cockneys of creation, burned itself, in the warm still
eventide, as clear as glass, or as the glow of a pale
topaz, and the particular cockney who roamed without
a plan and at his ease, but with his feet on Roman
slabs, his hands on Roman stones, his eyes on the Roman
void, his consciousness really at last of some good
to him, could open himself as never before to the
fond luxurious fallacy of a close communion, a direct
revelation. With which there were other moments
for him not less the fruit of the slow unfolding of
time; the clearest of these again being those enjoyed
on the terrace of a small island-villa—the
island a rock and the villa a wondrous little rock-garden,
unless a better term would be perhaps rock-salon,
just off the extreme point of Posilippo and where,
thanks to a friendliest hospitality, he was to hang
ecstatic, through another sublime afternoon, on the
wave of a magical wand. Here, as happened, were
charming wise, original people even down to delightful
amphibious American children, enamelled by the sun
of the Bay as for figures of miniature Tritons and
Nereids on a Renaissance plaque; and above all, on
the part of the general prospect, a demonstration
of the grand style of composition and effect that
one was never to wish to see bettered. The way
in which the Italian scene on such occasions as this
seems to purify itself to the transcendent and perfect
idea alone—idea of beauty,
of dignity, of comprehensive grace, with all accidents
merged, all defects disowned, all experience outlived,
and to gather itself up into the mere mute eloquence
of what has just incalculably been, remains
for ever the secret and the lesson of the subtlest
daughter of History. All one could do, at the
heart of the overarching crystal, and in presence of
the relegated City, the far-trailing Mount, the grand
Sorrentine headland, the islands incomparably stationed
and related, was to wonder what may well become of
the so many other elements of any poor human and social
complexus, what might become of any successfully working
or only struggling and floundering civilisation at
all, when high Natural Elegance proceeds to take such
exclusive charge and recklessly assume, as it were,
all the responsibilities.
This indeed had been quite the thing I was asking
myself all the wondrous way down from Rome, and was
to ask myself afresh, on the return, largely within
sight of the sea, as our earlier course had kept to
the ineffably romantic inland valleys, the great decorated
blue vistas in which the breasts of the mountains
shine vaguely with strange high-lying city and castle
and church and convent, even as shoulders of no diviner
line might be hung about with dim old jewels.
It was odd, at the end of time, long after those initiations,
of comparative youth, that had then struck one as
extending the very field itself of felt charm, as
exhausting the possibilities of fond surrender, it
