I visited M. le Cure {4} to-day. He has a charming house and a _jardin potager_. He showed me over the church. To-morrow I sit in the choir by his special invitation. He showed me all his vestments. To-morrow he really will be charming in red. He knows I am a heretic, and believes Pusey is still alive. He says that God will convert England on account of England's kindness to _les pretres exiles_ at the time of the Revolution. It is to be the reward of that sea-lashed island. Stained glass windows are wanted in the church; he has only six; fourteen more are needed. He gets them at 300 francs--12 pounds--a window in Paris. I was nearly offering half a dozen, but remembered you, and so only gave him something _pour les pauvres_. You had a narrow escape, Robbie. You should be thankful. I hope the 40 pounds is on its way, and that the 60 pounds will follow. I am going to hire a boat. It will save walking and so be an economy in the end. Dear Robbie, I must start well. If the life of St. Francis of Assissi awaits me I shall not be angry. Worse things might happen. Yours, OSCAR. --_Letter to Robert Ross_. A VISIT TO THE POPE c/o COOK & SON, PIAZZA DI SPAGNA, ROME, April 16th, 1900. My dear Robbie,--I simply cannot write. It is too horrid, not of me, but to me. It is a mode of paralysis--a _cacoethes tacendi_--the one form that malady takes in me. Well, all passed over very successfully. Palermo, where we stayed eight days, was lovely. The most beautifully situated town in the world--it dreams away its life in the _concha d'oro_, the exquisite valley that lies between two seas. The lemon groves and the orange gardens were so entirely perfect that I became quite a Pre-Raphaelite, and loathed the ordinary impressionists whose muddly souls and blurred intelligences would have rendered, but by mud and blur, those "golden lamps hung in a green night" that filled me with such joy. The elaborate and exquisite detail of the true Pre-Raphaelite is the compensation they offer us for the absence of motion; literature and motion being the only arts that are not immobile. Then nowhere, not even at Ravenna, have I seen such mosaics as in the Capella Palatine, which from pavement to domed ceiling is all gold: one really feels as if one was sitting in the heart of a great honey-comb looking at angels singing: and _looking_ at angels, or indeed at people, singing, is much nicer than listening to them, for this reason: the great artists always give to their angels lutes without strings, pipes without vent-holes, and reeds through which no wind can wander or make whistlings. Monreale you have heard of--with its cloisters and cathedral: we often drove there. I also made great friends with a young seminarist, who lived in the cathedral of Palermo--he and eleven others, in little rooms beneath the roof, like birds.