e another lyre, "suited to the sense of modern men." "For," said he,
"it is idle to set solid food before the lips of sucklings."

If we can trust Fra Ilario's letter as a genuine record, which is
unhappily a matter of some doubt, we have in this narration not only a
picturesque, almost a melodramatically picturesque glimpse of the poet's
apparition to those quiet monks in their seagirt house of peace, but
also an interesting record of the destiny which presided over the first
great work of literary art in a distinctly modern language.

IV. LA SPEZZIA.

While we were at Fosdinovo the sky filmed over, and there came a halo
round the sun. This portended change; and by evening, after we had
reached La Spezzia, earth, sea, and air were conscious of a coming
tempest. At night I went down to the shore, and paced the sea-wall they
have lately built along the Rada. The moon was up, but overdriven with
dry smoky clouds, now thickening to blackness over the whole bay, now
leaving intervals through which the light poured fitfully and fretfully
upon the wrinkled waves; and ever and anon they shuddered with electric
gleams which were not actual lightning. Heaven seemed to be descending
on the sea; one might have fancied that some powerful charms were
drawing down the moon with influence malign upon those still resisting
billows. For not as yet the gulf was troubled to its depth, and not as
yet the breakers dashed in foam against the moonlight-smitten
promontories. There was but an uneasy murmuring of wave to wave; a
whispering of wind, that stooped its wing and hissed along the surface,
and withdrew into the mystery of clouds again; a momentary chafing of
churned water round the harbour piers, subsiding into silence petulant
and sullen. I leaned against an iron stanchion and longed for the sea's
message. But nothing came to me, and the drowned secret of Shelley's
death those waves which were his grave revealed not.

"Howler and scooper of storms! capricious and dainty sea!"

Meanwhile the incantation swelled in shrillness, the electric shudders
deepened. Alone in this elemental overture to tempest I took no note of
time, but felt, through self-abandonment to the symphonic influence, how
sea and air, and clouds akin to both, were dealing with each other
complainingly, and in compliance to some maker of unrest within them. A
touch upon my shoulder broke this trance; I turned and saw a boy beside
me in a coastguard's uniform.