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F all the excursions I made from Naples renowned headquarters for excursions - none led me through more elemental highways than that which started from the Aquarium, at a fee of two lire. Doubtless the Aquarium of Naples exists for men of science, but men of art may well imagine it has been designed as a noble poem in color. Such chromatic splendors, such wondrous greens and browns and reds, surely not the color scale of earth, for over all a mystic translucence, a cool suffusion, every hue suffering "a sea - change into something rich and strange!" And the form of all these sea-creatures and seaflowers, so graceful, so grotesque, so manifold! "Nature's plastic hand," as Dante hath it, works deftly in water. It leaps to the eye that art has invented scarcely anything, that the art of design in particular is a vast plagiarism. Here be your carpets and your wall - patterns, your frosted glass and your pottery. What Persian rug excels yon lamprey's skin? My mind goes back to a great craftsman's studio, stacked with brilliant beetles and dragon-flies-Nature's feats of bravurato eke out his inventions. Even the dressmaker, I remember, is the greatest client of the butterfly net in her quest for delicious color-blendings. Yet with how few root-ideas Nature has worked; the infinitude of her combinations is purely an affair of arrangement, complicated with secondary qualities of size and color.

"Are not animals machines?" said Descartes. But I ask, Are not machines animals?

A vision surges up of Venice at night -out of the darkness of the Grand Canal comes throbbing a creature of the Naples Aquarium-all scattered blobs of flame, cohering through a spidery framework. Through the still, dark water it glides, under the still, starry sky, with

San Giorgio for solemn background, and only from the voices of Venetians singing as they float past-an impassioned sad memory, a trilled and fluted songcould one divine behind the fiery seadragon the mere steam-launch. Between the laws that fashioned steamboats and those that fashioned the animate world there is no essential difference. The steamboat is not even inanimate, for at the back of it burrows man like a nautilus in its shell, and his living will has had to fight with the same shaping forces as those which mould the entities of the water.

Shelley sings of "Death and his brother Sleep," but gazing at this mystic, marine underworld of the Naples Aquarium, I would sing of Life and his brother Sleep. For here are shown the strange beginnings of things, half sleep, half waking: organisms rooted at one point like flowers, yet groping out with tendrils towards life and consciousness-the not missing link between animal and vegetable life. What feeling comes to trouble this mystic doze, stir this comatose consciousness? The jellyfish that seems a mere embodied pulse-a single note replacing the quadruple chord of life-is yet a complex organism, compared with some that fit and flitter, half invisibly in this green universe of theirs: threads, insubstantialities, smoke spirals, shadowy filaments on the threshold of existence, ghostly fibres, flashing films, visible only by the beating of their white corpuscles. 'Tis reading the Book of Genesis, verse by verse.

I saw the sea-serpent at Naples, though not in the Aquarium. Its colossal bulk was humped sinuously along the Bay. 'Twas the Vesuvius range, stretching mistily. Mariners have perchance constructed the monster from such hazy glimpses of distant reefs. Still, no

dragon has wrought more havoc than this mountain, which smokes imperturbably while the generations rise and fall. Beautiful the smoke, too, when it grows golden in the setting sun, and the monstrous mass turns a marvellous purple. We wonder men should still build on Vesuvius,-betwixt the devil and the deep sea, yet the chances of eruption are no greater than the chances of epidemic in less salubrious places, as the plaguechurches of Italy testify.

Pompeii is buried some twenty feet deep. The Middle Ages walked over these entombed streets and temples and suspected nothing. But all towns are built on their dead past, for earth's crust renews itself as incessantly as our own skin. We walk over our ancestors. Mentally, too, strange ancestral strata lie in our deeps-even as the remains of an alimentary canal run through our spine and a primitive eye lies in the middle of our brain-that pineal gland in which Descartes located the soul. Sometimes we stumble over an old prejudice or a primitive emotion, prick ourselves with an arrow of ancestral conscience, and tremble with an ancient fear. Mayhap in slumber we descend to these regions, exploring below our consciousness and delving in the Catacombs of antiquity.

The destruction of Pompeii was effected, however, not by Vesuvius, but by the antiquarian. He it was to whom Pompeii fell as a spoil, he who turned Pompeii from a piece of life to a piece of learning, by transporting most of its treasures to a museum. The word is surely short for mausoleum. For objects in a museum are dead, their relations with life ended. Objects partake of the lives of their possessors, and when cut off are as dead as finger-nails. A vase dominating the court of a Pompeian house and a vase in the Naples Museum are as a creature to its skeleton. What a stimulation in the one or two houses left with their living reality: their frescoes and their furniture, their kitchens and middens. 'Tis statues that suffer most from their arrangement in ghostly rows. A statue is an æsthetic climax, the crown of a summit, the close of a vista. See that sunlit statue of Meleager, in the grounds of the Villa Medici, at the end of a green avenue, with pillar and architrave for

background, and red and white roses climbing around it, and imagine how its glory would be shorn in a gallery. The French have remembered to put the Venus di Milo at the end of a long Louvre corridor, which she fills with her far-seen radiance. These collections of Capolavori-these Apollos and Jupiters, and Venuses and Muses, dumped as close cemetery monuments - are indeed petrified. The fancy must resurrect them into their living relations with halls and courtyards, temples and piazzas, shrines and loggias.

