In the Accademia at Florence I discovered my own dilemma portrayed. It stated my problem, but it offered no solution. However, it gave me a sense of comradeship to find that Botticelli, so many years ago, had peered down over the same precipice. In _The Kingdom of Venus_ one sees a flowered wood; from leafy trees hangs golden fruit; between their trunks drifts in the flaming light that never was on sea or land. Here a band of maidens have met with a solitary youth to celebrate the renewal of spring. In the center of the landscape, a little back from the group, stands a sad-faced Venus, who might equally well be a madonna listening for the dreadful beat of Gabriel’s wings who shall summon her to be mother of a saviour to the world. To her left stand three wanton spirits of earth and air, innocently carnal, eternal in their loveliness. To her right three maidens dance with lifted hands. One of them gazes with melancholy desire towards the youth. He looks away from her unwillingly. In their eyes broods the gloomy foreknowledge of wrong-doing. They would fain be Grecians, but they have bowed to the Vatican. The shadows, the flowers, the rustling leaves are still pagan; but in the young girl’s eyes hangs the memory of the tortured Christ. She is wanton in her scarcely veiled nakedness, but she dares not forget; and while she remembers, she cannot be happy. The lips with which she will woo her lover have worshiped the wound-prints of the pierced hand. The Renaissance made even its sadness exquisite by using it as the vehicle for poetry; but we, having lost our sense of magic, explain our melancholy in mediaeval terms. Magic was still in the world; I was determined to find it. I was continually drawn back to the picture. I would sit before it for hours. It explained nothing. If offered no suggestions. It simply told me what I already knew about myself. But in watching it I found rest. Rebellion against social facts which turn love into lust left me. I came to see that a love which is unlawful is only lovely in its unfulfilment. The young girl in the woodland, did she rouse the frenzy in her lover, would lose the purity which was irrecoverable; by evening she would weep among the broken flowers. Perhaps, did I win her, it might be so with Vi. I tried to find satisfaction by losing myself in memories of the past. The past is always kindlier than the present because, as Carlyle once said, the fear has gone out of it. The heavy actuality of the sorrows of Romeos makes them pleasurable romance only to latter-day observers. In their own day they were scandals. So I wandered through sun-scorched Italian towns, red and white and saffron, and I hung above ancient bridges, looking down on rushing mountain torrents, and I dreamt myself back to the glory of the loves that had once been self-consuming beneath that forgetful hard blue sky.