaled upward (out of their dark
+sympathy, at the base of which lay a human corpse) a bliss, or an insanity,
+which the unhappy pair imagined to be well worth the sleepy innocence
+that was forever lost to them.
+
+As their spirits rose to the solemn madness of the occasion, they went
+onward, not stealthily, not fearfully, but with a stately gait and aspect.
+Passion lent them (as it does to meaner shapes) its brief nobility of
+carriage.  They trod through the streets of Rome, as if they, too, were
+among the majestic and guilty shadows, that, from ages long gone by, have
+haunted the blood-stained city.  And, at Miriam's suggestion, they turned
+aside, for the sake of treading loftily past the old site of Pompey's
+Forum.
+
+"For there was a great deed done here!" she said,--"a deed of blood like
+ours!  Who knows but we may meet the high and ever-sad fraternity of
+Caesar's murderers, and exchange a salutation?"
+
+"Are they our brethren, now?"  asked Donatello.
+
+"Yes; all of them," said Miriam,--" and many another, whom the world
+little dreams of, has been made our brother or our sister, by what we have
+done within this hour!"
+
+And at the thought she shivered.  Where then was the seclusion, the
+remoteness, the strange, lonesome Paradise, into which she and her one
+companion had been transported by their crime?  Was there, indeed, no such
+refuge, but only a crowded thoroughfare and jostling throng of criminals?
+And was it true, that whatever hand had a blood-stain on it,--or had
+poured out poison,--or strangled a babe at its birth,--or clutched a
+grandsire's throat, he sleeping, and robbed him of his few last breaths,
+--had now the right to offer itself in fellowship with their two hands?
+Too certainly, that right existed.  It is a terrible thought, that an
+individual wrong-doing melts into the great mass of human crime, and makes
+us, who dreamed only of our own little separate sin,--makes us guilty of
+the whole.  And thus Miriam and her lover were not an insulated pair, but
+members of an innumerable confraternity of guilty ones, all shuddering at
+each other.
+
+"But not now; not yet," she murmured to herself.  "To-night, at least,
+there shall be no remorse!"
+
+Wandering without a purpose, it so chanced that they turned into a street,
+at one extremity of which stood Hilda's tower.  There was a light in her
+high chamber; a light, too, at the Virgin's shrine; and the glimmer of
+these two was the loftiest light beneath the stars.  Miriam drew
+Donatello's arm, to make him stop, and while they stood at some distance
+looking at Hilda's window, they beheld her approach and throw it open.
+She leaned far forth, and extended her clasped hands towards the sky.
+
+"The good, pure child!  She is praying, Donatello," said Miriam, with a
+kind of simple joy at witnessing the devoutness of her friend.  Then her
+own sin rushed upon her, and she shouted, with the rich strength of her
+voice, "Pray for us, Hilda; we need it!"
+
+Whether Hilda heard and recognized the voice we cannot tell.  The window
+was immediately closed, and her form disappeared from behind the snowy
+curtain.  Miriam felt this to be a token that the cry of her condemned
+spirit was shut out of heaven.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+
+THE BURIAL CHANT
+
+
+The Church of the Capuchins (where, as the reader may remember, some of
+our acquaintances had made an engagement to meet) stands a little aside
+from the Piazza Barberini.  Thither, at the hour agreed upon, on the
+morning after the scenes last described, Miriam and Donatello directed
+their steps.  At no time are people so sedulously careful to keep their
+trifling appointments, attend to their ordinary occupations, and thus put
+a commonplace aspect on life, as when conscious of some secret that if
+suspected would make them look monstrous in the general eye.
+
+Yet how tame and wearisome is the impression of all ordinary things in the
+contrast with such a fact!  How sick and tremulous, the next morning, is
+the spirit that has dared so much only the night before!  How icy cold is
+the heart, when the fervor, the wild ecstasy of passion has faded away,
+and sunk down among the dead ashes of the fire that blazed so fiercely,
+and was fed by the very substance of its life!  How faintly does the
+criminal stagger onward, lacking the impulse of that strong madness that
+hurried him into guilt, and treacherously deserts him in the midst of it!
+
+When Miriam and Donatello drew near the church, they found only Kenyon
+awaiting them on the steps.  Hilda had likewise promised to be of the
+party, but had not yet appeared.  Meeting the sculptor, Miriam put a force
+upon herself and succeeded in creating an artificial flow of spirits,
+which, to any but the nicest observation, was quite as effective as a
+natural one.  She spoke sympathizingly to the sculptor on the subject of
+Hilda's absence, and somewhat annoyed him by alluding in Donatello's
+hearing to an attachment which had never been openly avowed, though
+perhaps plainly enough betrayed.  He fancied that Miriam did not quite
+recognize the limits of the strictest delicacy; he even went so far as to
+generalize, and conclude within himself, that this deficiency is a more
+general failing in woman than in man, the highest refinement being a
+masculine attribute.
+
+But the idea was unjust to the sex at large, and especially so to this
+poor Miriam, who was hardly responsible for her frantic efforts to be gay.
+Possibly, moreover, the nice action of the mind is set ajar by any
+violent shock, as of great misfortune or great crime, so that the finer
+perceptions may be blurred thenceforth, and the effect be traceable in all
+the minutest conduct of life.
+
+"Did you see anything of the dear child after you left us?"  asked Miriam,
+still keeping Hilda as her topic of conversation.  "I missed her sadly on
+my way homeward; for nothing insures me such delightful and innocent
+dreams (I have experienced it twenty times)as a talk late in the evening
+with Hilda."
+
+"So I should imagine," said the sculptor gravely; "but it is an advantage
+that I have little or no opportunity of enjoying.  I know not what became
+of Hilda after my parting from you.  She was not especially my companion
+in any part of our walk.  The last I saw of her she was hastening back to
+rejoin you in the courtyard of the Palazzo Caffarelli."
+
+"Impossible!"  cried Miriam, starting.
+
+"Then did you not see her again?"  inquired Kenyon, in some alarm.
+
+"Not there," answered Miriam quietly; "indeed, I followed pretty closely
+on the heels of the rest of the party.  But do not be alarmed on Hilda's
+account; the Virgin is bound to watch over the good child, for the sake of
+the piety with which she keeps the lamp alight at her shrine.  And besides,
+I have always felt that Hilda is just as safe in these evil streets of
+Rome as her white doves when they fly downwards from the tower top, and
+run to and fro among the horses' feet.  There is certainly a providence on
+purpose for Hilda, if for no other human creature."
+
+"I religiously believe it," rejoined the sculptor; "and yet my mind would
+be the easier, if I knew that she had returned safely to her tower."
+
+"Then make yourself quite easy," answered Miriam.  "I saw her (and it is
+the last sweet sight that I remember) leaning from her window midway
+between earth and sky!"
+
+Kenyon now looked at Donatello.
+
+"You seem out of spirits, my dear friend," he observed.  "This languid
+Roman atmosphere is not the airy wine that you were accustomed to breathe
+at home.  I have not forgotten your hospitable invitation to meet you this
+summer at your castle among the Apennines.  It is my fixed purpose to
+come, I assure you.  We shall both be the better for some deep draughts
+of the mountain breezes."