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All roads lead to the Museum. Thither go our old clothes, our old coins, our old creeds, and we wonder that men should ever have worn steel armor or cast-iron dogmas. Gazing at the Pompeian man, that" cunning cast in clay," whose clutch at his money - bags survives his bodily investiture - who does not feel as one from another planet surveying an earth-pygmy?

No object in the Naples Museum fascinates the philosophic mind more than Salpion's vase. Who was Salpion? I know not, though his once living hand signed his work, in bold sprawling letters,

ΣΑΛΠΙΩΝ ΑΘΗΝΑΙΟΣ ΕΠΟΙΗΣΕ

An Athenian made you, then, I muse, gazing upon its beautiful marble impassivity, and studying the alto-relievo of Mercury with his dancing train giving over the infant Bacchus to a seated nymph of Nysa. He who conceived you made you for sacrifices to Bacchus; lived among those white temples which the Greeks built for the adoration of their gods, but which remain for our adoration. He mounted that hill agleam with the marble pillars of immortal shrines; he passed the Areopagus, and the altar "to the unknown God"; he entered the Propylæa and gazed through the Columns of the Acropolis upon the blue Aegean. He sat in that marmoreal amphitheatre and saw the mimes in sock and buskin take the proscenium to the sound of lyres and flutes. Perchance 'twas while seeing the Mercury fable treated in a Choric dance in the sanded orchestra that he composed this grouping. Perhaps he but copied it from some play lost to us, for the Greek theatre with its long declamations had more analogy with sculpture

than with our agitated drama of to-day. The legend itself is in Lucian and Apollonius. But Salpion is not the beginning of this vase's story. For the artist himself belonged to the Renaissance, the scholars say; not our Renaissance, but a neo-Attic. Salpion did but deftly reproduce the archaic traditions of the first great period of Greek sculpture. Even in those days men's thoughts turned yearningly to a nobler past, and the young prix de Rome who should find inspiration in Salpion would be but imitating an imitation. Nor is Athenian all the history this fair Attic shape has held. Much more we know, yet much is dim. In what palace or private atrium did it pass its first years? How did it travel to Italy? Was it exported thither by a Greek merchant to adorn the house of some rich provincial, or more probably the country-seat of a noble Roman? For the ruins of Formia were the place of its discovery, and mayhap Cicero himself-the baths of whose villa some think to trace in the grounds of the Villa Caposele was its whilom proprietor.

But once recovered from the wrack of the antique world-it falls into indignity, more grievous than its long inhumation through the rise and fall of the medieval world. It drifts, across fields of asphodel, to the neighboring Gaeta - the Gibraltar of Italy, itself an ancient townrepublic of as many mutations mutations and glories, and there, stuck in the harbor mud, performs the function of a post to which boats are fastened. Stalwart fishermen, wearing gold earrings, push off from it with swarthy hands; bronzed women, with silver bodkins pinning in their back hair with long coils of many-colored linen, throw their ropes over its pedestal. Year after year it lies in its ooze while the sun rises and sets in glory on the promontory of Gaeta: it reeks of tar and the smell of fishing-nets; brine encrusts its high reliefs. The clatter of the port drowns the hollow cry of memory that comes when it is struck by an oar: there is the noise of shipping bales; the crews of forthfaring argosies heave anchor with their ancient chant; the sails of the galleons flap; the windlasses creak. Perchance a galley-slave, fretted by his chain, draws up with grappled boat-hook, and his blood flows into Salpion's vase.

And then a tide of happier fortune washes the vase from its harbor mud and deposits it in the Cathedral of Gaeta. The altar of Bacchus returns to sacerdotal uses: only now it is a font, and brown Italian babies are soused in it, while nurses in gilt coronets with trailing orange ribbons stand by, radiant.

And now Salpion's vase has reached the Museum, that cynosure of wandering tourists. It belongs not truly to the world of glass cases: it has not yet reached museum-point. It is of the Exhibition: not of the Museum proper, which should be a collection of antiquities. Other adventures await it, dignified or sordid. For museums themselves die and are broken up. Proteus had to change his shape; Salpion's vase has no need of external transformations.

O the passing, the mutations, the lapse, the decay and fall, and the tears of things! Yet Salpion's vase remains as beautiful for baptism as for Pagan ritual; symbol of art which persists, stable and sure as the sky, while thoughts and faiths pass and reform, like clouds on the blue.

