A SONNET BY E. F. H.

D-eep as the shadows of sweet Eventide

A-nd soft as Sunbeams from the golden West,

V-ain Strife, Ambitious Cares, all cast aside,

I-s the retirement of the Sage's rest;

E-mploying his untired, unfading mind

S-till from the past a present good to find. —

G-entle and just and wise, his memory's bark

G-lides o'er the past, as o'er the lulled sea;

I-n the young faces round him he may mark

L-istners less calm, perchance less glad than he :

B-ut as mild evening stills the troubled wind,

E-ven as gently o'er the restless mind

R-estoring peace, his varied converse flows

T-o shed around the light within that glows.

ASOLO AND ITS LACE-SCHOOL

Among the many festal gatherings of happy faces, met this New Year's Eve to see the old year out and ring in the new, I was present at one which had for me a peculiar interest. In the Sala of an old mansion, once the home of a noble Asolan family, a long table was spread for dinner and the soft light of the antique Florentine lamps ranged down its centre, fell in picturesque minglings of light and shadow on the bright heads and gleeful faces of thirty young girls, — ranging in age from seven or eight years to seventeen or eighteen, — with their mistress at their head, the lace-workers of the recently founded Lace-school of the little, old-world once county city of Asolo. As the traveller from the plains to the Asolan Hills comes jinking up the eight miles slope of the Cornuda road, behind the horse-bells of the primitive evening post-gig, he sees rising before him, against the sunset sky, crowning one of their pointed summits, the massive serrated walls of a pre-historic fortress, said to be Etruscan, known as the «Rocca,» and straggling downwards along the edge of the undulating ridge lies the little town of Asolo with its arched, house-crowned gateways, and its steep, narrow, colonnaded streets, once the home of a regal court, and regal still in its picturesque decay. The steep, narrow streets, lined, here with long covered archways, where foot-passengers may walk at ease on the wettest or the brightest day, safe alike from rain or sunshine, there, with tall ancient houses, filled now by humble residents enough, speak yet from many an old, carved doorway, arched marble-pillared window, and wall still gay with half-deemed freecos — of a time when the now ruined castle of the little mountain town was held not unworthy to be chosen as the refuge of the luckless

Caterina Cornaro, the dethroned Queen of Cyprus, and where amid « Italia's rare o'running beauty » she spent the last years of her tempest tossed life as the gentle and charitable « Lady of Asolo. » It was on an earthly paradise that the sad eyes of the banished Cyprian Queen rested as she gazed from her Castle tower, All around the overflowing loveliness of the tumbled vine and fig-clad Asolan hills with their wild luxury of verdure, their scattered campaniles and little townships, crowning their peaks or nestling in their shadows; beyond, as guardians of their loveliness, like the « mountains round about Jerusalem » towered, then as now, the grand rugged peaks of the Julian Alps; and the broad Trevisan plain, with its towns and steepes, lay basking in the blue misty sunlit haze at her feet. Only a small fragment of Queen Cornaro's Castle — used now as a prison — still stands; nature has taken the old straggling ruined walls of the rest back to her kindly heart and wrapt them tenderly in her own sumptuous draperies of leaf and fern. But the ancient Plaza with its quaint fountain and colonnaded and frescoed city buildings, to whose carved columns the sheep are tied, and under whose arches the merchants still vend their wares at the weekly Saturday markets, its high steepled Duomo, and Monsignore's house still look down on the loveliness of the vine clad hills as they did when the now decaying town was the harbour of a Queen.

And Asolo had its industries as well as its dignities in the past. When, somewhat over fifty years ago, a solitary young English pedestrian, walking from Bassano, lighted at unawares upon the little old-world town, in its wondrous setting of hill and mountain, two silk-winding factories stood near the top of the Cornuda road, giving work and bread to its inhabitants, and it was round one of the little silk-winders of Asolo, on her one yearly holiday, that Robert Browning wove the magic web

of his poet-thought, and so transformed the decaying old town into a vibrant land of romance, and the little Asolan peasant into the heroine of an immortal poem. Fifty years passed and brought with them the changes that fifty years will bring, and when those same feet again trod the steep streets of Asolo, — alas, for the last time, — Pippa's craft was a thing of the past. The old mill still stood with its antiquated dust-covered wooden machinery — just as the workers left it after their last evening's work — but thirty years had come and gone since the sound of the old machinery had been heard in the street, or a thread of silk had been unwound from its cocoon. New machinery had taken the place of hand labour, and railways had drawn the centres of industry from the old hill-perched town to the cities of the plain: no future silk-winding Pippa would sing on her one holiday — the occupation of the little town was gone. But the hand that had transformed the lovely old-world Asolo into the very fairy land of a poet's dream, held a gift in it still, and the new Lace-school of Asolo is a son's tribute of affection to the little town his poet-father loved. Mr. Barrett Browning bought the crumbling factory in which Pippa worked and sang, hoping to resuscitate Pippa's craft, but the silk industry was found to be past and gone beyond recall, so the old silk factory was transformed into the new Lace-school, and the young Asolan maidens have a new industry instead of the old one, and thankful for happy healthy work, (which means also bread) can rejoice still with Pippa in a New Year's holiday.

Mr. Browning's Lace-school was begun about a year and a half ago within the walls of the old factory, looking down on the verdant rivars and the blue misty plains, and across to the everlasting hills, and it is a charming sight to see thirty small pairs of hands all busy with their

pillows and their bobbins, weaving lovely Venetian lace in the beautiful antique old patterns, under their able and kindly mistress, a thoroughly trained teacher of the beautiful art, whose Asolan scholars turn out work that will hold its own with the best. As an adjunct to the Lace-school Mr. Browning has also revived an almost extinct Asolan industry, the hand-loom weaving of linen, and hand-woven table cloths part linen and part lace, like those in old Venetian pictures, can now be obtained at the Asolo Lace-school, other linens also, of stronger quality for curtains or furniture covers. The School has many distinguished customers, including royalty among its patrons, and, we rejoice to know, is now thoroughly established, and an estimable boon to the little town and its surrounding villages. Jost across the way from the Lace-school there is a tablet let into the wall of a little house,

IN QUESTÀ CASA
ASIUTA

ROBERTO BROWNING
SOMMO POETA INGLESE
VI SCRISSA ASOLANDO
1880.

And while one rejoices that Asolo is proud to remember the great English poet who loved her and has made her name immortal, one trusts too that the little Pippa's song, that so wove itself into other lives in the Poet's fancy, and still weaves itself, (all unconsciously to themselves,) into the fate of these young sisters of hers of a later generation, may also, through this last gift of thorough and hopeful work which it has brought to their poverty, weave something of the comforting content of its grand moral into the hearts of the young lace-workers,

a All service ranks the same with God
...God's puppets best and worst
Are we, there is no last nor first "

and some touch of the happy hopefulness of its glad refrain

a God's in His Heaven,
All's right with the world. "

JEANIE MORISON.