is reached, and all the skies are tremulous with starlight.  Alas, that we should vibrate so obscurely to these harmonies of earth and heaven!  The inner finer sense of them seems somehow unattainable—­that spiritual touch of soul evoking soul from nature, which should transfigure our dull mood of self into impersonal delight.  Man needs to be a mytho-poet at some moments, or, better still, to be a mystic steeped through half-unconsciousness in the vast wonder of the world.  Gold and untouched to poetry or piety by scenes that ought to blend the spirit in ourselves with spirit in the world without, we can but wonder how this phantom show of mystery and beauty will pass away from us—­how soon—­and we be where, see what, use all our sensibilities on aught or nought?

SIC GENIUS

In the picture-gallery at Modena there is a masterpiece of Dosso Dossi.  The frame is old and richly carved; and the painting, bordered by its beautiful dull gold, shines with the lustre of an emerald.  In his happy moods Dosso set colour upon canvas, as no other painter out of Venice ever did; and here he is at his happiest.  The picture is the portrait of a jester, dressed in courtly clothes and with a feathered cap upon his head.  He holds a lamb in his arms, and carries the legend, Sic Genius.  Behind him is a landscape of exquisite brilliancy and depth.  His face is young and handsome.  Dosso has made it one most wonderful laugh.  Even so perhaps laughed Yorick.  Nowhere else have I seen a laugh thus painted:  not violent, not loud, although the lips are opened to show teeth of dazzling whiteness;—­but fine and delicate, playing over the whole face like a ripple sent up from the depths of the soul within.  Who was he?  What does the lamb mean?  How should the legend be interpreted?  We cannot answer these questions.  He may have been the court-fool of Ferrara; and his genius, the spiritual essence of the man, may have inclined him to laugh at all things.  That at least is the value he now has for us.  He is the portrait of perpetual irony, the spirit of the golden Sixteenth Century which delicately laughed at the whole world of thoughts and things, the quintessence of the poetry of Ariosto, the wit of Berni, all condensed into one incarnation and immortalised by truthfullest art.  With the Gaul, the Spaniard, and the German at her gates, and in her cities, and encamped upon her fields, Italy still laughed; and when the voice of conscience sounding through Savonarola asked her why, she only smiled—­Sic Genius.

One evening in May we rowed from Venice to Torcello, and at sunset broke bread and drank wine together among the rank grasses just outside that ancient church.  It was pleasant to sit in the so-called chair of Attila and feel the placid stillness of the place.  Then there came lounging by a sturdy young fellow in brown country clothes, with a marvellous old wide-awake upon his head, and across his shoulders a bunch of