+
+"It may he," said Donatello, with unwonted sombreness; "the old house
+seemed joyous when I was a child.  But as I remember it now it was a grim
+place, too."
+
+The sculptor looked more attentively at the young man, and was surprised
+and alarmed to observe how entirely the fine, fresh glow of animal spirits
+had departed out of his face.  Hitherto, moreover, even while he was
+standing perfectly still, there had been a kind of possible gambol
+indicated in his aspect.  It was quite gone now.  All his youthful gayety,
+and with it his simplicity of manner, was eclipsed, if not utterly extinct.
+
+
+"You are surely ill, my dear fellow," exclaimed Kenyon.
+
+"Am I?  Perhaps so," said Donatello indifferently; "I never have been ill,
+and know not what it may be."
+
+"Do not make the poor lad fancy-sink," whispered Miriam, pulling the
+sculptor's sleeve.  "He is of a nature to lie down and die at once, if he
+finds himself drawing such melancholy breaths as we ordinary people are
+enforced to burden our lungs withal.  But we must get him away from this
+old, dreamy and dreary Rome, where nobody but himself ever thought of
+being gay.  Its influences are too heavy to sustain the life of such a
+creature."
+
+The above conversation had passed chiefly on the steps of the Cappuccini;
+and, having said so much, Miriam lifted the leathern curtain that hangs
+before all church-doors in italy.
+"
+Hilda has forgotten her appointment," she observed, "or else her maiden
+slumbers are very sound this morning.  We will wait for her no longer."
+
+They entered the nave.  The interior of the church was of moderate compass,
+but of good architecture, with a vaulted roof over the nave, and a row of
+dusky chapels on either side of it instead of the customary side-aisles.
+Each chapel had its saintly shrine, hung round with offerings; its picture
+above the altar, although closely veiled, if by any painter of renown; and
+its hallowed tapers, burning continually, to set alight the devotion of
+the worshippers.  The pavement of the nave was chiefly of marble, and
+looked old and broken, and was shabbily patched here and there with tiles
+of brick; it was inlaid, moreover, with tombstones of the mediaeval taste,
+on which were quaintly sculptured borders, figures, and portraits in
+bas-relief, and Latin epitaphs, now grown illegible by the tread of
+footsteps over them.  The church appertains to a convent of Capuchin monks;
+and, as usually happens when a reverend brotherhood have such an edifice
+in charge, the floor seemed never to have been scrubbed or swept, and had
+as little the aspect of sanctity as a kennel; whereas, in all churches of
+nunneries, the maiden sisterhood invariably show the purity of their own
+hearts by the virgin cleanliness and visible consecration of the walls and
+pavement.
+
+As our friends entered the church, their eyes rested at once on a
+remarkable object in the centre of the nave.  It was either the actual
+body, or, as might rather have been supposed at first glance, the
+cunningly wrought waxen face and suitably draped figure of a dead monk.
+This image of wax or clay-cold reality, whichever it might be, lay on a
+slightly elevated bier, with three tall candles burning on each side,
+another tall candle at the head, and another at the foot.  There was music,
+too; in harmony with so funereal a spectacle.  From beneath the pavement
+of the church came the deep, lugubrious strain of a De Profundis, which
+sounded like an utterance of the tomb itself; so dismally did it rumble
+through the burial vaults, and ooze up among the flat gravestones and sad
+epitaphs, filling the church as with a gloomy mist.
+
+"I must look more closely at that dead monk before we leave the church,"
+remarked the sculptor.  "In the study of my art, I have gained many a hint
+from the dead which the living could never have given me."
+
+"I can well imagine it," answered Miriam.  "One clay image is readily
+copied from another.  But let us first see Guido's picture.  The light is
+favorable now."
+
+Accordingly, they turned into the first chapel on the right hand, as you
+enter the nave; and there they beheld,--not the picture, indeed,--but a
+closely drawn curtain.  The churchmen of Italy make no scruple of
+sacrificing the very purpose for which a work of sacred art has been
+created; that of opening the way; for religious sentiment through the
+quick medium of sight, by bringing angels, saints, and martyrs down
+visibly upon earth; of sacrificing this high purpose, and, for aught they
+know, the welfare of many souls along with it, to the hope of a paltry fee.
+Every work by an artist of celebrity is hidden behind a veil, and seldom
+revealed, except to Protestants, who scorn it as an object of devotion,
+and value it only for its artistic merit.
+
+The sacristan was quickly found, however, and lost no time in disclosing
+the youthful Archangel, setting his divine foot on the head of his fallen
+adversary.  It was an image of that greatest of future events, which we
+hope for so ardently, at least, while we are young,--but find so very long
+in coming, the triumph of goodness over the evil principle.
+
+"Where can Hilda be?"  exclaimed Kenyon.  "It is not her custom ever to
+fail in an engagement; and the present one was made entirely on her
+account.  Except herself, you know, we were all agreed in our recollection
+of the picture."
+
+"But we were wrong, and Hilda right, as you perceive," said Miriam,
+directing his attention to the point on which their dispute of the night
+before had arisen.  "It is not easy to detect her astray as regards any
+picture on which those clear, soft eyes of hers have ever rested."
+
+"And she has studied and admired few pictures so much as this," observed
+the sculptor.  "No wonder; for there is hardly another so beautiful in
+the world.  What an expression of heavenly severity in the Archangel's
+face! There is a degree of pain, trouble, and disgust at being brought in
+contact with sin, even for the purpose of quelling and punishing it; and
+yet a celestial tranquillity pervades his whole being."
+
+"I have never been able," said Miriam, "to admire this picture nearly so
+much as Hilda does, in its moral and intellectual aspect.  If it cost her
+more trouble to be good, if her soul were less white and pure, she would
+be a more competent critic of this picture, and would estimate it not half
+so high.  I see its defects today more clearly than ever before."
+
+"What are some of them?"  asked Kenyon.
+
+"That Archangel, now," Miriam continued; "how fair he looks, with his
+unruffled wings, with his unhacked sword, and clad in his bright armor,
+and that exquisitely fitting sky-blue tunic, cut in the latest
+Paradisiacal mode!  What a dainty air of the first celestial society!
+With what half-scornful delicacy he sets his prettily sandalled foot on
+the head of his prostrate foe! But, is it thus that virtue looks the
+moment after its death struggle with evil?  No, no; I could have told
+Guido better.  A full third of the Archangel's feathers should have been
+torn from his wings; the rest all ruffled, till they looked like Satan's
+own!  His sword should be streaming with blood, and perhaps broken halfway
+to the hilt; his armor crushed, his robes rent, his breast gory; a
+bleeding gash on his brow, cutting right across the stern scowl of battle!
+He should press his foot hard down upon the old serpent, as if his very
+soul depended upon it, feeling him squirm mightily, and doubting whether
+the fight were half over yet, and how the victory might turn!  And, with
+all this fierceness, this grimness, this unutterable horror, there should
+still be something high, tender, and holy in Michael's eyes, and around
+his mouth.  But the battle never was such a child's play as Guido's dapper
+Archangel seems to have found it."
