I THE Hermit lived in a cave in the hollow of a hill. Below him was a glen, with a stream in a coppice of oaks and alders, and on the farther side of the valley, half a day’s journey distant, another hill, steep and bristling, which raised aloft a little walled town with Ghibelline […]

I “Above all,” the letter ended, “don’t leave Siena without seeing Doctor Lombard’s Leonardo. Lombard is a queer old Englishman, a mystic or a madman (if the two are not synonymous), and a devout student of the Italian Renaissance. He has lived for years in Italy, exploring its remotest corners, and has lately picked up […]

Hubert Granice, pacing the length of his pleasant lamp-lit library, paused to compare his watch with the clock on the chimney-piece. Three minutes to eight. In exactly three minutes Mr. Peter Ascham, of the eminent legal firm of Ascham and Pettilow, would have his punctual hand on the door-bell of the flat. It was a […]

I “You ought to buy it,” said my host; “it’s just the place for a solitary-minded devil like you. And it would be rather worth while to own the most romantic house in Brittany. The present people are dead broke, and it’s going for a song–you ought to buy it.” It was not with the […]

The view from Mrs. Manstey’s window was not a striking one, but to her at least it was full of interest and beauty. Mrs. Manstey occupied the back room on the third floor of a New York boarding- house, in a street where the ash-barrels lingered late on the sidewalk and the gaps in the […]

Mrs. Ballinger is one of the ladies who pursue Culture in bands, as though it were dangerous to meet alone. To this end she had founded the Lunch Club, an association composed of herself and several other indomitable huntresses of erudition. The Lunch Club, after three or four winters of lunching and debate, had acquired […]

I had always thought Jack Gisburn rather a cheap genius–though a good fellow enough–so it was no great surprise to me to hear that, in the height of his glory, he had dropped his painting, married a rich widow, and established himself in a villa on the Riviera. (Though I rather thought it would have […]

I. For hours she had lain in a kind of gentle torpor, not unlike that sweet lassitude which masters one in the hush of a midsummer noon, when the heat seems to have silenced the very birds and insects, and, lying sunk in the tasselled meadow-grasses, one looks up through a level roofing of maple-leaves […]

I “Oh, there IS one, of course, but you’ll never know it.” The assertion, laughingly flung out six months earlier in a bright June garden, came back to Mary Boyne with a sharp perception of its latent significance as she stood, in the December dusk, waiting for the lamps to be brought into the library. […]

I LEAGUERED in fireThe wild black promontories of the coast extendTheir savage silhouettes;The sun in universal carnage sets,And, halting higher,The motionless storm-clouds mass their sullen threats,Like an advancing mob in sword-points penned,That, balked, yet stands at bay.Mid-zenith hangs the fascinated dayIn wind-lustrated hollows crystalline,A wan valkyrie whose wide pinions shineAcross the ensanguined ruins of the […]

LIFE, like a marble block, is given to all,A blank, inchoate mass of years and days,Whence one with ardent chisel swift essaysSome shape of strength or symmetry to call;One shatters it in bits to mend a wall;One in a craftier hand the chisel lays,And one, to wake the mirth in Lesbia’s gaze,Carves it apace in […]

I. IMMENSE, august, like some Titanic bloom,The mighty choir unfolds its lithic core,Petalled with panes of azure, gules and or,Splendidly lambent in the Gothic gloom,And stamened with keen flamelets that illumeThe pale high-altar. On the prayer-worn floor,By surging worshippers thick-thronged of yore,A few brown crones, familiars of the tomb,The stranded driftwood of Faith’s ebbing sea–For […]

I. LA VIERGE AU DONATEUR. HERE by the ample river’s argent sweep,Bosomed in tilth and vintage to her walls,A tower-crowned Cybele in armored sleepThe city lies, fat plenty in her halls,With calm, parochial spires that hold in feeThe friendly gables clustered at their base,And, equipoised o’er tower and market-place,The Gothic minster’s winged immensity;And in that […]

PURE form, that like some chalice of old timeContain’st the liquid of the poet’s thoughtWithin thy curving hollow, gem-enwroughtWith interwoven traceries of rhyme,While o’er thy brim the bubbling fancies climb,What thing am I, that undismayed have soughtTo pour my verse with trembling hand untaughtInto a shape so small yet so sublime?Because perfection haunts the hearts […]

ILARIA, thou that wert so fair and dearThat death would fain disown thee, grief made wiseWith prophecy thy husband’s widowed eyesAnd bade him call the master’s art to rearThy perfect image on the sculptured bier,With dreaming lids, hands laid in peaceful guiseBeneath the breast that seems to fall and rise,And lips that at love’s call […]

WHAT strange presentiment, O Mother, liesOn thy waste brow and sadly-folded lips,Forefeeling the Light’s terrible eclipseOn Calvary, as if love made thee wise,And thou couldst read in those dear infant eyesThe sorrow that beneath their smiling sleeps,And guess what bitter tears a mother weepsWhen the cross darkens her unclouded skies? Sad Lady, if some mother, […]

I It was clear that the sleigh from Weymore had not come; and the shivering young traveller from Boston, who had counted on jumping into it when he left the train at Northridge Junction, found himself standing alone on the open platform, exposed to the full assault of night-fall and winter. The blast that swept […]

I It was last winter, after a twelve years’ absence from New York, that I saw again, at one of the Jim Cumnors’ dinners, my old friend Halston Merrick. The Cumnors’ house is one of the few where, even after such a lapse of time, one can be sure of finding familiar faces and picking […]

I Mrs. Lidcote, as the huge menacing mass of New York defined itself far off across the waters, shrank back into her corner of the deck and sat listening with a kind of unreasoning terror to the steady onward drive of the screws. She had set out on the voyage quietly enough,–in what she called […]

I The young men of our American Relief Corps are beginning to come back from the front with stories. There was no time to pick them up during the first months–the whole business was too wild and grim. The horror has not decreased, but nerves and sight are beginning to be disciplined to it. In […]