“His will”—of the hero’s weakness—“useless as a sword of base temper hung at the side of a drunkard or a dullard.” Or of his own southern land in September: “I scarce know why, looking at the country in this season, I always think of some beautiful woman after childbirth, who lies back in her white bed, smiling with a pale astonished inextinguishable smile.” Or the incision of this: “Where for him now were those unclean short-lived loves that left in the mouth the strange acidity of fruit cut with a steel knife?” Or the felicity of the following, of a southern night seen and felt from the terrace of a villa. “Clear meteors at intervals streaked the motionless air, running over it as lightly and silently as drops of water on a crystal pane.” “The sails on the sea,” he says of the same look-out by day, “were as pious and numberless as the wings of cherubim on the gold grounds of old Giottesque panels.” But it is above all here for two things that his faculty is admirable; one of them his making us feel through the windows of his situation, or the gaps, as it were, of his flowering wood, the golden presence of Rome, the charm that appeals to him as if he were one of the pilgrims from afar, save that he reproduces it with an authority in which, as we have seen, the pilgrims from afar have mainly been deficient. The other is the whole category of the phenomena of “passion,” as passion prevails between his men and his women—and scarcely anything else prevails; the states of feeling, of ecstasy and suffering engendered, the play of sensibility from end to end of the scale. In this direction he has left no dropped stitches for any worker of like tapestries to pick up. We shall here have made out that many of his “values” are much to be contested, but that where they are true they are as fresh as discoveries; witness the passage where Sperelli, driving back to Rome after a steeplechase in which he has been at the supreme moment worsted, meets nothing that does not play with significance into his vision and act with force on his nerves. He has before the race had “words,” almost blows, on the subject of one of the ladies present, with one of the other riders, of which the result is that they are to send each other their seconds; but the omens are not for his adversary, in spite of the latter’s success on the course. From the mail-coach, on the return, he overtook the flight toward Rome of Giannetto Rutolo, seated in a small two-wheeled trap, behind the quick trot of a great roan, over whom he bent with tight reins, holding his head down and his cigar in his teeth, heedless of the attempts of policemen to keep him in line. Rome, in the distance, stood up dark against a zone of light as yellow as sulphur; and the statues crowning St. John Lateran looked huge, above the zone, in their violet sky. _Then it was that Andrea fully knew the pain he was making another soul suffer._