+
+"For Heaven's sake, Miriam," cried Kenyon, astonished at the wild energy
+of her talk; "paint the picture of man's struggle against sin according to
+your own idea!  I think it will be a masterpiece."
+
+"The picture would have its share of truth, I assure you," she answered;
+"but I am sadly afraid the victory would fail on the wrong side.  Just
+fancy a smoke-blackened, fiery-eyed demon bestriding that nice young angel,
+clutching his white throat with one of his hinder claws; and giving a
+triumphant whisk of his scaly tail, with a poisonous dart at the end of it!
+That is what they risk, poor souls, who do battle with Michael's enemy."
+
+It now, perhaps, struck Miriam that her mental disquietude was impelling
+her to an undue vivacity; for she paused, and turned away from the picture,
+without saying a word more about it.  All this while, moreover, Donatello
+had been very ill at ease, casting awe-stricken and inquiring glances at
+the dead monk; as if he could look nowhere but at that ghastly object,
+merely because it shocked him.  Death has probably a peculiar horror and
+ugliness, when forced upon the contemplation of a person so naturally
+joyous as Donatello, who lived with completeness in the present moment,
+and was able to form but vague images of the future.
+
+"What is the matter, Donatello?"  whispered Miriam soothingly.  "You are
+quite in a tremble, my poor friend!  What is it?"
+
+"This awful chant from beneath the church,," answered Donatello; "it
+oppresses me; the air is so heavy with it that I can scarcely draw my
+breath.  And yonder dead monk!  I feel as if he were lying right across my
+heart."
+
+"Take courage!"  whispered she again "come, we will approach close to the
+dead monk.  The only way, in such cases, is to stare the ugly horror
+right in the face; never a sidelong glance, nor half-look, for those are
+what show a frightfill thing in its frightfullest aspect.  Lean on me,
+dearest friend!  My heart is very strong for both of us.  Be brave; and
+all is well."
+
+Donatello hung back for a moment, but then pressed close to Miriam's side,
+and suffered her to lead him up to the bier.  The sculptor followed.  A
+number of persons, chiefly women, with several children among them, were
+standing about the corpse; and as our three friends drew nigh, a mother
+knelt down, and caused her little boy to kneel, both kissing the beads and
+crucifix that hung from the monk's girdle.  Possibly he had died in the
+odor of sanctity; or, at all events, death and his brown frock and cowl
+made a sacred image of this reverend father.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+
+THE DEAD CAPUCHIN
+
+
+The dead monk was clad, as when alive, in the brown woollen frock of the
+Capuchins, with the hood drawn over his head, but so as to leave the
+features and a portion of the beard uncovered.  His rosary and cross hung
+at his side; his hands were folded over his breast; his feet (he was of a
+barefooted order in his lifetime, and continued so in death) protruded
+from beneath his habit, stiff and stark, with a more waxen look than even
+his face.  They were tied together at the ankles with a black ribbon.
+
+The countenance, as we have already said, was fully displayed.  It had a
+purplish hue upon it, unlike the paleness of an ordinary corpse, but as
+little resembling the flush of natural life.  The eyelids were but
+partially drawn down, and showed the eyeballs beneath; as if the deceased
+friar were stealing a glimpse at the bystanders, to watch whether they
+were duly impressed with the solemnity of his obsequies.  The shaggy
+eyebrows gave sternness to the look.  Miriam passed between two of the
+lighted candles, and stood close beside the bier.
+
+"My God!"  murmured she.  "What is this?"
+
+She grasped Donatello's hand, and, at the same instant, felt him give a
+convulsive shudder, which she knew to have been caused by a sudden and
+terrible throb of the heart.  His hand, by an instantaneous change, became
+like ice within hers, which likewise grew so icy that their insensible
+fingers might have rattled, one against the other.  No wonder that their
+blood curdled; no wonder that their hearts leaped and paused!  The dead
+face of the monk, gazing at them beneath its half-closed eyelids, was the
+same visage that had glared upon their naked souls, the past midnight, as
+Donatello flung him over the precipice.
+
+The sculptor was standing at the foot of the bier, and had not yet seen
+the monk's features.
+
+"Those naked feet!"  said he.  "I know not why, but they affect me
+strangely.  They have walked to and fro over the hard pavements of Rome,
+and through a hundred other rough ways of this life, where the monk went
+begging for his brotherhood; along the cloisters and dreary corridors of
+his convent, too, from his youth upward!  It is a suggestive idea, to
+track those worn feet backward through all the paths they have trodden,
+ever since they were the tender and rosy little feet of a baby, and (cold
+as they now are) were kept warm in his mother's hand."
+
+As his companions, whom the sculptor supposed to be close by him, made no
+response to his fanciful musing, he looked up, and saw them at the head of
+the bier.  He advanced thither himself.
+
+"Ha!"  exclaimed he.
+
+He cast a horror-stricken and bewildered glance at Miriam, but withdrew it
+immediately.  Not that he had any definite suspicion, or, it may be, even
+a remote idea, that she could be held responsible in the least degree for
+this man's sudden death.  In truth, it seemed too wild a thought to
+connect, in reality, Miriam's persecutor of many past months and the
+vagabond of the preceding night, with the dead Capuchin of to-day.  It
+resembled one of those unaccountable changes and interminglings of
+identity, which so often occur among the personages of a dream.  But
+Kenyon, as befitted the professor of an imaginative art, was endowed with
+an exceedingly quick sensibility, which was apt to give him intimations of
+the true state of matters that lay beyond his actual vision.  There was a
+whisper in his ear; it said, "Hush!" Without asking himself wherefore, he
+resolved to be silent as regarded the mysterious discovery which he had
+made, and to leave any remark or exclamation to be voluntarily offered by
+Miriam.  If she never spoke, then let the riddle be unsolved.
+
+And now occurred a circumstance that would seem too fantastic to be told,
+if it had not actually happened, precisely as we set it down.  As the
+three friends stood by the bier, they saw that a little stream of blood
+had begun to ooze from the dead monk's nostrils; it crept slowly towards
+the thicket of his beard, where, in the course of a moment or two, it hid
+itself.
+
+"How strange!"  ejaculated Kenyon.  "The monk died of apoplexy, I suppose,
+or by some sudden accident, and the blood has not yet congealed."
+
+"Do you consider that a sufficient explanation?"  asked Miriam, with a
+smile from which the sculptor involuntarily turned away his eyes.  "Does
+it satisfy you?"
+
+"And why not?"  he inquired.
+
+"Of course, you know the old superstition about this phenomenon of blood
+flowing from a dead body," she rejoined.  "How can we tell but that the
+murderer of this monk (or, possibly, it may be only that privileged
+murderer, his physician) may have just entered the church?"
+
+"I cannot jest about it," said Kenyon.  "It is an ugly sight!"
+
+"True, true; horrible to see, or dream of!" she replied, with one of those
+long, tremulous sighs, which so often betray a sick heart by escaping
+unexpectedly.  "We will not look at it any more.  Come away, Donatello.
+Let us escape from this dismal church.  The sunshine will do you good."
