lines of the landscape are not blurred but exquisitely selected and worked.

A quality like this Tuscan one is, as I have once before remarked, in some measure, abstract; a general character, like that of a composite photograph, selected and compounded by the repetition of the more general and the exclusion of more individual features. In so far, therefore, it is something rather tended towards in reality than thoroughly accomplished; and its accomplishment, to whatever extent, is naturally due to a tradition, a certain habit among artists and public, which neutralizes the refractory tendencies of individuals (the personal morbidness evident, for instance, in Botticelli) and makes the most of what the majority may have in common-that dominant interest, let us say, in line and mass. Such being the case, this Tuscan quality comes to an end with the local art of the middle ages, and can no longer be found, or only imperfect, after the breaking up and fusion of the various schools and the arising of eclectic personalities in the earliest 16th century. After the painters born between 1450 and 1460, there are no more genuine Tuscans. Leonardo, once independent of Verrocchio and settled in Lombardy, is barely one of them; and Michelangelo never at all-Michelangelo with his moods all of Rome or the great mountains, full of trouble, always, and tragedy. These great personalities, and the other eclectics, Raphael foremost, bring qualities to art which it lacked before, and are required to make it appear legitimately universal. I should shrink from judging their importance, compared with the older and more local and traditional men. Still further from me is it to prefer this Tuscan art to that, as local and traditional in its way, of Umbria or Venetia, which stands to this as the most poignant lyric or the richest romance stands, let us say, to the characteristic quality,

had

sober yet subtle, of Dante's greatest passages. There is, thank heaven, wholesome art various enough to appeal to many various healthy temperaments; and perhaps for each single temperament more than one kind of art is needful. My object in the foregoing pages has not been to put forward reasons for preferring the art of the Tuscans any more than the climate and landscape of Tuscany; but merely to bring home what the especial charm and power of Tuscan art and Tuscan nature seem to me to be. More can be gained by knowing any art lovingly in itself than by knowing twenty arts from each other through dry comparison.

I have tried to suggest rather than to explain in what way the art of a country may answer to its natural character, by inducing recurrent moods of a given kind. I would not have it thought, however, that such moods need be dominant, or even exist at all, in all the inhabitants of that country. Art, wide as its appeal may be, is no more a product of the great mass of persons than is abstract thought or special invention, however largely these may be put to profit by the generality. The bulk of the inhabitants help to make the art by furnishing the occasional exceptionally endowed creature called an artist, by determining his education and surroundings, in so far as he is a mere citizen; and, finally, by bringing to bear on him the stored up habit of acquiescence in whatever art has been accepted by that public from the artists of the immediate past. In fact the majority affects the artist mainly as itself has been affected by his predecessors. If, therefore, the scenery and climate call forth moods in a whole people definite enough to influence the art, this will be due, I think, to some especially gifted individual having, at one time or another, brought home those moods to them.

Therefore, we need feel no surprise

if any individual, peasant or man of business or abstract thinker, reveal a lack, even a total lack, of such impressions as I am speaking of; nor even if among those who love art a great proportion be still incapable of identifying those vague contemplative emotions from which all art is sprung. It is not merely the special endowment of eye, ear, hand, not merely what we call artistic talent which is exceptional and vested in individuals only. It takes a surplus of sensitiveness and energy to be determined in one's moods by natural surroundings instead of solely by one's own wants or circumstances or business. Now, art is born of just this surplus sensitiveness and energy; it is the response, not to the impressions made by our private ways and means, but to the impressions made by the ways and means of the visible, sensible universe.

But once produced, art is received, and more or less assimilated, by the rest of mankind, to whom it gives, in greater or less degree, more of such sensitiveness and energy than it could otherwise have had. Art thus calls forth contemplative emotions, otherwise dormant, and creates in the routine and scramble of individual wants The Contemporary Review.

and habits a sanctuary where the soul stops elbowing and trampling, and being elbowed and trampled; nay, rather, a holy hill, neither ploughed nor hunted over, a free high place in which we can see clearly, breathe widely, and, for a while, live harmlessly, serenely, fully.

Thinking these thoughts for the hundredth time, feeling them in a way as I feel the landscape, I walk home by the dear rock path girdling Fiesole, within sound of the chisels of the quarries.

