DEAR LEIGHTON,--I doubt very much whether Shelley himself could have answered your question to your satisfaction. His scholarship was that of a clever but idle boy in the upper forms of a public school. His translation from Plato, as Mr. Jowett tells me, and his translation from Euripides, as I know by personal experiment, having carefully collated it with the original text, absolutely swarm with blunders, sometimes, certainly, resulting in sheer nonsense. I fancy he may have been thinking of Aphrodite Urania, and perhaps confounding (as indeed it seems to me that a Greek poet might possibly and pardonably have done) the goddess of divine love with the Muse who was _not_ the Muse of astronomy when she first made her appearance in the Theogony of Hesiod, but simply the "heavenly one" in a general way, as I gather from a reference to the lexicon. I should have thought Calliope or Euterpe a fitter head mourner for Keats: but probably Shelley wished to introduce the most distinguished in the rank of the Muses in that capacity, on such an occasion. And if Urania was in a certain sense the chief of the Nine, she would naturally be most musical of mourners.--Ever yours sincerely, A.C. SWINBURNE. As years went on, Leighton became more and more enamoured of the beauty to be found in our own islands, and longed, as can be traced in his letters, that his sisters should share with him his intense love of nature. To his elder sister, who was in Yorkshire, he wrote in 1887:-- "A broad shoulder of moor, lifted against a great field of sky, is one of the grandest and most pathetic things in nature (see Leopardi). The beauty of moorland is that it has a particular poetry and impressiveness for _every_ condition of atmosphere and weather." Again:-- "I am very glad you like Ilkley so much--moors have an immense fascination for me, but all English scenery of whatever kind has charm for me. It has two immense virtues: first, being entirely of its own _kind_, it never suggests a, to itself, disparaging comparison with the scenery of any other country, and secondly, it is steeped, every fold and nook of it, in English poetry, and is haunted with the murmur of the prettiest of peace-suggesting words: _home_. I wonder whether you both feel as I do the endearing quality in our old green-brown country." It became his habit, in these later years, to visit Scotland in September before flying off to his second home. More and more did he realise the marvellous beauty of the scenery there. He told me, shortly before he died, that the most beautiful vision he had ever beheld on earth was the one he saw when approaching Skye by sea from the south, when the sun was setting and illuminating the range of the Cuillin Hills with magic light and colour. He wrote to his father from:--