it is!

WILLIAM MORRIS.

Supreme above all the enchanted gardens of Italy, both in the
bewildering beauty of its sensuous charm and in the potency of its
appeal to the imagination, stands the Villa d'Este at Tivoli.

It is a hillside villa, a succession of terraces forming a stairway of
flowers between the palace and the lower garden, where

"Cypress and fig tree and orange in tier upon tier still repeated,
Rose-garden on garden upheaved in balconies step to the sky."

But it is also a superb water-staircase, for the river Anio, turned from
its course by a gigantic feat of engineering, leaps in a magnificent
cascade, laughs in the spray of a thousand fountain jets, and makes the
bosquets which shadow the regal staircase a haunt of the water nymphs as
well as of the Dryads. You fancy, as your unwary foot presses the
concealed springs that it is the white hands of mischievous Naiads which
dash the water in your face, a pensive melancholy settles upon you with
the mysterious dusk, and you are startled by Undine's "short, quick
sobs," and are loth to believe that the plaintive sounds with which the
air pulses are but the dropping of rills in and out of the shadowy
pools.

The pompous hydraulic organ no longer thunders its "full-mouthed
diapason," but the nightingales fill the long summer nights with their
surges of wild rhapsodies. Both the eye and the ear of the artist
receive refreshment and stimulus here. The garden is a bath of
verdancy and coolness even upon the most torrid day. The very light
which filters through the dense foliage is tinged with green. The
marbles are velvety and moist with moss, and the maidenhair fern drips
lush and dank. Here Liszt drew inspiration from the harmonies of water
notes blended with the chiming of distant bells, and Watteau showed in
the many studies which he made in the garden how potent was its
influence in investing his _fetes champetres_ with the grace of the
idyl.

[Illustration: In the Garden of Villa d'Este

From a photograph by Mr. Charles S. Platt]

That its appeal was no less powerful to a poet, the "craft-master" of
his day, it is our purpose later to show.

Many minor poets also have felt and, with more or less success, have
interpreted its wondrous charm--Story perhaps best of all.

"What peace and quiet in this villa sleep!
Here let us pause nor chase for pleasure on,
Nothing can be more exquisite than this.
See how the old house lifts