--

in that darkening room, and afraid as I had never before been afraid. I did not scream; I was much too frightened to scream; - I only struggled to the head of the stairs, and stumbled, and fell, rolling over and over down to the next lobby. I do not remember being hurt; the stair-carpets were soft and very thick. The noise of my tumble brought immediate succor and sympathy. But I did not say a word about what I had seen; I knew that I should be punished if I spoke of it. . . .

Now some weeks or months later, at the beginning of the cold season, the real Cousin Jane came back one morning to occupy that room upon the third floor. She seemed delighted to meet me again; and she caressed me so fondly that I felt ashamed of my secret dismay at her return. On the very same day she took me out with her for a walk, and bought me cakes, toys, pictures, a multitude of things, -carrying all the packages herself. I ought to have been grateful, if not happy. But the generous shame that caresses had awakened was already gone; and that memory of which I could speak to no one least of all to her again darkened my thoughts as we walked together. This Cousin Jane who was buying me toys, and smiling, and chatting, was only, perhaps, the husk of another Cousin Jane that had no face. . . . Before the brilliant shops, among the crowds of happy people, I had nothing to fear. But afterwards after dark might not the Inner disengage herself from the other, and leave her room, and glide to mine with chin upturned, as if staring at the ceiling? . . .

Twilight fell before we reached home, and Cousin Jane had ceased to speak or smile. No doubt she was tired. But I noticed that her silence and her sternness had begun with the gathering of the dusk,

and a chill crept over me.

Nevetheless, I passed a merry evening with my new toys, which looked very beautiful under the lamplight, and

If, at that time, I could have dared to speak of the other Cousin Jane, somebody might have thought proper in view of the strange sequel-to tell me the natural history of such apparitions. But I could not have believed the explanation. I understood only that I had seen; and because I had seen I was afraid.

And the memory of that seeing disturbed me more than ever, after the coffin of Cousin Jane had been carried away. The knowledge of her death had filled me, not with sorrow, but with terror. Once I had wished that she were dead. And the wish had been fulfilled- but the

punishment was yet to come! Dim thoughts, dim fears - enormously older than the creed of Cousin Jane awakened within me, as from some prenatal sleep, especially a horror of the dead as evil beings, hating mankind. . . . Such horror exists in savage minds, accompanied by the vague notion that character is totally transformed or stripped by death, — that those departed, who once caressed and smiled and loved, now menace and gibber and hate. What power, I asked myself in dismay, could protect me from her visits? I had not yet ceased to believe in the God of Cousin Jane; but I doubted whether he would or could do anything for me. Moreover, my creed had been greatly shaken by the suspicion that Cousin Jane had always lied. How often had she not assured me that I could not see ghosts or

...

evil spirits! Yet the Thing that I had seen was assuredly her inside-self, - the ghost or the goblin of her, — and utterly evil. Evidently she hated me: she had lured me into a lonesome room for the sole purpose of making me hideously afraid. And why had she hated me thus before she died? was it because she knew that I hated her, that I had wished her to die? Yet how did she know? - could the ghost of her see, through blood and flesh and bone, into the miserable little ghost of myself?... Anyhow, she had lied. Perhaps

II

IDOLATRY

"Ah, Psyche, from the regions which Are Holy Land!"

The early Church did not teach that the gods of the heathen were merely brass and stone. On the contrary she accepted them as real and formidable personalities - demons who had assumed divinity to lure their worshipers to destruction. It was in reading the legends of that Church, and the lives of her saints, that I obtained my first vague notions of the pagan gods.

I then imagined those gods to resemble in some sort the fairies and the goblins of my nursery-tales, or the fairies in the ballads of Sir Walter Scott. Goblins and their kindred interested me much more than the ugly Saints of the Pictorial Church History, - much more than even the slender angels of my French religious prints, who unpleasantly reminded me of Cousin Jane. Besides, I could not help suspecting all the friends of Cousin Jane's God, and feeling a natural sympathy with his enemies, whether devils, goblins, fairies, witches, or heathen deities. To the devils indeed - because I supposed them stronger than the rest I had often prayed for help and friendship; very humbly at first, and in great fear of being too grimly answered, but afterwards with words of reproach on finding that my condescensions had been ignored.