+
+When had ever a woman such a trial to sustain as this!  By no possible
+supposition could Miriam explain the identity of the dead Capuchin,
+quietly and decorously laid out in the nave of his convent church, with
+that of her murdered persecutor, flung heedlessly at the foot of the
+precipice.  The effect upon her imagination was as if a strange and
+unknown corpse had miraculously, while she was gazing at it, assumed the
+likeness of that face, so terrible henceforth in her remembrance.  It was
+a symbol, perhaps, of the deadly iteration with which she was doomed to
+behold the image of her crime reflected back upon her in a thousand ways,
+and converting the great, calm face of Nature, in the whole, and in its
+innumerable details, into a manifold reminiscence of that one dead visage.
+
+No sooner had Miriam turned away from the bier, and gone a few steps, than
+she fancied the likeness altogether an illusion, which would vanish at a
+closer and colder view.  She must look at it again, therefore, and at once;
+or else the grave would close over the face, and leave the awful fantasy
+that had connected itself therewith fixed ineffaceably in her brain.
+
+"Wait for me, one moment!"  she said to her companions.  "Only a moment!"
+
+So she went back, and gazed once more at the corpse.  Yes; these were the
+features that Miriam had known so well; this was the visage that she
+remembered from a far longer date than the most intimate of her friends
+suspected; this form of clay had held the evil spirit which blasted her
+sweet youth, and compelled her, as it were, to stain her womanhood with
+crime.  But, whether it were the majesty of death, or something originally
+noble and lofty in the character of the dead, which the soul had stamped
+upon the features, as it left them; so it was that Miriam now quailed and
+shook, not for the vulgar horror of the spectacle, but for the severe,
+reproachful glance that seemed to come from between those half-closed lids.
+True, there had been nothing, in his lifetime, viler than this man.
+She knew it; there was no other fact within her consciousness that she
+felt to be so certain; and yet, because her persecutor found himself safe
+and irrefutable in death, he frowned upon his victim, and threw back the
+blame on her!
+
+"Is it thou, indeed?"  she murmured, under her breath.  "Then thou hast no
+right to scowl upon me so!  But art thou real, or a vision?" She bent down
+over the dead monk, till one of her rich curls brushed against his
+forehead.  She touched one of his folded hands with her finger.
+
+"It is he," said Miriam.  "There is the scar, that I know so well, on his
+brow.  And it is no vision; he is palpable to my touch!  I will question
+the fact no longer, but deal with it as I best can."
+
+It was wonderful to see how the crisis developed in Miriam its own proper
+strength, and the faculty of sustaining the demands which it made upon her
+fortitude.  She ceased to tremble; the beautiful woman gazed sternly at
+her dead enemy, endeavoring to meet and quell the look of accusation that
+he threw from between his half-closed eyelids.
+
+"No; thou shalt not scowl me down!"  said she.  "Neither now, nor when we
+stand together at the judgment-seat.  I fear not to meet thee there.
+Farewell, till that next encounter!"
+
+Haughtily waving her hand, Miriam rejoined her friends, who were awaiting
+her at the door of the church.  As they went out, the sacristan stopped
+them, and proposed to show the cemetery of the convent, where the deceased
+members of the fraternity are laid to rest in sacred earth, brought long
+ago from Jerusalem.
+
+"And will yonder monk be buried there?" she asked.
+
+"Brother Antonio?"  exclaimed the sacristan.
+
+"Surely, our good brother will be put to bed there!  His grave is already
+dug, and the last occupant has made room for him.  Will you look at it,
+signorina?"
+
+"I will!"  said Miriam.
+
+"Then excuse me," observed Kenyon; "for I shall leave you.  One dead monk
+has more than sufficed me; and I am not bold enough to face the whole
+mortality of the convent."
+
+It was easy to see, by Donatello's looks, that he, as well as the sculptor,
+would gladly have escaped a visit to the famous cemetery of the
+Cappuccini.  But Miriam's nerves were strained to such a pitch, that she
+anticipated a certain solace and absolute relief in passing from one
+ghastly spectacle to another of long-accumulated ugliness; and there was,
+besides, a singular sense of duty which impelled her to look at the final
+resting-place of the being whose fate had been so disastrously involved
+with her own.  She therefore followed the sacristan's guidance, and drew
+her companion along with her, whispering encouragement as they went.
+
+The cemetery is beneath the church, but entirely above ground, and lighted
+by a row of iron-grated windows without glass.  A corridor runs along
+beside these windows, and gives access to three or four vaulted recesses,
+or chapels, of considerable breadth and height, the floor of which
+consists of the consecrated earth of Jerusalem.  It is smoothed decorously
+over the deceased brethren of the convent, and is kept quite free from
+grass or weeds, such as would grow even in these gloomy recesses, if pains
+were not bestowed to root them up.  But, as the cemetery is small, and it
+is a precious privilege to sleep in holy ground, the brotherhood are
+immemorially accustomed, when one of their number dies, to take the
+longest buried skeleton out of the oldest grave, and lay the new slumberer
+there instead.  Thus, each of the good friars, in his turn, enjoys the
+luxury of a consecrated bed, attended with the slight drawback of being
+forced to get up long before daybreak, as it were, and make room for
+another lodger.
+
+The arrangement of the unearthed skeletons is what makes the special
+interest of the cemetery.  The arched and vaulted walls of the burial
+recesses are supported by massive pillars and pilasters made of
+thigh-bones and skulls; the whole material of the structure appears to be
+of a similar kind; and the knobs and embossed ornaments of this strange
+architecture are represented by the joints of the spine, and the more
+delicate tracery by the Smaller bones of the human frame.  The summits of
+the arches are adorned with entire skeletons, looking as if they were
+wrought most skilfully in bas-relief.  There is no possibility of
+describing how ugly and grotesque is the effect, combined with a certain
+artistic merit, nor how much perverted ingenuity has been shown in this
+queer way, nor what a multitude of dead monks, through how many hundred
+years, must have contributed their bony framework to build up.  these
+great arches of mortality.  On some of the skulls there are inscriptions,
+purporting that such a monk, who formerly made use of that particular
+headpiece, died on such a day and year; but vastly the greater number are
+piled up indistinguishably into the architectural design, like the many
+deaths that make up the one glory of a victory.
+
+In the side walls of the vaults are niches where skeleton monks sit or
+stand, clad in the brown habits that they wore in life, and labelled with
+their names and the dates of their decease.  Their skulls (some quite
+bare, and others still covered with yellow skin, and hair that has known
+the earth-damps) look out from beneath their hoods, grinning hideously
+repulsive.  One reverend father has his mouth wide open, as if he had died
+in the midst of a howl of terror and remorse, which perhaps is even now
+screeching through eternity.  As a general thing, however, these frocked
+and hooded skeletons seem to take a more cheerful view of their position,
+and try with ghastly smiles to turn it into a jest.  But the cemetery of
+the Capuchins is no place to nourish celestial hopes: the soul sinks
+forlorn and wretched under all this burden of dusty death; the holy earth
+from Jerusalem, so imbued is it with mortality, has grown as barren of the
+flowers of Paradise as it is of earthly weeds and grass.  Thank Heaven for
+its blue sky; it needs a long, upward gaze to give us back our faith.  Not
+here can we feel ourselves immortal, where the very altars in these
+chapels of horrible consecration are heaps of human bones.
