exquisite tints of the ripe skin, momentarily gratified the sea-
thirst in me. For I thirst with all the thirst of the salt sea,
and the sun-heated sands dry for the tide, with all the sea I
thirst for beauty. And I know full well that one lifetime,
however long, cannot fill my heart. My throat and tongue and
whole body have often been parched and feverish dry with
this measureless thirst, and again moist to the fingers' ends
like a sappy bough. It burns in me as the sun burns in the
sky.

The glowing face of Cytherea in Titian's Venus and Adonis, the
heated cheek, the lips that kiss each eye that gazes on them,
the desiring glance, the golden hair--sunbeams moulded into
features--this face answered me. Juno's wide back and mesial
groove, is any thing so lovely as the back ? Cythereals poised
hips unveiled for judgment; these called up the same thirst I
felt on the green sward in the sun, on the wild beach listening
to the quiet sob as the summer wave drank at the land. I will
search the world through for beauty. I came here and sat to
rest before these in the days when I could not afford to buy so
much as a glass of ale, weary and faint from walking on stone
pavements. I came later on, in better times, often straight
from labours which though necessary will ever be distasteful, always to rest
my heart with loveliness. I go still; the divine beauty of flesh is life
itself to me. It was, and is, one of my London pilgrimages.

Another was to the Greek sculpture galleries in the British
Museum. The statues are not, it is said, the best; broken too, and
mutilated, and seen in a dull, commonplace light. But they were
shape--divine shape of man and woman; the form of limb and torso, of bust