And out of this flux man has dared to make a legend of changelessness, when at most he may one day determine the law of the flux.

Everything changes but change. Yet man's heart demands perfections-I had almost said petrifactions-perfect laws, perfect truths, dogmas beyond obsolescence, flawless leaders, unsullied saints, knights without fear or reproach; throws over its idols for the least speck of clay, and loses all sense of sanctity in a truth whose absoluteness for all time and place is surrendered.

Yet is there something touching and significant in this clinging of man's to Platonic ideals: the ruder and simpler he, the more indefectible his blessed vision, the more shining his imaged grail. And so in this shifting world of eternal flux his greatest emotions and cravings have gathered round that ideal of eternal persistence that is named God.

There are two torrents that amaze me the one is Niagara, and the other the outpouring of reverent prayer falling perpetually in the Roman Catholic Church. What with masses, and the exposition of the Host, there is no day

nor moment of the day in which the praises of God are not being sung somewhere: in noble churches, in dim crypts and underground chapels, in cells and oratories. I have been in a great cathedral, sole congregant, and, lo! the tall wax candles were lit, the carven stalls were full of robed choristers, the organ rolled out its sonorous phrases, the priests chanted, marching and bowing, the censer swung its incense, the bell tinkled. Niagara is indifferent to spectators, and so the ever-falling stream of prayer. As steadfastly and unremittingly as God sustains the universe, so steadfastly and unremittingly is He acknowledged, the human antiphony answering the divine strophe. There be those who cannot bear that Niagara should fall and thunder in mere sublimity, but only to such will this falling thunder of prayer seem waste.

It is as the Bambino that Christ chiefly lives in Art, and at this extreme, too, we miss his true inwardness. Yet the tenderness of the conception of the Christ-babe makes atonement. What can be more touching than Gentile da Fabriano's enchanting altar-piece of the Adoration of the Magi, in which-even as the glamourous procession of the Three Kings resteeps the earth in the freshness and dew of morning-the dominance of holy innocence seems to bathe the tired world in a wistful tenderness that links the naïve ox and ass with the human soul and all the great chain of divine life. The Christ-child, held in his mother's arms, lays his hand upon the kneeling Magi's head, yet not as with conscious divinity: 'tis merely the errant touch of baby fingers groping out towards the feel of things. No lesson could be more emollient to rude ages, none could better serve to break the pride and harshness of the lords of the earth. Yet this delicious and yearning vision of a sanctified and unified cosmos remains a dream; futile as a Christmas Carol that breaks sweetly on the ear and dies away, leaving the cry of the world's pain undispossessed.

And despite the Christ-child and the Christ crucified, nowhere does the triumph of life run higher than in this sunny land of religious gloom. Consider the Baglioni, those swashbuckling tyrants of Perugia. Consider the Medici, those overpowering patricians of the sign of

the pill-a bitter pill, indeed, to their rivals. Not their chapel in Santa Croce, full though it be of the pomp of marble and majolica; not their San Marco monastery with their doctor-saints-St. Cosmo and St. Damian; not their Medici Palace, despite that joyous Benozzo fresco with its gay glamour of landscape and processions; not the Pitti with its incalculable treasures; not the Villa Medici, nor even the Venus herself,―so reeks with the pride of life as all that appertains to their tombs. When I gaze upon the monuments of these magnificent dead in the Old Sacristy of Florence, with the multiple allusions to the family and its saints-in marble and terra-cotta, in stucco and bronze, in fresco and frieze, in high relief and low relief,-I feel a mere grave-worm. And when I crawl into the Capella dei Principi, where stand the granite Sarcophagi of the Grand Dukes, there glances at me from every square inch of the grandiose walls and the pompous crests and rich mosaics a glacial radiation of the pride of life-nay, the hubris of life. That hushed spaciousness is yet like an elaborate funeral mass perpetually performed by an orchestra opulently overpaid. And yet, in the New Sacristy, I find consolation. For, inasmuch as the genius of Michael Angelo was harnessed to the funeral car of his patrons, I perceive that here at last they are truly buried. They are buried beneath the majestic sculptures of Day and Night, Evening and Dawn, and 'tis Michael Angelo that lives here, not they. Peace to their gilded dust.

Yet if this funereal spot in Florence is so vivid with the genius of Michael Angelo, the spot in Rome which his genius essayed to vivify is almost funereal. Europe has perhaps no more melancholy chamber than that art-shrine in which the pleasure-pilgrims of the world crick their necks or catch bits of frescoed ceiling in hand-mirrors. 'Tis not merely the bad light-for even in the best morning light the Sixtine Chapel is fuscous-nor the sombre effect of the discolored and chaotic "Last Judgment" with its bluish streakishness and dark background-nor the dull painted hangings, nor the overcrowding of the ceiling with its Titanic episodes and figures,