CONTENTS
LIMBO
IN PRAISE OF OLD HOUSES
THE LIE OF THE LAND
TUSCAN MIDSUMMER MAGIC
ON MODERN TRAVELLING
OLD ITALIAN GARDENS
ABOUT LEISURE
RAVENNA AND HER GHOSTS
THE COOK-SHOP AND THE FOWLING-PLACE
ACQUAINTANCE WITH BIRDS
ARIADNE IN MANTUA
Perocchè gente di molto valore
Conobbi che in quel Limbo eran sospesi.
It may seem curious to begin with Dante and pass on to the Children'sRabbits' House; but I require both to explain what it is I mean byLimbo; no such easy matter on trying. For this discourse is not aboutthe Pious Pagans whom the poet found in honourable confinement at theGate of Hell, nor of their neighbours the Unchristened Babies; but I amglad of Dante's authority for the existence of a place holding suchcreatures as have just missed a necessary rite, or come too soon forthorough salvation. And I am glad, moreover, that the poet has insistedon the importance—"gente di molto valore"—of the beings thus enclosed;because it is just with the superior quality of the things in what Imean by Limbo that we are peculiarly concerned.
And now for the other half of my preliminary illustration of thesubject, to wit, the Children's Rabbits' House. The little gardens whichthe children played at cultivating have long since disappeared, takeninsensibly back into that corner of the formal but slackly kept gardenwhich looks towards the steep hill dotted with cows and sheep. But inthat corner, behind the shapeless Portugal laurels and the patches ofseeding grass, there still remains, beneath big trees, what the childrenused to call the "Rabbits' Villa." 'Tis merely a wooden toy house, withgreen moss-eaten roof, standing, like the lake dwellings of prehistorictimes, on wooden posts, with the tall foxgloves, crimson and white,growing all round it. There is something ludicrous in this superannuatedtoy, this Noah's ark on stilts among the grass and bushes; but when youlook into the thing, finding the empty plates and cups "for having teawith the rabbits," and when you look into it spiritually also, it growsoddly pathetic. We walked up and down between the high hornbeamhedges, the sunlight lying low on the armies of tall daisies andseeding grasses, and falling in narrow glints among the white boles andhanging boughs of the beeches, where the wooden benches stand unused inthe deep grass, and the old swing hangs crazily crooked. Yes, theRabbits' Villa and the surrounding overgrown beds are quite pathetic. Isit because they are, in a way, the graves of children long dead, asdead—despite the grown-up folk who may come and say "It was I"—as therabbits and guinea-pigs with whom they once had tea? That is it; andthat explains my meaning: the Rabbits' Villa is, to the eye of theinitiate, one of man