TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES:

A number of words in this book have both hyphenated and non-hyphenated variants. For the words with both variants present the one more used has been kept.

Obvious punctuation and other printing errors have been corrected.

The book cover was modified by the Transcriber and has been put in the public domain.

The Transcriber would like to point out to what are considered a couple of translation inaccuracies from the original Italian language version.

In page [59] the text reads:

"I know of no marsh capable of provoking in human pulses a fever more violent that that which at times steals up to us from the shadows of a silent canal."

While in the Italian edition (Publisher: Milano Fratelli Treves; year: 1900), the text reads:

"Io non conosco palude capace di provocare in polsi umani una febbre più violenta di quella che sentimmo talvolta venire verso di noi all'improvviso dall'ombra di un canale taciturno."

The Transcriber thinks a more adequate translation would be:

"I know of no marsh capable of causing a fever in human pulses more violent than the one we sometimes hear coming towards us suddenly from the shadow of a taciturn channel."

In page [195] the text reads:

"He had astonished even himself by that sudden apparition, that unexpected discovery which illumined the shadows of his mind, because exterior reality, and almost tangible."

While in the Italian edition the text reads:

"Si stupiva egli medessimo di quell'apparizione subitanea, di quella improvvisa scoperta che, illuminandosi nell buio del suo spirito si esternava e quasi diveniva tangibile."

The Transcriber thinks a more adequate translation would be:

"He was surprised himself by that sudden appearance, of that sudden discovery that, illuminating itself in the darkness of his spirit, it became external and almost became tangible."

THE LITERATURE OF ITALY

consists of sixteen volumes, of which this one forms a part. For full particulars of the edition see the Official Certificate bound in the volume entitled

"A HISTORY OF ITALIAN
LITERATURE."

Literature
of Italy
1265 1907.

Edited by Rossiter Johnson and
Dora Knowlton Ranous

With a General Introduction by William
Michael Rossetti and Special Introductions
by James, Cardinal Gibbons,
Charles Eliot Norton, S. G. W. Benjamin,
William S, Walsh, Maurice
Francis Egan, and others
New translations, and former renderings
compared and revised

Translators: James C. Brogan, Lord Charlemont,
Geoffrey Chaucer, Hartley Coleridge,
Florence Kendrick Cooper, Lady Dacre,
Theodore Dwight, Edward Fairfax, Ugo
Foscolo, G. A. Greene, Sir Thomas Hoby,
William Dean Howells, Luigi Monti, Evangeline
M. O'Connor, Thomas Okey, Dora
Knowlton Ranous, Thomas Roscoe, William
Stewart Rose, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William
Michael Rossetti, John Addington
Symonds, William S. Walsh, William
Wordsworth, Sir Thomas Wyatt

THE FLAME

(IL FUOCO)

BY

GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO

TRANSLATED BY DORA KNOWLTON RANOUS

.... fa come natura face in foco.

—DANTE

THE NATIONAL ALUMNI

COPYRIGHT, 1907, BY
THE NATIONAL ALUMNI

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

INTRODUCTION

Gabriele D'Annunzio, poet, novelist, and dramatist, was born in 1864, on the yacht Irene near Pescara in the Abruzzi, his mother being the Duchess Maria Galesse of Rome. His education was begun in the College of Prato, in Tuscany, and finished in the University of Rome. His mind early showed signs of extraordinary power and brilliant versatility; he studied art and produced very creditable work while a mere lad, and at the age of sixteen he published his first poem, Primo Vere, which attracted flattering attention and caused him to be hailed as an infant prodigy. In 1880 he went to Rome and became a contributor to the Cronaca Bizantina, a magazine of art and literature. He remained in Rome three years, producing in that time Terra vergine ("Virgin Soil"), Canto novo ("New Song"), and Intermezzo di rime ("Intervals of Rhyme"), all of which were received with admiration and amazement, and with not a little criticism for their unconventional boldness of expression.

D'Annunzio left Rome in 1884 and returned to his native hills, where he wrote Il libro delle vergine ("The Book of the Virgins") in 1884; San Pantaleone (1886), and Isottèo Guttadauro. Then, abandoning his revolutionary and realistic though splendid and intoxicating poetry for prose, the young genius next surprised his public with a novel, Giovanni Episcopo, followed by Il Piacere ("The Child of Pleasure"), in 1889. The former is a strong yet repelling story of crude brutalism, told by a victim of relentless fate; the latter is a kind of poem in prose, in which there is something above mere facility of literary touch; he shows the power of the master poet or painter to see the world at a glance, and with a dextrous hand to draw for eyes less keen that world in all its changeful aspects.

His next important novel, Il trionfo della morte ("The Triumph of Death") was produced in 1896. This brought upon him a storm of mingled applause and criticism—admiration for its marvelous beauty of literary expression, condemnation of the realistic study of a degenerate whose sins lead him to suicide. But, with a proud defiance of criticism, with eyes fixed only on his art, he dared after this achievement to write the self-revelatory novel that is known as his masterpiece—Il fuoco ("The Flame"). In this great novel, which may fairly be called unique, we recognize the personification of a renascence of Latin genius. Under the thinnest veil of disguise, the author presents his own figure and that of one of the world's greatest tragic actresses, revealing the most intimate details of their well known friendship. On this picture of the most romantic of love-affairs, in Venice, the most romantic of cities, he has lavished his finest strokes of genius, writing of feminine nature with rare truth and skill, and an exquisite intuition as to the workings of a woman's mind and the throbbings of her heart.

Besides his poems and novels, D'Annunzio has written several plays, the best known being La Gioconda ("Joy"), La Gloria ("Glory"), La morta città ("The City of the Dead"), and Francesca da Rimini. He is unquestionably the greatest Italian writer of to-day, and few works of Italian fiction appear that do not show something of his influence. A European critic of keen discernment says: "Read his works, all ye men and women for whom life has no secrets and truth has no terror."

D. K. R.

BOOK I
THE EPIPHANY OF THE FLAME

TO TIME AND TO HOPE

Without hope, it is impossible to find
the unhoped-for.

—HERACLITUS OF EPHESUS.

He who sings to the god a song of
hope shall see his wish accomplished.

—ÆSCHYLUS OF ELEUSIS.

Time is the father of miracles.

—HARIRI DI BASRA.

CHAPTER I
THE BELLS OF SAN MARCO

"Stelio, does not your heart quail a little, for the first time?" inquired La Foscarina, with a fleeting smile, as she touched the hand of the taciturn friend seated beside her. "I see that you are pale and thoughtful. Yet this is a beautiful evening for the triumph of a great poet."

With an all-comprehensive glance, she looked around at all the beauty of this last twilight of September. In the dark wells of her eyes were reflected the circles of light made by the oar as it flashed in the water, which was illuminated by the glittering angels that shone from afar on the campaniles of San Marco and San Giorgio Maggiore.

"As always," she went on, in her sweetest tones, "as always, everything is in your favor. On such an evening as this, what mortal could shut out from his mind the dreams that you may choose to evoke by the magic of your words? Do you not feel already that the multitude is well disposed to receive your revelation?"

Thus, delicately, she flattered her friend; thus she pleased herself by exalting him with continual praise.

"It is impossible to imagine a more magnificent and unique festival than this, to persuade so disdainful a poet as you to come forth from his ivory tower. For you was reserved this rare joy; to communicate for the first time with the people in a sovereign place like the Hall of the Greater Council, from the platform where once the Doge harangued the assembled patricians, with the Paradiso of Tintoretto for a background, and overhead the Gloria of Veronese."

Stelio Effrena looked long and searchingly into her eyes.

"Do you wish to intoxicate me?" he said, with a sudden laugh. "Your words remind me of the soothing cup offered to a man on his way to the scaffold. Ah, well, my friend, it is true: I own that my heart quails a little."

The sound of applause rose from the Traghetto di San Gregorio, echoed through the Grand Canal, reverberating among the porphyry and serpentine discs ornamenting the ancient mansion of the Dario, which now leaned over slightly, like a decrepit courtesan loaded with her jewels.

The royal barge passed.

"There is the one person among your audience whom etiquette demands that you shall crown with some of your flowers of oratory," pursued the charming flatterer, alluding to the Queen. "I believe that, in one of your earlier books, you own to a taste and respect for ceremonials. One of your most extraordinary flights of fancy is that description of a day of Charles the Second, King of Spain."

When the royal barge passed the gondola, the man and the woman saluted it. The Queen, recognizing the poet, the author of Persephone, and the distinguished tragic actress, turned to gaze at them with a movement of instinctive curiosity. She was blonde and rosy, and her face was lighted by her ever-ready smile, as she looked out from the cloud of creamy Buranesi laces clinging around her shoulders. Beside her sat Andriana Duodo, the patroness of Burano, where, on that industrious little island, she cultivated flax, and raised the most marvelous old-fashioned flowers.

"Does it not seem to you that the smiles of those two women are so similar as to be twin-like?" said La Foscarina, gazing at the silvery ripples in the wake of the barge, wherein the double light seemed to prolong its self.

"The Countess has a magnificent and ingenuous soul—one of those rare Venetian spirits that preserve their warmth, as their ancient paintings retain their vivid color," said Stelio, earnestly, as if in gratitude. "I have an absolute devotion for her sensitive hands. They fairly quiver with pleasure when they touch rare lace or rich velvet, lingering over the texture with a grace that seems almost shy of betraying such voluptuous joy in mere touch. One day, when I had accompanied her to the gallery of the Academia, she stopped before the Massacre des Innocents by the first Bonifazio. You recollect, of course, the green robe of the prostrate woman that one of Herod's soldiers is about to kill—a thing impossible to forget! She paused long before it, seeming fairly to radiate from her own person the perfect joy that filled her senses; then she said to me, 'Let us leave this place now, Effrena! Take me away, but I must leave my eyes on that robe—I cannot look at anything more!' Ah, do not smile at her, dear friend! She was perfectly simple and sincere in saying that: she really did leave her spiritual vision behind her on that bit of canvas which Art, with a touch of color, has made the center of an infinitely pleasurable mystery. Besides, it was really a blind woman that I accompanied there, but I was suddenly seized with reverence for the privileged soul for whom the magic of color had power to abolish for the moment all memory of commonplace life, and to cut off all other worldly communication. What should you call such a state of mind? A filling of life's goblet to the brim, it seems to me. It is exactly what I should like to do to-night, if I were not discouraged."

A new clamor, louder and more prolonged, rose between the two guardian columns of granite, as the royal barge approached the bank of the Piazzetta, now black with the waiting throng. During the slight pause that followed, the movement of the crowd shifted, like the changing of eddies in a current, and all the galleries of the Palace of the Doges were filled with a confused buzzing, like the mysterious murmur within a sea-shell. Suddenly the buzz rose to a shout, rending the clear air and finally dying away in the gathering twilight. The multitude seemed to realize the divinity of that poetic hour, amid those incomparable surroundings; and perhaps, in its acclaim to youthful royalty and beauty, it expressed a vague longing to forget its prosaic existence, and to revel in the gift of eternal poetry with which its storied walls and waters were endowed.

"Do you know, Perdita," Stelio suddenly exclaimed, "of any other place in the world that possesses, like Venice, at certain times, the power to stimulate all the forces of human life by the exaltation of all desires to a feverish intensity? Do you know of any more irresistible temptress?"

She whom he called Perdita did not reply; she bent her head as if from desire to concentrate her thoughts; but through all her being she felt the indefinable thrill always felt at the sound of the voice of her friend when it revealed the vehemence and passionate soul toward which this woman was drawn by a mingling of love and terror that had no limit.

"Peace! Oblivion! Do you find them down there, at the end of that deserted canal, when you go home exhausted and fevered after inhaling the commingled breath of the crowd that you are able to rouse to wild enthusiasm by a single gesture? As for myself, when I float on these dead waters, I feel my vital powers increase with bewildering rapidity; at certain times my brain seems on fire, as if I were in delirium."

"The flame and the power are within yourself, Stelio," said La Foscarina almost humbly, without raising her eyes.

He was silent, absorbed. Poetic imagery and impetuous music took form within his brain, as if by virtue of some magic fecundation; and his spirit reveled in the unexpected delight of that flood of inspiration.

It was still that hour which, in one of his books, he had called "Titian's hour," because all things glowed with a rich golden light, like the nude figures of that great painter, appearing almost to illumine the sky rather than to receive light from it.

"Perdita," said the poet, who, at the sight of so many things multiplying their beauties around him, was conscious of a kind of intellectual ecstasy, "does it not seem to you that we are following the funeral train of the dead Summer? There she lies in her funereal barge, robed in golden draperies, like a Doge's wife, like a Loredana, a Morosina, or a Soranza of the golden age; and her cortège conducts her toward the Isle of Murano, where some lord of the flames will place her in a coffin of opaline crystal, so that, submerged in the waters of the lagoon, she can, at least, through her transparent eyelids, behold the supple movement of the seaweed, and thus fancy herself enwrapped in the undulating tresses of her own hair, while waiting for the sun of resurrection to dawn."

