so Rome without love would not be Rome, and the stairway of the Trinità, glorified by the slow ascension of the Day, became the Stairway of Felicity by the ascent of Elena the Fair on her way to the Palazzo Zuccari.

'At times,' Elena said to him, 'my feeling for you is so delicate, so profound, that it becomes—how shall I describe it?—maternal almost!'

Andrea laughed, for she was his senior by barely three years.

'And at times,' he rejoined, 'I feel the communion of our spirits to be so chaste that I could call you sister while I kiss your hands.'

These fallacious ideas of purity and loftiness of sentiment were but the reaction after more carnal delights, when the soul experiences a vague yearning for the ideal. At such times too, the young man's aspirations towards the art he so much loved were apt to revive. The desire to give pleasure to his mistress by his literary or artistic efforts drove him to work. He accordingly wrote La Simona, and executed his two engravings: The Zodiac and Alexander's Bowl.

For the execution of his art, he chose by preference, the most difficult, exact, and incorruptible vehicles—verse and engraving; and he aimed at adhering strictly to, and reviving, the traditional Italian methods, by going back to the poets of the stil novo, and the painters who were precursors of the Renaissance. His tendencies were essentially towards form; his mind more occupied by the expression of his thought than the thought itself. Like Taine, he considered it a greater achievement to write three really fine lines, than to win a pitched battle. His Story of the Hermaphrodite imitated in its structure Poligiano's Story of Orpheus and contained lines of extraordinary delicacy, power and melody, particularly in the choruses of hybrid monsters—the Centaurs, Sirens and Sphinxes. His new tragedy, La Simona, of moderate length,[54] possessed a most singular charm. Written and rhymed though it was, on the ancient Tuscan rules, it might have been conceived by an English poet of Elizabeth's time, after a story from the Decameron, and it breathed something of the strange and delicious charm of certain of the minor dramas of Shakespeare.

[54]

On the frontispiece of the single copy, the author had signed his work: A. S. Calcographus Aqua Forti Sibi Tibi Fecit.

A. S. Calcographus Aqua Forti Sibi Tibi Fecit

Copper had greater attractions for him than paper, nitric acid than ink, 

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