blossoms
and carpeted with red anemones. Everything basked in sunlight and
glittered with exceeding brilliancy of hue. A tiny white chapel stood
in a corner of the enclosure. Two iron-grated windows let me
see inside: it was a bare place, containing nothing but a wooden
praying-desk, black and worm-eaten, an altar with its candles and no
flowers, and above the altar a square picture brown with age. On the
floor were scattered several pence, and in a vase above the holy-water
vessel stood some withered hyacinths. As my sight became accustomed to
the gloom, I could see from the darkness of the picture a pale Christ
nailed to the cross with agonising upward eyes and ashy aureole above
the bleeding thorns. Thus I stepped suddenly away from the outward
pomp and bravery of nature to the inward aspirations, agonies,
and martyrdoms of man--from Greek legends of the past to the real
Christian present--and I remembered that an illimitable prospect has
been opened to the world, that in spite of ourselves we must turn our
eyes heavenward, inward, to the infinite unseen beyond us and within
our souls. Nothing can take us back to Phoebus or to Pan. Nothing
can again identify us with the simple natural earth. '_Une immense
esperance a traverse la terre_,' and these chapels, with their deep
significances, lurk in the fair landscape like the cares of real life
among our dreams of art, or like a fear of death and the hereafter in
the midst of opera music. It is a strange contrast. The worship of men
in those old times was symbolised by dances in the evening, banquets,
libations, and mirth-making. 'Euphrosyne' was alike the goddess of
the righteous mind and of the merry heart. Old withered women telling
their rosaries at dusk; belated shepherds crossing themselves beneath
the stars when they pass the chapel; maidens weighed down with
Margaret's anguish of unhappy love; youths vowing their life to
contemplation in secluded cloisters,--these are the human forms which
gather round such chapels; and the motto of the worshippers consists
in this, 'Do often violence to thy desire.' In the Tyrol we have seen
whole villages praying together at daybreak before their day's work,
singing their _Miserere_ and their _Gloria_ and their _Dies Irae_, to
the sound of crashing organs and jangling bells; appealing in the
midst of Nature's splendour to the Spirit which is above Nature, which
dwells in darkness rather than light, and loves the yearnings and
c