A spontaneous smile spread over La Foscarina's face, born in her eyes, which glowed as if they really had beheld the vision of the beautiful dead.

"Do you know, Perdita," resumed Stelio, after a moment's pause, during which both gazed at a file of small boats filled with fruit, floating upon the water like great baskets, "do you know anything about a particularly pretty detail in the chronicles of the Doges? The Doge's wife, to meet the expenses of her robes of ceremony, enjoyed a certain percentage of the tax on fruit. Does not this seem delightfully appropriate? The fruits of these isles clothed her in gold and crowned her with pearls! Pomona paying tribute to Arachne! an allegory that Paolo Veronese might well have painted on the dome of the Vestiario. When I conjure up the figure of the noble lady, tall and erect in her high, jeweled buskins, it pleases me to think that something fresh and rustic is connected with the rich folds of her heavy brocade: the tribute of the fruits. What a savor this seems to add to her magnificence! Only fancy, my friend, that these figs and grapes of the new-come Autumn are the price of the golden robe that covers the dead Summer."

"What delightful fancies, Stelio!" said La Foscarina, whose face became young again when she smiled, as a child to whom one shows a picture-book. "Who was it that once called you the Image-maker?"

"Ah—images!" said the poet, his fancy warming. "In Venice, just as one feels everything to a musical rhythm, so he thinks of everything in poetic imagery. They come to us from everywhere, innumerable, diverse, more real and living to our minds than the persons we elbow in these narrow streets. In studying them, we can lose ourselves in the depths of their haunting eyes, and divine, by the curve of their lips, what they would say to us. Some art tyrannical as imperious mistresses, and hold us long beneath the yoke of their power. Others are enfolded in a veil, like timid virgins, or are tightly swaddled, like infants; and only he that knows how to rend their veils can lead them to the perfect life. This morning, when I awakened, my soul was filled with images; it was like a beautiful tree with its branches laden with chrysalides."

He paused, with a laugh.

"If they come forth from their prison to-night," he added, "I am saved; if they do not, I am lost!"

"Lost?" said La Foscarina, gazing earnestly at him, with eyes so full of confidence that his heart went out to her in gratitude. "No, Stelio, you will not lose yourself. You are always sure of yourself; you bear your own destiny in your hands. I think your mother never could have felt any apprehension on your account, even in the most serious circumstances. Is not that true? Pride is the only thing that makes your heart falter."

"Ah, sweet friend, how I love you—how I thank you for saying that!" said the poet frankly, taking her hand. "You continually foster my pride and encourage me to believe that I have already acquired those virtues to which I never cease to aspire. Sometimes you seem to have the power of conferring I know not what divine quality on the things that are born in my soul, and of making them appear adorable in my own eyes. Sometimes, too, you fill me with the awe-struck wonder of the sculptor who, having in the evening borne to the sacred temple the marble gods still warm from his hands—I might say still clinging to the fingers that moulded them—the next day beholds them standing on their pedestals, surrounded by clouds of incense, and seeming to exhale divinity from every pore of the insensate matter from which he fashioned them with his perishable hands. And so, each time that Fortune grants me the favor of being near you, I realize that you are necessary to my life, although, during our long separations, I can live without you, and you without me, despite the fact that both of us well know what splendors would be born of the perfect union of our lives. Thus, knowing the full value of that which you give me, and, still more, of that which you could give me, I think of you as lost to me; and, by that name which it pleases my fancy to call you, I try to express at the same time this consciousness and this regret."

He interrupted himself, because he felt a quiver of the hand he clasped in his own.

"When I call you 'Perdita,'" he resumed softly, after a pause, "I fancy that you can see my desire approaching you, with a deadly blade deep in its palpitating side. Even should it reach you, the chill of death has already touched its audacious hand."

The woman experienced an oft-felt suffering as she listened to the poetic words that flowed from her friend's lips with a spontaneity that proved them sincere. Again she felt an agitation and a terror that she knew not how to define. She felt that she was slipping out of her own life, and was transported into a kind of fictitious life, intense and hallucinating, where even to breathe was difficult. Drawn into that atmosphere, as fiery as the glow surrounding a lighted forge, she felt that she should be capable of passing through any transfigurations that it might please the master of her spirit to work in her to satisfy his continual craving for poetry and beauty. She comprehended that, in his idealistic mind, her own image resembled that of the dead Summer, wrapped in its opalescent cerements. She felt a childish desire to gaze into the poet's eyes as in a mirror, to contemplate the likeness of her real self.

That which rendered her melancholy most painful, was the recognition of a vague resemblance between this agitation and the anxiety that always possessed her when she sank her own personality in that of some sublime creation of dramatic art. Was not this man drawing her, in fact, into a similar region of higher but artificial life; and, that she might figure there without remembrance of her everyday self, did he not seek to cover her with a splendid disguise? But, while she was unable to maintain so great a degree of intensity except by a painful effort, she knew that he dwelt within that state of exaltation with perfect ease, as if in his natural atmosphere, ceaselessly enjoying a marvelous world of fancy, which he could renew or change at his own pleasure.

He had come to realize in himself the intimate union of art and of life, thus finding, in the depths of his own soul, a source of perpetual harmony. He had become able to maintain within himself, without lapse, the mysterious psychological condition that engenders works of beauty, and thus, at a single stroke, to crystallize into ideal types the fleeting figures of his varied existence. It was to celebrate this conquest over his own mental powers that he put the following words into the mouth of one of his heroes: "I witnessed within myself the continual genesis of a higher life, wherein all appearances metamorphosed themselves as if reflected in a magic mirror." Endowed with an extraordinary linguistic facility, he could instantly translate into words the most complicated workings of his mind, with a precision so exact and vivid that sometimes, as soon as expressed, they seemed not to be his own, having been rendered objective by the isolating power of style. His clear and penetrating voice, which, so to speak, seemed to define each word as distinctly as if it were a note of music, enhanced still more this peculiar quality of his speech, so that those who heard him speak for the first time experienced an ambiguous feeling—a mingling of admiration and aversion, because he revealed his own personality in a manner so strongly marked that it seemed to denote an intention to demonstrate the existence of a profound and impassable difference between himself and his listeners. But as his sensibility equaled his intelligence, it was easy for those that knew him well and liked him to absorb, through his crystalline speech, the glow of his vehement and passionate soul. These knew how illimitable was his power to feel and to dream, and from what fiery source sprang the beautiful images into which he converted the substance of his inner life.

She whom he called Perdita knew it well; and, as a pious soul awaits from God some supernatural help that shall work out its salvation, so she seemed to be waiting for him to put her into the state of grace necessary to enable her to elevate and maintain herself in those fiery regions toward which a mad desire to be consumed impelled her, despairing as she was at the thought of her vanished youth, and the fear of finding herself left alone at last in a desert of ashes.

"It is you now, Stelio," she said, with the slight smile she used to hide her sadness, "who wish to intoxicate me." She gently drew her hand from his. Then, to break the spell, she pointed to a loaded barge that was slowly approaching them, and said:

"Look! Look at your pomegranates!"

But her voice shook a little.

Then, in the dreamy twilight, on the water as silvery-green as the leaves of the willow, they watched the passing boat overflowing with that emblematic fruit which suggests things rich and hidden: caskets of red leather, surmounted by the crown of a royal donor; some closed, others half-open, revealing their close-packed gems.

In a low tone, the tragic actress repeated the words addressed by Hades to Persephone in the sacred drama, at the moment when the daughter of Demeter tastes the fatal pomegranate:

Quando tu coglierai il colchico in fiore su'l molle
Prato terrestre, presso la madre dal cerulo peplo.

"Ah, Perdita! how well you know how to throw a shadow into your voice!" interrupted the poet, feeling the harmony of the twilight that seemed to throw a mystic vagueness over the syllables of his lines. "How well you know how to become nocturnal, even before the evening is upon us! Do you recall the scene where Persephone is on the point of throwing herself into Erebus, to the wailing of the chorus of the Oceanides? Her face is like yours when a shadow passes over it. Her crowned head leans backward, as she stands rigidly erect in her saffron-colored peplum; and the very spirit of the night seems flowing into her bloodless flesh, deepening under her chin, in the hollows of her eyes and around her nostrils, giving her face the look of a tragic mask. It is your mask, Perdita! While I was composing my Mystery, the remembrance of you aided me in evoking her divine person. That little saffron-velvet ribbon you so often wear around your neck gave me the note for Persephone's peplum. And one evening at your house, when I was about to take leave of you at the threshold of a room where the lamps were not yet lighted—an agitated evening of last autumn, you remember?—you succeeded, with a single movement, in bringing to full light in my being the creature that had lain long there undeveloped; and then, without dreaming that you had brought about that sudden birth, you shut yourself again within the solitary obscurity of your own Erebus. Ah, I was certain that I could hear you sob, yet a torrent of uncontrollable joy ran through my veins. I never have spoken to you of this before, have I? I ought to have consecrated my work to you, as to an ideal Lucina."

She shrank under the eyes of the master of her spirit; she suffered because of that mask which he admired on her face, and because of that strange joy that she was aware was continually up-springing within him, like a perpetually playing fountain. She felt oppressed by her own personality; troubled because of her too-expressive face, the muscles of which possessed a strange power of mimicry; pained to think of that involuntary art which governed the significance of her gestures, and of that expressive shadow which sometimes on the stage, during a moment of anxious silence, she knew how to throw over her face like a veil of grief—that shadow which now threatened to remain among the lines traced by time on the face that was no longer young. She suffered cruelly by the hand she adored—that hand so delicate and noble which, even with a gift or a caress, had power to hurt her.

"Do you not believe, Perdita," Stelio continued after another pause, "in the occult beneficence of signs? I do not mean astral science or horoscopic signs. I mean that, like those that believe themselves under the influence of one planet or another, we can create an ideal correspondence between our own soul and some terrestrial object, in such a way that this object, becoming impregnated, little by little, with the essence of ourselves, and being magnified by our illusion, finally becomes for us the representative sign of our unknown destiny, and takes on an aspect of mystery when it appears to us in certain crises of our life. This is the secret whereby we may restore to our withering hearts something of their pristine freshness. I know by experience the beneficial effect we may derive from intense communion with some earthly object. From time to time it is necessary for our natures to become like a hamadryad, in order to feel within us the circulation of new energy drawn from the source of life. Of course you understand that I am thinking of your words just now, when the boat passed. You expressed the same idea when you said 'Look at your pomegranates!' For you, and for everyone that loves me, the pomegranate never can be anything but mine. For you and for them, the idea of my personality is indissolubly linked to that fruit which I have chosen for an emblem, and which I have charged with significant ideals, more numerous than its seeds. Had I lived in the times when men excavated the Grecian marbles and found under the soil the still damp roots of ancient fables, no painter could have represented me on his canvas without putting in my hand the Punic apple. To sever from my person that symbol would have seemed to the ingenuous artist like the amputation of a living member, for, to his pagan imagination, the fruit would have seemed to grow to my hand as to its natural branch. In short, he would not have conceived me in any different way than he thought of Hyacinthus or Narcissus or Ciparissus, all three of whom would appear to him as youths symbolized by a plant. But, even in our day, a few lively and warm imaginations exist that comprehend all the meaning and enjoy all the savor of my invention.

"You, yourself, Perdita, do you not delight in cultivating in your garden a pomegranate, the beautiful 'Effrenian' tree, that you may every summer watch me blossom and bring forth fruit? In one of your letters, flying to me like a winged messenger, you described to me the graceful ceremony of decorating the tree with garlands the day you received the first copy of Persephone. So, for you, and for those that love me, I have in reality renewed an ancient myth when, in fancy, I have assimilated myself with a form of eternal Nature. And when I am dead (and may Nature grant that I am able to manifest my whole self in my work before I die!), my disciples will honor me under a symbol of that tree; and in the sharp outline of the leaf, in the flame of the flower, and in the hidden treasure of the ripe fruit, they will recognize certain qualities of my art. By that leaf, by that flower and fruit, as if by a posthumous teaching of the master, their minds will be formed to a similar sharpness, flame-like intensity, and treasured richness.

"You will see now, Perdita, what is the real beneficence of symbols. By affinity, I am led to develop myself in accord with the magnificent genius of the plant which it pleases me to fancy as the symbol of my aspirations toward a full, rich life. This arboreous image of myself suffices to assure me that my powers should follow nature in order to attain naturally the end for which they were created. 'Nature has disposed me thus' is the epigraph of Leonardo da Vinci, which I placed on the title-page of my first book; and the pomegranate, as it continually blossoms and bears its fruit, repeats to me that simple phrase over and over again. We obey only the laws written in our own substance, and by reason of this we shall remain intact in the midst of dissolution, in the unity and plenitude that make our joy. No discord exists between my art and my life."

