ealously closed inward upon itself, is a
singularly weighty one; the more so because, as the peasant said when
asked the way to an old sanctuary that had fallen to the occupation of
farm-labourers, and was now deserted even by them: Maintenant il n'y a
personne la.

NOTES

126. *Published in the Nineteenth Century, June 1894, and now reprinted
by the kind permission of the proprietors.

APOLLO IN PICARDY*

[142] "CONSECUTIVE upon Apollo in all his solar fervour and
effulgence," says a writer of Teutonic proclivities, "we may discern
even among the Greeks themselves, elusively, as would be natural with
such a being, almost like a mock sun amid the mists, the northern or
ultra-northern sun-god. In hints and fragments the lexicographers and
others have told us something of this Hyperborean Apollo, fancies about
him which evidence some knowledge of the Land of the Midnight Sun, of
the sun's ways among the Laplanders, of a hoary summer breathing very
softly on the violet beds, or say, the London-pride and crab-apples,
provided for those meagre people, somewhere amid the remoteness of
their icy seas. In such wise Apollo had already anticipated his sad
fortunes in the Middle Age as a god definitely in exile, driven north
of the Alps, and even here ever in flight before the summer. Summer
indeed he leaves now to the management of [143] others, finding his way
from France and Germany to still paler countries, yet making or taking
with him always a certain seductive summer-in-winter, though also with
a divine or titanic regret, a titanic revolt in his heart, and
consequent inversion at times of his old beneficent and properly solar
doings. For his favours, his fallacious good-humour, which has in
truth a touch of malign magic about it, he makes men pay sometimes a
terrible price, and is in fact a devil!"

Devilry, devil's work:--traces of such you might fancy were to be found
in a certain manuscript volume taken from an old monastic library in
France at the Revolution. It presented a strange example of a cold and
very reasonable spirit disturbed suddenly, thrown off its balance, as
by a violent beam, a blaze of new light, revealing, as it glanced here
and there, a hundred truths unguessed at before, yet a curse, as it
turned out, to its receiver, in dividing hopelessly against itself the
well-ordered kingdom of his thought. Twelfth volume of a dry enough
treatise on mathematics, applied, still with no relaxation of