Every year the Normal School provides traveling scholarships for some of its best pupils. The term is two years. Archeologists are sent to Greece, historians to Rome. Rolland had no strong desire for such a mission; he was too eager to face the realities of life. But fate is apt to stretch forth her hand to those who are coy. Two of his fellow students had refused the Roman scholarship, and Rolland was chosen to fill the vacancy almost against his will. To his inexperience, Rome still seemed nothing more than dead past, a history in shreds and patches, a dull record which he would have to piece together from inscriptions and parchments. It was a school task; an imposition, not life. Scanty were his expectations when he set forth on pilgrimage to the eternal city. The duty imposed on him was to arrange documents in the gloomy Farnese Palace, to cull history from registers and books. For a brief space he paid due tribute to this service, and in the archives of the Vatican he compiled a memoir upon the nuncio Salviati and the sack of Rome. But ere long his attention was concentrated upon the living alone. His mind was flooded by the wonderfully clear light of the Campagna, which reduces all things to a self-evident harmony, making life appear simple and giving it the aspect of pure sensation. For many, the gentle grace of the artist's promised land exercises an irresistible charm. The memorials of the Renaissance issue to the wanderer a summons to greatness. In Italy, more strongly than elsewhere, does it seem that art is the meaning of human life, and that art must be man's heroic aim. Throwing aside his theses, the young man of twenty, intoxicated with the adventure of love and of life, wandered for months in blissful freedom through the lesser cities of Italy and Sicily. Even Tolstoi was forgotten, for in this region of sensuous presentation, in the dazzling south, the voice from the Russian steppes, demanding renunciation, fell upon deaf ears. Of a sudden, however, Shakespeare, friend and guide of Rolland's childhood, resumed his sway. A cycle of the Shakespearean dramas, presented by Ernesto Rossi, displayed to him the splendor of elemental passion, and aroused an irresistible longing to transfigure, like Shakespeare, history in poetic form. He was moving day by day among the stone witnesses to the greatness of past centuries. He would recall those centuries to life. The poet in him awakened. In cheerful faithlessness to his mission, he penned a series of dramas, catching them on the wing with that burning ecstacy which inspiration, coming unawares, invariably arouses in the artist. Just as England is presented in Shakespeare's historical plays, so was the whole Renaissance epoch to be reflected in his own writings. Light of heart, in the intoxication of composition he penned one play after another, without concerning himself as to the earthly possibilities for staging them. Not one of these