He spoke with perfect freedom, as if the mind of the listening woman were a chalice into which he poured his thoughts till it was full to the brim. An intellectual felicity filled him, blended with a vague consciousness of the mysterious action whereby his mind was preparing itself for the effort it was soon to make. From time to time, as if by a lightning flash, his mental vision beheld, as he bent toward his beloved friend and listened to the beat of the oar in the silence of the great estuary, the crowd, with its thousand faces, gathering in the vast hall; and he felt a rapid throbbing of his heart.

"It is a very singular thing, Perdita," said he, gazing at the pale distance of the waters, "to observe how readily chance aids our imagination in ascribing an element of mystery to the conjunction of certain appearances with the aim we have fancied. I do not understand the reason why the poets of to-day are so indignant at the vulgarity of the present, and complain that they were born either too late or too early. I am convinced that to-day, as always, every man of intelligence has power to create for himself his own beautiful fable of life. We should study the confused whirl of life with the same lively imagination that Leonardo encouraged in his disciples when he advised them to study the stains on the wall, the ashes on the hearth, the clouds, even mud, and similar objects, in order to find there 'wonderful inventions' and 'infinite things.' In the same way, he declared, one can find in the sound of bells every name and every word that can be imagined. That great master knew well that chance—as the sponge of Apelles had already shown—is always the friend of the ingenious artist. For example, I never cease to be astonished at the ease and grace with which chance favors the harmonious development of my inventions. Do you not believe that the dark god Hades forced his bride to eat the seven seeds of the pomegranate in order to furnish me with the subject of a masterpiece?"

He interrupted himself with one of the bursts of boyish laughter that revealed so clearly the persistence of natural joyousness in the depths of his heart.

"See, Perdita," he continued, still laughing, "whether I am not right. Early in October last year I was invited to Burano by Donna Andriana Duodo. We passed the morning in her flax-fields, and in the afternoon we went to visit Torcello. At that time I was beginning to saturate myself with the mythical story of Persephone, and already my poem had begun to take shape in my brain, and it seemed to me that I was floating on the waters of the Styx, and that I should arrive at the abode of the Manes. Never had I experienced a purer and sweeter understanding of death, and this feeling seemed to render me so ethereal that I fancied I could tread the field of asphodel without leaving there the least trace of my footsteps. The air was damp, warm, the sky was gray; the canals wound between the banks covered with half-faded verdure. (You know Torcello only by sunlight, perhaps.) But all this time some one was talking, arguing, and declaiming in Charon's boat. The sound of praise roused me from my reverie. Francesco di Lizo was speaking of me, regretting that such an artist, so magnificently sensual—I quote his own words—should be obliged to live apart from the obtuse and hostile throng, and to celebrate the feast of sound, color, and form in the solitary palace of his dream. He abandoned himself to a lyric impulse, recalling the joyous and splendid life of the Venetian painters, the popular favor that swept them, like a whirlwind, up to the heights of the glory, beauty, strength and joy which they multiplied around them in producing countless images on walls and domes.

"Then Donna Andriana said: 'Well, I promise solemnly that Stelio Effrena shall have his triumphal feast in Venice.' The Dogaressa had spoken! At that moment I beheld, on the low, mossy bank, a pomegranate laden with fruit, which, like the hallucination of a vision, broke the infinite squalor of that place. Donna Orsetta Contarini, who was sitting beside me, uttered a cry of delight, and held out her hands, as impatient as her lips. Nothing pleases me so much as a frank, strong expression of desire. 'I adore pomegranates!' she cried, and she seemed fairly to be tasting its fine, sharp flavor. She was as childish as her name is archaic. Her cry moved me; but Andrea Contarini appeared severely to disapprove of his wife's vivacity. He seemed to me like a Hades that has little faith in the mnemonic virtue of the seven seeds as applied to legitimate marriage. But the boatmen, too, were stirred with sympathy, and rowed toward the shore, approaching it so close that I was able to jump out first, and I began at once to despoil the tree, my brother. It was another case, albeit from the lips of a pagan of the words of the Last Supper: 'Take, eat, this is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.' How does this seem to you, Perdita? Do not think that I am inventing this story. I assure you it is true."

La Foscarina allowed herself to be fascinated by the free and elegant fancy whereby he exercised the quickness of his wit and his facility of expression. In his words was something intoxicating, variable, and vigorous, which suggested to her mind the double and diverse image of water and of fire.

"Now," he continued, "Donna Andriana has kept her promise. Guided by that hereditary taste for magnificence which she shows so plainly, she has prepared a truly ducal feast in the Palace of the Doges, in imitation of those that were held there toward the end of the sixteenth century. She conceived the idea of rescuing from oblivion the Ariadne of Benedetto Marcello, and of making her sigh in the same place where Tintoretto painted the daughter of Minos receiving the crown of stars from Aphrodite. Don't you recognize in the beauty of this idea the woman who wished to leave her dear eyes behind her on that ineffable green robe? Remember, too, that this musicale in the Hall of the Greater Council has a historic precedent. In fifteen hundred seventy-three, in this same Hall, was performed a mythological composition by Cornelio Frangipani, with music by Claudio Merulo, in honor of his most Christian Majesty Henry Third. Own, Perdita, that my erudition astonishes you. Ah, if you only knew all that I have learned on that subject! I will read you my lecture on it, some day when you deserve a severe punishment!"

"What! Are you not to read it to-night at the festival?" inquired La Foscarina in surprise, fearing that, with his well known heedlessness of engagements, Effrena had resolved to disappoint the expectant public.

He understood her anxiety, and chose to amuse himself with it.

"This evening," he replied, with tranquil assurance, "I shall take a sherbet in your garden, and delight my eyes with the sight of the pomegranate, with its jewels gleaming in the starlight."

"Ah, Stelio! What do you mean?" she cried, half rising.

In her words and movement was so keen a regret, and at the same time so strange an evocation of the expectant gathering, that his mind was troubled. The image of the formidable monster with innumerable human faces amid the gold and somber purple of the vast hall reappeared before his mental vision; in fancy he felt its fixed regard and hot breath. He realized also the peril he had resolved to face in trusting only to the inspiration of the moment, and felt a horror of a possible sudden mental obscurity, an unexpected confusion of his thought.

"Reassure yourself," he said. "I was only jesting. I will go ad bestias, and I will go unarmed. Did you not see the sign reappear just now? Do you believe, after the miracle of Torcello, that it reappeared in vain? It has come to warn me again that the only attitude that suits me is the one to which Nature disposes me. Now, you well know, my friend, that I do not know how to speak of anything but myself. And so, from the throne of the Doges, I must speak to my listeners only of my own soul, under the veil of some seductive allegory, with the charm of flowing musical cadences. I purpose to do this extemporaneously, if the fiery spirit of Tintoretto will only inspire me, from the heights of his Paradise, with sufficient ardor and audacity. The risk tempts me. But into what a strange error I was about to fall, Perdita! When the Dogaressa announced the feast to me, and begged me to do the honors, I undertook to compose a dignified discourse, a really ceremonious effort in prose, ample and solemn as one of those great robes of state behind glass in the Correr Museum; not without making in the exordium a profound genuflexion to the Queen; nor omitting to weave an impressive garland for the head of the most serene Andriana Duodo! And for several days it has given me a curious pleasure to dwell in spiritual communion with a Venetian patrician of the sixteenth century, a master of letters like Cardinal Bembo, a member of the Academy Uracini or Adorni, a frequent visitor to the gardens of Murano and the hills of Asolo. Certain it is that I felt a marked resemblance between the turn of my periods and the massive gold frames that surround the paintings on the ceiling of the Hall of Council. But, alas! yesterday morning, when I arrived here, and, in passing along the Grand Canal, when I wished to steep my weariness in the damp, transparent shade where the marble still exhales the spirit of the night, I had a sudden impression that my papers were worth much less than the dead seaweed tossed by the tide, and they seemed as strange to me as the Trionfi of Celio Magno and the Favole Marittime of Anton Maria Consalvi, quoted and commented on in them by me. What should I do, then?"

He threw around him an all-sweeping glance, as if exploring the waters and the sky in search of an invisible presence, or a newly arrived phantom. A yellowish light spread toward the solitary shores, which stood out in sharp lines like the dark veins in agate. Behind him, toward the Salute, the sky was scattered with light rosy and violet ribbon-like clouds, giving it the appearance of a glaucous sea, peopled with Medusas. From the gardens near the water descended the odor of foliage saturated with light and heat—an odor so heavy one might almost see it float on the waves like aromatic oil.

"Do you feel the Autumn, Perdita?" Stelio asked his dreamy friend, in a penetrating voice.

Again she had a vision of the dead Summer, enclosed within opalescent glass and sunk among the masses of seaweed.

"Yes, I feel it—within myself!" she replied, with a melancholy smile.

"Did you not see it last night, when it descended upon the city? Where were you last night, at sunset?"

"In a garden of the Giudecca."

"I was here, on the Riva. When human eyes have contemplated such a spectacle of joy and beauty, does it not seem to you that the eyelids should close and seal themselves forever? I should like to speak to-night, Perdita, of these hidden, secret matters. I should like to celebrate within myself the nuptials of Venice and Autumn, in almost the same tonality that Tintoretto used when he painted the nuptials of Ariadne and Bacchus for the hall of the Anticollegio—azure, purple and gold. Last night an old germ of poetry suddenly blossomed in my soul. I recalled a fragment of a forgotten poem that I wrote when I began to write in nona rima, one September in my early youth, when I had come by sea to Venice for the first time. The title of the poem was simply 'The Allegory of Autumn,' and the god was no longer represented as crowned with vine-leaves, but with jewels, like one of Paolo Veronese's princes, his being aglow with passion, about to approach the Anadyomenean City, with her arms of marble and her thousand green girdles. But the idea had not at that time reached the right degree of intensity to be admitted to the realm of Art, and instinctively I gave up the effort to manifest it in its entirety. But, in an active mind, as in a fertile soil, no seed is lost; and now this idea returns to me at an opportune moment and urgently demands expression. What a just and mysterious fatality governs the mental world! It was necessary that I should respect that first germ in order to feel its multiplied virtues develop in me to-day. That Vinci, who looked deep into all things profound, certainly meant something of this kind in his fable of the grain of millet that says to the ant: 'If you will be kind enough to let me satisfy my desire to be born again, I will render myself to you again a hundredfold.' Admire the touch of grace in those fingers capable of breaking iron! Ah, he is always the incomparable master! How can I forget him for a time, that I may give myself to the Venetians?"

The playful irony with which he had been speaking was suddenly extinguished in his last words, and again he seemed plunged in his own thoughts.

"It is already late; the hour approaches; we must return," he said presently, rousing himself as if from a troubled dream, for he had seen reappear that formidable monster with the thousand human faces filling the depth and width of the great hall. "I must go back to the hotel in time to dress."

Then, with a return of his boyish vanity, he thought of the eyes of the unknown women who would see him that evening for the first time.

"To the Hotel Danieli," La Foscarina said to the boatman.

While the dentellated iron of the prow swung around on the water, with a slow, animal-like movement, each felt a sadness different but equally painful at leaving behind them the infinite silence of the estuary, already overcome by darkness and death, and being compelled to return toward the magnificent and tempting city, whose canals, like the veins of a full-blooded woman, began to burn with the fever of night.

They were quiet for some time, absorbed by their interior agitation, which shook each heart to it depths. And all things around them exalted the power of life in the man who wished to attract to himself the universe in order not to die, and in the woman, who would have thrown her oppressed soul to the flames in order to die pure.

Both started at the unexpected sound of the salute at the lowering of the flag on board a man-of-war anchored before the gardens. At the summit of the black mass they saw the tricolored flag slide down the staff and fold itself up, like a heroic dream that suddenly vanishes. For a moment the silence seemed deeper, and the gondola glided into darker shadows, grazing the side of the armed colossus.

"Do you know that Donatella Arvale who is to sing in Ariadne?" said Stelio suddenly.

"She is the daughter of the great sculptor, Lorenzo Arvale," La Foscarina replied, after an instant of hesitation. "I have no dearer friend than she—and in fact she is my guest at present. You will meet her at my house this evening, after the festival."

"Donna Andriana spoke to me of her last night as a prodigy. She said that the idea of resurrecting Ariadne had come to her on hearing Donatella Arvale sing divinely the air: Come mai puoi—Vedermi piangere? We shall have some divine music at your house, Perdita. Oh, how I long to hear it! Below there, in my solitude, for months and months, I hear only the music of the sea, which is too terrible, and my own music, which is too tumultuous."

