A JOURNEY TO NATURE 



had evidently left in the affections of the boy and 

 the dog, for it was becoming quite plain to me 

 that children and animals cannot rise to the moral 

 plane of heroic self-abnegation. 



Those walks in the sharp November mornings 

 with a child were, I dare say, disciplinary as well 

 as sensuous. There were many chaste- revealings 

 in the frosty gallery of the season. Nature had 

 passed in a few weeks from a painter to a sculptor. 

 Her Fortuny trees were changed to Thorvaldsen 

 statues. November on her exhibition days scorns 

 any drapery but that of her own incense. The 

 white flesh of the maenad birches flashed, marble- 

 like, behind the solid junipers. I could see their 

 beautiful limbs glistening far off on the pedestals 

 of the moss, and the hills themselves, only yester 

 day wrapped in Indian dyes, were gray and naked. 

 It does not take an invalid knight errant long to 

 see that November, like June, is driving the way 

 ward fancies back to woman. I do not wonder 

 that some of the physicists have declared that the 

 atoms themselves are male and female. If ever 

 the amateur worshipper at this outdoor shrine 

 grows restless at the anthropomorphic returns of 

 his fancy to concrete Dryads, and rushes to the 

 poets to escape from the earthly gravitation of 

 his impersonation, he will plunge into a greater 

 labyrinth than before, for the poets all steer their 

 argosies by the sex-magnet. The invincible Flor 

 entine maid sails unperturbed through Tasso, and 

 Petrarch, and Dante, just as she sails through 

 Horace. Whenever you can get Fiammetta and 



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