OCTOBER 73 



most sombre depth to the most chromatic light, was at 

 his command. In his pictures of spring the colour 

 laughs, rejoices, and exults. In the " Isle of the Dead " it 

 seems as though a veil of cre"pe were spread over the sea, 

 the sky, and the trees. . . . Many of his pictures have 

 such an ensnaring brilliancy that the eye is never weary 

 of feasting upon their floating splendour. Indeed, later 

 generations will probably do him honour as the greatest 

 colour-poet of the century, and at the same time they 

 will learn from his works that at the close of this same 

 unstable century there were complete and healthy human 

 beings. . . . The more modern sentiment became 

 emancipated, the more did artists venture to feel with 

 their own nerves and not with those of earlier genera- 

 tions, and the more it became evident that modern senti- 

 ment is almost always disordered, recklessly despairing, 

 unbelieving, and weary of life. Boecklin, the most 

 modern of modern painters, possesses that quality of iron 

 health of which modernity knows so little.' 



To return to my time in Germany. The weather grew 

 cold and foggy, and my expeditions from Cronberg into 

 Frankfort were fewer than I could have wished, and many 

 sights I did not see at all. 



Among the towns of which I have an early though 

 faint recollection, not even Paris itself is more utterly 

 and entirely changed than Frankfort. Only here and 

 there does anything remain that recalls Goethe's descrip- 

 tion, so familiar to the readers of his ever-enchanting 

 autobiography, that perfect mixture, ' Truth and Poetry.' 

 The Jewish cemetery, full of interest with its unbroken 

 record from the twelfth century, I did not see, though to 

 my mind it must be one of the most interesting spots in 

 Europe. This feeling would only be understood by the 

 English, the awful hatred of the Jews universal on the 

 Continent being happily unknown to us. The world 