The bells of San Marco gave the signal for the Angelus, and their powerful notes spread in great waves of sound over the water, vibrating among the masts of the vessels, and creeping out upon the infinite reach of the lagoon. From San Giorgio Maggiore, San Giorgio dei Greci, San Giorgio degli Schiavoni, San Giovanni in Bragora, and San Moisé, from the Salute, the Redentore, and beyond, over the entire domain of the Evangelista, to the distant towers of the Madonna dell' Orto, San Giobbe and Sant' Andrea, tongues of bronze responded, mingling in one great chorus, seeming to extend over the silent stones and waters a single immense and invisible dome of metal, the vibration of which might almost reach the first sparkling stars. Those sacred voices seemed to lend to the City of Silence an ideal and infinite grandeur.

"Can you still pray?" said Stelio in a softened voice, looking at the woman who, with eyes downcast, and hands clasped on her knees, seemed absorbed in a silent orison.

She did not reply; she only pressed her lips together more closely.

The minds of both were confused by the strange, the new image, and the new name, that had risen between them. Perturbation and passion seized them again, drew them near each other with such force that they dared not look into each other's eyes, for fear of what might be read there.

"Shall I see you again this evening, after the festival?" said La Foscarina, with a slight unsteadiness in her voice. "Are you free?"

She was eager now to hold him, to make him her prisoner, as if she feared he would escape her, as if she had hoped to find this night some magic philter that would bind him to her forever. And, though she comprehended now that the gift of all she had to give had become necessary, she realized only too clearly, nevertheless, even through the intoxication that bewildered her, the poverty of the gift so long withheld. And a mournful modesty, a mingling of terror and pride, contracted her slender frame.

"I am free—and I am yours!" the young man answered in a half whisper, without raising his eyes to hers. "You know that nothing is worth to me what you can give."

His heart, too, was stirred to its depths, with the two aims before his ambition toward which, this night, all his energy bent, like a powerful bow: the city and the woman, both tempting and mysterious, weary with having lived too much, and oppressed with too many loves; both were too much magnified by his imagination, and both were destined to disappoint his hopes.

In the moment that followed, a violent wave of mingled regret and desire swept over him. The pride and intoxication of his hard, persistent labor; his boundless ambition, which had been curbed within a sphere too narrow for it; his intolerance of mediocrity, his demand for the privileges of princes; his superb and empurpled dreams; his insatiable need of preëminence, glory, pleasure—surged in his soul with a confusing tumult, dazzling and suffocating him. And the craving of his sadness inclined him to win the final love of this solitary, nomadic woman, the very folds of whose garments seemed to suggest the frenzy of the far-off multitudes, whom she had so often thrilled and shaken with her art, by a cry of passion, a sob of grief, or a death-like silence. An irresistible impulse drew him toward this woman, in whom he fancied he saw the traces of all emotions and experiences, toward that being, no longer young, who had known so many caresses, yet was unknown by him.

"Is it a promise?" he murmured, bowing his head lower to conceal his agitation. "Ah! at last!"

She made no reply, but fixed on him a gaze of almost mad intensity, which he did not see.

They relapsed into silence again, while the reverberation of the bells passing overhead was so penetrating that they felt it in the roots of the hair, as from a quiver of their own flesh.

"Good-by," said La Foscarina, as they were landing. "When we leave the hall, let us meet in the courtyard, near the second well, the nearest to the Molo."

"Good-by," he answered. "Take some place where I may see you, among the crowd, when I speak my first word."

A confused clamor arose from San Marco, above the sound of the bells, spread over the Piazzetta, and died away toward the Fortuna.

"May all light be on your brow, Stelio!" said La Foscarina, holding out her burning hands to him passionately.

CHAPTER II
THE FACE OF TRUTH

When he entered the court by the south door, Stelio Effrena, seeing the black and white throng that swarmed up the Giants' Stairway, in the ruddy light of the torches fixed in the iron candelabra, felt a sudden sensation of repugnance, and paused at the entrance. He noted the contrast between this paltry crowd and the noble architecture which, magnified by the unusual nocturnal illumination, expressed, by their varied harmoniousness, the strength and the beauty of a day that was past.

"Oh, how miserable!" he exclaimed, turning to the friends that accompanied him. "In the Hall of the Greater Council, from the throne of the Doges, how is it possible to find metaphors that will move a thousand starched shirt-bosoms? Let us go back; let us inhale the odor of the real crowd, the true crowd. The Queen has not yet left the royal palace. We have time enough."

"Until the moment that I see you on the platform, I shall not feel sure that you will really speak," said Francesco de Lizo, laughing.

"I believe that Stelio would prefer the balcony to the platform," said Piero Martello, wishing to flatter the master's taste for sedition, and his factious spirit, which he himself affected, in imitation. "He would like to harangue, between the two red columns, the mutinous people who threatened to set fire to the new Procuratie and the old Libreria."

"Yes, certainly," said Stelio, "if the harangue had power to prevent or to precipitate an irreparable act. I hold that we use the written word to create a pure form of beauty, which, even in an uncut book, is enclosed and shut in, as in a tabernacle that may be entered only by election, with the same premeditated will used in the breaking of a seal. But the spoken word, it seems to me, when it is addressed directly to a multitude, should have only action for its aim. On this condition alone can a proud spirit, without lessening itself in dignity, communicate with the masses by means of voice and gesture. Otherwise, his effort becomes merely histrionic. And so I repent bitterly of having accepted this function of an ornamental orator, who must not speak unless he speaks agreeably. Consider, I ask you, how humiliating for me is the honor that they think to do me, and consider also the uselessness of my speech. All these people, strangers here, have left their mediocre occupations, or their favorite amusements, to come and listen to me with the same vain and stupid curiosity that would lead them to listen to some new virtuoso. For the women that will listen to me, the art with which I have tied my cravat will be much more appreciated than the art with which I shall round my periods. And, after all, the only effect of my speech will be a clapping of hands, deadened by gloves, or a brief, discreet murmur, to which I shall reply with a gracious inclination of the head. Does it seem to you that I am about to attain the summit of my ambition?"

"You are wrong," said Francesco de Lizo. "You should congratulate yourself for this happy occasion, which will allow you, for several hours, to impress the rhythm of art on the life of a forgetful city, and to make us dream of the splendors that might embellish our existence by a renewed union of Art with Life. If the man that built the Teatro di Festa were there, he would praise you for that harmony which he predicted. But the most wonderful thing about this affair is the fact that, notwithstanding your absence, and your ignorance of the project, the festival seems to have been prepared under the direct inspiration of your genius. This is the best proof that it is possible to restore and diffuse taste, even in the midst of the barbaric present. Your influence to-day is more powerful than you think. The lady who has desired to honor you—she that you call the Dogeressa—at every new idea that came to her, asked herself: 'Would it please Effrena?' If you only knew how many young and eager spirits put to themselves to-day the same question, when they consider the aspects of their inner life!"

"And for whom should you speak, if not for them?" said Daniele Glauro, the fervent and sterile ascetic of Beauty, with that melodious voice which seemed to reflect the frank and inextinguishable ardor of the soul beloved by the master as one of the most faithful. "If, when you stand upon the platform, you will look about you, you will easily recognize the expression in their eyes. There are many of them, and some have come a long distance; they await your words with an eagerness that you perhaps do not understand. They are those who have imbibed the spirit of your poetry, who have breathed the fiery ether of your dream, and felt the grip of your chimera; those to whom you have announced the transfiguration of the world by the miracle of a new art. The number that you have attracted as an apostle of hope and of joy is very great. They have heard that you are to speak in Venice, in the Ducal Palace—one of the most splendid and glorious places on earth. They will be able to see you and listen to you for the first time, surrounded by the magnificence that seems to them an appropriate frame to your personality. The old Palace of the Doges, which has so long been wrapped in nocturnal darkness, is suddenly illuminated and aroused this night for you, and, to their minds, it is you alone that have had the power to rekindle these long-extinguished torches. Do you understand now the eagerness of their expectation? Does it not seem to you that to them only you ought to speak? The condition you impose on the man that harangues a multitude may be fulfilled. You can awaken an emotion in their breasts that shall turn them forever toward the Ideal. For how many of them, Stelio, you might make this Venetian night an experience never to be forgotten!"

Stelio laid his hand on the prematurely bent shoulders of the mystic doctor, and, smiling, repeated Petrarch's words: "Non ego loquar omnibus, sed tibi, sed mihi, et his."

He saw within himself the radiant eyes of his unknown disciples, and heard within his soul, in clear tones, the sound of his own exordium.

"Nevertheless," he replied gayly, addressing Piero Martello, "it would be amusing to conjure up a tempest on this sea."

They were standing under the arch, near a column, in contact with the noisy, unanimous crowd, which gathered in the Piazzetta, stretched out toward the Zecca, was swallowed up near the Procuratie, barred the Torre dell'Orologio, occupied every space like a wave without form, and communicated its living warmth to the marble columns and the walls, against which it surged in its violent movement. From time to time, a louder cry arose from the distance, at the farther end of the Piazza, swelling higher and stronger until it burst out near them like a clap of thunder, then diminishing until it died away in a murmur.

"I should like to-night to find myself for the first time with a woman I loved, on a floating couch, over there, beyond the gardens, toward the Lido," said the romantic poet, Paris Eglano, a blond, beardless youth, whose handsome mouth, with its full red lips, contrasted with the almost angelic delicacy of his other features. "Within an hour, Venice will present to some Nero-like lover, hidden in a gondola, the spectacle of a city set on fire by its own delirium."

Stelio smiled, noting to what extent his intimates had become imbued with his own spiritual essence, and how deep the seal of his own style had stamped itself on their minds. Suddenly the image of La Foscarina flashed across his mental vision: La Foscarina, poisoned by too much art, remembering too many amatory experiences, with the stamp of maturity and of corruption on her eloquent mouth, the aridity of the vein fever that burned in those hands that pressed out the juices of deceitful fruits, and the marks of a hundred masks on that face which had simulated the fury of all mortal passions. Thus she appeared to his ardent thought of her, and his heart throbbed faster as he pictured her emerging soon from the multitude, as from some element that enslaved her, and thought that from her glance he should draw the necessary inspiration.

"Come, let us go," said he resolutely to his friends. "It is the hour."

The cannon announced that the Queen had left the royal palace. A prolonged quiver ran through the living human mass, like that which precedes a storm at sea. From the bank of San Giorgio Maggiore, a rocket rushed up with a long hiss, rising in the air like a fiery stem and bursting into a mass of pink splendor at the top; then it curved, grew fainter, and dissolved in trembling sparks, extinguished finally with a slight crackling in the water. And the joyous clamor that greeted the beautiful Queen, repeating her name—the name of the starry, white flower and of the pearl—evoked in Stelio's imagination the pomp of the ancient Promissione, the triumphal procession of the Arts escorting the new Dogaressa to the palace; the wave of joy on which Morosina Grimani mounted to her throne, shimmering with gold, while all the Arts bowed before her, laden with gifts as if they bore horns of plenty.

"Certainly," said Francesco de Lizo, "if the Queen loves your books, she will wear all her pearls this evening. You will have before you a veritable labyrinth of jewels—all the hereditary gems of the Venetian patricians."

"Look toward the foot of the stairway, Stelio," said Daniele Glauro. "A group of devotees is waiting for you to pass that way."

Stelio stopped at the well indicated by La Foscarina. He leaned over the bronze edge, his knees touching the little carved caryatides, and saw in the dark water the reflection of the stars. For the moment his soul isolated itself, shut out the surrounding sounds, and withdrew into the shadowy disc, from which rose a slight dampness betokening the presence of water. His excited desire felt a need to attain even greater intoxication than this night promised him, and he felt that in the farthest depths of his being lay a secret soul, which, like this dark, watery mirror, remained immovable, strange, and intangible.

"What do you see there?" inquired Piero Martello, also leaning over the rim, worn in places by the ropes of centuries.

"The face of Truth!" the master answered.

In the apartments contiguous to the Hall of the Greater Council, once occupied by the Doge, but now by the pagan statues that were seized as booty in ancient wars, Stelio awaited the summons from the master of the ceremonies to mount to the platform. He was quite calm, and smiled on the friends that spoke to him, but their words reached his ear between pauses, like interrupted sounds borne from afar by the wind. From time to time, with an abrupt, involuntary movement, he drew near to one of the statues, and ran his hand nervously over it, as if seeking some weak spot, that he might break it; or he bent curiously over some rare medal, as if to read on it some indecipherable sign. But his eyes saw nothing of all this; they were turned within, where the multiplied power of his will evoked the silent forms that his voice would presently transform into the perfection of verbal music. His whole being contracted itself in an effort to raise to the highest degree of intensity the representation of the extraordinary feelings that possessed him. Since he could speak only of himself, and of his own universe, at least he would unite in one ideal figure the sovereign qualities of his art, and show to his disciples by his genius for imagery what an invincible force hastened him through this life. Once more he intended to show them that, in order to obtain the victory over men and circumstances, there is no other way than to persevere in exalting oneself and to magnify one's own dream of beauty or of power.

