long, and twenty-one feet wide. In the after part of the day this Grotto is lighted by the western sun, but during the morning and midday, you will find it pretty much as Seneca describes it, 'Darkness made visible'; and to foot-passengers it seems a terrifying place, for it is nearly always crowded with two streams of people going and coming, screaming donkey-drivers, carriages, and peasants. But once through the Grotto, the road leads off to Pozzuoli, where it finds the little bit of Mergellina that has been straying gracefully around by the sea. At Pozzuoli the two join, and then, as the old song sings,

it goes,

out, if

'Over the hills and far away';

you please to follow it, Mrs. Dale, to that Euboean coast of Cuma, where 'the anchor with tenacious fluke moored the ships of Æneas, and the bending sterns fringed the margin of the shore.'"

When we returned to the carriage, on leaving the palazzo of the embassy, Venitia, with a playful, knowing air, directed the driver to take us to "Detkens,” as if quite at home in this new city.

"The truth is," she said, "that although I cannot help feeling as Goethe did in Sicily, when you and Ottilie will persist, like the Sicilian guide, in marring, by your illtimed erudition, my refreshing feelings of peace, calling up departed spectres, and reviving tumults and horrors,' I must, in self-defence, do as the contradictory German poet did at Palermo, rush off to purchase a Homer and Virgil; for I find I am to be persecuted with learned allusions on all sides, in these eternally classic heights of the ancient world. So, while you and Mr. Rochester were dancing stately tongue minuets à la cour, I learned from his agreeable wife that this place, 'Detkens,' –

to which we are now driving, is where bookish strangers most do congregate, finding there all manner of nice things."

To "Detkens" accordingly we drove, and Venitia who has not Janet's cleverness in old tongues, never having been willing to study any but modern languages and music, which have needed but little application on her supplied herself with translations of all the old poets and historians she could find.

part

AVA

ELECTRA.

ENITIA is playing fugues. How positive the dear girl is, but very clever and original. She has just finished a fugue of Bach, with a throbbing beat in it like a full heart. It is the one

in the Chromatic Fantasia, that Fantasia so soft and tender and flowing in its modulations, that one would scarcely imagine a single deviation had been made from its fundamental harmony. He was, indeed, a great master, this same John Sebastian Bach. While listening to his fugues I forget that they are exercises of deep thought, great intellectual power, and profound knowledge, — mental musical feats, for he throws into them a rhythmical life that is full of freedom; they are not mere themes transposed into different keys, one hand following the other slavishly, but independent, reasoning poems.

Of a totally different nature are Handel's fugues, and yet, to my ears and taste, not less masterly. They are not so self-contained or persistent, but quite as free and strong. Some few of them give me more pleasure than Bach's even, especially the one Venitia has just commenced, the superb fugue in E minor (mi); it sounds like the concentrated roll of mid-ocean.

But I do not like her execution of fugues. She thinks

they must be rigid, because they are exact. While she executes other compositions freely, stamping them with the sharp impress of her unmistakable genius, she shows the student in these; you can hear the beat of the metronome through every measure. She needs emancipating, as it were, in almost everything. Not that she is bound by Janet, or me, or any one; on the contrary, her opinions are independent enough. She is a little dogmatical and obstinate once in a while; at such times we combat her, but are very careful not to repress her in any way. But she is angular, and hard, and too devoted to technical minutia. I feel discouraged sometimes, and fancy that this enchantment results from the fairy-like spell which extreme culture and exquisite surroundings of social refinement exercise over some natures. There have never been any rough points in her life since her recollection; no heavy shadows to bring out rich, strong lights; it is this smoothness of existence which deprives her of comprehending some things in Art as well as in Life, seeing only the cold, bald, matter-of-fact side of the crystal, entirely losing sight of the beautiful prismatic. play of Fancy and Poesy. She would "fain touch, hold, weigh, and measure all things, never dreaming that the sweetest, dearest, loveliest emotions in this existence are but the shadows of a dream, intangible, inexpressible, like the faint odor of a rare fruit or flower, the delicate droplet of a luscious grape, the perishable down on Psyche's wing.

But to return to Handel's fugue.

There are some creations of Art which can never be comprehended until one has been anchored as far out in the deep waters of sorrow as the master who created therefore I will not complain that Venitia is not

them;

capable of seizing the meaning of this great E minor fugue. God forbid that she should ever have her ears, eyes, and taste sharpened into consciousness on such a brackish wave of grief as is contained in it! As I read over the notes of the music lying near me on my writingtable, I think of the composer, and of his life, which was so void of love and tenderness. The solitary suffering of Handel is betrayed in such passages as "He was despised and rejected of men," in the Messiah, which he is said to have written with hot tears raining down on his manuscript, mingling with the ink, and this fugue, which makes every fibre in one's being vibrate with emotion.

Poor, passionate Handel! A haughty pride, almost Satanic, made his life what it was. In his youth he loved a beautiful young girl, and she adored him. Her parents looking upon him as an inferior, insulted him. He never forgave them. So keen was the wound that even when at last they consented to the marriage to save her life, he refused; and the poor girl died of a broken heart, of the harshness of her lover, not of her family.

Now go play that fugue in E minor, and think of this opening theme in his life-fugue, of his haughty reiterated anger, which, like that thrice-repeated B in the music, led through all the stormy modulations of his fierce, contentious existence. In every measure of it you will hear the passionate love and passionate anger which combated together, resulting in a life of sullen loneliness for him, and death for the woman he loved.

66

We were talking of Vêpres Siciliennes, after sunset, over our Hyson," as Lamb says, "which we are oldfashioned enough to drink unmixed still of an evening." For we all love our tea; and Janet quotes with great sat