On the road to _Mon Reale_ we visited Villa Tasca, a palace of rose-tinted marble. Its garden is famous. Out of the dust-white road into a paradise of flowers! Only oriental people, like the Arab, who have known the desert and thirst and the sun’s too direct heat, know how to make gardens. It was one of their perfected arts. And in these gardens they knew how to set pleasure places of unbelievable charm. All the old gardens of the South, of Latin races, are among the richest enchantments. It takes centuries and wars and changing kings, caprice and madness, and love, to ripen gardens. Money and haste can not do it. A garden, in the finest acceptance of the term, will be impossible in our country for centuries. Even the flowers are lovelier in Latin gardens of the South, because they seem to be freighted with so many memories. VILLA TASCA If Love could build a place for pure delight ’Twould be like this—pink marble, stone-white lace, Within a garden grave and gay, kind both to bird and flower, With friendly paths, curved, perfume-bordered ways, And plaintive settles princely lover chose; With water-mirrors, with the fountain’s spray. Some lovely, ancient land like Sicily, Since centuries alone make gardens rich— Caprices, memories—royal death—and love. Who boasts he can buy beauty with bare gold Is like the fool whom God gives back to Fate. As long ago as the Twelfth Century, the brilliant, unfettered mind of the Eighteenth Century was active in Sicily. The Renaissance would have begun earlier, if Europe had been able to comprehend, and then seize the astonishing intellectual development of this little island. I used to wonder where Wagner drew the impetus, the power, for the sacred music of the close of Parsifal, with its dizzy heights of impassioned vision. Now I know. It was from religious paintings done in gold and gems, by inspired Twelfth Century builders, here in Sicily. He caught fire from a great age of faith. Goethe, in the middle of the Eighteenth Century, knew that this was a land drenched with a kind of power that was passing. He lived here long. And daily he went to write in a lovely garden, called _Villa Giulia_, and he, too, had hard work to drag himself away. Hence the fable, perhaps, of the Sirens. The Square of the Great Cathedral (partly Moorish) is perhaps the loveliest thing I ever looked upon, save old Venetian Palaces. And it haunts me still, like the Grand Canal of Venice, under some unforgettable light. The giant-bodied, blond, Norse sea-kings who came were robbers. But that which was Greece and the Orient touched them mightily. They became followers of the Christ, planned Crusades, married princesses of France, and all the time dwelled in a Moorish Court and spoke both the tongues of the East and the West. Here East and West met, then blended. A superstition was shattered.