He bent over a medallion by Pisanello, feeling at his temples the ardent, rapid pulsation of his thought.

"See, Stelio," said Daniele Glauro to him, with that pious reverence which veiled his voice whenever he spoke of his religion, "see how the mysterious affinities of Art work upon you, and how an infallible instinct leads you, amid so many forms, and at the very moment when your thought is about to reveal itself, toward the example of the most perfect expression, the highest model of style. At the very instant of coining your own idea, you are led to study one of Pisanello's medallions; you are attracted by the impression of one of the greatest stylists that ever have lived in the world, the most frankly Hellenic soul of the whole Renaissance. And suddenly your forehead is illumined by a ray of light."

The pure bronze bore the effigy of a young man with beautiful, waving hair, an imperial profile and Apollo-like neck, and the head was so perfect a type of elegance and vigor that the imagination could not picture him in life except as free from all decadence and eternally unchangeable, as the artist had presented him in this circle of bronze.—Dux equitum præstans Malatesta Novellus Cesenæ dominus. Opus Pisani pictoris.—And beside it was another medallion by the same artist, bearing the effigy of a virgin, with narrow chest, a swan-like throat, and hair drawn back in the shape of a heavy bag; the forehead, high and receding, seemed already to promise the aureole of the blessed, and she was like a vase of purity sealed forever, hard, precise, and limpid as a diamond, an adamantine pyx where the spirit, consecrated like the Host, rested as a sacrifice.—Cicilia Virgo, filia Johannis Francesco primi Marchionis Mantuae.

"Here comes La Foscarina, with Donatella Arvale," announced Francesco de Lizo, who had been watching the crowd that climbed the Censors' Stairway and pressed into the vast hall.

Again Stelio Effrena felt a wave of agitation sweep over him. The murmur of the throng seemed to come from afar and mingle in his ears with the throbbing of his arteries, and in this murmur he fancied he heard once more the last words of Perdita.

CHAPTER III
THE NUPTIALS OF AUTUMN AND VENICE

The murmur swelled louder, diminished, then ceased, as Stelio, with firm, light movement, ascended the marble steps of the platform. As he turned toward the audience, his dazzled eyes rested upon the formidable monster with a thousand human faces, amid the gold and somber purple of the immense hall.

A sudden thrill of pride gave him complete self-control. He bowed to the Queen and to Donna Andriano Duodo, who smiled upon him with the same twin smiles he had seen from the gliding gondola on the Grand Canal. He threw a keen glance toward the scintillating first rows, seeking La Foscarina, then looked toward the farther end of the hall, where only a dark zone, dotted with white spots, could be distinguished. The silent, attentive multitude seemed to him like an enormous, many-eyed chimera, its breast covered with glittering scales, extending its black bulk under the arches of the rich, heavy ceiling that hung over it like a suspended treasure.

Dazzling was that chimeric breast, where sparkled necklaces that must once have flashed their fires under the same ceiling on the night of a coronation banquet. The tiara and the necklaces of the Queen—the rows of pearls, like grains of light, somehow suggesting the miraculous image of a smile just about to appear—the dark emeralds of Andriano Duodo, taken long ago from the handle of a scimitar; the rubies of Giustiniana Memo, set in the semblance of carnations by the inimitable craftsmanship of Vettor Camelio; the sapphires of Lucrezia Priuli, taken from the shoes in which the Most Serene Zilia had walked to her throne on the day of her triumph; the beryls of Orsetta Contarini, delicately set in dull gold by the art of Silvestro Grifo; the turquoises of Zenobia Corner, bathed in a strange pallor by the mysterious malady that, in a single night, changed them as they lay on the warm breast of the Princess de Lusignan, among the delights of Asolo—all the rich jewels that had illumined the nights of the Anadyomenean city glowed with renewed fire on the breast of the chimera, from which rose a moist odor of feminine breaths and many perfumes. The rest of that strangely marked and shapeless body extended to the rear of the hall, in a sort of long tail, passing between the two gigantic spheres, which recalled to the memory of the "Image-maker" the two bronze spheres that the monster with the bandaged eyes presses with his paws in Giambellino's allegory. And this vast animal life, devoid of all thought for the time before him who alone at that moment must think, endowed with the inert fascination of enigmatic idols, covered with its own silence as with a shield capable of receiving and resisting any shock, awaited the first thrill of his dominating word.

Stelio Effrena measured this silence, upon which his first syllable must fall. While his voice was rising to his lips, an effort of will summoning it and fortifying it against instinctive hesitation, he perceived La Foscarina standing near the railing that encircled the celestial sphere. The pale face of the tragic actress rose from her bare neck, and the purity of her white shoulders was just above the orbit of the zodiacal figures. Stelio admired the art of this apparition. With his own eyes fixed upon those distant, adoring ones, he began to speak slowly, as if the rhythm of the oars still lingered in his ears.

"One afternoon, not long ago, while I was returning from the gardens along the warm bank of the Schiavoni, where the souls of poets sometimes believe they see I know not what magic golden bridge spanning a sea of light and silence toward a dream of infinite beauty, I thought—or rather, I witnessed with my thoughts, as at some intimate spectacle—of the nuptial alliance, under those skies, of Autumn and Venice.

"Everywhere was disseminated a spirit of life, arising from passionate expectation and restrained ardor, which made me marvel at its vehemence, but which seemed not altogether new to me; I had already seen it in some shadowy zones, under the almost death-like immobility of Summer; and sometimes I had felt it vibrating, like a mysterious pulse, in the strange feverish odor of the water. Thus, I thought, it is true, then, that this pure city of Art aspires to a supreme state of beauty which for her returns annually, as the flowers return to the forest. She tends to reveal herself in full harmony, as if always she bore within her bosom, powerful and conscious, the same desire of perfection from which she sprang and was formed throughout the ages, like some divine creature. Under the motionless fire of Summer, she seemed to palpitate no more, to breathe no more, but to lie dead in her green waters. My feeling did not deceive me, however, when I fancied I saw her secretly inspired by a spirit of life sufficient to renew the most sublime of the ancient miracles.

"That is what I thought, and what I saw. But how can I convey to you that listen to me any idea of that vision of joy and beauty? No sunrise, no sunset, could equal the glory of that hour of light on the water and the marble. The unexpected apparition of the beloved woman in a forest in springtime could not be as intoxicating as this sudden revelation by daylight of the heroic and voluptuous city, which carries in its marble embrace the richest dream of a Latin soul."

The voice of the orator, clear, penetrating, almost icy at the beginning, was suddenly warmed by the invisible sparks kindled within him by the effort of improvisation, yet governed by the extreme nicety of his ear. While his words flowed without hesitation, and the rhythmic line of his periods set forth their beauty with the clearness of a figure drawn at one stroke by a bold hand, his auditors were conscious of the excessive tension of his mind, and it captivated them as one of those terrifying feats at the circus, where all the herculean energies of the athlete show the test by his quivering tendons and swelling arteries. They felt the reality, the living warmth of the thought thus expressed, and their pleasure was the greater because unexpected, for most of his auditors had anticipated from this indefatigable searcher after perfection the studied reading of a laboriously composed discourse. His devotees observed with emotion this audacious test, as if they saw before them, unveiled, the secret labor that had brought forth the forms that had given them so much joy. And this first wave of emotion, spreading by contagion, indefinitely multiplied and becoming unanimous, returned to him who caused it, and seemed almost to overcome him.

This was the expected danger. Under the pressure of a wave so strong, the speaker faltered. For a few seconds a thick cloud darkened his brain; the light of his mind was extinguished, as a torch before an irresistible wind; his eyes grew dim, as if he were about to faint. But he felt how mortifying would be the shame of defeat if he yielded to this seizure; and in that darkness, by a sort of effort of brute force, or like the striking of steel on flint, his will rose in triumph over the instinctive weakness. With glance and gesture, he directed the eyes of the assemblage to the great masterpiece in the ceiling of that hall, spreading there in a kind of sun-like radiance.

"I am certain," he exclaimed, "that Venice appeared thus to Paolo Veronese, when he sought within himself for an image of the Queen triumphant."

He explained the reason why the great master, after throwing upon his canvas a profusion of gold, jewels, silks, purple, ermine, and all imaginable richness, at last could represent the glorious face only in the nimbus of a shadow.

"We ought to exalt Veronese for that shadowy veil alone! Representing by a human face the Queen of Cities, he yet knew how to express its essential spirit, whose symbol was an inextinguishable flame seen through a watery veil. And one I know well, who, having plunged his soul in this sublime element, has withdrawn it enriched with a new power, and consequently has lived a fuller and more ardent spiritual life."

This one he knew well—was it not himself? In the assertion of his own personality he found again all his courage, and felt that henceforth he was master of his thoughts and words, freed from danger, capable of drawing within the charmed circle of his dream the enormous, many-eyed chimera, with the glittering breast—the ephemeral and versatile monster from whose side emerged its offspring, the Tragic Muse, her head rising above the constellations.

Obedient to his movement, the innumerable faces turned toward the Apotheosis, their awakened eyes contemplating with wonder this marvel, as if they beheld it for the first time, or under a new aspect. The naked back of the woman with the golden helmet shone under the cloud with an effect of muscular life so perfect that it looked as attractive as palpable flesh. And, from this nudity, more realistic than all the rest, victorious over Time, which had darkened around it heroic images of sieges and battles, seemed to emanate a powerful enchantment, the sweetness of which was augmented by the breath of the autumn night coming through the open windows; while, from above, the princesses of a former day, leaning over the balustrades between two columns, inclined their illumined faces and opulent breasts toward their worldly sisters below.

Under the new spell of enchantment, the poet threw off his winged words, harmonious as lyric strophes. He described the Queen City palpitating with ardor within her thousand green girdles, extending her marble arms toward the wild Autumn, whose humid breath reached her, balmy with the delicious death of the fields and islands, making her sigh like a bride awaiting her hour of joy. By the magic of his words, Venice seemed to be possessed of marvelous hands, with which she wove for herself the inimitable tissue of allegory that covered her.

"And since, in all the world, poetry alone is truth, he that knows how to contemplate it, and to draw it into his own soul by the virtue of his thought, will be very near to mastering the secret of victory over life."

In pronouncing these last words, Stelio sought the eyes of Daniele Glauro, and saw that they sparkled with happiness beneath that large, meditative brow, which seemed swollen by the weight of an unborn world. The mystic doctor was there, near the platform, with several of those unknown disciples that he had described to the master as eager and anxious, full of faith and expectation, impatient to break the chain of their daily servitude, and to know the free intoxication of joy and sadness. Stelio noted that they were grouped, like a nucleus of compressed force, against the great red bookcases, wherein lay buried innumerable volumes of useless and forgotten lore. He marked their eager and attentive faces, their long hair, their lips, half parted with child-like absorption, or closed tightly in a kind of violent sensitiveness, their bright eyes, to which the breath of his words carried lights and shadows, as a changeful breeze stirs a parterre of delicate flowers. He felt that in his own hand he held all their souls blended into one spirit, which he could at will agitate, crush, tear, or burn, as if it were a filmy scarf.

While his mind expanded and relaxed, in its continued effort, he still retained a strange power of exterior investigation, a faculty of material observation which became the clearer and more penetrating with the warmth and quickening of his eloquence.

Suddenly he saw with his mental vision the picture he wished to present, and his verbal expression of it was after the manner of the master painters that had reigned in that place, with the luxuriance of Veronese, and the fire of Tintoretto.

"All the vitalities and all the transfigurations of the ancient stones, where Time has accumulated so many mysteries, and where glory has set her emblems; all the alternations of marvelously easy creations and destructions were reflected in the water; the effulgence of a jubilant light glittered between the crosses of cupolas inflated by prayer, and the slender saline crystals hanging under the arch of the bridges. Like a sentinel on a rampart uttering his shrill cry to him that listens for the signal, so the golden angel from the summit of the highest tower at last flashed out the announcement.

"And He appeared! The Bridegroom appeared, seated in his fiery chariot, which he turned toward the Queen of Cities, and in his youthful, superhuman countenance was a strange fascination springing from an animal-like cruelty and delicacy contrasting with the deep eyes, full of all knowledge. His blood rioted through his veins, from the tips of his fingers to his nimble feet; mysterious, occult things veiled his being, concealing joy as the grape in bloom conceals the vine; and all the tawny gold and purple that surrounded him were like the vestment of his senses.

"With what passion, throbbing under her thousand emerald girdles, and the richness of her jewels, the Queen of Cities gave herself to the magnificent god!"

Swept up in this rushing flight of words, the soul of the multitude seemed to reach the sentiment of Beauty, as if it were a summit never before attained. The pulse of the people and the voice of the poet seemed to give back to those ancient walls their former life, and to reawaken in that cold museum its original spirit: a flood of powerful ideas, concrete, and organized in the most durable substance to attest the nobility of a great race.

