Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 1).djvu/301

 open air; but she knew nothing of their dread attributes, and though they awed her they did not fill her with any painful fear. She did not understand them; there was no one to explain to her the meanings of the paintings, and carvings, and the letters on the walls; but she grew into a great and tender sympathy with them which was in itself a sort of comprehension.

Even of the terrible shapes she had no fear; the dread winged boy with hoary locks of age, that the Etruscans feared as higher than the gods, had no terror in his frown for her; and the veiled divinities who sat beside the inner door of the warrior's tomb, who for the dead had been tyrants of fate, mystic, inscrutable, omnipotent, grew to be to her as playmates and as friends. The very twilight and hush and solemn sadness of this place were but so much added sweetness to her. And in her there seemed to have been always that melancholy, and that obedience to destiny, which were the characteristics of the Etruscan religion, even when most they loved the lyre and the lotus garland and the brimming rhyton.

Here was her refuge, her palace, her place of sanctity and dreams; here the