+
+Yet let us give the cemetery the praise that it deserves.  There is no
+disagreeable scent, such as might have been expected from the decay of so
+many holy persons, in whatever odor of sanctity they may have taken their
+departure.  The same number of living monks would not smell half so
+unexceptionably.
+
+Miriam went gloomily along the corridor, from one vaulted Golgotha to
+another, until in the farthest recess she beheld an open grave.
+
+"Is that for him who lies yonder in the nave?"  she asked.
+
+"Yes, signorina, this is to be the resting-place of Brother Antonio, who
+came to his death last night," answered the sacristan; "and in yonder
+niche, you see, sits a brother who was buried thirty years ago, and has
+risen to give him place."
+
+"It is not a satisfactory idea," observed Miriam, "that you poor friars
+cannot call even your graves permanently your own.  You must lie down in
+them, methinks, with a nervous anticipation of being disturbed, like weary
+men who know that they shall be summoned out of bed at midnight.  Is it
+not possible (if money were to be paid for the privilege) to leave Brother
+Antonio--if that be his name--in the occupancy of that narrow grave till
+the last trumpet sounds?"
+
+"By no means, signorina; neither is it needful or desirable," answered the
+sacristan.  "A quarter of a century's sleep in the sweet earth of
+Jerusalem is better than a thousand years in any other soil.  Our brethren
+find good rest there.  No ghost was ever known to steal out of this
+blessed cemetery."
+
+"That is well," responded Miriam; "may he whom you now lay to sleep prove
+no exception to the rule!"
+
+As they left the cemetery she put money into the sacristan's hand to an
+amount that made his eyes open wide and glisten, and requested that it
+might be expended in masses for the repose of Father Antonio's soul.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+
+THE MEDICI GARDENS
+
+
+Donatello," said Miriam anxiously, as they came through the Piazza
+Barberini, "what can I do for you, my beloved friend?  You are shaking as
+with the cold fit of the Roman fever." "Yes," said Donatello; "my heart
+shivers." As soon as she could collect her thoughts, Miriam led the young
+man to the gardens of the Villa Medici, hoping that the quiet shade and
+sunshine of that delightful retreat would a little revive his spirits.
+The grounds are there laid out in the old fashion of straight paths, with
+borders of box, which form hedges of great height and density, and are
+shorn and trimmed to the evenness of a wall of stone, at the top and sides.
+There are green alleys, with long vistas overshadowed by ilex-trees; and
+at each intersection of the paths, the visitor finds seats of
+lichen-covered stone to repose upon, and marble statues that look
+forlornly at him, regretful of their lost noses.  In the more open
+portions of the garden, before the sculptured front of the villa, you see
+fountains and flower-beds, and in their season a profusion of roses, from
+which the genial sun of Italy distils a fragrance, to be scattered abroad
+by the no less genial breeze.
+
+But Donatello drew no delight from these things.  He walked onward in
+silent apathy, and looked at Miriam with strangely half-awakened and
+bewildered eyes, when she sought to bring his mind into sympathy with hers,
+and so relieve his heart of the burden that lay lumpishly upon it.
+
+She made him sit down on a stone bench, where two embowered alleys crossed
+each other; so that they could discern the approach of any casual intruder
+a long way down the path.
+
+"My sweet friend," she said, taking one of his passive hands in both of
+hers, "what can I say to comfort you?"
+
+"Nothing!"  replied Donatello, with sombre reserve.  "Nothing will ever
+comfort me."
+
+"I accept my own misery," continued Miriam, "my own guilt, if guilt it be;
+and, whether guilt or misery, I shall know how to deal with it.  But you,
+dearest friend, that were the rarest creature in all this world, and
+seemed a being to whom sorrow could not cling,--you, whom I half fancied
+to belong to a race that had vanished forever, you only surviving, to show
+mankind how genial and how joyous life used to be, in some long-gone age,
+--what had you to do with grief or crime?"
+
+"They came to me as to other men," said Donatello broodingly.  "Doubtless
+I was born to them."
+
+"No, no; they came with me," replied Miriam.  "Mine is the responsibility!
+Alas! wherefore was I born?  Why did we ever meet? Why did I not drive
+you from me, knowing for my heart foreboded it--that the cloud in which I
+walked would likewise envelop you!"
+
+Donatello stirred uneasily, with the irritable impatience that is often
+combined With a mood of leaden despondency.  A brown lizard with two
+tails--a monster often engendered by the Roman sunshine--ran across his
+foot, and made him start.  Then he sat silent awhile, and so did Miriam,
+trying to dissolve her whole heart into sympathy, and lavish it all upon
+him, were it only for a moment's cordial.
+
+The young man lifted his hand to his breast, and, unintentionally, as
+Miriam's hand was within his, he lifted that along with it.  "I have a
+great weight here!"  said he.  The fancy struck Miriam (but she drove it
+resolutely down) that Donatello almost imperceptibly shuddered, while, in
+pressing his own hand against his heart, he pressed hers there too.
+
+"Rest your heart on me, dearest one!"  she resumed.  "Let me bear all its
+weight; I am well able to bear it; for I am a woman, and I love you!  I
+love you, Donatello!  Is there no comfort for you in this avowal?  Look at
+me!  Heretofore you have found me pleasant to your sight.  Gaze into my
+eyes!  Gaze into my soul!  Search as deeply as you may, you can never see
+half the tenderness and devotion that I henceforth cherish for you.  All
+that I ask is your acceptance of the utter self-sacrifice (but it shall be
+no sacrifice, to my great love) with which I seek to remedy the evil you
+have incurred for my sake!"
+
+All this fervor on Miriam's part; on Donatello's, a heavy silence.
+
+"O, speak to me!"  she exclaimed.  "Only promise me to be, by and by, a
+little happy!"
+
+"Happy?"  murmured Donatello.  "Ah, never again!  never again!"
+
+"Never?  Ah, that is a terrible word to say to me!"  answered Miriam.  "A
+terrible word to let fall upon a woman's heart, when she loves you, and is
+conscious of having caused your misery!  If you love me, Donatello, speak
+it not again.  And surely you did love me?"
+
+"I did," replied Donatello gloomily and absently.
+
+Miriam released the young man's hand, but suffered one of her own to lie
+close to his, and waited a moment to see whether he would make any effort
+to retain it.  There was much depending upon that simple experiment.
+
+With a deep sigh--as when, sometimes, a slumberer turns over in a troubled
+dream Donatello changed his position, and clasped both his hands over his
+forehead.  The genial warmth of a Roman April kindling into May was in the
+atmosphere around them; but when Miriam saw that involuntary movement and
+heard that sigh of relief (for so she interpreted it), a shiver ran
+through her frame, as if the iciest wind of the Apennines were blowing
+over her.
+
+"He has done himself a greater wrong than I dreamed of," thought she, with
+unutterable compassion.  "Alas!  it was a sad mistake!  He might have had
+a kind of bliss in the consequences of this deed, had he been impelled to
+it by a love vital enough to survive the frenzy of that terrible moment,
+mighty enough to make its own law, and justify itself against the natural
+remorse.  But to have perpetrated a dreadful murder (and such was his
+crime, unless love, annihilating moral distinctions, made it otherwise) on
+no better warrant than a boy's idle fantasy!  I pity him from the very
+depths of my soul!  As for myself, I am past my own or other's pity."