But in spite of their indifference, my sympathy with the enemies of Cousin Jane's God steadily strengthened; and my interest in all the spirits that the Church History called evil, especially the heathen gods, continued to grow. And at last one day I discovered, in one unexplored corner of our library, several beautiful books about art, great folio books containing figures of gods and of demi-gods, athletes and heroes, nymphs and fauns and nereids, and all the charming monsters half-man, half-animal of Greek mythology.

How my heart leaped and fluttered on that happy day! Breathless I gazed; and the longer that I gazed the more unspeakably lovely those faces and forms appeared. Figure after figure dazzled, astounded, bewitched me. And this new delight was in itself a wonder, also a fear. Something seemed to be thrilling out of those pictured pages, something invisible that made me afraid. I remembered stories of the infernal magic that informed the work of the pagan statuaries. But this superstitious fear presently yielded to a conviction, or rather intuition, which I could not possibly have explained,—that the gods had been belied because they were beautiful.

--

(Blindly and gropingly I had touched a truth, the ugly truth that beauty of the highest order, whether mental, or moral, or physical, must ever be hated by the many and loved only by the few!). And these had been called devils! I adored them! I loved them! -I promised to detest forever all who refused them reverence! . . . Oh! the contrast between that immortal loveliness and the squalor of the saints and the patriarchs and the prophets of my religious pictures! a contrast indeed as of heaven and hell. . . . In that hour the medieval creed seemed to me the very religion of ugliness and of hate. And as it had been taught to me, in the weakness of my sickly childhood, it certainly was. And even to-day, in spite of larger knowledge, the words "heathen" and "pagan"- however ignorantly used in scorn revive within me old sensations of light and beauty, of freedom and joy.

well here allow the Interrupter an opportunity to talk.

The first perception of beauty ideal is never a cognition, but a recognition. No mathematical or geometrical theory of æsthetics will ever interpret the delicious shock that follows upon the boy's first vision of beauty supreme. He himself could not even try to explain why the newly-seen form appears to him lovelier than aught upon earth. He only feels the sudden power that the vision exerts upon the mystery of his own life, and that feeling is but dim deep memory, blood-remembrance.

a

Many do not remember, and therefore cannot see at any period of life. There are myriad minds no more capable of perceiving the higher beauty than the blind wan fish of caves - offspring of generations that swam in total darkness -is capable of feeling the gladness of light. Probably the race producing minds like these had no experience of higher things, never beheld the happier vanished world of immortal art and thought. Or perhaps in such minds the higher knowledge has been effaced or blurred by long dull superimposition of barbarian inheritance.

But he who receives in one sudden vision the revelation of the antique beauty, he who knows the thrill divine that follows after, the unutterable mingling of delight and sadness, he remembers! Somewhere, at some time, in the ages of a finer humanity, he must have lived with beauty. Three thousand

four thousand years ago: it matters not; what thrills him now is the shadowing of what has been, the phantom of rapture forgotten. Without inherited sense of the meaning of beauty as power, of the worth of it to life and love, never could the ghost in him perceive, however dimly, the presence of the gods.

Now I think that something of the ghostliness in this present shell of me must have belonged to the vanished world of beauty, must have mingled freely with the best of its youth and grace

and force,

must have known the worth of long light limbs on the course of glory, and the pride of the winner in contests, and the praise of maidens stately as that young sapling of a palm, which Odysseus beheld, springing by the altar in Delos.

All this I am able to believe, because I could feel, while yet a boy, the divine humanity of the ancient gods. . . .

But this new-found delight soon became for me the source of new sorrows. I was placed with all my small belongings under religious tutelage; and then, of course, my reading was subjected to severe examination. One day the beautiful books disappeared; and I was afraid to ask what had become of them. After many weeks they were returned to their former place; and my joy at seeing them again was of brief duration. All of them had been unmercifully revised. My censors had been offended by the nakedness of the gods, and had undertaken to correct that impropriety. Parts of many figures, dryads, naiads, graces, muses, had been found too charming and erased with a pen-knife. And, in most cases, garments had been put upon the gods even upon the tiny Loves woven with cross-strokes of a quill-pen, so designed as to conceal all curves of beauty, pecially the lines of the long fine thighs.

es

However, in my case, this barbarism proved of some educational value. It furnished me with many problems of restoration; and I often tried very hard to reproduce in pencil-drawing the obliterated or the hidden line. In this I was not successful; but, in spite of the amazing thoroughness with which every mutilation or effacement had been accomplished, my patient study of the methods of attack enabled me-long before I knew Winkelmann to understand how Greek artists had idealized the human

figure. Perhaps that is why, in after years, few modern representations of the nude could interest me for any length of time. However graceful at first sight the image might appear, something commonplace would presently begin to reveal itself in the lines of those very forms against which my early tutors had waged such implacable war.

