ted
and:

"Loved that hall, tho' white and cold,
Those niched shapes of noble mould,
A princely people's awful princes,
The grave, severe Genovese of old."

[I suppose, by the way, that every one who has taken the trouble to
compare the stanza of 'The Daisy' with that of the invitation 'To the
Rev. F. D. Maurice,' which immediately follows, will have noted the
pretty rhythmical difference made by the introduction of the double
dactyl in the closing line of the latter; the difference between:

"Of olive, aloe, and maize, and vine,"

And:

"Making the little one leap for joy."]

But let Mrs. Woods resume the strain:--

"O that I were listening under the olives!
So should I hear behind in the woodland
The peasants talking. Either a woman,
A wrinkled granddame, stands in the sunshine,
Stirs the brown soil in an acre of violets--
Large odorous violets--and answers slowly
A child's swift babble; or else at noon
The labourers come. They rest in the shadow,
Eating their dinner of herbs, and are merry.
Soft speech Provencal under the olives!
Like a queen's raiment from days long perished,
Breathing aromas of old unremembered
Perfumes, and shining in dust-covered palaces
With sudden hints of forgotten splendour--
So on the lips of the peasant his language,
His only now, the tongue of the peasant."

Say what you will, there is a dignity about these Latin races, even
in their trivial everyday movements. They suggest to me, as those
lines of Homer suggested to Mr. Pater's Marius, thoughts which almost
seem to be memories of a time when all the world was poetic:--

"Oi d'ote de limenos polubentheos entos ikonto
Istia men steilanto, thesand d'en nei melaine . . .
Ek de kai antoi Bainon epi regmini thalasses."

"And how poetic," says Pater, "the simple incident seemed, told just
thus! Homer was always telling things after this manner.
And one might think there had been no effort in it: that here was but
the almost mechanical transcript of a time naturally, intrinsically
poetic, a time in which one could hardly have spoken at all without
ideal effect, or the sailors pulled down their boat without making a
picture in 'the great style' against a sky charged with marvels."

One evening in last February a company of Provencal singers, pipers,
and tambour players came to an hotel in Cannes, and