bravery of nature to the inward aspirations, agonies, and martyrdoms of man—­from Greek legends of the past to the real Christian present—­and I remembered that an illimitable prospect has been opened to the world, that in spite of ourselves we must turn our eyes heavenward, inward, to the infinite unseen beyond us and within our souls.  Nothing can take us back to Phoebus or to Pan.  Nothing can again identify us with the simple natural earth. ’Une immense esperance a traverse la terre,’ and these chapels, with their deep significances, lurk in the fair landscape like the cares of real life among our dreams of art, or like a fear of death and the hereafter in the midst of opera music.  It is a strange contrast.  The worship of men in those old times was symbolised by dances in the evening, banquets, libations, and mirth-making.  ‘Euphrosyne’ was alike the goddess of the righteous mind and of the merry heart.  Old withered women telling their rosaries at dusk; belated shepherds crossing themselves beneath the stars when they pass the chapel; maidens weighed down with Margaret’s anguish of unhappy love; youths vowing their life to contemplation in secluded cloisters,—­these are the human forms which gather round such chapels; and the motto of the worshippers consists in this, ‘Do often violence to thy desire.’  In the Tyrol we have seen whole villages praying together at daybreak before their day’s work, singing their Miserere and their Gloria and their Dies Irae, to the sound of crashing organs and jangling bells; appealing in the midst of Nature’s splendour to the Spirit which is above Nature, which dwells in darkness rather than light, and loves the yearnings and contentions of our soul more than its summer gladness and peace.  Even the olives here tell more to us of Olivet and the Garden than of the oil-press and the wrestling-ground.  The lilies carry us to the Sermon on the Mount, and teach humility, instead of summoning up some legend of a god’s love for a mortal.  The hillside tanks and running streams, and water-brooks swollen by sudden rain, speak of Palestine.  We call the white flowers stars of Bethlehem.  The large sceptre-reed; the fig-tree, lingering in barrenness when other trees are full of fruit; the locust-beans of the Caruba:—­for one suggestion of Greek idylls there is yet another, of far deeper, dearer power.

But who can resist the influence of Greek ideas at the Cap S. Martin?  Down to the verge of the sea stretch the tall, twisted stems of Levant pines, and on the caverned limestone breaks the deep blue water.  Dazzling as marble are these rocks, pointed and honeycombed with constant dashing of the restless sea, tufted with corallines and grey and purple seaweeds in the little pools, but hard and dry and rough above tide level.  Nor does the sea always lap them quietly; for the last few days it has come tumbling in, roaring and raging on the beach with huge waves crystalline in their transparency, and maned with fleecy spray.