In the country of Virgil, life remains pastoral still. The field-labourer of northern counties may be but a hapless hind, hedging and ditching dolefully, or at least serving a steam-beast with oil and fire, but in the land of the Georgics there is the poetry of agriculture still.
The fatal desire of fame, which is to art the corroding element, as the desire of the senses is to love--bearing with it the seeds of satiety and mortality--had entered into him without his knowing what it was that ailed him.
Genius lives in isolation, and suffers from it. But perhaps it creates it. The breath of its lips is like ether; purer than the air around it, it changes the air for others into ice.
Conscience and genius--the instinct of the heart, and the desire of the mind--the voice that warns and the voice that ordains: when these are in conflict, it is bitter for life in which they are at war; most bitter of all when that life is in its opening youth, and sure of everything, and yet sure of nothing.
Between them there was that bottomless chasm of mental difference, across which mutual affection can throw a rope-chain of habit and forbearance for the summer days, but which no power on earth can ever bridge over with that iron of sympathy which stands throughout all storms.
When the heart is fullest of pain, and the mouth purest with truth, there is a cruel destiny in things, which often makes the words worst chosen and surest to defeat the end they seek.
There is a chord in every human heart that has a sigh in it if touched aright. When the artist finds the key-note which that chord will answer to--in the dullest as in the highest--then he is great.
Life without a central purpose around which it can revolve, is like a star that has fallen out of its orbit. With a great affection or a great aim gone, the practical life may go on loosely, indifferently, mechanically, but it takes no grip on outer things, it has no vital interest, it gravitates to nothing.
Fame has only the span of a day, they say. But to live in the hearts of the people--that is worth something.
Keep young. Keep innocent. Innocence does not come back: and repentance is a poor thing beside it.
The chimes of the monastery were ringing out for the first mass; deep bells of sweet tone, that came down the river like a benediction on the day. Signa kneeled down on the grass.