uries was silent in
his face. What he said need not be repeated. The charm was less in his
words than in his personality; for Momus-philosophy lay deep in every
look and gesture of the man. The place lent itself to irony: parties
of Americans and English parsons, the former agape for any
rubbishy old things, the latter learned in the lore of obsolete
Church-furniture, had thronged Torcello; and now they were all gone,
and the sun had set behind the Alps, while an irreverent stranger
drank his wine in Attila's chair, and nature's jester smiled--_Sic
Genius_.

When I slept that night I dreamed of an altar-piece in the Temple of
Folly. The goddess sat enthroned beneath a canopy hung with bells
and corals. On her lap was a beautiful winged smiling genius, who
flourished two bright torches. On her left hand stood the man of
Modena with his white lamb, a new S. John. On her right stood the man
of Torcello with his keys, a new S. Peter. Both were laughing after
their all-absorbent, divine, noiseless fashion; and under both was
written, _Sic Genius_. Are not all things, even profanity,
permissible in dreams?

* * * * *

COMO AND IL MEDEGHINO

To which of the Italian lakes should the palm of beauty be accorded?
This question may not unfrequently have moved the idle minds of
travellers, wandering through that loveliest region from Orta to
Garda--from little Orta, with her gemlike island, rosy granite crags,
and chestnut-covered swards above the Colma; to Garda, bluest of all
waters, surveyed in majestic length from Desenzano or poetic Sirmione,
a silvery sleeping haze of hill and cloud and heaven and clear waves
bathed in modulated azure. And between these extreme points what
varied lovelinesses lie in broad Maggiore, winding Como, Varese with
the laughing face upturned to heaven, Lugano overshadowed by the
crested crags of Monte Generoso, and Iseo far withdrawn among the
rocky Alps! He who loves immense space, cloud shadows slowly sailing
over purple slopes, island gardens, distant glimpses of snow-capped
mountains, breadth, air, immensity, and flooding sunlight, will choose
Maggiore. But scarcely has he cast his vote for this, the Juno of the
divine rivals, when he remembers the triple lovelinesses of the
Larian Aphrodite, disclosed in all their placid grace from Villa
Serbelloni;--the green blue of the waters, clear as glass, opaque
through depth; the _millefleurs_ roses clambering in