Being Impressions and Translations of Maurice Hewlett "For as it is hurtful to drink wine or water alone; and as wine mingled with water is pleasant and delighteth the taste: even so speech, finely framed, delighteth the ears of them that read the story."—3 MACCABEES xv. 39. I cannot add one tendril to your bays, Worn quietly where who love you sing your praise; But I may stand Among the household throng with lifted hand, Upholding for sweet honour of the land Your crown of days. I cannot be for

Mr. Critics—to whom, kind or unkind, I confess obligations—and the Public between them have produced, it appears, some sort of demand for this Second Edition. While I do not think it either polite or politic to enquire too deeply into reasons, I am not the man to disoblige them. It is sufficient for me that in a world indifferent well peopled five hundred souls have bought or acquired my book, and that other hundreds have signified their desire to do likewise. Nevertheless—the vanity of authors

Polite reader, you who have travelled Italy , it will not be unknown to you that the humbler sort in that country have ever believed certain spots and recesses of their land—as wells, mountain-paths, farmsteads, groves of ilex or olive, quiet pine-woods, creeks or bays of the sea, and such like hidden ways—to be the chosen resort of familiar spirits, baleful or beneficent, fate-ridden or amenable to prayer, half divine, wholly out of rule or ordering; which rustic deities and genii locorum , if

Although you know your Italy well, you ask me, who see her now for the first time, to tell you how I find her; how she sinks into me; wherein she fulfils, and wherein fails to fulfil, certain dreams and fancies of mine (old amusements of yours) about her. Here, truly, you show yourself the diligent collector of human documents your friends have always believed you; for I think it can only be appetite for acquisition, to see how a man recognisant of the claims of modernity in Art bears the first

[Footnote: My thanks are due to the Editor of Black and White for permission to reprint the substance of this essay.] I have been here a few days only—perhaps a week: if it's impressionism you're after, the time is now or a year hence. For, in these things of three stages, two may be tolerable, the first clouding of the water with the wine's red fire, or the final resolution of the two into one humane consistence: the intermediate course is, like all times of process, brumous and hesitant. After

The Via del Monte alle Croce is a leafy way cut between hedgerows, in the morning time heavy with dew and the smell of wet flowers. Where it strays out of the Giro al Monte there is a crumbly brick wall, a well, and a little earthen shrine to Madonna—a daub, it is true, of glaring chromes and blues, thick in glaze and tawdry devices of stout cupids and roses, but somehow, on this suggestive Autumn morning, innocent and blue of eye as the carolling throngs of Luca which it travesties. And a pious

(An Old-fashioned Narrative) [Footnote: Perhaps I may be allowed to explain that this article was written from the standpoint of a cultivated Pagan of the Empire, who should have journeyed in Time as well as Space.] The rim of the sun was burning the hill tops, and already the vanguard of his strength stemming the morning mists, when I and my companion first trod the dust of a small town which stood in our path. It still lay very hard and white, however, and sharply edged to its girdle of olives

The man of our time to class poetry as a thing very pleasant and useful shall hardly be found. At most the saying will suffer reprint as a quaintness, a freak, or a paradox; and so it has proved. From Prato, dusty little city of mid-Tuscany, and with the impress of its Reale Orfanotrofio (nourisher, it would thus appear, of more Humanities than one) comes an "Opera Nova, nella quale si contengono bellissime historie, contrasti, lamenti et frottole, con alcune canzoni a ballo, strambotti, geloghe

[Footnote: This appeared in the New Review for December 1896, and is reproduced by leave of the Publisher.] (A Colloquy with Perugino) "There," said my Roman escort, as we forded the Tiber near Torglano, "the haze is lifting: behold august Perugia," I looked out over the misty plain, and saw the spiked ridge of a hill, serried with towers and belfries as a port with ships' masts; then the grey stone walls and escarpments warm in the sun; finally a mouth to the city, which seemed to engulph both

In the days when it was verging on a question whether a man could be at the same time a good Christian and an artist, the chosen subjects of painting were significant of the approaching crisis—those glaring moral contrasts in history which, for want of a happier term, we call dramatic. Why this was so, whether Art took a hint from Politics, or had withdrawn her more intimate manifestations to await likelier times, is a question it were long to answer. The subjects, at any rate, were such as the

