tmare, bespattered for them the clear blue
sky, and danced, black and horrible spots, before the face of the sun.
The remembrance of Italian wickedness weighed on them like an incubus,
clung to them with a frightful fascination. While the foulest criminals
of Italy discussed the platonic vapidnesses of Bembo's sonnets, and wept
at the sweet and languid lamentations of Guarini's shepherds and nymphs;
the strong Englishmen of the time of Shakespeare, the men whose children
were to unsheathe under Cromwell the sword of righteousness, listened
awe-stricken and fascinated with horror to the gloomy and convulsed, the
grand and frightful plays of Webster and of Tourneur. And the sin of the
Renaissance, which the art of Italy could neither pourtray nor perceive;
appeared on the stage decked in superb and awful garb by the tragic
imagination of Elizabethan England.

THE OUTDOOR POETRY.

The thought of winter is bleak and barren to our mind; the late year is
chary of aesthetic as of all other food. In the country it does not bring
ugliness; but it terribly reduces and simplifies things, depriving them
of two-thirds of their beauty. In sweeping away the last yellow leaves,
the last crimson clouds, and in bleaching the last green grass, it
effaces a whole wealth of colour. It deprives us still more by actually
diminishing the number of forms: for what summer had left rich, various,
complex, winter reduces to blank uniformity. There is a whole world of
lovely things, shapes and tints, effects of light, colour, and
perspective in a wood, as long as it is capriciously divided into a
thousand nooks and crannies by projecting boughs, bushes, hedges, and
hanging leaves; and this winter clears away and reduces to a
Haussmanized simplicity of plan. There is a smaller world, yet one quite
big enough for a summer's day, in any hay field, among the barren oats,
the moon-daisies, the seeded grasses, the sorrel, the buttercups, all
making at a distance a wonderful blent effect of luminous brown and
lilac and russet foamed with white; and forming, when you look close
into it, an unlimited forest of delicately separate stems and bloom and
seed; every plant detaching itself daintily from an undefinable
background of things like itself. This winter turns into a rusty brown
and green expanse, or into a bog, or a field of frozen upturned clods.
The very trees, stripped of their leaves, look as if prepared for
diagrams of the abstraction tree