Blackthorn is now mixed in the bare purple hedgerows, and almond blossom, here and there, whitens the sere oak and the black rocks above. These are the heights from which, as tradition has it, Florence descended; the people of which Dante said:

The Spectator.

Ella Fuller Maitland.

"Guten Morgen, Fräulein Katinka!" She menaced him over the banisters with her violin case.

"Good morning, Mr. Carl Brenner! Why don't you speak English? and my name is Kathleen, not Katinka!"

He shrugged his shoulders, and the sunshine laughed in his eyes.

"Ach! I have not the brogue, and your Irish tongue runs itself away until I stop you with a big German word."

"Why Katinka?" she persisted; "it is most rude to call me anything SO ugly."

"It is not ugly, and your 'Käszlein' is hard to say. But Katinka! she is of me the ideal so good. She will cook me my meals-warm me my pantoffeln! Ach! She is hausengel, mit all the kitchen graces at the ends of her fingers."

"How commonplace you are! As if the Goddess of every German did not live in the kitchen and spend her very soul in making him fat. Your Katinka will have no second idea beyond kartoffeln and pickled cabbages!"

He looked down a little shyly, yet smiling.

"But she will love me, and the kartoffeln and cabbages shall be but her care of me. Love has a thousand voices, yet are they not lowly or despised."

"But your imaginary Katinka, with her soul all frittered away with little things, how will she ever know enough to help you? She will live alone, outside your life."

"You mistake," he answered, with mingled pride and tenderness. "I lean not upon her, but rather she on me, for that is as it should be. And then a too clever wife might burn me my rhymes if they pleased her not,

and so break the fine heart of a poet."

She leant a little more towards him, the smile in her dark blue eyes giving the lie to her sharp words.

"In fact you require a knitting-machine and cook combined. I wish you joy of your Katinka, when she is yours."

"Then is the joy sure to come, my Fräulein; but first I would want your pity, that I may only dream of my love, until the golden thalers come to visit an empty purse."

"The dream is sometimes best," she answered softly. "It never disappoints. Now one of mine is just coming true, and I am a little frightened." A certain apprehension drove the gaiety from his face. "This dream then is it? Ach, no! You would not announce it so. Tell me, mein Fräulein, that I may know what can make you look so happy."

She was indeed radiant, and palpitating with anxiety to share her good news with some one; just then Carl Brenner was a special providence. He was always so charmingly sympathetic in anything that concerned her. "On Tuesday I am playing at a concert-a grand concert!"

"So! At the Conservatoire; but that has happened often before?"

"Now, do you think I am making all this fuss about a mere students' concert? Don't you know I am out of my apprenticeship, and have my name to

make?"

"No!" he interrupted, "I make it for you, Katinka the Great!-not the little Käszlein!"

This time he had to defend himself against descending justice, but she was too proud of herself to be severe. "I am to play two solos at the Grand-Ducal Concert on Tuesday!

Was denkst du- Oh! your detestable German! I mean what do you think of that?"

With a quick impulsive motion of his hand he had brushed away her momentary confusion-for in such things Carl had gentle ways-and his enthusiasm quite satisfied her.

"It is wonderful fortune, Fräulein; I congratulate you. So like another Lorelei sitting aloft in your high chamber, you have made captive the Grand-Ducal ear as his Highness passed by? Wunderlich!"

They both laughed, for it was well known that his Highness could sleep peacefully and enjoyingly through the loudest and most impassioned strains. Even his own regimental brass band, blaring and clashing outside the palace windows, was to him as a lullaby inducing sweet rest. But then he was a brave old man, and had faced cannon and lived through bombardments, so his occasional snores accentuating a dainty pianissimo passage were charitably allowed for.

"He has nothing to do with it. The Directorate have substituted me for Frau Fichte, who is ill. It is a grand chance, one in a thousand, and may in the near future mean Paris, London-fame!"

It was no idle boasting, for she recognized her own power, and had worked hard to perfect it. Nothing gives such confidence so much as hard work. Moreover she was speaking to a fellow-student in another branch of art, one who himself had ambitions and eager hopes. They understood each other, and his face reflected the light on hers.

"And I too," he began, so eagerly that his good careful English suffered a little. "There is to me a great chance also. You have heard of the Preisgedicht that shall be chosen by the Heidelberg University before many days?"