+
+She arose from the young man's side, and stood before him with a sad,
+commiserating aspect; it was the look of a ruined soul, bewailing, in him,
+a grief less than what her profounder sympathies imposed upon herself.
+
+"Donatello, we must part," she said, with melancholy firmness.  "Yes;
+leave me!  Go back to your old tower, which overlooks the green valley you
+have told me of among the Apennines.  Then, all that has passed will be
+recognized as but an ugly dream.  For in dreams the conscience sleeps, and
+we often stain ourselves with guilt of which we should be incapable in our
+waking moments.  The deed you seemed to do, last night, was no more than
+such a dream; there was as little substance in what you fancied yourself
+doing.  Go; and forget it all!"
+
+"Ah, that terrible face!"  said Donatello, pressing his hands over his
+eyes.  "Do you call that unreal?"
+
+"Yes; for you beheld it with dreaming eyes," replied Miriam.  "It was
+unreal; and, that you may feel it so, it is requisite that you see this
+face of mine no more.  Once, you may have thought it beautiful; now, it
+has lost its charm.  Yet it would still retain a miserable potency' to
+bring back the past illusion, and, in its train, the remorse and anguish
+that would darken all your life.  Leave me, therefore, and forget me."
+
+"Forget you, Miriam!"  said Donatello, roused somewhat from his apathy of
+despair.
+
+"If I could remember you, and behold you, apart from that frightful visage
+which stares at me over your shoulder, that were a consolation, at least,
+if not a joy."
+
+"But since that visage haunts you along with mine," rejoined Miriam,
+glancing behind her, "we needs must part.  Farewell, then!  But if
+ever--in distress, peril, shame, poverty, or whatever anguish is most
+poignant, whatever burden heaviest--you should require a life to be given
+wholly, only to make your own a little easier, then summon me!  As the
+case now stands between us, you have bought me dear, and find me of little
+worth.  Fling me away, therefore!  May you never need me more! But, if
+otherwise, a wish--almost an unuttered wish will bring me to you!"
+
+She stood a moment, expecting a reply.  But Donatello's eyes had again
+fallen on the ground, and he had not, in his bewildered mind and
+overburdened heart, a word to respond.
+
+"That hour I speak of may never come," said Miriam.  "So
+farewell--farewell forever."
+
+"Farewell," said Donatello.
+
+His voice hardly made its way through the environment of unaccustomed
+thoughts and emotions which had settled over him like a dense and dark
+cloud.  Not improbably, he beheld Miriam through so dim a medium that she
+looked visionary; heard her speak only in a thin, faint echo.
+
+She turned from the young man, and, much as her heart yearned towards him,
+she would not profane that heavy parting by an embrace, or even a pressure
+of the hand.  So soon after the semblance of such mighty love, and after
+it had been the impulse to so terrible a deed, they parted, in all outward
+show, as coldly as people part whose whole mutual intercourse has been
+encircled within a single hour.
+
+And Donatello, when Miriam had departed, stretched himself at full length
+on the stone bench, and drew his hat over his eyes, as the idle and
+light-hearted youths of dreamy Italy are accustomed to do, when they lie
+down in the first convenient shade, and snatch a noonday slumber.  A
+stupor was upon him, which he mistook for such drowsiness as he had known
+in his innocent past life.  But, by and by, he raised himself slowly and
+left the garden.  Sometimes poor Donatello started, as if he heard a
+shriek; sometimes he shrank back, as if a face, fearful to behold, were
+thrust close to his own.  In this dismal mood, bewildered with the
+novelty of sin and grief, he had little left of that singular resemblance,
+on account of which, and for their sport, his three friends had
+fantastically recognized him as the veritable Faun of Praxiteles.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+
+MIRIAM AND HILDA
+
+
+On leaving the Medici Gardens Miriam felt herself astray in the world; and
+having no special reason to seek one place more than another, she suffered
+chance to direct her steps as it would.  Thus it happened, that, involving
+herself in the crookedness of Rome, she saw Hilda's tower rising before
+her, and was put in mind to climb to the young girl's eyry, and ask why
+she had broken her engagement at the church of the Capuchins.  People
+often do the idlest acts of their lifetime in their heaviest and most
+anxious moments; so that it would have been no wonder had Miriam been
+impelled only by so slight a motive of curiosity as we have indicated.
+But she remembered, too, and with a quaking heart, what the sculptor had
+mentioned of Hilda's retracing her steps towards the courtyard of the
+Palazzo Caffarelli in quest of Miriam herself.  Had she been compelled to
+choose between infamy in the eyes of the whole world, or in Hilda's eyes
+alone, she would unhesitatingly have accepted the former, on condition of
+remaining spotless in the estimation of her white-souled friend.  This
+possibility, therefore, that Hilda had witnessed the scene of the past
+night, was unquestionably the cause that drew Miriam to the tower, and
+made her linger and falter as she approached it.
+
+As she drew near, there were tokens to which her disturbed mind gave a
+sinister interpretation.  Some of her friend's airy family, the doves,
+with their heads imbedded disconsolately in their bosoms, were huddled in
+a corner of the piazza; others had alighted on the heads, wings, shoulders,
+and trumpets of the marble angels which adorned the facade of the
+neighboring church; two or three had betaken themselves to the Virgin's
+shrine; and as many as could find room were sitting on Hilda's window-sill.
+But all of them, so Miriam fancied, had a look of weary expectation and
+disappointment, no flights, no flutterings, no cooing murmur; something
+that ought to have made their day glad and bright was evidently left out
+of this day's history.  And, furthermore, Hilda's white windowcurtain was
+closely drawn, with only that one little aperture at the side, which
+Miriam remembered noticing the night before.
+
+"Be quiet," said Miriam to her own heart, pressing her hand hard upon it.
+"Why shouldst thou throb now?  Hast thou not endured more terrible things
+than this?"
+
+Whatever were her apprehensions, she would not turn back.  It might
+be--and the solace would be worth a world--that Hilda, knowing nothing of
+the past night's calamity, would greet her friend with a sunny smile, and
+so restore a portion of the vital warmth, for lack of which her soul was
+frozen.  But could Miriam, guilty as she was, permit Hilda to kiss her
+cheek, to clasp her hand, and thus be no longer so unspotted from the
+world as heretofore
+
+"I will never permit her sweet touch again," said Miriam, toiling up the
+staircase, "if I can find strength of heart to forbid it.  But, O!  it
+would be so soothing in this wintry fever-fit of my heart.  There can be
+no harm to my white Hilda in one parting kiss.  That shall be all!"
+
+But, on reaching the upper landing-place, Miriam paused, and stirred not
+again till she had brought herself to an immovable resolve.
+
+"My lips, my hand, shall never meet Hilda's more," said she.
