He squandered too much in the heat of personal
communication. How often I have seen him draw his dark brows together, fix
his eyes upon some object on the wall or a figure in the carpet, and then
flash into the lamplight the very image that was in his brain. He could
bring the drama of antique life before one out of the shadows--white
figures against blue backgrounds. I shall never forget his face as it
looked one night when he told me about the solitary day he spent among the
sea temples at Paestum: the soft wind blowing through the roofless
columns, the birds flying low over the flowering marsh grasses, the
changing lights on the silver, cloud-hung mountains. He had wilfully
stayed the short summer night there, wrapped in his coat and rug, watching
the constellations on their path down the sky until `the bride of old
Tithonus' rose out of the sea, and the mountains stood sharp in the dawn.
It was there he caught the fever which held him back on the eve of his
departure for Greece and of which he lay ill so long in Naples. He was
still, indeed, doing penance for it.
I remember vividly another evening, when something led us to talk of
Dante's veneration for Virgil. Cleric went through canto after canto of
the `Commedia,' repeating the discourse between Dante and his `sweet
teacher,' while his cigarette burned itself out unheeded between his long
fingers.
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