slowest of slow trains, that we might make the famous Brenner Pass by
daylight. It was no easy matter, at last, to pull up from the dear
old city in which we had become so firmly planted, and to leave the
German friends who made the place like home to us. One gets to love
Germany and the Germans as he does no other country and people in
Europe. There has been something so simple, honest, genuine, in our
Munich life, that we look back to it with longing eyes from this land
of fancy, of hand-organ music, and squalid splendor. I presume the
streets are yet half the day hid in a mountain fog; but I know the
superb military bands are still playing at noon in the old Marian
Platz and in the Loggie by the Residenz; that at half-past six in the
evening our friends are quietly stepping in to hear the opera at the
Hof Theater, where everybody goes to hear the music, and nobody for
display, and that they will be at home before half-past nine, and
have dispatched the servant for the mugs of foaming beer; I know that
they still hear every week the choice conservatoire orchestral
concerts in the Odeon; and, alas that experience should force me to
think of it! I have no doubt that they sip, every morning, coffee
which is as much superior to that of Paris as that of Paris is to
that of London; and that they eat the delicious rolls, in comparison
with which those of Paris are tasteless. I wonder, in this land of
wine,--and yet it must be so,--if the beer-gardens are still filled
nightly; and if it could be that I should sit at a little table
there, a comely lass would, before I could ask for what everybody is
presumed to want, place before me a tall glass full of amber liquid,
crowned with creamy foam. Are the handsome officers still sipping
their coffee in the Cafe Maximilian; and, on sunny days, is the crowd
of fashion still streaming down to the Isar, and the high, sightly
walks and gardens beyond?

As I said, it was eleven o'clock of a clear and not very severe
night; for Munich had had no snow on the ground since November. A
deputation of our friends were at the station to see us off, and the
farewells between the gentlemen were in the hearty fashion of the
country. I know there is a prejudice with us against kissing between
men; but it is only a question of taste: and the experience of
anybody will tell him that the theory that this sort of salutation
must necessarily be desirable between opposite sexes is a delusion.
But I suppose it cannot be denied that kissing between men was
invented in Germany before they wore full beards. Well, our goodbyes
said, we climbed into our bare cars. There is no way of heating the
German cars, except by tubes filled with hot water, which are placed
under the feet, and are called foot-warmers. As we slowly moved out
over the plain, we found it was cold; in an hour the foot-warmers,
not hot to start with, were stone cold. You are going to sunny
Italy, our friends had said: as soon as you pass the Brenner you will
have sunshine and delightful weather. This thought consoled us, but
did not warm our feet. The Germans, when they travel by rail, wrap
themselves in furs and carry foot-sacks.

We creaked along, with many stoppings. At two o'clock we were at
Rosenheim. Rosenheim is a windy place, with clear starlight, with a
multitude of cars on a multiplicity of tracks, and a large, lighted
refreshment-room, which has a glowing, jolly stove. We stay there an
hour, toasting by the fire and drinking excellent coffee. Groups of
Germans are seated at tables playing cards, smoking, and taking
coffee. Other trains arrive; and huge men stalk in, from Vienna or
Russia, you would say, enveloped in enormous fur overcoats, reaching
to the heels, and with big fur boots coming above the knees, in which
they move like elephants. Another start, and a cold ride with
cooling foot-warmers, droning on to Kurfstein. It is five o'clock
when we reach Kurfstein, which is also a restaurant, with a hot
stove, and more Germans going on as if it were daytime; but by this
time in the morning the coffee had got to be wretched.

After an hour's waiting, we dream on again, and, before we know it,
come out of our cold doze into the cold dawn. Through the thick
frost on the windows we see the faint outlines of mountains.
Scraping away the incrustation, we find that we are in the Tyrol,
high hills on all sides, no snow in the valley, a bright morning, and
the snow-peaks are soon rosy in the sunrise. It is just as we
expected,--little villages under the hills, and slender church spires
with brick-red tops. At nine o'clock we are in Innsbruck, at the
foot of the Brenner. No snow yet. It must be charming here in the
summer.

During the night we have got out of Bavaria. The waiter at the
restaurant wants us to pay him ninety kreuzers for our coffee, which
is only six kreuzers a cup in Munich. Remembering that it takes one
hundred kreuzers to make a gulden in Austria, I launch out a Bavarian
gulden, and expect ten kreuzers in change. I have heard that sixty
Bavarian kreuzers are equal to one hundred Austrian; but this waiter
explains to me that my gulden is only good for ninety kreuzers. I,
in my turn, explain to the waiter that it is better than the coffee;
but we come to no understanding, and I give up, before I begin,
trying to understand the Austrian currency. During the day I get my
pockets full of coppers, which are very convenient to take in change,
but appear to have a very slight purchasing, power in Austria even,
and none at all elsewhere, and the only use for which I have found is
to give to Italian beggars. One of these pieces satisfies a beggar
when it drops into his hat; and then it detains him long enough in
the examination of it, so that your carriage has time to get so far
away that his renewed pursuit is usually unavailing.

