extending his hands, imploring Eurydice to come forth, imploring that they should make him sicken with hope and suspense no longer. Then quickly he cut his way into the crowd, turning aside with outstretched arms, like so much woodland leafage, the creatures that he met; striking deeper into the crowd with trembling hands and anxious, averted eyes, silently moving to that twisting, winding music, till it was plain that Eurydice was not there; and he returned, with imploring face and wearied gesture, to wait impatiently once more. Suddenly a light came into his eyes, a curious smile, childish, eager, on to his lips; he raised one hand as if to catch some unheard sound, and then, quickly, softly, like one following some sudden magnetism, glided into another group, rapidly shoving aside the women as he went, till he stopped suddenly behind one woman, hesitating, drawing in his breath, his hopes and fears on tip-toe. With that odd smile, childish, half crazy, he laid his hand on her shoulder, the light of joy flooding his thin, irregular, boyish face, and taking her by the hand, led her, his heart visibly panting with the sighing, panting music, out of the crowd. The music moved in wide waves, oscillated in little sharp detached notes; and Orpheus's hand, raised behind the girl's head, hesitated, and trembled with suspense. Then, with infinite joyful gentleness, it descended, slowly, slowly, over her face, feeling for the well-known features. But at the second touch the joy in his face died out, smouldered gradually into doubt and disappointment. Holding her still by the hand, he let that other exploring hand droop in disenchantment, convulsed with uncertainty and fear. The music swayed, as if nodding yes and no; again, as it moved in delicate, hesitating, detached notes, the hand of Orpheus descended across the girl's face, but languidly this time, timidly, and with a little shudder. The music rose to a closing cadence, the hand was withdrawn, Orpheus fell a step back, his face faint with disgust; the hand holding the girl's grasped it yet a second in horror and indecision, it brought her nearer him for a heart's beat, then, as the music ended the cadence, it pushed her aside, and hurled her arm away in loathing.

"O happy dwellers in Elysium," burst out the passionate recitative of Orpheus; "keep me no longer in suspense; give back Eurydice to me."

"The Fates fulfil thy wish," answered the chorus in a great, massive phrase; and that song of welcome began once more, but calling upon Eurydice, bidding her rejoin her living lover; and turned, this time, into the solemn farewell of the land of Death. Orpheus stood there silent, with bowed head, clasping his hands, grinding them in suppressed impatience; and, as the chorus drew to an end, there came up to him, suddenly from behind, and rapidly placing her hands on his shoulders, the long-sought Eurydice. At that well known touch,

her lover gave a start, but not of joy his slender figure shrank in her clasp, his face paled and shuddered, overcome by the greatness of happiness, by the sense of supernatural things.

Then, after a second, his white, convulsed face was flooded with joy, his arms were flung round Eurydice's neck, and, passing his hand lightly over her face as he went-to feel, if not to see it, at least-he led her away, silently, swiftly, borne off with her, as it were, on the last notes of that sweet, solemn song of farewell from the dead.

The last bars of that chorus were echoed by the violins; the stage was empty, the curtain falling. But no one spoke. More poignant than any grief was this great, dearly-bought joy-silencing, overpowering.

"I wonder," said Baldwin, after a long while, "whether they have carried her your pine and laurel branches, Donna Maria ?"

"I know they have," answered Carlo. "I spoke to your footman just before the last act: he had given them, and swore he had been silent."

"Do you think she will appreciate such an offering, unconsecrated by a florist?" asked Baldwin, sceptically. "Will she understand what it means?"

"What does it matter whether she does?" exclaimed Carlo cynically. "Most probably she won't; but we shall never be the wiser; and when one will never be any the wiser oneself, and one has a silent footman to screen one from others, why shouldn't one have the satisfaction of indulging in a bit of sentiment? Those branches were not intended to please her, bless you! They were intended to please ourselves, to put the finishing touch to our impression."

Donna Maria was rather overcome with the sense of having made an idiot of herself, more especially as she could see the tip of several huge pads, baskets, bolsters of complimentary flowers protruding from the side scenes, ready for presentation. To have sent an armful of pine branches to an actress, and she a woman of the world! at Carlo's explanation she flared up.

But

"No, no!" she exclaimed; "that's beastly, beastly! I'm willing she should throw it all on her fire; but I won't presume to be cynical."

A breath of south-west wind among the pine trees, a scent of bay leaves and shaken spruce, of growing grass and opening flowers, swept across Carlo's mind.

"And yet," he said, "we have all seen instances of artists, not merely singers and actors, but painters and writers, being apparently totally impervious, foreign to the sort of impressions which their work produces; living unconscious of the kind of images and emotions which their art awakens in others, incapable of perceiving its kinship to what we feel as its closest relation; in fact, being the particular human beings among a thousand whom we should put aside as un

worthy of listening to their own music, of seeing their own pictures and acting, even of reading their own poetry."

"But how," persisted Donna Maria, her mobile face pathetically showing her vision of those branches crackling in the singing-woman's grate" how can a creature give us what she has not got herself? Or do you suppose it possible that she gives but a fortuitous combination-ordered by some automatic mechanism of her nature-of tones and gestures which, like the fortuitous combinations of lights and shades and colours in trees and meadows, makes shape, has character and suggestiveness only when perceived by our mind, existing to her as so much dead matter. It's absurd! absurd! Explain it if you can!"

