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Not I; my pen falls lifeless; it would take a Moore to sing of; a Byron to immortalise; a Longfellow, a Whittier or a Tennyson to make an idyl of; it has sent artists wild; the eye rests lovingly on the hill-crests of the Sabine, Volscian and Albano on the one side, then turns to the city with its temples, its palaces, the historic past showing in their very stones.
'You will go, dearest Fraeulein', writes Schiller on the 5th of April, as Lotte was about to return to Rudolstadt, 'and I feel that you take away with you the best part of my present joys. A month later she had found him lodgings in the neighboring village of Volkstedt, and then came a delightful summer idyl, which prolonged itself until the middle of November, an idyl not of love-making, for Schiller could not yet pluck up the courage for that, but of spiritual comradeship.
The most charming picture of Veronese is a Venus and Adonis, which is finer than that of Titian, a classic and most exquisite idyl of love and sleep, cool shadow and golden-sifted sunshine. His most considerable work in the gallery is a Christ teaching the Doctors, magnificent in arrangement, severely correct in drawing, and of a most vivid and dramatic interest.
He made up his mind to go to the Engadine and see for himself how matters looked. He could stay at Saint Moritz, or even Samaden, so as not to disturb Marcello's idyl, and Marcello could come down alone to see him. He should probably meet acquaintances, and would give them to understand that he had come in order to get rid of Regina and save his stepson from certain destruction.
The epithalamium was chanted at night by a chorus of girls, outside the bridal chamber. Compare the conclusion of the hymn of Adonis, in the fifteenth Idyl.
He had gone to Lourdes, he had striven his utmost at the Grotto, he had hoped for a moment that he would end by believing should Marie be miraculously healed; but total and irremediable ruin had come when the predicted cure had taken place even as science had foretold. And their idyl, so pure and so painful, the long story of their affection bathed in tears, likewise spread out before him.
It is still, perfect, and utterly simple sketches like these, thrown off in the repose of power, that form the best setting for a heroic or poetical action: what better device was ever invented, even by Tennyson himself, for striking just the right note in the reader's mind while thinking of a noble primitive knight, than that in another Idyl, where Lancelot went along, looking at a star, "and wondered what it was"? Of a more imaginative kind of beauty are the descriptions of the walls of rock near Castle Dangerous, decked by the hermit with tinted bas-reliefs, and the fine one of Camelot, looking as if "built by fairy kings," with its city gate surmounted by the figures of the three mystic queens, "the friends of Arthur," and decked upon the keystone with the image of the Lady, whose form is set in ripples of stone and crossed by mystic fish, while her drapery weeps from her sides as water flowing away.
Hadidjé, rather proud of her wound, continued to give herself interesting airs as the principal heroine of this terrible tragedy. As it was in reality merely a scratch, which hurt her very little, her only object in complaining was to emphasize her caprices. After the stormy days we had just gone through, this morning passed like an idyl.
This idyl, as I conceive it, is the idea of humanity definitely reconciled with itself, in the individual as well as in the whole of society; it is union freely re-established between inclination and duty; it is nature purified, raised to its highest moral dignity; in short, it is no less than the ideal of beauty applied to real life.
The great enterprise, first unfolding itself with the episode of Cleve and Berg and whimsically surrounding itself with the fantastic idyl of the Princess of Conde, had attained vast and misty proportions in the brain of its originator.
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