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So saying, Cyril jumped out of the gig, and ran up the steep last ascent of the hill. He had persuaded himself of his moral rightness and felt quite happy.

Suddenly the road made a sharp bend between the overhanging rocks, grown in all their fissures with dark ilex tufts and yellow broom and pale pink cyclamen; it turned, and widened into a flat grass-grown place, surrounded by cypresses on the top and ridge of the hill. Cyril ran to the edge and gave a cry of pleasure. Below was stretched a wide strip of Maremma swamp-land, mottled green and brown–green where the grass was under water, brown where it was burned into cinders by the sun; with here and there a patch of shining pond or canal; and at the extremity of this, distinguishable from the greyish amber sky only by its superior and intense luminousness, the sea–not blue nor green, but grey, silvery, steel-like, as a mirror in the full sunshine. Baldwin stopped the gig beneath the cypresses.

“Look there,” he said, pointing with his whip to a dark greenish band, scarcely visible, which separated the land from the sea: “those are the pine woods of Viareggio. It was into their sand and weeds that the sea washed Shelley’s body. Do you think we should be any the better off if he had taken to practical work which he could not do, and declared that poetry was a sort of French cookery?”

Baldwin tied the reins to the stem of a cypress, and threw himself down on the warm sere grass on the brow of the hill, overlooking the tangle of olive and vine and fig-trees of the slopes below.

“In Shelley’s time,” answered Cyril, leaning his head and shoulders against one of the cypresses, and looking up into its dark branches, compact in the centre, but delicate like feather and sparkling like jet where their extremities stood out against the pale blue sky–“in Shelley’s time, things were rather different from what they are now. There was a religion of progress to preach and be stoned for; there was a cause of liberty to fight for–there were Bourbons and Lord Eldons, and there was Greece and Spain and Italy. There was Italy still when Mrs. Browning wrote: had she looked out of Casa Guidi windows now, on to the hum-drum, shoulder-shrugging, penny-haggling, professorial, municipal-councillorish Italy of to-day she could scarcely have felt in the vein. The heroic has been done–“

“There is Servia and Montenegro, and there are Nihilists and Democrats,” answered Baldwin.

“I know–but we can’t sing about barbarous ruffians, nor about half-besotten, half-knavish regicides; we can’t be Democrats now-a-days–at least I can’t. Would you have a man sing parliamentary debates, or High Church squabbles, or Disestablishment, or Woman’s rights, or anti-communism? sing the superb conquests of man over nature, etc., like your Italian friends, your steam-engine and mammoth poet Zanella? The wonders of science!–six or seven thousand dogs and cats being flayed, roasted, baked, disembowelled, artificially ulcerated, galvanized on ripped-up nerves, at Government expense, in all the laboratories of Christendom, in order to discover the soul-secreting apparatus, and how to cure old maids of liver complaint! Thank you. My muse aspires not thereunto. What then? Progress? But it is assured. Why, man, we can’t even sing of despair, like the good people of the year ’20, since we all know that (bating a few myriads of sufferers and a few centuries of agony) all is going to come quite right, to be quite comfortable in this best of all possible worlds. What then remains, again? Look around you. There remains the poetry of beauty–oh yes, of pure beauty, to match the newest artistic chintzes; the poetry of artistic nirvana, of the blissful sleep of all manliness and energy, to the faint sound (heard through dreams) of paradisiac mysticism sung to golden lutes, or of imaginary amorous hysterics, or of symphonies in alliteration. And this when there is so much error, so much doubt, so much suffering, when all our forces are required to push away a corner of the load of evil still weighing on the world: this sort of thing I cannot take to.” And Cyril fiercely plucked out a tuft of lilac-flowered thyme, and threw it into the precipice below, as if it had been the poetry of which he was speaking.