But if the colour of life looks so well in the rather sham scenery of Hyde Park, it looks brilliant and grave indeed on a real sea-coast.  To have once seen it there should be enough to make a colourist.  O memorable little picture!  The sun was gaining colour as it neared setting, and it set not over the sea, but over the land.  The sea had the dark and rather stern, but not cold, blue of that aspect—­the dark and not the opal tints.  The sky was also deep.  Everything was very definite, without mystery, and exceedingly simple.  The most luminous thing was the shining white of an edge of foam, which did not cease to be white because it was a little golden and a little rosy in the sunshine.  It was still the whitest thing imaginable.  And the next most luminous thing was the little child, also invested with the sun and the colour of life.

In the case of women, it is of the living and unpublished blood that the violent world has professed to be delicate and ashamed.  See the curious history of the political rights of woman under the Revolution.  On the scaffold she enjoyed an ungrudged share in the fortunes of party.  Political life might be denied her, but that seems a trifle when you consider how generously she was permitted political death.  She was to spin and cook for her citizen in the obscurity of her living hours; but to the hour of her death was granted a part in the largest interests, social, national, international.  The blood wherewith she should, according to Robespierre, have blushed to be seen or heard in the tribune, was exposed in the public sight unsheltered by her veins.

Against this there was no modesty.  Of all privacies, the last and the innermost—­the privacy of death—­was never allowed to put obstacles in the way of public action for a public cause.  Women might be, and were, duly suppressed when, by the mouth of Olympe de Gouges, they claimed a “right to concur in the choice of representatives for the formation of the laws”; but in her person, too, they were liberally allowed to bear political responsibility to the Republic.  Olympe de Gouges was guillotined.  Robespierre thus made her public and complete amends.

THE HORIZON

To mount a hill is to lift with you something lighter and brighter than yourself or than any meaner burden.  You lift the world, you raise the horizon; you give a signal for the distance to stand up.  It is like the scene in the Vatican when a Cardinal, with his dramatic Italian hands, bids the kneeling groups to arise.  He does more than bid them.  He lifts them, he gathers them up, far and near, with the upward gesture of both arms; he takes them to their feet with the compulsion of his expressive force.  Or it is as when a conductor takes his players to successive heights of music.  You summon the sea, you bring the mountains, the distances unfold unlooked-for wings and take an even flight.  You are but a man lifting his weight upon the upward road, but as you climb the circle of the world goes up to face you.