ing-desk, and the other clasped the back of her | There was the same refinement of brow and father's chair. nostril in both, counterbalanced by a full though The blind father sat with head uplifted and firm mouth and powerful chin, which gave an turned a little aside toward his daughter, as if expression of proud tenacity and latent impetuhe were looking at her. His delicate paleness, ousness: an expression carried out in the backset off by the black velvet cap which surmount- ward poise of the girl's head, and the grand line ed his drooping white hair, made all the more of her neck and shoulders. It was a type of perceptible the likeness between his aged feat- face of which one could not venture to say ures and those of the young maiden, whose whether it would inspire love or only that uncheeks were also without any tinge of the rose. I willing admiration which is mixed with dread;

the question must be decided by the eyes, which often seem charged with a more direct message from the soul. But the eyes of the father had long been silent, and the eyes of the daughter were bent on the Latin pages of Politian's Miscellanea, from which she was reading aloud at the eightieth chapter, to the following effect:

hazel eyes filled with pity; she hastened to lay the book on his lap, and kneeled down by him, looking up at him as if she believed that the love in her face must surely make its way through the dark obstruction that shut out every thing else. At that moment the doubtful attractiveness of Romola's face, in which pride and passion seemed to be quivering in the balance with native refinement and intelligence, was transfigured to the most lovable womanliness by mingled pity and affection: it was evident that the deepest fount of feeling within her had not yet wrought its way to the less changeful features, and only found its outlet through her eyes.

But the father, unconscious of that soft radiance, looked flushed and agitated as his hand explored the edges and back of the large book. "The vellum is yellowed in these thirteen years, Romola."

"There was a certain nymph of Thebes named Chariclo, especially dear to Pallas; and this nymph was the mother of Teiresias. But once when in the heat of summer, Pallas, in company with Chariclo, was bathing her disrobed limbs in the Heliconian Hippocrene, it happened that Teiresias coming as a hunter to quench his thirst at the same fountain, inadvertently beheld Minerva unveiled, and immediately became blind. For it is declared in the Saturnian laws that he who beholds the gods against their will shall atone for it by a heavy penalty...... When Teiresias had fallen into this calamity, Pallas, "Yes, father," said Romola, gently; "but moved by the tears of Chariclo, endowed him your letters at the back are dark and plain still with prophecy and length of days, and even-fine Roman letters; and the Greek characcaused his prudence and wisdom to continue after he had entered among the shades, so that an oracle spake from his tomb; and she gave him a staff, wherewith, as by a guide, he might walk without stumbling......And hence Nonnus, in the fifth book of the Dionysiaca, introduces Acteon exclaiming that he calls Teiresias happy, since, without dying, and with the loss of his eyesight merely, he had beheld Minerva unveiled, and thus, though blind, could for evermore carry her image in his soul."

At this point in the reading the daughter's hand slipped from the back of the chair and met her father's, which he had that moment uplifted; but she had not looked round, and was going on, though with a voice a little altered by some suppressed feeling, to read the Greek quotation from Nonnus, when the old man said:

Stay, Romola; reach me my own copy of Nonnus. It is a more correct copy than any in Poliziano's hands, for I made emendations in it which have not yet been communicated to any man. I finished it in 1477, when my sight was fast failing me."

Romola walked to the farther end of the room, with the queenly step which was the simple action of her tall, finely-wrought frame, without the slightest conscious adjustment of herself.

"Is it in the right place, Romola?" asked Bardo, who was perpetually seeking the assurance that the outward fact continued to correspond with the image which lived to the minutest detail in his mind.

"Yes, father; at the west end of the room, on the third shelf from the bottom, behind the bust of Hadrian, above Apollonius Rhodius and Callimachus, and below Lucan and Silius Italicus."

As Romola said this a fine ear would have detected in her clear voice and distinct utterance a faint suggestion of weariness struggling with habitual patience. But as she approached her father, and saw his arms stretched out a little with nervous excitement to seize the volume, her

ter," she continued, laying the book open on her father's knee, "is more beautiful than that of any of your bought manuscripts."

"Assuredly, child," said Bardo, passing his finger across the page as if he hoped to discriminate line and margin. "What hired amanuensis can be equal to the scribe who loves the words that grow under his hand, and to whom an error or indistinctness in the text is more painful than a sudden darkness or obstacle across his path? And even these mechanical printers who threaten to make learning a base and vulgar thing—even they must depend on the manuscript over which we scholars have bent with that insight into the poet's meaning which is closely akin to the mens divinior of the poet himself-unless they would flood the world with grammatical falsities and inexplicable anomalies that would turn the very fountains of Parnassus into a deluge of poisonous mud. But find the passage in the fifth book to which Poliziano refers. I know it very well."

Seating herself on a low stool close to her father's knee, Romola took the book on her lap and read the four verses containing the exclamation of Acteon.

"It is true, Romola," said Bardo, when she had finished; "it is a true conception of the poet; for what is that grosser, narrower light by which men behold merely the petty scene around them, compared with that far-stretching, lasting light which spreads over centuries of thought, and over the life of nations, and makes clear to us the minds of the immortals who have reaped the great harvest and left us to glean in their farrows? For me, Romola, even when I could see, it was with the great dead that I lived; while the living often seemed to me mere spectres-shadows dispossessed of true feeling and intelligence; and unlike those Lamix to whom Poliziano, with that superficial ingenuity which I do not deny to him, compares our inquisitive Florentines, because they put on their eyes when they went abroad, and took them off when they

got home again, I have returned from the con- |ing at some distance from him, stretching her arms downward and clasping her fingers tightly as she looked with a sad dreariness in her young face at the lifeless objects around her-the parchment backs, the unchanging mutilated marble, the bits of obsolete bronze and clay.

verse of the streets as from a forgotten dream, and have sat down among my books, saying with Petrarca, the modern who is least unworthy to be named after the ancients, 'Libri medullitus delectant, colloquuntur, consulunt, et viva quadam nobis atque arguta familiaritate junguntur.' "And in one thing you are happier than your favorite Petrarca, father," said Romola, affectionately humoring the old man's disposition to dilate in this way; "for he used to look at his copy of Homer and think sadly that the Greek was a dead letter to him: so far, he had the inward blindness that you feel is worse than your outward."

"True, child; for I carry within me the fruits of that fervid study which I gave to the Greek tongue under the teaching of the younger Crisolora, and Filelfo, and Argiropulo, though that great work in which I had desired to gather, as into a firm web, all the threads that my research had laboriously disentangled, and which would have been the vintage of my life, was cut off by the failure of my sight and my want of a fitting coadjutor; for the sustained zeal and unconquerable patience demanded from those who would tread the unbeaten paths of knowledge are still less reconcilable with the wandering, vagrant propensity of the feminine mind than with the feeble powers of the feminine body."

Father," said Romola, with a sudden flush and an injured tone, "I read any thing you wish me to read; and I will look out any passages for you, and make whatever notes you want."

Bardo shook his head and smiled with a bitter sort of pity. "As well try to be a pentathlos and perform all the five feats of the palæstra with the limbs of a nymph. Have I forgotten thy fainting in the mere search for the references I needed to explain a single passage of Callimachus ?"

"But, father, it was the weight of the books, and Maso can help me-it was not want of attention and patience."

Bardo, though usually susceptible to Romola's movements and eager to trace them, was now too entirely preoccupied by the pain of rankling memories to notice her departure from his side.

"Yes," he went on, "with my son to aid me, I might have had my due share in the triumphs of this century: the names of the Bardi, father and son, might have been held reverently on the lips of scholars in the ages to come; not on account of frivolous verses or philosophic treatises, which are superfluous and presumptuous attempts to imitate the inimitable, such as allure vain men like Panhormita, and from which even the admirable Poggio did not keep himself sufficiently free; but because we should have given a lamp whereby men might have studied the supreme productions of the past. For why is a young man like Poliziano, who was not yet born when I was already held worthy to maintain a discussion with Thomas of Sarzana, to have a glorious memory as a commentator on the Pandects-why is Ficino, whose Latin is an offense to me, and who wanders purblind among the superstitious fancies that marked the decline at once of art, literature, and philosophy, to descend to posterity as the very high priest of Platonism, while I, who am more than their equal, have not effected any thing but scattered work, which will be appropriated by other men? Why? but because my son, whom I had brought up to replenish my ripe learning with young enterprise, left me and all liberal pursuits that he might lash himself and howl at midnight with besotted friars-that he might go wandering on pilgrimages befitting men who know of no past older than the missal and the crucifix ?-left me when the night was already beginning to fall on me."

In these last words the old man's voice, which had risen high in indignant protest, fell into a Bardo shook his head again. "It is not tone of reproach so tremulous and plaintive that mere bodily organs that I want: it is the sharp Romola, turning her eyes again toward the blind edge of a young mind to pierce the way for my aged face, felt her heart swell with forgiving somewhat blunted faculties. For blindness acts pity. She seated herself by her father again, like a dam, sending the streams of thought back-and placed her hand on his knee-too proud to ward along the already-traveled channels and obtrude consolation in words that might seem hindering the course onward. If my son had like a vindication of her own value, yet wishing not forsaken me, deluded by debasing fanatical to comfort him by some sign of her presence. dreams, worthy only of an energumen whose dwelling is among tombs, I might have gone on and seen my path broadening to the end of my life; for he was a youth of great promise....... But it has closed in now," the old man continued, after a short pause; 66 it has closed in now -all but the narrow track he has left me to tread -alone, in my blindness."

"Yes, Romola," said Bardo, automatically letting his left hand, with its massive prophylactic rings, fall a little too heavily on the delicate blue-veined back of the girl's right, so that she bit her lip to prevent herself from starting. "If even Florence only is to remember me, it can but be on the same ground that it will remember Niccolò Niccoli-because I forsook the Romola started from her seat and carried vulgar pursuit of wealth in commerce that I away the large volume to its place again, stung might devote myself to collecting the precious too acutely by her father's last words to remain remains of ancient art and wisdom, and leave motionless as well as silent; and when she turned them, after the example of the munificent Roaway from the shelf again, she remained stand-mans, for an everlasting possession to my fellow

citizens. But why do I say Florence only? If | assigned thee, nor even that in erudition thou Florence remembers me, will not the world re- art on a par with the more learned women of member me?...... Yet," added Bardo, after a this age; thou art nevertheless-yes, Romola short pause, his voice falling again into a sad- mia," said the old man, his pedantry again meltdened key, “Lorenzo's untimely death has raised ing into tenderness, "thou art my sweet daugha new difficulty. I had his promise-I should ter, and thy voice is as the lower notes of the have had his bond-that my collection should flute, dulcis, durabilis, clara, pura, secans aëra always bear my name and should never be sold, et auribus sedens,' according to the choice words though the harpies might clutch every thing of Quintilian; and Bernardo tells me thou art else; but there is enough for them-there is fair, and thy hair is like the brightness of the more than enough-and for thee, too, Romola, morning, and indeed it seems to me that I disthere will be enough. Besides, thou wilt mar- cern some radiance from thee. Ah! I know ry; Bernardo reproaches me that I do not seek how all else looks in this room, but thy form I a fitting parentado for thee, and we will delay only guess at. Thou art no longer the little no longer, we will think about it." woman six years old, that faded for me into darkness: thou art tall, and thy arm is but little below mine. Let us walk together."

"No, no, father; what could you do? besides, it is useless: wait till some one seeks me," said Romola, hastily.

"Nay, my child, that is not the paternal duty. It was not so held by the ancients, and in this respect Florentines have not degenerated from their ancestral customs."

"But I will study diligently," said Romola, her eyes dilating with anxiety. "I will become as learned as Cassandra Fedele: I will try and be as useful to you as if I had been a boy, and then perhaps some great scholar will want to marry me, and will not mind about a dowry; and he will like to come and live with you, and he will be to you in place of my brother......and you will not be sorry that I was a daughter."

The old man rose, and Romola, soothed by these beams of tenderness, looked happy again as she drew his arm within hers, and placed in his right hand the stick which rested at the side of his chair. While Bardo had been sitting, he had seemed hardly more than sixty: his face, though Rale, had that refined texture in which wrinkles and lines are never deep; but now that he began to walk he looked as old as he really was rather more than seventy; for his tall, spare frame had the student's stoop of the shoulders, and he stepped with the undecided gait of the blind.

"No, Romola," he said, pausing against the There was a rising sob in Romola's voice as bust of Hadrian, and passing his stick from the she said the last words, which touched the father-right to the left that he might explore the familly fibre in Bardo. He stretched his hand up- iar outline with a "seeing hand." "There will ward a little in search of her golden hair, and be nothing else to preserve my memory and caras she placed her head under his hand, he gen-ry down my name as a member of the great retly stroked it, leaning toward her as if his eyes discerned some glimmer there.

"Nay, Romola mia, I said not so: if I have pronounced an anathema on a degenerate and ungrateful son, I said not that I could wish thee other than the sweet daughter thou hast been to me. For what son could have tended me so gently in the frequent sickness I have had of late?

That of Poggio

public of letters-nothing but my library and my collection of antiquities. And they are choice,' continued Bardo, pressing the bust and speaking in a tone of insistence. "The collections of Niccolò I know were larger: but take any collection which is the work of a single man-that of the great Boccaccio even, which Niccolò bought-mine will surpass it. And even in learning thou art not, ac- was contemptible compared with mine. It will cording to thy measure, contemptible. Some- be a great gift to unborn scholars. And there thing perhaps were to be wished in thy capacity is nothing else. For even if I were to yield to of attention and memory, not incompatible even the wish of Aldo Manuzio when he sets up his with the feminine mind. But as Calcondila press at Venice, and give him the aid of my anbore testimony when he aided me to teach thee, notated manuscripts, I know well what would thou hast a ready apprehension, and even a wide- be the result: some other scholar's name would glancing intelligence. And thou hast a man's stand on the title-page of the edition-some nobility of soul: thou hast never fretted me with scholar who would have fed on my honey and thy petty desires as thy mother did. It is true, then declared in his preface that he had gatherI have been careful to keep thee aloof from the ed it all himself fresh from Hymettus. Else, debasing influence of thy own sex, with their why have I refused the loan of many an annosparrow-like frivolity and their enslaving super- tated codex? why have I refused to make pubstition, except, indeed, from that of our cousin lic any of my translations? why, but because Brigida, who may well serve as a scarecrow and scholarship is a system of licensed robbery, and a warning. And though-since I agree with your man in scarlet and furred robe whą, sits in the divine Petrarca, when he declares, quoting judgment on thieves, is himself a thief of the the Aulularia of Plautus, who again was indebt- thoughts and the fame that belong to his fellows. ed for the truth to the supreme Greek intellect, But against that robbery Bardo de' Bardi shall 'Optimam fœminam nullam esse, alia licet alia struggle-though blind and forsaken, he shall pejor sit'-I can not boast that thou art entirely struggle. I too have a right to be remembered lifted out of that lower category to which Nature—as great a right as Pontanus or Merula, whose