The splendor of divine youth descended upon the women, as it might have descended in a sumptuous alcove, for each felt within herself the breathlessness of expectation and the joy of yielding, like that of the Queen of Cities. They smiled with vague languor as if wearied by the strain upon their emotions; their cool, polished shoulders rose from their corollas of jewels.

Stelio looked down upon the sparkling breast of the great, many-eyed chimera, on which rose and fell many fluttering feather fans, like tiny wings; and over his spirit passed an intoxicating glow that disquieted him. The vibration of his nerves, acting upon those of his auditors and thus reacting upon himself, unsettled him so much as almost to unbalance him. For an instant he felt that he was oscillating above the crowd, like a concave and sonorous body, the resonances of which were engendered by an indistinct yet infallible will.

He was surprised at the unknown power that dwelt within him, abolishing his own personal limits and conferring the fulness of a chorus on his single voice.

This, then, was the mysterious truce which the revelation of Beauty could grant to the daily existence of wearied man; this was the mysterious will that could possess the poet at the moment when he replied to the souls of his followers who questioned him as to the value of life and tried to raise themselves, if only once, to the height of the eternal Ideal. He was only the messenger through whom Beauty offered to those men, assembled in this place consecrated by centuries of human glory, the divine gift of oblivion. He was only the translator into rhythmic speech of the visible language whereby, in this same place, the noble craftsmen of a former day had expressed the prayers and aspirations of the race. And for one hour, at least, those men would contemplate the world with different eyes; they would think and dream with different souls.

In fancy, he passed beyond the walls that enclosed the palpitating throng in a kind of heroic cycle, a circle of red triremes, fortified towers, and triumphal theories. The place now seemed too narrow for the exaltation of his new feeling; and once more he was drawn toward the real people, the immense, unanimous crowd he had seen outside the palace, who had sent upward in the starry night a clamor that, like blood or wine, intoxicated them as they uttered it.

And not alone to this multitude did his thoughts turn; his fancy beheld an infinity of multitudes, massed together in theaters, dominated by an idea of truth and of beauty, pale and intent before the great arch of the stage, which should open before them some marvelous transfiguration of life, or frenzied by the sudden splendor radiating from an immortal phrase. And the dream of a higher Art, as it surged up again in his thought showed him mankind once more reverencing poets, as those who alone can interrupt at intervals its daily anguish, quench its thirst, and dispense oblivion. He even judged too slight the test he was now undergoing; he felt himself capable of creating gigantic fictions. The still formless work that he nourished in his soul shook him with a thrill of life as he looked again at the tragedienne, standing above the sphere of constellations—the Muse with the transcendent voice, who seemed to carry the frenzy of far-off throngs, now silenced, in the classic folds of her robes.

Almost overcome by the incredible intensity of emotion that had possessed him during the brief pause, he began to speak again in a lower tone. He spoke of the growth of art between the youth of Giorgione and the old age of Tintoretto, and described it as golden, purple, rich and expressive as the pomp of the earth irradiated by the glow of sunset.

"When I consider the impetuous creators of such marvelous beauty, my mind recalls an image from a fragment of Pindar's: 'When the centaurs became acquainted with the virtues of wine, sweet as honey and a conqueror of men, they banished milk from their tables and hastened to quaff their wine from silver horns.' No one in the world better knew than they how to taste the wine of life. They drew from it a kind of lucid intoxication that multiplied their powers and communicated to their eloquence a fertilizing energy. And in their greatest creations, the violent throbbing of their pulses seems to have persisted throughout the ages, like the veritable rhythm of Venetian art.

"Ah, how pure and poetic is the slumber of the Virgin Ursula on her immaculate bed! The most religious silence reigns in that chamber, where the pious lips of the sleeper seem to form themselves into the act of uttering prayer. Through the doors and the windows steals the timid light of dawn, illumining the syllables inscribed on her pillow: INFANTIA is the simple word that spreads around that virginal head, like the fresh aurora of the morning: INFANTIA. She sleeps, the maiden already betrothed to the pagan prince and destined to martyrdom. So chaste, so ingenuous, so fervent, is she not the image of Art such as the precursors saw it, with the sincerity of their child-like eyes? INFANTIA! The word evokes around that couch all those forgotten ones: Lorenzo Veneziano, Simone da Cusighe, Catarino, Jacobello, Maestro Paolo, Giambono, Semitecolo, Antonio, Andrea, Quirizio da Murano, and all the laborious family by whom color—which later was the rival of fire—was prepared in the burning island of furnaces. But would not they themselves have uttered a cry of admiration if they had seen the drops of blood that sprang from the maiden's heart when it was pierced by the arrow of the beautiful pagan archer? A current so red from a virgin nourished on white milk! This victory was a sort of festival: to it the archers brought their finest bows, their richest garments, their most elegant air. The golden-haired barbarian, aiming his arrows at the martyr, with a movement so proud and graceful, does he not resemble an adolescent and wingless Eros? That gracious slayer of innocence (or perhaps his brother), after laying aside his bow, will abandon himself to the enchantment of music to dream a dream of infinite pleasure.

"It was indeed Giorgione that poured into him a new soul, and kindled it with an implacable longing. The music that charms him is not the melody that last night the lutes diffused among the curving arches, over radiant thrones, or diminishing in the silence of distances in the visions of the third Bellini. Under the touch of religious hands, it still rises from the harpsichord; but the world it awakens is full of a joy and a sadness wherein sin hides its head.

"He that has looked at the Concerto with the eyes of wisdom has comprehended an extraordinary and irrevocable moment of the Venetian soul. By means of a harmony of color—whose power of expression is as boundless as the mystery of sounds—the artist reveals the first agitation of an eager spirit to whom life has suddenly appeared under the aspect of a rich inheritance.

"The monk, seated at his harpsichord, and his older companion, do not resemble those monks that Vettor Carpaccio represented as flying before the wild beast tamed by Jerome, in San Giorgio degli Schiavoni. Their essence is nobler and stronger; they breathe an atmosphere higher and richer, propitious to the birth of a great joy, a great sadness, or a superb dream. What notes do those beautiful, sensitive hands draw from the keys on which they linger? Magic notes, no doubt, since they have power to work in the musician a transfiguration so great. He is half-way through his mortal existence, already far from his youth and near his decline, yet only now life reveals itself to him, rich with all good things, like a forest full of ripe, red fruit, the velvety freshness of which his always busy hands never before have known. As his senses still slumber, he has not yet fallen under the domination of a single seductive image, but he suffers a sort of confused anguish wherein regret overcomes desire, while in the web of harmonies that he seeks, the vision of his past—but only as it might have been and was not—weaves itself like the tissue of a chimera.

"His companion divines this inner agitation, for he is already at the threshold of old age; calm, sweet, and serious, he touches the shoulder of the passionate player with a pacifying movement. But there, emerging from the warm shadows like the embodiment of youthful ardor itself, is the young man with hat beplumed and flowing locks, the glowing flower of adolescence which Giorgione created under the influence of a reflection from that Hellenic myth whence arose the ideal form of Hermaphrodite. He is there, present, yet a stranger, separated from the others, like a being that cares only for his own welfare. The music exalts his inexpressible dream, and seems to multiply indefinitely his capacity to enjoy. He knows himself master of that life which escapes the other two, and the harmonies sought by the musician seem to him only the prelude to his own feast. His glance is sidewise and intent, turned toward a certain point, as if he would attract to himself something that charms him; his closed lips are ready with a kiss as yet ungiven; his brow is so spacious that the thickest garland would not encumber it; but if I think of his hands, I fancy them crushing the laurel leaves to perfume his fingers."

The hands of the Inspirer illustrated the gesture of the covetous youth, as if they were really pressing out the essence of the aromatic leaf; and his voice lent to the image an illusion so strong that the young men felt that here at last was one who could express their cherished and secret thoughts and dreams, and give voice to their unspeakable, continuous, and ceaseless longings. They occupied the free space at the back of the seated audience, making a living border for that compact mass; and, as the edges of a flag that waves in the breeze have a stronger flutter, these youthful hearts beat faster than those of older men at the warm breath of the poet's words.

Stelio recognized them, distinguishing them by their singularity of attitude, the intensity of emotion revealed by their compressed lips and the glow of ardor in their cheeks. On the face of one, turned toward the open balcony, he read the enchantment of the autumn night, and the delicious breeze coming from the lagoon. The glance of another indicated, by a ray of love, some woman, seated near by, looking as if she were lost in tender recollections, her face white, her red lips slightly parted, like the entrance to a hive moist with honey.

His eyes continually returned to the promised woman, who looked as she stood there like the living support of a starry sphere. He was grateful to her for her choice of this manner of appearing to him when, for the first time, he gave himself to the people. He no longer regarded her as merely the passing fancy of a single night, a woman ripened by long experience, but the marvelous instrument of a new art, the interpreter of the greatest poetry, she that should incarnate in her changeful personality his future fictions of beauty, she whose unforgettable voice should carry to mankind the long-expected word. He now felt attached to her, not by a promise of love, but by a promise of glory; and the formless work that he still cherished in his breast again leaped within him.

"You that listen to me," he continued, "do you not see some analogy between these three symbols of Giorgione's and the three generations, all living at the same time, that illumined the dawn of a new century? Venice, the City Triumphant, reveals herself to their eyes like a great, a superabundant banquet, where all the riches accumulated throughout centuries of war and commerce are to be set out without stint. What richer fountain of pleasure could there be to initiate life in insatiable desire? It is a time of agitation, almost of distraction, which, because of its fulness, is worth an hour of heroic violence. Alluring voices and laughter seem to float from the hills of Asolo where, surrounded by all delights, reigns the daughter of San Marco, Domina Aceli, who found in a myrtle grove of Cyprus the cincture of Aphrodite. Now approaches the youth with the white plumes; he comes to the banquet, followed by his uncurbed escort, and all desires kindle and burn like torches quickened by the wind. And this was the beginning of that divine Autumn of Art toward which men will always turn with deep emotion as long as the human soul strives to transcend the narrowness of its common existence in order to live a life more fervent or to die a nobler death.

"I see Giorgione imminent on the marvelous sphere, but I do not recognize his mortal person; I seek him in the mystery of the fiery cloud that envelops him. He appears to us more myth-like than human. The destiny of no poet on earth is comparable to his. All concerning his life is unknown; some even go so far as to deny his existence. His name is inscribed on no work, and many refuse to attribute any work to him with absolute certainty. But the whole of Venetian art was illumined by his revelation; it was from him that the great Titian received the secret of infusing glowing blood into the veins of the beings he created. In fact, that which Giorgione represents in Art is the Epiphany of the Flame. He deserves to be called 'the Flame-Bearer,' like Prometheus.

"When I consider the rapidity with which this sacred gift has passed from one artist to another, glowing with increasing splendor from color to color, I think of one of those lampadeforie, or festivals, in which the Greeks tried to perpetuate the memory of the Titan son of Japetus. On the day of the festival, a group of young Athenian horsemen would set off at a gallop, riding from Ceramicus to Colonos, their chief waving a torch that had been lighted at the altar of a temple. If the torch was extinguished by the swiftness of the course, the bearer handed it to a companion, who re-lighted it as he rode; and this one gave it to a third; the third to a fourth, and so on, always galloping, until the last bearer laid it, still alight, on the altar of the Titan. This image, with all it suggests of fiery vehemence, represents to my fancy the feast of the master-colorists of Venice. Each of them, even to the least illustrious, held in his hand the sacred gift, if only for an instant. Some of them, like that first Bonifacio, whom we should glorify, gathered with incombustible fingers the inmost flower of the flame."

His fingers made a movement in the air as if to pluck the ideal flower. His eyes turned again toward the celestial sphere, as if he wished to offer the fiery gift to her who guarded the divine zodiacal beasts. "To you, Perdita!" But the woman was smiling at some one at a distance.

Following the thread of her smile, Stelio's eyes were led to an unknown woman, who suddenly seemed to stand out illumined against a shadowy background.

Was not that the creature of music whose name had resounded against the iron sides of the ship that evening, in the silence and the shadow?

She seemed to Stelio to be almost an interior image, suddenly engendered in that part of his soul where the brief sensation he had felt while passing through the shadow of the vessel had remained like an isolated and indistinct point. For a second she was beautiful—as beautiful as were his yet unexpressed thoughts.

"The city to which such creators have given a soul so powerful," he continued, floating himself on the rising wave, "is considered to-day, by the greater number, only as a vast inert reliquary, or as a refuge of peace and oblivion.