+
+Meanwhile, Hilda sat listlessly in her painting-room.  Had you looked into
+the little adjoining chamber, you might have seen the slight imprint of
+her figure on the bed, but would also have detected at once that the white
+counterpane had not been turned down.  The pillow was more disturbed; she
+had turned her face upon it, the poor child, and bedewed it with some of
+those tears (among the most chill and forlorn that gush from human sorrow)
+which the innocent heart pours forth at its first actual discovery that
+sin is in the world.  The young and pure are not apt to find out that
+miserable truth until it is brought home to them by the guiltiness of some
+trusted friend.  They may have heard much of the evil of the world, and
+seem to know it, but only as an impalpable theory.  In due time, some
+mortal, whom they reverence too highly, is commissioned by Providence to
+teach them this direful lesson; he perpetrates a sin; and Adam falls anew,
+and Paradise, heretofore in unfaded bloom, is lost again, and dosed
+forever, with the fiery swords gleaming at its gates.
+
+The chair in which Hilda sat was near the portrait of Beatrice Cenci,
+which had not yet been taken from the easel.  It is a peculiarity of this
+picture, that its profoundest expression eludes a straightforward glance,
+and can only be caught by side glimpses, or when the eye falls casually
+upon it; even as if the painted face had a life and consciousness of its
+own, and, resolving not to betray its secret of grief or guilt, permitted
+the true tokens to come forth only when it imagined itself unseen.  No
+other such magical effect has ever been wrought by pencil.
+
+Now, opposite the easel hung a looking-glass, in which Beatrice's face and
+Hilda's were both reflected.  In one of her weary, nerveless changes of
+position, Hilda happened to throw her eyes on the glass, and took in both
+these images at one unpremeditated glance.  She fancied--nor was it
+without horror--that Beatrice's expression, seen aside and vanishing in a
+moment, had been depicted in her own face likewise, and flitted from it as
+timorously.
+
+"Am I, too, stained with guilt?"  thought the poor girl, hiding her face
+in her hands.
+
+Not so, thank Heaven!  But, as regards Beatrice's picture, the incident
+suggests a theory which may account for its unutterable grief and
+mysterious shadow of guilt, without detracting from the purity which we
+love to attribute to that ill-fated girl.  Who, indeed, can look at that
+mouth,--with its lips half apart, as innocent as a babe's that has been
+crying, and not pronounce Beatrice sinless?  It was the intimate
+consciousness of her father's sin that threw its shadow over her, and
+frightened her into a remote and inaccessible region, where no sympathy
+could come.  It was the knowledge of Miriam's guilt that lent the same
+expression to Hilda's face.
+
+But Hilda nervously moved her chair, so that the images in the glass
+should be no longer Visible.  She now watched a speck of sunshine that
+came through a shuttered window, and crept from object to object,
+indicating each with a touch of its bright finger, and then letting them
+all vanish successively.  In like manner her mind, so like sunlight in its
+natural cheerfulness, went from thought to thought, but found nothing that
+it could dwell upon for comfort.  Never before had this young, energetic,
+active spirit known what it is to be despondent.  It was the unreality of
+the world that made her so.  Her dearest friend, whose heart seemed the
+most solid and richest of Hilda's possessions, had no existence for her
+any more; and in that dreary void, out of which Miriam had disappeared,
+the substance, the truth, the integrity of life, the motives of effort,
+the joy of success, had departed along with her.
+
+It was long past noon, when a step came up the staircase.  It had passed
+beyond the limits where there was communication with the lower regions of
+the palace, and was mounting the successive flights which led only to
+Hilda's precincts.  Faint as the tread was, she heard and recognized it.
+It startled her into sudden life.  Her first impulse was to spring to the
+door of the studio, and fasten it with lock and bolt.  But a second
+thought made her feel that this would be an unworthy cowardice, on her own
+part, and also that Miriam- only yesterday her closest friend had a right
+to be told, face to face, that thenceforth they must be forever strangers.
+
+She heard Miriam pause, outside of the door.  We have already seen what
+was the latter's resolve with respect to any kiss or pressure of the hand
+between Hilda and herself.  We know not what became of the resolution.  As
+Miriam was of a highly impulsive character, it may have vanished at the
+first sight of Hilda; but, at all events, she appeared to have dressed
+herself up in a garb of sunshine, and was disclosed, as the door swung
+open, in all the glow of her remarkable beauty.  The truth was, her heart
+leaped conclusively towards the only refuge that it had, or hoped.  She
+forgot, just one instant, all cause for holding herself aloof.  Ordinarily
+there was a certain reserve in Miriam's demonstrations of affection, in
+consonance with the delicacy of her friend.  To-day, she opened her arms
+to take Hilda in.
+
+"Dearest, darling Hilda!"  she exclaimed.  "It gives me new life to see
+you!"
+
+Hilda was standing in the middle of the room.  When her friend made a
+step or two from the door, she put forth her hands with an involuntary
+repellent gesture, so expressive that Miriam at once felt a great chasm
+opening itself between them two.  They might gaze at one another from the
+opposite side, but without the possibility of ever meeting more; or, at
+least, since the chasm could never be bridged over, they must tread the
+whole round of Eternity to meet on the other side.  There was even a
+terror in the thought of their meeting again.  It was as if Hilda or
+Miriam were dead, and could no longer hold intercourse without violating a
+spiritual law.
+
+Yet, in the wantonness of her despair, Miriam made one more step towards
+the friend whom she had lost.  "Do not come nearer, Miriam!"  said Hilda.
+Her look and tone were those of sorrowful entreaty, and yet they
+expressed a kind of confidence, as if the girl were conscious of a
+safeguard that could not be violated.
+
+"What has happened between us, Hilda?" asked Miriam.  "Are we not
+friends?"
+
+"No, no!"  said Hilda, shuddering.
+
+"At least we have been friends," continued Miriam.  "I loved you dearly!
+I love you still!  You were to me as a younger sister; yes, dearer than
+sisters of the same blood; for you and I were so lonely, Hilda, that the
+whole world pressed us together by its solitude and strangeness.  Then,
+will you not touch my hand?  Am I not the same as yesterday?"
+
+"Alas!  no, Miriam!"  said Hilda.
+
+"Yes, the same, the same for you, Hilda," rejoined her lost friend.  "Were
+you to touch my hand, you would find it as warm to your grasp as ever.  If
+you were sick or suffering, I would watch night and day for you.  It is in
+such simple offices that true affection shows itself; and so I speak of
+them.  Yet now, Hilda, your very look seems to put me beyond the limits of
+human kind!"
+
+"It is not I, Miriam," said Hilda; "not I that have done this."
+
+"You, and you only, Hilda," replied Miriam, stirred up to make her own
+cause good by the repellent force which her friend opposed to her.  "I am
+a woman, as I was yesterday; endowed with the same truth of nature, the
+same warmth of heart, the same genuine and earnest love, which you have
+always known in me.  In any regard that concerns yourself, I am not
+changed.  And believe me, Hilda, when a human being has chosen a friend
+out of all the world, it is only some faithlessness between themselves,
+rendering true intercourse impossible, that can justify either friend in
+severing the bond.  Have I deceived you?  Then cast me off!  Have I
+wronged you personally?  Then forgive me, if you can.  But, have I sinned
+against God and man, and deeply sinned?  Then be more my friend than ever,
+for I need you more."
