villains as you please, and the
impression may still be moral; and you may have as many saints as you
please, and the impression may still be immoral."

The road had suddenly emerged out of the olive woods covering the lowest
hill ranges, and in a few minutes they were driving through a perfect
desert. The road, a narrow white ribbon, stretched across a great flat
tract of country: field after field of Indian corn, stripped of its
leaves and looking like regiments of spindles, and of yellowish green
grass, half under water; on either side a ditch full of water-lilies,
widening into sedge-fringed canals, in which the hay of coarse long
grass was stacked in boats for sheer want of dry soil, or expanding into
shallow patches of water scarcely covering the grass, and reflecting,
against the green of the meadow below, the boldly peaked marble
mountains of Carrara, bare, intensely ribbed, veined, and the blue sky
and rainy black clouds. Green brown fields, tufts of reed, hill and sky
reflected in the inundated grass--nothing more, not a house, or shed, or
tree for miles around--in front only the stormy horizon where it touched
the sea.

"This is beautiful," cried Cyril. "I should like to come and live here.
It is much lovelier and more peaceful than all the woods and valleys in
creation."

Baldwin laughed. "It might be a good beginning for final Nirvana," he
said. "These are the sea-swamps, the _padule_, where the serene Republic
of Lucca sent its political offenders. You were locked up in a tower,
the door bricked up, with food enough to last till your keeper came back
once a fortnight; the malaria did the rest."

"It is like some of our modern literature," answered Cyril, with a
shudder; "Maremma poetry--we have that sort of thing, too."

"By the way," went on Baldwin; "I don't think we quite came to the end
of our discussion about what a poet ought to do with his moral
instincts, if he has any."

"I know," answered Cyril, "and _I_ have meanwhile returned to my
previous conclusion that, now that all great singable strifes are at
an end, poetry cannot satisfy the moral cravings of a man."

"You think so?" asked Baldwin, looking rather contemptuously at his
companion. "You think so? Well, therein lies your mistake. I think, on
the contrary, that poetry requires more moral sense and energy than most
men can or will give to it. Do you know what a poet has to deal with,
at least a poet who does not confine himself to me