Is it not almost invariably true that the modern naked figure, as chiseled or painted, shadows something of the modern living model,-something, therefore, of individual imperfection? Only the antique work of the grand era is superindividual, reflecting the ideal, supreme in the soul of a race. Many, I know, deny this; but do we not remain, to some degree, barbarians still? Even the good and great Ruskin, on the topic of Greek art, spake often like a Goth. Did he not call the Medicean Venus "an uninteresting little person"?

Now after I had learned to know and love the elder gods, the world again began to glow about me; glooms that had brooded over it slowly thinned away. The terror was not yet gone; but I now wanted only reasons to disbelieve all that I feared and hated. In the sunshine, in the green of the fields, in the blue of the sky, I found a gladness before unknown. Within myself new thoughts, new imaginings, dim longings for I knew not what, were quickening and thrilling. I looked for beauty, and everywhere found it: in passing faces,-in attitudes and motions, in the poise of plants and trees, in long white clouds, — in faint blue lines of far-off hills. At moments the simple pleasure of life would quicken to a joy so large, so deep, that it frightened me. But at other times there would come to me a new and strange sadness, a shadowy and inexplicable pain.

I had entered into my Renaissance.

I

THE harbor, brimful with the tide, was blue as morning sky, and motionless as high summer clouds. Along the grassgrown wharves,-silver-gray piles which crumbled at the ends into a jackstraw heap of rotting logs, there was no human stir. Over one gray shanty the red ensign, a fold showing the yellow crown of Her Majesty's customs, hung limp from the staff. The thirty-foot flood had moved in imperceptibly, and lay, from the wharves to the distant islands, like a floor of steel. The masts of pinkies at their moorings plunged in deep, straight lines of black reflection, save where some profound, mysterious tremor of the tide shivered the mirror, and sent the phantom spars in wriggling fragments to the depths. A lone sandpiper, skimming the surface, mated with a flying shadow; and two or three, wheeling together, doubled into a little flock that swerved, divided, and rejoined. The long water-front of gray houses, and behind them the treeless, empty street of pink sand, lay asleep in peaceful desolation.

The hum of voices, however, came, from on board a small two-masted schooner made fast to a mouldering wharf. And on the sunny side of the mainsail, that was half hoisted to dry in the morning air, sat a little group of men in varied postures of idleness. A tawny-haired youth in a Scotch cap straddled the rail, spitting overside, kicking the woodwork sonorously, and fingering off the flakes of blistered paint. The others, all old men, basked on the cabin roof, sat on the bleached and ancient boom, perched on a coil of frayed hawser, or tilted back on chairs and boxes. All, except one, were men of a bygone generation, whose faces,

placid and weatherseamed, and whose beards, of every cut, from the white, wideforked whisker to the fiery chin-strap of Ireland, marked them for men who kept the ways of the old country. The one exception sat in a kitchen chair by the wheel,-a long-limbed old man, of quick eye and humorous wrinkles, by every feature a Yankee among Canadians. His big, brown, cramped hands, tattooed with a blue five-spot at the fork of either thumb, whittled busily at a peg.

"Harbor-master sayed so, too," the old man with the forked beard was declaring, from his perch on the mainboom. "Sayed, ain't no vessel o' tonnage worth countun' ever clearrs out o' this porrt nowadays, or enterrs. An' it lies right in my own memory when they used to come in, brigs an' ships an' all, crowdud: carrgoes an' settlerrs!" The speaker waved his hand slowly, as in admiration of a broad picture. "An' the Loodianah would be sailun' from Liverrpool, bang up again this w'arf as ever was, a-landin' swarrms; an' Danny Eustis had a barr an' lodgun's right on ut, there where the timberr's sunk in. Times has changed." He sighed, and letting his head sink, spread out the white flanges of his beard across his chest.

The youth who straddled the rail turned his freckled face toward the company, grinning malignly, as one adept in putting his finger on the main trouble.

"This schooner's the only thing bigger'n a pinky that's seaworthy in the whol' bloomin' harbor," he sneered. “An' she ain't left her pier fer how long is it, Cap'n Christy?-fer".

The old Yankee at the wheel caught

him up.

"Look here, Master Kibben," he said mildly, "I'd ruther you'd let that paint