+
+"Do not bewilder me thus, Miriam!"  exclaimed Hilda, who had not forborne
+to express, by look and gesture, the anguish which this interview
+inflicted on her.  "If I were one of God's angels, with a nature incapable
+of stain, and garments that never could be spotted, I would keep ever at
+your side, and try to lead you upward.  But I am a poor, lonely girl, whom
+God has set here in an evil world, and given her only a white robe, and
+bid her wear it back to Him, as white as when she put it on.  Your
+powerful magnetism would be too much for me.  The pure, white atmosphere,
+in which I try to discern what things are good and true, would be
+discolored.  And therefore, Miriam, before it is too late, I mean to put
+faith in this awful heartquake which warns me henceforth to avoid you."
+
+"Ah, this is hard!  Ah, this is terrible!" murmured Miriam, dropping her
+forehead in her hands.  In a moment or two she looked up again, as pale as
+death, but with a composed countenance: "I always said, Hilda, that you
+were merciless; for I had a perception of it, even while you loved me best.
+You have no sin, nor any conception of what it is; and therefore you are
+so terribly severe!  As an angel, you are not amiss; but, as a human
+creature, and a woman among earthly men and women, you need a sin to
+soften you."
+
+"God forgive me," said Hilda, "if I have said a needlessly cruel word!"
+
+"Let it pass," answered Miriam; "I, whose heart it has smitten upon,
+forgive you.  And tell me, before we part forever, what have you seen or
+known of me, since we last met?"
+
+"A terrible thing, Miriam," said Hilda, growing paler than before.
+
+"Do you see it written in my face, or painted in my eyes?"  inquired
+Miriam, her trouble seeking relief in a half-frenzied raillery.  "I would
+fain know how it is that Providence, or fate, brings eye-witnesses to
+watch us, when we fancy ourselves acting in the remotest privacy.  Did all
+Rome see it, then?  Or, at least, our merry company of artists?  Or is it
+some blood-stain on me, or death-scent in my garments?  They say that
+monstrous deformities sprout out of fiends, who once were lovely angels.
+Do you perceive such in me already? Tell me, by our past friendship, Hilda,
+all you know."
+
+Thus adjured, and frightened by the wild emotion which Miriam could not
+suppress, Hilda strove to tell what she had witnessed.
+
+"After the rest of the party had passed on, I went back to speak to you,"
+she said; "for there seemed to be a trouble on your mind, and I wished to
+share it with you, if you could permit me.  The door of the little
+courtyard was partly shut; but I pushed it open, and saw you within, and
+Donatello, and a third person, whom I had before noticed in the shadow of
+a niche.  He approached you, Miriam.  You knelt to him!  I saw Donatello
+spring upon him!  I would have shrieked, but my throat was dry.  I would
+have rushed forward, but my limbs seemed rooted to the earth.  It was like
+a flash of lightning.  A look passed from your eyes to Donatello's--a
+look"--"Yes, Hilda, yes!"  exclaimed Miriam, with intense eagerness.  "Do
+not pause now!  That look?"
+
+"It revealed all your heart, Miriam," continued Hilda, covering her eyes
+as if to shut out the recollection; "a look of hatred, triumph, vengeance,
+and, as it were, joy at some unhoped-for relief."
+
+"Ah!  Donatello was right, then," murmured Miriam, who shook throughout
+all her frame.  "My eyes bade him do it!  Go on, Hilda."
+
+"It all passed so quickly, all like a glare of lightning," said Hilda,
+"and yet it seemed to me that Donatello had paused, while one might draw a
+breath.  But that look!  Ah, Miriam, spare me.  Need I tell more?"
+
+"No more; there needs no more, Hilda," replied Miriam, bowing her head, as
+if listening to a sentence of condemnation from a supreme tribunal.  "It
+is enough!  You have satisfied my mind on a point where it was greatly
+disturbed.  Henceforward I shall be quiet.  Thank you, Hilda."
+
+She was on the point of departing, but turned back again from the
+threshold.
+
+"This is a terrible secret to be kept in a young girl's bosom," she
+observed; "what will you do with it, my poor child?"
+
+"Heaven help and guide me," answered Hilda, bursting into tears; "for the
+burden of it crushes me to the earth!  It seems a crime to know of such a
+thing, and to keep it to myself.  It knocks within my heart continually,
+threatening, imploring, insisting to be let out!  O my mother!--my mother!
+Were she yet living, I would travel over land and sea to tell her this
+dark secret, as I told all the little troubles of my infancy.  But I am
+alone--alone!  Miriam, you were my dearest, only friend.  Advise me what
+to do."
+
+This was a singular appeal, no doubt, from the stainless maiden to the
+guilty woman, whom she had just banished from her heart forever.  But it
+bore striking testimony to the impression which Miriam's natural
+uprightness and impulsive generosity had made on the friend who knew her
+best; and it deeply comforted the poor criminal, by proving to her that
+the bond between Hilda and herself was vital yet.
+
+As far as she was able, Miriam at once responded to the girl's cry for
+help.
+
+"If I deemed it good for your peace of mind," she said, "to bear testimony
+against me for this deed in the face of all the world, no consideration of
+myself should weigh with me an instant.  But I believe that you would
+find no relief in such a course.  What men call justice lies chiefly in
+outward formalities, and has never the close application and fitness that
+would be satisfactory to a soul like yours.  I cannot be fairly tried and
+judged before an earthly tribunal; and of this, Hilda, you would perhaps
+become fatally conscious when it was too late.  Roman justice, above all
+things, is a byword.  What have you to do with it?  Leave all such
+thoughts aside! Yet, Hilda, I would not have you keep my secret imprisoned
+in your heart if it tries to leap out, and stings you, like a wild,
+venomous thing, when you thrust it back again.  Have you no other friend,
+now that you have been forced to give me up?"
+
+"No other," answered Hilda sadly.
+
+"Yes; Kenyon!"  rejoined Miriam.
+
+"He cannot be my friend," said Hilda, "because--because--I have fancied
+that he sought to be something more."
+
+"Fear nothing!"  replied Miriam, shaking her head, with a strange smile.
+"This story will frighten his new-born love out of its little life, if
+that be what you wish.  Tell him the secret, then, and take his wise and
+honorable counsel as to what should next be done.  I know not what else to
+say."
+
+"I never dreamed," said Hilda,--"how could you think it?--of betraying you
+to justice.  But I see how it is, Miriam.  I must keep your secret, and
+die of it, unless God sends me some relief by methods which are now beyond
+my power to imagine.  It is very dreadful.  Ah!  now I understand how the
+sins of generations past have created an atmosphere of sin for those that
+follow.  While there is a single guilty person in the universe, each
+innocent one must feel his innocence tortured by that guilt.  Your deed,
+Miriam, has darkened the whole sky!"
+
+Poor Hilda turned from her unhappy friend, and, sinking on her knees in a
+corner of the chamber, could not be prevailed upon to utter another word.
+And Miriam, with a long regard from the threshold, bade farewell to this
+doves' nest, this one little nook of pure thoughts and innocent
+enthusiasms, into which she had brought such trouble.  Every crime
+destroys more Edens than our own!
+
+
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of "The Marble Faun, Volume 1"
+by Hawthorne.
+
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