, and sketches of her host and hostess as lovers
in wedlock on the other side of our perilous forties; sketches of the bays, the
towns, the people - priests, dames, cavaliers, urchins, infants, shifting groups
of supple southerners - flashed across the page like a web of silk, and were
dashed off, redolent of herself, as lightly as the silvery spray of the blue
waves she furrowed; telling, without allusions to the land behind her, that she
had dipped in the wells of blissful oblivion. Emma Dunstane, as is usual with
those who receive exhilarating correspondence from makers of books, condemned
the authoress in comparison, and now first saw that she had the gift of writing.
Only one cry: »Italy, Eden of exiles!« betrayed the seeming of a moan. She wrote
of her poet and others immediately. Thither had they fled, with adieu to
England!
    How many have waved the adieu! And it is England nourishing, England
protecting them, England clothing them in the honours they wear. Only the
posturing lower natures, on the level of their buskins, can pluck out the
pocket-knife of sentimental spite to cut themselves loose from her at heart in
earnest. The higher, bleed as they may, too pressingly feel their debt. Diana
had the Celtic vivid sense of country. In England she was Irish, by hereditary,
and by wilful opposition. Abroad, gazing along the waters, observing, comparing,
reflecting, above all, reading of the struggles at home, the things done and
attempted, her soul of generosity made her, though not less Irish, a daughter of
Britain. It is at a distance that striving countries should be seen if we would
have them in the pure idea; and this young woman of fervid mind, a reader of
public speeches and speculator on the tides of politics (desirous, further, to
feel herself rather more in the pure idea), began to yearn for England long
before her term of holiday exile had ended. She had been flattered by her
friend, her wedded martyr at the stake, as she named him, to believe that she
could exercise a judgement in politics - could think, even speak acutely, on
public affairs. The reports of speeches delivered by the men she knew or knew
of, set her thrilling; and she fancied the sensibility to be as independent of
her sympathy with the orators as her political notions were sovereignly above a
sex devoted to trifles, and the feelings of a woman who had gone through fire.
She fancied it confidently, notwithstanding a peculiar intuition that the
