One was Burne Jones. I shall never forget how, as a youth in the Public Library at Sydney, I turned over the leaves of a volume of etchings and suddenly alighted on “Merlin and Vivien.” Something I knew of Botticelli, Lippi and the rest, and I had brooded over their antique mystery and charm; but here were all the mystery and the charm brought down among us from the world where saints stand stiff and aureoled, and angels walk tip-toe on lily cups. The fifteenth century artists of Flanders and Venice and Florence introduced us into a frankly supernatural world, and they delighted like children to scatter rich fruits on the golden floors, and to stick peacocks’ feathers into the bejewelled walls. It is a rarer and subtler art to suggest that infinitely remote world while accepting the austere conditions of our own earth. The pale ghosts of Puvis de Chavannes’ frescoes are a far-off suggestion of this art; and one thinks too of the modern magician who has brought before us the twinkling of Salome’s feet by the red blood from the Baptist’s head, curdling amid the flowers; the rich-robed daughters of Apollo among the olives; the mystic elephant in solemn festival, gathering the lotus with his trunk as his feet plash slowly in the clear waters of the sacred lake. But the shadowy art of Puvis, the wayward and limited art of Gustave Moreau, come short of the consistent and completely realised art which has been attained by the painter who stands forth in the eyes of Europe as the greatest imaginative artist of England. It is a new synthesis of the world of nature and the world of dreams. The three women who dance in the foreground of “The Mill” tell us of a country where human joys and sorrows, hopes and fears, are set to a different measure, and sung in unknown keys. A strange and troublous art, it seems sometimes,--like the sinuous melodies of Renan, which seem to belong to some far-haunted past, and yet contain the intimate secrets of our own hearts,--but it fascinates and holds us as though music became visible before our eyes. It opens before us a new and delightful pathway into the land of dreams.