She nodded. "But I thought Schiller gold medallists might not compete?"

"Nein! Nein! Es war mir-it was of me the error! The struggle is for them only, and the honor great to the winner."

"But how little time! Have you only just learnt this?"

"I knew it not an hour ago; but I will be ready. I am even working now. It shall mean perchance fameand my loved ideal!"

She stretched down to him a hand of warm encouragement. "Courage then, brave comrade! for we are both trembling on the brink. But how can your Katinka help you here, unless yours is to be the romance of a cooking-stove!"

He looked up in laughing rebuke. "Ach! das Käszlein! I kiss the velvet paw that can only play at scratching. My theme is love, therefore is Katinka already my great inspiration."

A golden ripple of merriment parted them, but as she darted away out of sight he called up the stairs

"One little moment, Fräulein! Does it happen on Tuesday your concert?"

"Yes," her clear voice answered him, and then became hesitating. “But this time it must only be a tiny bunch of violets. I will wear nothing more extravagant."

"So," he agreed cheerfully, and "so," as every one knows, stands for anything or nothing, just as a German chooses. But Kathleen Haynes little knew as she entered her room SO blithely that Carl's preoccupation in his inspired task had made him a little less clear-headed, and that in his mind an English Tuesday confused itself with a German Wednesday before he had written two lines of his poem. But he did not forget her flowers, which were to be rarer than violets.

In pure lightness of heart she went singing to the window and threw it open. What a joyous time had been

hers in Weinbergen-a time of hard work, of earnest endeavor and happy play with the glamor and romance of a quaint old German city to gild all her life, and set even its lonely hours with precious stones of remembered glory. It was as the miniature of a young face framed gorgeously with jewels and gold. Nor were such rich surroundings wasted, for she had weaved them cunningly into her work, and she would play wearisome scales by the hour together to the honor of some departed hero who had been great in patience.

Why! just over against her, in the narrow street, the eyes of a great genius had first seen the light. True that a fine statue in a more aristocratic centre bore witness of him, yet it was even better to be able to look into the very room where he had played as a child, and lisped his first prayer.

The gleaming white pigeons seemed to have their own sentiment on the subject, and sunned themselves more benignly on that quaint slanting roof than on any other. Kathleen returned their bows, cooing to them softly in their own tongue-one need only be happy to do such ridiculous thingswhile from the street below a pleasant babel of busy feet, cheerful voices and quick laughter proclaimed how good it was to be alive. But few go sadly when the market-place is one great bouquet of flower-laden scents and luscious ripe fruits; when the ramparts of the city are all vineyards bursting to a rich harvest, with summer itself caught and stayed in the golden meshes to heighten the mellow glory of autumn, and make the vintage rare. Life then is strong and glad; the heart beats merrily, bright ripples are on the river, and in the air a song of plenty and thanksgiving.

No wonder then that Kathleen had to take even the pigeons into her con

fidence, and make them sharers of her joy, for she was buoyantly elated, and tremulously hopeful of astonishing not the Grand-Duke-for that was beyond her-but the artistic, critical audience which follows in the wake of Grand-Dukes. Amongst such would be, as she knew, her judges, with power to dispose of her future, and Frau Fichte's illness had paved the way to a quick sentence. But she meant to plead her own cause with burning eloquence and win it; conscious power sent the bright flush into her face, the light into her eyes, and again she nodded blithely to the pigeons. Then, too, there was Carl Brenner--such a pleasant background to the picture, in which she mistakenly thought ambition was the central figure. Of course she knew that these sentimental young Germans had pretty, poetical ways of expressing themselves, which were only to be lightly heeded.

But was not Carl different from the rest, more earnest even in his merry moments-and, to herself she whispered, more faithful and true of heart? For the present it was enough that they were in a sense fellow-students, which is a close and dear and wholesome companionship-try it, men and maidens, who are weary of playing with each other-and a haze of sunlight veiled all the future.

Once more she and the self-satisfied pigeons mutually genuflected, and then she made herself some coffee the happiest young soul in all Weinbergen.

Carl Brenner sat at his disordered desk in despair. The cathedral chimes marking every passing quarter of the hour maddened him. They did not pass-they raced; and his pulses beat out the second, until he was conscious of nothing but the remorseless throbbing. To morrow his work would have