of singing angels, those Ascensions and Assumptions, and innumerable basreliefs of gleaming marble moulded into softest wax by mastery of art—­distract our eyes from the single round medallion, not larger than a common plate, inscribed by him upon the front of the high altar.  Perhaps, if one who loved Amadeo were bidden to point out his masterpiece, he would lead the way at once to this.  The space is small:  yet it includes the whole tragedy of the Passion.  Christ is lying dead among the women on his mother’s lap, and there are pitying angels in the air above.  One woman lifts his arm, another makes her breast a pillow for his head.  Their agony is hushed, but felt in every limb and feature; and the extremity of suffering is seen in each articulation of the worn and wounded form just taken from the cross.  It would be too painful, were not the harmony of art so rare, the interlacing of those many figures in a simple round so exquisite.  The noblest tranquillity and the most passionate emotion are here fused in a manner of adorable naturalness.

From the church it is delightful to escape into the cloisters, flooded with sunlight, where the swallows skim, and the brown hawks circle, and the mason bees are at work upon their cells among the carvings.  The arcades of the two cloisters are the final triumph of Lombard terra-cotta.  The memory fails before such infinite invention, such facility and felicity of execution.  Wreaths of cupids gliding round the arches among grape-bunches and bird-haunted foliage of vine; rows of angels, like rising and setting planets, some smiling and some grave, ascending and descending by the Gothic curves; saints stationary on their pedestals, and faces leaning from the rounds above; crowds of cherubs, and courses of stars, and acanthus leaves in woven lines, and ribands incessantly inscribed with Ave Maria!  Then, over all, the rich red light and purple shadows of the brick, than which no substance sympathises more completely with the sky of solid blue above, the broad plain space of waving summer grass beneath our feet.

It is now late afternoon, and when evening comes, the train will take us back to Milan.  There is yet a little while to rest tired eyes and strained spirits among the willows and the poplars by the monastery wall.  Through that grey-green leafage, young with early spring, the pinnacles of the Certosa leap like flames into the sky.  The rice-fields are under water, far and wide, shining like burnished gold beneath the level light now near to sun-down.  Frogs are croaking; those persistent frogs, whom the Muses have ordained to sing for aye, in spite of Bion and all tuneful poets dead.  We sit and watch the water-snakes, the busy rats, the hundred creatures swarming in the fat well-watered soil.  Nightingales here and there, new-comers, tune their timid April song:  but, strangest of all sounds in such a place, my comrade from the Grisons jodels forth an Alpine cowherd’s melody. Auf den Alpen droben ist ein herrliches Leben!