"I see," answered Carlo laughing; "you are determined that she should understand the connection between Orpheus and the Villa Borghese. But, listen, can we not suppose-and daily experience obliges us to form some explanatory supposition, does it not?—that in certain beings, endowed with special powers of evoking poetry for others, there exists, as it were, an interruption, a separation, between this artistic entity and their entity as men and women, and that what circulates into the whole life of the beholder and listener, mingling with their hourly feelings and perceptions and fancies, remains isolated in these special creatures, dammed up, like water in a reservoir, in a special corner of their nature?"

"Ah,” put in Baldwin, "you will never persuade Donna Maria of that; you will never persuade your own feelings, however much you may persuade your reason. We suffer from, or rather we enjoy, a special delusion, a sort of intellectual mirage, in virtue of which half the charm in all things which are charming lies in the suggestion that there must be more charmingness beyond. The delusion is due, I suppose, to the seeming logical connection between a visible and an invisible, a given and a giver; the joy we have received makes us look to a joy which we shall receive. The poetical faculty within us is exactly this power of creating for ourselves a something beyond; of making for ourselves an unreality out of every reality. Half the charm of the music of Gluck is that it suggests to us those pastures in the Villa Borghese; half their charm will always be in future that they suggest to us the music of Gluck. Half the charm of Orpheus is that Orpheus must be so much more charming: that could we only know this youth, redolent to us of meadows and woodland, full of a life so keen and tender, we should touch (as we think) a thing to whom woods, meadows, life, and love must mean much more than to ourselves; one who could tell so many things, enrich our nature by so many."

"And then you are quite pleased at the possibility of all this being nonsense!" cried Donna Maria; "of our finding a creature who

has less of all this than ourselves: knowing less, feeling less. You find it quite satisfactory; forsooth!"

"Not satisfactory, but in a sense consolatory," answered Baldwin. "It shows us, indeed, for the hundredth time, that in this world all is isolated, dispersed, imperfect; but it shows also the power, the irresistible impulse we possess of uniting, concentrating, and perfecting by our vision, our perception, our feeling. Great as is the art of the artist, the art is more potent still of him who perceives, who connects the single work, the single art, with life, intermeshing it with all life's nerves and arteries. And therefore I should not repine too much were Orpheus to throw pine branches and laurel twigs upon the fire, unconscious of the poetry which he evokes. Wander over thy wooden stage among thy cardboard trees, my poor Orphens, move thy beautiful arms and open out thy passionate eyes, sing thy woodland, meadowland songs! We know thee when we meet thee again, thee or thy brethren, as we know when we come across the laurels and cypresses of Pindus. We know thee, Orpheus, and recognize thy face. But, behold! when we look in it, 'tis the face of one who has neither gesture nor voice; it is the face of one of our own dear friends." And Baldwin lightly pressed Donna Maria's little childish fingers, lying disconsolately on the elbow of her chair.

The last act was drawing to a close. Eurydice had implored and stormed, Orpheus had kept his word to the gods, and neither looked nor explained; until at length his courage had failed. He had looked, but only to see Eurydice sink dead a second time. When the dreadful reality had become clear, or half clear, he had gently lifted her from the ground and wrapped her in his cloak. And now, after calling on her vainly, in supplication, in agony, and finally almost in anger, he sank down, as the violins played the last bars of the famous air" Che farò senza Euridice," on the seat beside her, clasping her dead hands in his hands, and hiding his head on his dead love's breast.

"Well," said Carlo, as they were moving away, and in order, after that silence, to say something, "what is, after all our discussions, the moral value of the beautiful?"

"To make us believe that there is good in ourselves and others," answered Donna Maria.

"And that great artists are not necessarily automata," added Baldwin, apologetically.

For, in that last pathetic scene, when Orpheus had taken off his cloak to spread over Eurydice, there had been revealed, twisted into the girdle of his tunic, a long twig of laurel, of the sort that grows not in theatre dressing-rooms, but in the high-lying pastures of the Villa Borghese.

VERNON LEE.

SPEECH AND SONG.

IN

PART I.-SPEECH.

N dealing with the two great forms of vocal utterance, it will be most convenient to take them in their historical, or at any rate their logical, order. Whatever "native woodnotes wild" our hypothetical half-human ancestor may have "warbled" by way of loveditties before he taught himself to speak, there is no doubt that singing as an art is a later development than articulate speech, without which, indeed, song would be like a body without a soul. I will, therefore, treat of speech first; and it will clear the ground if I begin with a definition. Physiologically, speech is the power of modifying vocal sound by breaking it up into distinct elements, and moulding it, if I may say so, into different forms. Speech, in this sense, is the universal faculty of which the various languages by means of which men hold converse with each other are the particular manifestations. Speech is the abstract genus, language the concrete species.

I am happy to say it does not fall within the scope of my present purpose to discuss the origin of language, a mysterious problem, on which the human brain has exercised itself so much and to so little purpose, that some years ago, I believe, the French Academy declined to receive any further communications on the subject. The origin of the voice is a different matter. The vocal function is primarily a means of expression. I see no reason for disagreeing with Darwin, when he says that "the primeval use and means of development of the voice" was as an instrument of sexual attraction. The progenitors of man, both male and female, are supposed to have made every effort to charm each other by vocal melody, or what they considered to be such, and by constant practice with that object the vocal organs became developed. Darwin seems inclined to believe that, as women have sweeter voices than men, they were the first to acquire musical powers