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every time took up the words and repeated them, with faint aerial voices, as if they were the souls in Purgatory. The other memory which lives with me side by side with this one is a memory of a tomb in a crypt of the Certosa di Val d'Ema. It is the tomb of an abbot, whose figure in pale marble lies on the pavement, surrounded by a plain iron railing. As to its technical merits I neither know nor care any-thing ; but on the old man's face, on his lips, and his closed eyes, more distinctly than I have anywhere else seen it, that peculiar expression rests which one thing alone can give—that expression of hope and peace escaping from a calyx of pain, which the Catholic Church has the secret of leaving on its children—that visible sign and seal of the peace that passes understanding, of the crown of life, of the aim of life, of the meaning of life—of everything in life that the modern world is disowning. Nothing in the Uffizi, nothing in the Pitti Galleries lives in my mind like that image of a lost beatitude. By escaping from this modern world a certain peace may be found. There is peace for the wanderer in the strange seclusions of the East ; in secret lands where life has preserved the past by leaving it, or where the present itself is like the past in its remoteness. Peace may be found there—for a time at any rate—a peace that is not stagnant, but vivid with a tumult of stingless pleasures, with the pulses of a magical youth given back again to the 290 IN AN ENCHANTED ISLAND

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