"In truth, I know of no other place in the world—unless it be Rome—where a bold and ambitious spirit can better foster the active virtue of his intellect, and all the energies of his being toward the supreme heights, than on these quiet waters. I know of no marsh capable of provoking in human pulses a fever more violent that that which at times steals up to us from the shadows of a silent canal. Nor do those men who, at noontide in the midsummer heat, lie among the ripe grain, feel in their veins a more fiery wave of blood than that which suffuses our eyes when we lean too intently over these waters, to see whether, perchance, we may descry in their depths some old sword or ancient diadem.

"Do not all gracious spirits come hither, as to a place of sweet refuge—those that hide some secret pain, those that have accomplished some final renunciation, those that have become weak through some morbid affection, and those that seek silence only to hear the soft step of advancing Death? Perhaps in their fading eyes Venice appears like a clement city of death, embraced by the waters of oblivion. But their presence is no more important than the wandering weeds that float at the foot of the steps of the marble palaces. They only increase the odor of sickly things, that strange, feverish odor on which at times, toward evening, after a laborious day, we nourish the fulness of our own feelings.

"But the ambiguous city does not always indulge the illusions of those that look to her as a giver of peace. I know one who, in the midst of sweet repose on her breast, started up as terror-struck as if when lying beside his loved one, with her hand resting on his weary eyelids, he had heard serpents hissing in her hair!

"Ah, if I only knew how to tell you of that prodigious life which palpitates beneath her great necklaces and her thousand green girdles! Not a day passes that she does not absorb more and more of our souls: sometimes she gives them back to us fresh and intact, restored to their original newness, whereon to-morrow's events will be imprinted with indelible clearness; again, she gives them back to us infinitely subtle and voracious, like a flame that destroys all that it touches, so that, at evening, among the cinders and the ashes, we may light upon some wonderful sublimate. Each day she urges us to the act that is the very genesis of our species: the unceasing effort to surpass ourselves. She shows us the possibility of transforming pain into the most efficacious stimulating energy; she teaches us that pleasure is the most certain means of knowledge given to us by Nature, and that the man who has suffered much is less wise than he that has enjoyed much."

At these audacious words, a slight murmur of disapproval passed over the auditorium; the Queen shook her head ever so little, in token of denial; several ladies, in a rapid exchange of glances, seemed to signify to one another a sentiment of graceful horror. But these signs were overbalanced by the acclamation of youthful approval that rose from all sides toward him that taught with a boldness so frank the art of rising to the superior forms of life by the virtue of joy.

Stelio smiled as he recognized his own, and so numerous; he smiled to recognize the efficacy of his teaching, which already, in more than one spirit, had dissipated the clouds of inert sadness, shown it the cowardice of weak tears, and infused it with a lasting disdain for feeble complaint and soft compassion. He rejoiced at having been able to proclaim once more the principle of his doctrine, emanating naturally from the soul of the art he glorified. And those that had retired to a hermit's cell, there to adore a sad phantom that lived only in the dim mirror of their own eyes; those that had created themselves kings of palaces without windows, where, from time immemorial, they had awaited a Visitation; those that had sought to unearth among ruins the image of Beauty, but who had found only a worn sphinx, which had tormented them with its endless enigmas; those that stood every evening at their thresholds to greet the mysterious Stranger bearing gifts under his mantle, and who, with pale cheeks, laid their ears against the ground to catch the first sound of the Stranger's approach; those whose souls were sterilized by resigned mourning or devoured by desperate pride; those that were hardened by useless obstinacy, or deprived of sleep by hope continually disappointed—all these spirits he wished now to summon that they might recognize their ailment under the splendor of that ancient yet ever-new soul.

"In truth," said he, in a tone full of exultation, "if the whole population, abandoning their homes, should emigrate, attracted to-day toward other shores as formerly their heroic youth were tempted by the arch of the Bosphorus, in the time of the Doge Pietro Ziani, and the voice of prayer should no more strike against the sonorous gold of the concave mosaics, nor the sound of the oar perpetuate with its rhythmic stroke the meditation of the silent stones, Venice would still remain a City of Life. The ideal creatures protected by its silence live in the whole past and for the whole future. In them we shall always discover new concordances with the edifice of the universe, unforeseen meetings with the idea born only yesterday, clear announcements of that which is with us only a presentiment as yet, open answers to that which as yet we have not dared to ask.

"These ideal creatures are simple, but they are full of innumerable meanings; they are ingenuous, yet are clothed in strange attire. Should we contemplate them for an indefinite time, they never would cease to pour dissimilar truths into our minds. Should we visit them every day, every day they would appear to us under a new aspect, as do the sea, the rivers, the fields, the woods, the rocks. At times the things they say to us do not really reach our intellects, but reveal themselves to us in a sort of confused happiness, which causes our own substance to dilate and quiver to its inmost depths. Some bright day they will point out to us the path to the distant forest, wherein Beauty has awaited us from time immemorial, buried in her mystic hair.

"Whence came to them their immeasurable power?

"From the pure unconsciousness of the artificers that created them.

"Those profound men ignored the immensity of the things they wished to express. Penetrating with a million roots into the soil of life, not like single trees, but like vast forests, they absorbed infinite elements, which they transfused and condensed into ideal species, whose essences nevertheless remained unknown to them, as the flavor of the apple is unknown to the branch that bears it. They were the mysterious means chosen by Nature in her effort to represent in an integral form those types in which she has not yet succeeded. Because of this, continuing the work of the Divine Mother, their minds, as Leonardo says, have become transformed into 'a likeness of the Divine Mind.' And because creative force rushed to their fingers incessantly, like sap to the buds of trees, they created with joy."

All the desire of the determined artist, panting and struggling to obtain this Olympian gift, all his envy of those gigantic creators of Beauty, all his insatiable thirst for happiness and glory, were revealed in the tone in which he pronounced these last words. Once more the soul of the multitude was under the magic of the poet's spell, strained and vibrating like a single cord composed of a thousand strands, the resonance of which could be incalculably prolonged. That resonance awakened within the multitude the sense of a truth that had lain dormant, but which the poet's words now revealed for the first time.

In the sonority of the deep silence, the solitary voice reached its climax.

"To create with joy! It is the attribute of Divinity! It is impossible to imagine at the summit of the spirit an act more triumphal. Even the words that signify it possess something of the splendor of sunrise.

"And these artists created by a medium that is in itself a joyous mystery: by color, which is the ornament of the world; by color, which seems the effort of matter to become light.

"And the newly awakened musical sense they had for color was such that their creations transcend the narrow limits of figured symbols, and assume the high revealing power of an infinite harmony.

"Never have the words of Vinci, on whom Truth flashed one day with her thousand secrets, appeared so true as when we stand before the great symphonic canvases of the masters: 'Music cannot be called anything but the sister of Painting.' They are not alone silent poetry, but also silent music. The most subtle seekers of rare symbols, and those most desirous to impress the sign of an internal universe on the purity of a meditative brow, seem to us almost sterile compared with these great unconscious musicians.

"When we behold Bonifacio, in the parable of Dives, intoning with a note of fire the most powerful harmony of color in which the essence of a proud and voluptuous nature ever has revealed itself, we do not ask questions about the blond youth, listening to the music and seated between the two magnificent courtesans, whose faces glow like lamps of purest amber; but, passing beneath the material symbol, we abandon ourselves to the power of evocation of those chords, wherein our spirits seem to-day to find a presentiment of I know not what evening, heavy with beautiful destiny and autumnal gold, in a harbor as quiet as a basin of perfumed oil where a galley palpitating with oriflammes shall enter with a strange silence, like a butterfly of twilight darting into the chalice of some great flower.

"Shall we not, with our mortal eyes, really see it, some glorious evening, approaching the Palace of the Doges? Does it not appear to us from a prophetic horizon in the Allegory of Autumn which Tintoretto offers us, like a superior, concrete image of our dream of yesterday?

"Seated on the shore, like a deity, Venice receives the ring from the young, vine-wreathed god who descends into the water, while Beauty floats in the air with a starry diadem to crown the marvelous alliance!

"Behold yon distant ship! It seems to bring a message from the gods. Behold the symbolic Woman! Her body is capable of bearing the germs of a world!"

A whirlwind of applause broke out, dominated by the clamor of the young men, who hailed him who had kindled before their anxious eyes a hope so glowing, who had professed a faith so strong in the occult genius of the race, in the lofty virtue of the ideals handed down by their fathers, in the sovereign dignity of their spirit, the indestructible power of beauty, in all the great things held as naught by modern barbarity. The disciples extended their arms toward the master with an effusion of gratitude, an impulse of love, for he had illumined their souls as with a torch. In each lived again Giorgione's creation: the youth with the beautiful white plumes, who advanced toward the rich mass of spoils; and each fancied as multiplied to infinity his own power to enjoy all things. Their cry expressed so plainly their perturbation of spirit, that the master felt an inward tremor and the inrush of a wave of sadness as he thought of the ashes of this sudden fire, and of the cruel wakening of the morrow. Against what sharp obstacles must be broken this terrible desire to live, this violent will of each to shape the wings of Victory to his own destiny, and to bend all the energies of his nature toward the sublime end!

But that night favored youthful delirium. All the dreams of domination, of pleasure and of glory, that Venice has first cradled, then stifled, in her marble arms, seemed to rise anew from the foundations of the palace, to enter from the open balconies, palpitating like a people revivified under the arch of that rich and heavy ceiling, which was like a suspended treasure. The strength which, on the ceiling and the walls, seemed to swell the muscles of the gods, the kings, and the heroes, the beauty which, in the nudity of the goddesses, the queens, and the courtesans, ran like visible music—all that human strength and beauty, transfigured by centuries of art, harmonized itself in a single figure, which these intoxicated ones fancied they beheld, real and breathing, erected before them by the new poet.

They vented their intoxicated enthusiasm in that great cry which they sent up to him who had offered to their thirsty lips a cup of his own wine. Henceforth, all would be able to see the inextinguishable flame through its watery veil. Some one among them already imagined himself crumpling laurel leaves to perfume his hands; and another resolved to seek at the bottom of a silent canal for the old sword and the ancient diadem.

CHAPTER IV
THE SPIRIT OF MELODY

Alone with the statues in one of the rooms of the neighboring museum, Stelio Effrena rested for a moment, shrinking from any other contact, feeling the need of gathering his strength and quieting his nerves, to free himself from the unusual vibration through which it seemed to him all the essence of his spirit had been dissipated and scattered over the composite soul of the throng. Of his recent words, no trace remained in his memory, and of recent images he perceived no vestige. The only phrase that lingered in his mind was that "inmost flower of the flame," which he had conjured up in speaking of the glory of the first Bonifacio, and which he had plucked with his own incombustible fingers to offer to his promised love. He remembered how, at the precise instant of this spontaneous offering, the woman had turned away her head, and how, instead of a glance from her dreamy eyes, he had encountered the indicating smile. Then the intoxicating cloud that had been just on the point of melting away, seemed to condense itself anew in his brain, in the vague form of the creature of music; and he fancied that she held in her hand the flower of flame, as, in a dominating attitude, she emerged above his inward agitation as from the trembling waves of a summer sea.

As if to celebrate that image, from the Hall of the Greater Council came the first notes of the symphony of Benedetto Marcello, the fugue-like movement of which revealed at once its grand style. A sonorous idea, clear and strong as a living person, developed itself in the powerful measure; and in that melody Stelio recognized the virtue of the same principle around which, as around a thyrsus, he had twined the garlands of his poesy.

Then the name that had already resounded against the sides of the vessel, in the silence and the shadow, that name which, in the great wave of sound from the evening bells, had been lost like a sibylline leaf, seemed to his fancy to propose its syllables to the orchestra as a new theme to be interpreted by the musicians' bows. The violins, viols, and violoncellos sang it in turn; the sudden blasts of the heroic trumpets exalted it; and at last a whole quartette, in one great, thrilling chord, flung it toward that heaven of joy where later would sparkle the starry crown offered to Ariadne by the golden Aphrodite.

In the pause that followed, Stelio experienced a singular agitation, almost like a religious ecstasy, before that annunciation. He realized what it was worth to him, in that inestimable lyric moment, to find himself alone amid this group of white and motionless statues. A shred of the same mystery which, under the quarter of the ship, had seemed to float lightly across his senses like a misty veil, again waved before his eyes in that deserted hall, which was so near to the human throng. It was like the silence of the sea-shell, lying on the shore beside the stormy ocean. He again felt a conviction, such as he had already experienced in certain extraordinary hours of his journey, of the presence of his fate, which was about to give to his spirit a new impulse, perhaps to quicken within him a marvelous act of will. And, as he remembered the thousands of obscure destinies hanging over the heads of that crowd, which had been so stirred by his images of an ideal life, he congratulated himself on being able to adore alone the propitious demon that came to visit him secretly, to offer to him a veiled gift, in the name of an unknown mistress.

He thrilled at the burst of human voices that saluted with triumphal acclamation the unvanquished god.

