elf.

One should contrive to have impressions like these sufficiently often
in life: this is the excitement which is helpful; the heartbeating,
the breathlessness, the pain even, which brace and make us widely
sensitive. Brother Wind--why did St. Francis not invoke him?--played
with us roughly and healthfully, telling us, in the hurtling against
houses, the rustling, soughing among trees, and the whistling in our
own hair and ears, of the greatness of the universe's life and the
greatness of our own.

On the crest, under the thin fringe of bare trees, with the plain of
Rome, the snow of the Apennines on one side, the violet woods of Monte
Laziale on the other, the surprise of suddenly coming on a rude stone
cottage, with headless statues of athletes and togaed Romans built
into its rough walls. And in a hollow under delicate leafless
chestnuts that wonderful little theatre, cut out of black volcanic
stone, as if the representation were to be storm and full moon, making
and unmaking of mountains and countries, and the whole of history....
Beginning to come down, and just above that little theatre, as we
turned, we saw, beyond the dark ridge of Castel Gandolfo, cupolaed and
towered, a narrow belt of light, more brilliant than that of the sky:
the light upon the sea.

_March_ 7.

IV.

ST. PETER'S.

The greatness of the place had taken me, and quite unexpectedly, at
once: the pale shimmer of the marble and the gold, the little
encampment of yellow lights ever so far off close to the ground at the
Confession; and, above all, the spaciousness, the vast airiness and
emptiness, which seemed in a way to be rather a mode of myself than a
quality of the place. I had come to see, if I could, Pollaiolo's tomb
in the Chapel of the Sacrament. I found the grating closed; and
kneeling before it, a foreign northern-looking man, with grizzled,
curly hair and beard, and a torn fustian coat and immense nailed
shoes. He was muttering prayers, kissing his rosary or medal at
intervals, and slightly prostrating himself. But what struck me, and
apparently others (for people approached and stared), was his
extraordinary intentness and fervour. He was certainly conscious of no
one and nothing save whatever his eyes were fixed upon--either the
sacrament or the altar behind that railing, or merely some vision of
his own. And he seemed not only different from everyone else, but
separate, isolated from that vast place which made all t