A few years since we chose to spend the summer in a chÂlet among the Dolomites of South Tyrol. Weird, fantastic, inaccessible, mysterious, grotesque, and yet often wearing a jewelled crown of eternal ice, these peaks soared into the ether above and around us. "Nothing," says a recent traveller, "can surpass the majesty and beauty of the towers and ramparts, the battlemented walls, impregnable castles, and gracefully pinnacled cathedrals into the forms of which their summits are built up. Their colouring is another striking characteristic; many of them rivet the eye with the richness of the tints,--deep reds, bright yellows, silvery whites, and the dark blues and blacks of the rocks. But all these colours are modified and softened by a peculiar grayish white tint. The mountains look as if powdered over with some substance less hard and cold than newly fallen snow."

Although within a day's drive of Pieve di Cadore,--Titian's birthplace--and not far from Cortina, we could hardly have found a more isolated spot. It was a hermitage, and we knew literally no one within hundreds of miles.

Ossip Schubin, the popular German novelist at that time, had sent us a volume of stories, with the request that we would translate them. We selected the story now offered as being most in sympathy with our romantic surroundings.

A learned Englishman has said, "If histories were written as histories should be, boys and girls would cry to read them." But alas! how is the spirit, the tone, of a dead century to be made to breathe again and report itself? The landscape alone is permanent; new figures constantly fill the foreground. Poetry, legend, myths, help us to divine some of the strange chords in the human chant, which, heavily burdened with sorrow, come down to us through the ages.

In this twentieth century no one sentiment or emotion is allowed so far to dominate as to crush out all others. But how was it in the days of the Crusaders, of the Minnesingers, of the Troubadours? If we would realise the seclusion, the loneliness of many lives centuries ago, we have only to enter either "The Wartburg" or the castle of Solmes Brauenfels in the Rhine valley, which dates back a thousand years. Look into the gloomy keeps; hear the shrieking of the bars in the heavy portcullis; gaze down into the damp, ugly moats; or listen to the soughing of the stormy winds in the branches of the tall forest trees which closely environ these grim abodes. It is conceivable that Elizabeth languished and died at "The Wartburg," when the chivalrous TannhÄuser no longer came to inspire with love and song. Could even Martin Luther have lived in these cold, black walls without his work which daily rekindled his soul as he studied the inspired pages of the Bible?

Among the annals of a wicked old past, this story appears as a legend dimly connected with the pathetic face of the "Maid of Lille" a copy of which is in the Boston Art Museum.

There is no appeal here to the modern girl. The word "altruism" had not been invented. Yet there was genius in loving as Blanche did--what trustful, boundless love, what exaggeration of the object loved! And while to-day we strive to master a useless sorrow by a useful activity, we can still appreciate the beauty and holiness of such love.

Sarah H. Adams.

BLANCHE

In the museum at Lille, somewhat aside from the bewildering mass of pictures, stands, in a glass case, a masterpiece of unknown origin--the "tÊte de cire,"--a maiden's bust moulded in coloured wax.

You will smile when you hear of a coloured wax bust and think of Madame Tussaud's collection, or of a pretty, insignificant doll's head; but should you ever see the "tÊte de cire," instead of laughing you will fold your hands, and, instead of Madame Tussaud's glass-eyed puppets, will think of a lovely girl cut off in her early bloom, whom you once saw at rest on the hard pillow of her coffin. Pale, with exquisite features, reddish brown hair, eyes slightly blinking, as if afraid of too much sun, a painfully resigned smile about her mouth, and with neck slightly bent forward, as if awaiting her death-stroke, full of touching innocence and of a languid grace, this waxen bust stands out of its dull gold case,--the image of an angel who had lived an earthly life and whose heart was broken by a mortal pain.

Whence came this masterly production? Nobody knows! One ascribes it to Leonardo, another to Raphael, while still others have sought for its origin in antiquity. Upon one point only all agree,--that the bust was made from a cast taken after death.

The painter, Wickar, brought it out of Italy into France. 'Twas said that he found it in a Tuscan convent.

* * * * *

The lovely girl smiles, pleased at the critical debates of the curious, who wish to attribute this graceful creation to one of the illustrious Heroes of Art: smiles and dreams!