By night, except for the bright oases of the Indian Exhibition, the view is little more than a black blank, a great inky plain with faint sparks and rows of light here and there, as though the world had been made of saltpetre paper, and had lately been set fire to.  Were you a traveller from Mars you would say that the world was very badly lighted.  But, for all that, night is the time for the Great Wheel, for the conflagration of pleasure at our feet makes us forget the void dark beyond.  Then the Wheel seems like a great revolving spider’s web, with fireflies entangled in it at every turn, and the little engine-house at the centre, with its two electric lights, seems like the great lord spider, with monstrous pearls for his eyes.  And, as in the daytime the height robs the depth of its significance, strips poor humanity of any semblance of impressive or attractive meaning, at night the effect is just the reverse.  What a fairy-world is this opening out beneath our feet, with its golden glowing squares and circles and palaces, with its lamplit gardens and pagodas! and who are these gay and beautiful beings flitting hither and thither, and passing from one bright garden to another on the stream of pleasure?  If this many-coloured, passionate dream be really human life, let us hasten to be down amongst it once more!  And, after all, is not this flattering night aspect of the world more true than that disheartening countenance of it in the daylight?  Those golden squares and glowing gardens and flashing waters are, of course, an illusion of the magician Kiralfy’s, yet what power could the illusion have upon us without the realities of beauty and love and pleasure it attracts there?

THE BURIAL OF ROMEO AND JULIET

One morning of all mornings the citizens of Verona were startled by strange news.  Tragic forces, to which they had been accustomed to pay little heed, had been at work in their city during the dark hours, and young Romeo of the Montagues, handsome, devil-may-care lad as they had known him, and little Juliet of the Capulets, that madcap, merry, gentle young mistress, lay dead, side by side in the church of Santa Maria.

Death! surely they were used to death! and Love, flower of the clove! they were used to love.  But here were love and death, that somehow they could not understand.  So they hurried in wondering groups to Santa Maria, that they might gaze at the dead lovers, and thus perhaps come to understand.

Romeo and Juliet lay receiving their guests in the vault of the Capulets, with a strange smile of welcome for all who came.  And their presence-chamber was bright with candles and flowers, and sweet with the sweet smell of death.  The air that had drunk in their wild words and their last long looks of heavenly love still hung about the dark corners, as the air where a rose has been holds a little while the memory of its breath.  Yes! that morning, in that dank