“All the beautiful colours the world had worn when she was man’s mistress are gone, and now, as if mourning for her lover and lord, she is clad only in sombre raiment.  Since her lord departed she bears but scanty fruit, and since her lover left her, she that was glad has grown morose; her joy seems to have died with his; and the feeling of gloom is heightened, when at the sound of the man’s footsteps a pack of wild dogs escape from a ruin, where they have been sleeping, and wake the forest with lugubrious yelps and barks.  About the dismantled porches no single rose—­the survival of roses planted by some fair woman’s hand—­remains to tell that man was once there—­worked there for his daily bread, seeking a goodness and truth in life which was not his lot to attain.

“There are few open spaces, and the man has to follow the tracks of animals.  Sometimes he comes upon a herd of horses feeding in a glade; they turn and look upon him in a round-eyed surprise, and he sees them galloping on the hill-sides, their manes and tails floating in the wind.

“Paris is covered with brushwood, and trees and wood from the shore have torn away the bridges, of which only a few fragments remain.  Dim and desolate are those marshes now in the twilight shedding.

“The river swirls through multitudinous ruins, lighted by a crescent moon; clouds hurry and gather and bear away the day.  The man stands like a saint of old, who, on the last verge of the desert, turns and smiles upon the world he conquered.

“The great night collects and advances in shadow; and wandering vapour, taking fire in the darkness, rolls, tumbling over and over like fiery serpents, through loneliness and reeds.

“But in the eternal sunshine of the South flowers have not become extinct; winds have carried seeds hither and thither, and the earth has waxed lovely, and the calm of the spiritual evenings of the Adriatic descend upon eternal perfume and the songs of birds.  Symbol of pain or joy there is none, and the august silence is undisturbed by tears.  From rotting hangings in Venice rats run, and that idle wave of palace-stairs laps in listless leisure the fallen glories of Veronese.  As it is with painters so it is with poets, and wolf cubs tear the pages of the last Divine Comedy in the world.  Rome is his great agony, her shameful history falls before his eyes like a painted curtain.  All the inner nature of life is revealed to him, and he sees into the heart of things as did Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane—­Christ, that most perfect symbol of the denial of the will to live; and, like Christ, he cries that the world may pass from him.

“But in resignation, hatred and horror vanish, and he muses again on the more than human redemption, the great atonement that man has made for his shameful life’s history; and standing amid the orange and almond trees, amid a profusion of bloom that the world seems to have brought for thank-offering, amid an apparent and glorious victory of inanimate nature, he falls down in worship of his race that had freely surrendered all, knowing it to be nothing, and in surrender had gained all.