(How Sandro Botticelli saw Simonetta in the Spring) Up at Fiesole, among the olives and chestnuts which cloud the steeps, the magnificent Lorenzo was entertaining his guests on a morning in April. The olives were just whitening to silver; they stretched in a trembling sea down the slope. Beyond lay Florence, misty and golden; and round about were the mossy hills, cut sharp and definite against a grey-blue sky, printed with starry buildings and sober ranks of cypress. The sun catching the mosaics

At mass-time Sandro, folded in his shabby green cloak, stepped into the sun on the Ponte Vecchio. The morning mists were rolling back under the heat; you began to see the yellow line of houses stretching along the turbid river on the far side, and frowning down upon it with blank, mud- stained faces. Above, through streaming air, the sky showed faintly blue, and a campanile to the right loomed pale and uncertain like a ghost. The sound of innumerable bells floated over the still city. Hardly a s

At ten o'clock on the morning of April the twenty-sixth, a great bell began to toll: two beats heavy and slow, and then silence, while the air echoed the reverberation, moaning. Sandro, in shirt and breeches, with bare feet spread broad, was at work in his garret on the old bridge. He stayed his hand as the strong tone struck, bent his head and said a prayer: "Miserere ei, Domine; requiem eternam dona, Domine"; the words came out of due order as if he was very conscious of their import. Then he

For a short time in her motley history, an old-clothesman, one Domenico— he and his "Compagnia del Bruco," his Company of the Worm [1]— reigned over Siena and gave to her people a taste for blood. It was bloodshed on easy terms they had; for surely no small nation (except that tiger-cat Perugia) has achieved so much massacre with so little fighting. Massacre considered as one of the Fine Arts? No indeed; but massacre as a viaticum , as "title clear to mansions in the skies"; for, with more compl

( Studies in Translation from Stone ) Greatest of great ladies is Ilaria, potens Luccæ , sleeping easily, with chin firmly rounded to the vault, where she has slept for five hundred years, and still a power in Lucca of the silver planes. It was a white-hot September day I went to pay my devotions to her shrine. Lucca drowsed in a haze, her bleached arcades of trees lifeless in the glare of high noon; all the valley was winking, the very bells had no strength to chime: and then I saw Ilaria lie i

There was once a man in Italy—so the story runs—who said that animals were sacred because God had made them. People didn't believe him for a long time; they came, you see, of a race which had found it amusing to kill such things, and killed a great many of them too, until it struck them one fine day that killing men was better sport still, and watching men kill each other the best sport of all because it was the least trouble. Animals! said they, why, how can they be sacred; things that you call

He hated Marco first of all because one day he undersold him in the Campo, put him to shame in open market. Figs were going cheap that October in spite of the waning year; but there was no earthly reason why he should give the English ladies more than four for two soldi . What were soldi to English people? The scratch of a flea! He would have given them a handful, taken as they came, for their piece of cinquanta , and reaped a tidy little profit for himself. Who would have been the worse? God kn

The secret of happy travelling is contrast. Suffer, that you may drowse thereafter: grill, that you may have a heat on you worth assuagement. Wherefore, to the Italian wanderer, it will be worth while to endure the fierceness of the Lombard plain, even the gilded modernisms of Milan (blistering though they may be under the stroke of the naked sun) and the dusty, painful traverse of the Apennines, to drop down at last into the broad green peace of the Val D'Arno. Take, however, the first halting-

From my roof-top, whither I am fled to snatch what cooler airs may drift into this cup of earth, I can see above the straggling tiles of gable and loggia the cupolas and belfries of many churches. I know they are all dead; for I have wound a devious way through the close inhospitable streets and met them or their ghosts at every corner. The ghost of a dead church is the worst of all disembodied sighs: he wails and chatters at you. Here I have seen churches whose towers were fallen and their trib

Lovely and honourable ladies, it is, as I hold, no mean favour you have accorded me, to sit still and smiling while I have sung to your very faces a stave verging here and there on the familiar. You have sat thus enduring me, because, being wrought for the most part out of stone or painter's stuff, your necessities have indeed forbidden retirement. Yet my obligations should not on that account be lighter. He would be a thin spirit who should gain a lady's friendly regard, and then vilipend becau