ng at all. You
are not likely, if you know them. Still, they are apprehensive.

Though one were to arise from the dead to preach to them, they would
only make of him a nine days' wonder, and then laugh a little, and yawn
a little, and go on in their own paths.

Out of the eater came forth meat, and from evil there may be begotten
good; but out of nullity there can only come nullity. They have wadded
their ears, and though Jeremiah wailed of desolation, or Isaiah
thundered the wrath of heaven, they would not hear,--they would go on
looking at each other's dresses.

What could Paul himself say that would change them?

You cannot make sawdust into marble; you cannot make sea-sand into gold.
"Let us alone," is all they ask; and it is all that you could do, though
the force and flame of Horeb were in you.

* * *

It is very curious, but loss of taste in the nobles has always been
followed by a revolution of the mob. The _decadence_ always ushers in
the democracy.

* * *

Pleasure alone cannot content any one whose character has any force, or
mind any high intelligence. Society is, as you say, a book we soon read
through, and know by heart till it loses all interest. Art alone cannot
fill more than a certain part of our emotions; and culture, however
perfect, leaves us unsatisfied. There is only one thing that can give to
life what your poet called the light that never was on sea or land--and
that is human love.

* * *

"Yes, it is a curious thing that we do not succeed in fresco. The grace
is gone out of it; modern painters have not the lightness of touch
necessary; they are used to masses of colour, and they use the palette
knife as a mason the trowel. The art, too, like the literature of our
time, is all detail; the grand suggestive vagueness of the Greek drama
and of the Umbrian frescoes are lost to us under a crowd of elaborated
trivialities; perhaps it is because art has ceased to be spiritual or
tragic, and is merely domestic or melodramatic; the Greeks knew neither
domesticity nor melodrama, and the early Italian painters were imbued
with a faith which, if not so virile as the worship of the Phidian Zeus,
yet absorbed them and elevated them in a degree impossible in the tawdry
Sadduceeism of our own day. By the way, when the weather is milder you
must go to Orvieto; you have never been there, I think; it is the
Prosodion of Signorelli. What a fine P