Viva il forte, viva il grande!

The vast hall resounded like a great timbrel, and the reverberation penetrated through the Censors' Stairway, the Golden Stairway, the corridors and the vestibules to the furthermost parts of the palace, like a thunder of joy echoing in the serene night.

Viva il forte, viva il grande!
Vincitor dell' Indie dome!

It seemed indeed that the chorus was saluting the apparition of the magnificent god invoked by the poet on the City Beautiful. It seemed that in those vocal notes the folds of his purple draperies quivered like flames in a crystal tube. The living image hung suspended over the assemblage, which nourished it with its own dream.

Viva il forte, viva il grande!

In the impetuous fugue movement, the bass, the contraltos, the sopranos repeated the frenzied acclamation to the Immortal of the thousand names and the thousand crowns, "born on an ineffable bed, like to a young man in his first youth."

The old Dionysian intoxication seemed born again, diffusing itself through that divine chorus. The fulness and freshness of life in the smile of Zeus, who freed men's souls from sadness, expressed itself in a luminous outburst of joy. The torches of the Bacchantes blazed and crackled in the sound. As in an Orphic hymn, the brightness of conflagration illumined that youthful brow, surmounted by azure hair. "When the splendor of fire invaded the whole earth, he alone checked the whirlwinds of flame." As in the Homeric hymn, there palpitated the sterile bosom of the sea, expressing in regular cadences the measured stroke of the oars that propelled the stout vessel toward unknown lands. The Flower-bearer, the Fructifier, the visible Remedy for mortal man, the sacred Flower, The Friend of Pleasure, Dionysius, the liberator, suddenly appeared before mankind on the wings of song, crowning for them that nocturnal hour with happiness, placing before them once more the cup overflowing with all the good things of life.

The song increased in power; all the voices blended in the rush of melody. The hymn celebrated the tamer of tigers, of panthers, lions and lynxes. A cry seemed to rise from Mænads with heads turned backward, flying locks and floating robes, who struck their cymbals and shook their castanets: Evoé!

But now suddenly surged above these heroic measures a broad, pastoral rhythm, invoking the Theban Bacchus, of the pure brow and gentle thoughts:

Quel che all'olmo la vite in stretto nodo
Pronuba accoppia, e i pampini feconda ...

Only two voices, in a succession of sixths, now sang the flowery nuptials, the leafy marriage, the flexible bonds. Before the eyes of the multitude again passed that image already created by the poet of the barque laden with clusters, like a vat filled with grapes to be made into wine. And again the song seemed to recall the miracle witnessed by the prudent pilot Medeia: "And behold! a sweet and fragrant wine ran over the swift, black boat.... And behold! a vine climbed to the top of the sail, and from it hung innumerable clusters of grapes. And a dark ivy twined about the mast, and it was covered with flowers, and beautiful fruits amid their foliage grew thereon, and garlands were wound about the rowlocks."

The spirit of the fugue then passed into the orchestra, and mounted in exquisitely light roulades, while the voices struck on the orchestral web with simultaneous percussion. And, like a thyrsus waving over the Bacchic troop, a single voice floated out in the nuptial melody, with the laughing joy and grace of the pastoral marriage:

Viva dell'olmo,
E della vite
L'almo fecondo
Sostenitor!

The voices seemed to evoke the image of erect and graceful Tiades, gently waving their thyrsi in the mists of divine intoxication, dressed in long saffron-hued robes, their faces lighted up, ardent as those women of Veronese, who leaned over their aerial balconies to listen to the song.

But the heroic acclamation once more sprang up with final vehemence. The face of the conquering god reappeared amid torches frantically waved aloft. Then, in unison, in a supreme burst of joy, voices and orchestra thundered together at the many-eyed chimera under the suspended treasure of that dome circled by red triremes, armed towers, and triumphal bands:

Viva dell'Indie,
Viva de' mari,
Viva de' mostri
Il domator.

Stelio Effrena had gone as far as the threshold; through the throng that made way before him he penetrated into the hall and halted near the platform occupied by the orchestra and the singers. His restless eyes sought La Foscarina near the celestial sphere, but did not find her. The head of the Tragic Muse no longer rose above the constellations. Where was she? To what place has she withdrawn? Could she see him, although he could not see her? A confused anxiety agitated him, and the remembrance of the early evening on the water returned to him indistinctly, accompanied by the words of her recent promise. Glancing up at the open balconies, he thought that perhaps she had stepped outside to breathe the fresh night air, and that, perhaps, leaning against the balustrade she felt passing over her cool throat the wave of music, which would seem as sweet to her as the delight of a kiss from beloved lips.

But his impatience to hear the divine voice dominated all other impatience, abolished all other desire. He observed that again a profound silence reigned throughout the hall, as at the instant when he had opened his lips to speak his first word. And, as at that instant, the versatile and ephemeral monster, with a thousand human faces, seemed to extend itself and yawn to receive a new soul.

Some one near Stelio whispered the name of Donatella Arvale. He turned his eyes toward the platform, past the row of violoncellos, which formed a brown hedge. The singer remained invisible, hidden in the delicate, quivering forest of bows, whence would arise the mournful harmony that must accompany the Lament of Ariadne.

Amid a sympathetic silence rose a prelude of violins. Then the viols and violoncellos added a sigh more profound to that imploring plaint. Was not this—after the Phrygian flute and the castanets, after the instruments of orgies, which trouble the reason and provoke delirium—was not this the august Doric lyre, grave and sweet, the harmonious support of song? Thus was the Drama born from the boisterous Dithyramb. The great metamorphosis of the Dionysian rite, the frenzy of the sacred festival before the creative inspiration of the tragic poet, were figured in that musical alternance. The fiery breath of the Thracian god gave life to a sublime form of Art. The crown and the tripod, the prize of the poet's victory, had displaced the lascivious goat and the Attic basket of figs. Æschylus, keeper of a vineyard, had been visited by the god, who had infused into him his spirit of flame. On the bank of the Acropolis, near the sanctuary of Dionysius, a marble theater had risen, capable of containing the chosen people.

Thus suddenly opened in the mind of the Master the pathways of centuries, extending through the distance of primitive mysteries. That form of Art, toward which now tended the effort of his genius, attracted by the obscure aspirations of human multitudes, appeared to him in the sanctity of its origins. The divine sadness of Ariadne, up-springing like a melodious cry from the furious Thiaros, made leap once more within him the work he nourished in his soul, unformed yet alive. With a glance, again he sought the Muse of the revealing voice against the sphere of constellations, but he did not see her, and turned once more to the forest of instruments, whence rose the imploring plaint.

Then, amid the slender bows, that rose and fell upon the strings with alternating movement, appeared the singer, erect as a stem; and, like a stem, she seemed to balance herself an instant on the softened harmony. The youthfulness of her agile and robust body shone resplendent through the texture of her robes, as a flame is seen through the thinness of polished ivory. Rising and falling around her white form, the bows seemed to draw their melody from the secret music that dwelt within her. When her lips opened in an enchanting curve, Stelio recognized the strength and purity of the voice before the singer had uttered one modulation, as if she were a crystal statue wherein he could behold the unspringing of a jet of living water.

Come mai puoi
Vedermi piangere?

The melody of a by-gone love and long-dead sorrow flowed from those lips with an expression so pure and strong that suddenly, within the soul of the multitude, it was changed into a mysterious happiness. Was that strain indeed the divine plaint of the daughter of Minos, as she held out her arms in vain to the fair Stranger on the deserted shore of Naxos? The fable vanished; the illusion of the moment was abolished. The eternal love and eternal sorrow of gods and of men were exhaled in that perfect voice. The futile regret for each lost joy, the recollection of each fugitive blessing, the supreme prayer flying toward every sail on the sea, toward every sun hiding itself among the mountains, the implacable desire and the promise of death—all these things passed into the great, solitary song, transformed by the power of Art into sublime essences which the soul could receive without suffering. The words were dissolved in tone, losing their significance, changed into notes of love and sadness, indefinitely illuminating. Like a circle that is closed, and yet dilates continually in accordance with the rhythm of universal life, the melody encircled the composite soul which dilated with it in immeasurable joy. Through the open balconies, in the perfect calm of the autumn night, the enchantment spread over the peaceful waters and mounted to the watchful stars, higher than the motionless masts of the ships, higher than the sacred towers, inhabited by the now silent bronze bells. During the interludes the singer drooped her youthful head and stood motionless as a white statue among the forest of instruments, where the long bows rose and fell in alternate movement, perhaps unconscious of that world which in a few brief moments her song had transfigured.

CHAPTER V
THE EPIPHANY OF THE FLAME

Descending to the courtyard hastily, in order to escape importunate curiosity, Stelio took refuge in a shadowy corner, to watch, among the crowd coming down the Giants' Stairway, for the appearance of the two women, the actress and the singer, who were to meet him near the well.

Every instant his expectation became more anxious, while around him rose the tumultuous cry that extended to the outer walls of the palace and lost itself among the clouds, now lighted with a glare as of a conflagration. An almost terrible joy seemed to spread over the Anadyomenean City, as if a vehement breath had suddenly dilated all breasts, filling the veins of all men with a superabundance of life. The repetition of the Bacchic Chorus celebrating the crown of stars, placed by Aphrodite on the forgetful head of Ariadne, had drawn a cry from the throng on the Molo beneath the open balconies. When, at the final elevation, the word Viva! rang out from the chorus of Mænads, Satyrs, and Egipans, the chorus of the populace had responded to it like a formidable echo from the harbor of San Marco. And in this moment of Dionysian delirium it seemed as if the people remembered the forests of old that were burned on sacred nights, and had given a signal for the conflagration that must light up the beauty of Venice in final, dazzling splendor.

The dream of Paris Eglano—the spectacle of marvelous flames offered to love on a floating couch—flashed before Stelio's vision. The persistent image of Donatella Arvale lingered in his thought: a supple, youthful figure, strong and shapely, rising erect amid the sonorous forest of bows, which seemed to draw their notes from the hidden music within herself. And, seized with a strange distress, through which passed something like the shadow of horror, he saw the image of the other woman: poisoned by art, worn with experience, with the taste of maturity and worldly corruptness on those eloquent lips, a feverish dryness in those hands, which had pressed the juice from deceitful fruits, and with the marks of a thousand masks on the face that had simulated the fury of all mortal passions. To-night, at last, after a long period of waiting and of hope, he was to receive the gift of that heart, no longer young, which had been claimed by others before him, but which he never yet had called his own. How his heart had throbbed in the early evening as he sat beside that silent woman, floating toward the City Beautiful over the waters that seemed to bear them on with the terrifying smoothness of mysterious machinery. Ah, why did she come now to meet him in company with the other temptress? Why did she place beside her despair and worldly wisdom the pure splendor of innocent youth?

He started suddenly as he perceived in the throng at the top of the marble staircase, by the light of the smoking torches, the form of La Foscarina pressed so closely against that of Donatella Arvale that the robes of both blended into one mass of whiteness. He followed them with his eyes until they reached the lowest stair, anxious as if at each step they had approached the edge of an abyss. The unknown during these hours had already led in the heart of the poet a life so intense that on seeing her approach him he experienced the emotion that would have seized him before a breathing incarnation of one of the ideal creatures born of his art.

She descended slowly on the human wave. Behind her, the Palace of the Doges, filled with streams of lights and confused sounds, made one think of those fairy-tale awakenings which suddenly, in the depths of the forest, transfigure inaccessible castles where for centuries the hair on royal heads had grown longer and longer during a protracted sleep. The two guardian Giants shone red in the blaze of the torches; the cuspid of the Golden Gate sparkled with tiny lights. And still the clamor rose and swelled above the groups of marbles, loud as the moaning of the stormy sea against the walls of Malamocco.

In this tumult, Effrena saw advancing toward him the two temptresses, escaping from the crowd as if from the clasp of a monster. And his fancy pictured extraordinary assimilations, which should be realized with the ease of dreams and the solemnity of liturgic ceremonies. He said to himself that Perdita was leading this magnificent prey to him, that he might discover some rarely beautiful secret, that some great work of love might be accomplished, in which she desired to be his fellow artisan. He told himself that this very night she would say to him most marvelous words. Across his spirit passed once again the indefinable melancholy he had felt when he leaned over the bronze rim to contemplate the reflection of the stars in that dark mirror; he waited in expectation of some event that should stir that secret soul in the furthermost depths of his being, where it lay motionless, strange, intangible. By the whirling of his thoughts, he comprehended that he was again plunged into that delirium which the glamor of the lagoon had given him at twilight. Then, emerging from the shadowy corner, he went forward to meet the two women with an intoxicating presentiment.

"Oh, Effrena!" said La Foscarina, as she reached the well, "I had given up all hope of finding you here. We are very late, are we not? But we were caught in the crowd and could not escape."

Then, turning toward her companion with a smile, she said: