Ever affectionately yours, dear Friend,
Will.
P. S. By the way, you will be glad to know that Baron Tauchnitz is also going to bring out in 2 vols. a selection of representative tales by Fiona Macleod. The book called The Magic Kingdoms has been postponed till next year, but the first part of it will appear in The Monthly Review in December probably. Stories, articles, studies, will appear elsewhere.
Your friend W. S. has been and is not less busy, besides maturing work long in hand. So at least I can’t be accused of needless indolence.
To his great relief October-end found us at Taormina once again; and on Allhallow-e’en he wrote to Mrs. Janvier:
Oct. 30th.
... We reached Messina all right, and Giardini, the Station for Taormina, in fair time; then the lovely winding drive up to unique and beautiful and wildly picturesque Taormina and to the lovely winter villa and grounds of Santa Caterina where a warm welcome met us from Miss Mabel Hill, with whom we are to stay till the New Year.... I have for study a pleasant room on the garden terrace, at the Moorish end of the old convent-villa with opposite the always open door windows or great arch trellised with a lovely ‘Japanesy’ vine, looking down through a sea of roses and lemon and orange to the deep blue Ionian Sea. The divine beauty, glow, warmth, fragrance, and classic loveliness of this place would delight you.... Overhead there is a wilderness of deep blue, instinct with radiant heat and an almost passionate clarity. Forza, Mola, Roccafiorita, and other little mountain towns gleam in it like sunlit ivory. Over Forza (or Sforza rather) the storm-cloud of the Greco, with a rainbow hanging like a scimitar over the old, pagan, tragic, savagely picturesque mountain-ridge town. The bells of the hill-chapels rise and fall on the wind, for it is the beginning of All Souls festa. It is the day when ‘things’ are abroad and the secret ways are more easily to be traversed.
Beneath my Moorish arch I look down through clustering yellow roses and orange and lemon to green-blue water, and thence across the wild-dove’s breast of the Ionian Sea. Far to the S. E. and S., over where Corinth and Athens lie, are great still clouds, salmon-hued on the horizon with pink domes and summits. An intense stillness and the phantasmagoria of a forgotten dreamland dwell upon the long western promontories of the Syracusan coast, with the cloud-like Hyblæan hill like a violet, and a light as of melting honey where Leontinoi and Siracusa lie....
Nov. 8: This is a week later. I have accidentally destroyed or mislaid a sheet of this letter. Nothing of importance—only an account of the nocturnal festa of All Souls, with the glittering lights and the people watching by the graves, and leaving lights and flowers on each, the one to show the wandering souls the way back to the grave, the other to disguise the odour of mortality and illude them with the old beauty of the lost world—and the offerings of handfuls of beans, to give them sustenance on this their one mortal hour in the year. We three came here yesterday (Elizabeth, Miss Hill and I) and enjoyed the marvellous mountain-climbing journey from the sea-level of Giarre (near Catania) up to beautiful Linguaglossa, and Castiglione 2000 ft. high and so on to Randazzo and Maletto (3000 ft.) where we got out, and drove thro’ the wild lava-lands of this savage and brigand haunted region to Castello di Maniace where il Signor Ducino Alessandro gave us cordial and affectionate welcome.
Sunday 9th. The weather is doubtful, but if it keeps fine we are going to drive down the gorges of the Simalthos (the Simeto of today) and then up by the crags and wild town of Bronte, and back by the old Ætnean hillroad of the ancient Greeks, or by the still more ancient Sikelian tombs at a high pass curiously enough known not by its ancient fame but as the Pass of the Gipsies. As the country is in a somewhat troubled and restive state just now, especially over Bronte, all pre-arrangements have been made to ensure safety....