k first to the Hellespontic, noting the close fillet, and the
cloth bound below the face, and then you will be prepared to understand
the last I shall show you, and the loveliest of the southern
Pythonesses.

[Illustration: X.

Grass of the Desert.]

222. A less deep thinker than Botticelli would have made her parched
with thirst, and burnt with heat. But the voice of God, through nature,
to the Arab or the Moor, is not in the thirst, but in the fountain--not
in the desert, but in the grass of it. And this Libyan Sibyl is the
spirit of wild grass and flowers, springing in desolate places.

You see, her diadem is a wreath of them; but the blossoms of it are not
fastening enough for her hair, though it is not long yet--(she is only
in reality a Florentine girl of fourteen or fifteen)--so the little
darling knots it under her ears, and then makes herself a necklace of
it. But though flowing hair and flowers are wild and pretty, Botticelli
had not, in these only, got the power of Spring marked to his mind. Any
girl might wear flowers; but few, for ornament, would be likely to wear
grass. So the Sibyl shall have grass in her diadem; not merely
interwoven and bending, but springing and strong. You thought it ugly
and grotesque at first, did not you? It was made so, because precisely
what Botticelli wanted you to look at.

But that's not all. This conical cap of hers, with one bead at the
top,--considering how fond the Florentines are of graceful head-dresses,
this seems a strange one for a young girl. But, exactly as I know the
angel of Victory to be Greek, at his Mount of Pity, so I know this
head-dress to be taken from a Greek coin, and to be meant for a Greek
symbol. It is the Petasus of Hermes--the mist of morning over the dew.
Lastly, what will the Libyan Sibyl say to you? The letters are large on
her tablet. Her message is the oracle from the temple of the Dew: "The
dew of thy birth is as the womb of the morning."--"Ecce venientem diem,
et latentia aperientem, tenebit gremio gentium regina."

223. Why the daybreak came not then, nor yet has come, but only a deeper
darkness; and why there is now neither queen nor king of nations, but
every man doing that which is right in his own eyes, I would fain go on,
partly to tell you, and partly to meditate with you: but it is not our
work for to-day. The issue of the Reformation which these great
painters, the scholars of Dante, began, we may follow, farther, in the
study