and a most curious country it is: the mine shafts dotted over the stony ground look like so many beehives, the dusty rocks glitter in places like gold, and over everything is a thin tawny deposit of sulphur. On leaving the higher ground, the train passes a number of dirty picturesque little towns, perched like eagles' nests among the hills. The only one which merits more than a passing word is Castrogiovanni, the ancient Enna, once impregnable as a fortress, and the home of many a classic myth and fantastic legend The soil all round is now very impoverished, and the forests have almost disappeared, so that it is hard to recognise the grassy dells, where an old fable tells us the hounds used to lose the scent of their game through the fragance of the flowers. A long melancholy stretch of marshland with a gloomy view of Etna leads to Catania: a town of which much boast is made by the Sicilians. Anything more dull and uninteresting than the spectacle it presents to the casual traveller, it is difficult to imagine. The native beauty of Sicily seems to have deserted the cities built on the base of Etna, and the desolation of the mountain seems to have entered into their life. Overwhelmed again and again by the lava, each time Catania has risen phoenix-like from its ashes, and has rebuilt its squares and palaces from the very material that caused their destruction. The effect of the long straight dirty streets, and the gloomy colour of both houses and pavements is unpleasing in the extreme. The Cathedral has a striking exterior, but is very poor internally. It was built by King Roger, who procured most of his materials from the ancient theatre; but owing to earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, but little of the original structure now remains. Its principal treasure is the veil of Santa Agata, the patron saint of the place, which is kept in a tasteless and tawdry shrine in a chapel near the high altar. For hundreds of years it has been the custom for the Bishop of Catania to solemnly display the veil before the approaching lava streams, on the occasions when the eruptions threaten any of the towns or villages which lie on the mountain slope. Here one stumbles across one of those strange links with English history which are so frequently found in Sicily, for the crown of the Saint was presented by Richard Cœur de Lion. There is an enormous Benedictine monastery, one of the largest in the world, but like all the sights of Catania, it is bare and uninteresting. The presiding genius of the town appears to be Bellini, who was a native of the place, and whose body was brought here from Paris after his death. He is honoured with a fine statue, the base of which is supported by wellexecuted groups of figures representing his four chief operas; and the public gardens and many of the streets and squares are named after him in one form or another. There is a very quaint old lava elephant bearing an obelisk of Egyptian granite on his back, supposed to have been one of the goals in the old theatre, which now stands before the Cathedral gates: the other embellishments of the city are unimportant. The one redeeming feature of Catania, mirabile dictu, is its astounding number of gas lamps it is, without exception, the best lighted town-for its size-in the world handsome lamps line all the chief streets at intervals of ten yards, and the citizens are justly proud of their nightly illuminations. There is nothing else worthy of praise in the city. J. D. ERRINGTON LOVELAND. DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI AS PREACHER. PAINTER as well as Poet, born a British subject, yet, to his inmost being, of the fervid sunny south; mediævalist in thought and art and at the same time possessed of all the breadth, and in the best and highest sense of the word, the rationalism of this present day, Dante Gabriel Rossetti stands forth not only as one of the most remarkable figures of the latter half of the 19th Century, but even more as one of the greatest and most influential teachers that has ever lived and loved and worked. Art with him was, as it used to be with the men of old, a very sacred thing indeed, and the rationalism which runs through all the teaching hidden within his loveliest poems was ever tempered and held in duest bounds by the veneration he felt and never lost sight of, even for a moment, for the dim religious light of a long forgotten past. So curiously, so gracefully, so skifully does he weave into his writings the religious fervour of the middle ages, the mysticism of Roman Italy, the Madonna worship of the superstitious sunny south, that almost unconsciously, and quite naturally, we have assigned him more the position of religious recluse than that of the worker, the thinker in the present day, the prophet of all that is highest and widest and purest and most God-like in the near future. No mystic he, in any other light than that of his tender love for the mystic past, though around his name has somehow grown a halo of mystery, which melts away as the clear calm sunshine of his teaching enters into the heart and mind of the thoughtful, intelligent reader and student of his poems. And between his pictorial art and his poems there lies a curious likeness, and withal there is a great unlikeness. Like, in that the same mystic religious mediævalism pervades the spirit, the germ, the central motif of each, and yet unlike, wholly and entirely unlike, in the fact that whilst only mysticism, sometimes almost of an irritating and far-fetched nature, is the entire characteristic of his paintings, yet the poems are full of that modernity of thought, if I may so express myself, as renders them easily and alike intelligible and delightful to the cloistered student, the dilettante frequenter of the salons of culture, of refinement, of sweetness and light, and the every day practical hard-headed toiler who at night would fain lose himself and his surroundings in the dreamings of the graceful past. In short, as it has been truly said, his teaching in a most remarkable manner is a cross betwixt Italian Tradition and English Fact, a mingling of the old and of the new, of the foreign and of the home influence, which has for all sorts and conditions of men an indefinable but none the less a very definite charm. There are reserve forces, there are potentialities and possibilities hidden within the daintiness of his lines that have for many an indescribable attraction, as being, in a far off mystic manner but the expression of their own thoughts, long buried in the depths of their own hearts and almost unrealised, unrecognised, till, as it seems to them, they are met with for the first time in his heart-stirring tender melodies. The unknown, the half-guessed-at, the somewhat incomprehensible is ever new, ever delightful, ever sought after, and it is in this sense that Rossetti is a teacher of his kind, beloved by all thoughtful reverent beings, because he draws out of them all the latent poetry of their nature, he puts into words their best and purest thoughts, he shows them what they are and what they can be, he tells them what is in them, and, as it were, he holds up to them the looking-glass in which they are able to see the noblest workings of their inward mind and spirit. What teaching there is for instance in those lines of his upon "A Young Fir-Wood" :— "These little firs to-day are things To clasp into a giant's cap, Or fans to suit his lady's lap, From many winters, many springs Shall cherish them in strength and sap, Till they be marked upon the map, It is in lines as these that one seems to hear not only "the roll of the ages," but one discerns somewhat of the possibilities and the potentialities that lie hidden in the dim remote undreamed-of future. And again how exactly, and yet how delicately, is indicated in his "Sudden Light" that curious sense of pre-existence, as Sir Walter Scott used to term it, that now and again comes over us, frequently only to pass away almost before we are conscious of having experienced it. In the lines I am about to quote Rossetti has for ever fixed the fleeting fancy: "I have been here before, But how or when I cannot tell : I know the grass beyond the door, The sweet keen smell, The sighing sound, the lights around the shore. You have been mine before, How long ago I may not know: But just when at that swallow's soar Your neck turned so, Some veil did fall,-I knew it all of yore." What teaching of grandest, solemnest import he conveys to the soul in "Lost Days" :— The lost days of my life until to-day, What were they, could I see them on the street |