The Brenner Pass repaid us for the pains we had taken to see it,
especially as the sun shone and took the frost from our windows, and
we encountered no snow on the track; and, indeed, the fall was not
deep, except on the high peaks about us. Even if the engineering of
the road were not so interesting, it was something to be again amidst
mountains that can boast a height of ten thousand feet. After we
passed the summit, and began the zigzag descent, we were on a sharp
lookout for sunny Italy. I expected to lay aside my heavy overcoat,
and sun myself at the first station among the vineyards. Instead of
that, we bade good-by to bright sky, and plunged into a snowstorm,
and, so greeted, drove down into the narrow gorges, whose steep
slopes we could see were terraced to the top, and planted with vines.
We could distinguish enough to know that, with the old Roman ruins,
the churches and convent towers perched on the crags, and all, the
scenery in summer must be finer than that of the Rhine, especially as
the vineyards here are picturesque,--the vines being trained so as to
hide and clothe the ground with verdure.

It was four o'clock when we reached Trent, and colder than on top of
the Brenner. As the Council, owing to the dead state of its members
for now three centuries, was not in session, we made no long tarry.
We went into the magnificent large refreshment-room to get warm; but
it was as cold as a New England barn. I asked the proprietor if we
could not get at a fire; but he insisted that the room was warm, that
it was heated with a furnace, and that he burned good stove-coal, and
pointed to a register high up in the wall. Seeing that I looked
incredulous, he insisted that I should test it. Accordingly, I
climbed upon a table, and reached up my hand. A faint warmth came
out; and I gave it up, and congratulated the landlord on his furnace.
But the register had no effect on the great hall. You might as well
try to heat the dome of St. Peter's with a lucifer-match. At dark,
Allah be praised! we reached Ala, where we went through the humbug
of an Italian custom-house, and had our first glimpse of Italy in the
picturesque-looking idlers in red-tasseled caps, and the jabber of a
strange tongue. The snow turned into a cold rain: the foot-warmers,
we having reached the sunny lands, could no longer be afforded; and
we shivered along till nine o'clock, dark and rainy, brought us to
Verona. We emerged from the station to find a crowd of omnibuses,
carriages, drivers, runners, and people anxious to help us, all
vociferating in the highest key. Amidst the usual Italian clamor
about nothing, we gained our hotel omnibus, and sat there for ten
minutes watching the dispute over our luggage, and serenely listening
to the angry vituperations of policemen and drivers. It sounded like
a revolution, but it was only the ordinary Italian way of doing
things; and we were at last rattling away over the broad pavements.

Of course, we stopped at a palace turned hotel, drove into a court
with double flights of high stone and marble stairways, and were
hurried up to the marble-mosaic landing by an active boy, and, almost
before we could ask for rooms, were shown into a suite of magnificent
apartments. I had a glimpse of a garden in the rear,--flowers and
plants, and a balcony up which I suppose Romeo climbed to hold that
immortal love-prattle with the lovesick Juliet. Boy began to light
the candles. Asked in English the price of such fine rooms. Reply
in Italian. Asked in German. Reply in Italian. Asked in French,
with the same result. Other servants appeared, each with a piece of
baggage. Other candles were lighted. Everybody talked in chorus.
The landlady--a woman of elegant manners and great command of her
native tongue--appeared with a candle, and joined in the melodious
confusion. What is the price of these rooms? More jabber, more
servants bearing lights. We seemed suddenly to have come into an
illumination and a private lunatic asylum. The landlady and her
troop grew more and more voluble and excited. Ah, then, if these
rooms do not suit the signor and signoras, there are others; and we
were whisked off to apartments yet grander, great suites with high,
canopied beds, mirrors, and furniture that was luxurious a hundred
years ago. The price? Again a torrent of Italian; servants pouring
in, lights flashing, our baggage arriving, until, in the tumult,
hopeless of any response to our inquiry for a servant who could speak
anything but Italian, and when we had decided, in despair, to hire
the entire establishment, a waiter appeared who was accomplished in
all languages, the row subsided, and we were left alone in our glory,
and soon in welcome sleep forgot our desperate search for a warm
climate.

The next day it was rainy and not warm; but the sun came out
occasionally, and we drove about to see some of the sights. The
first Italian town which the stranger sees he is sure to remember,
the outdoor life of the people is so different from that at the
North. It is the fiction in Italy that it is always summer; and the
people sit in the open market-place, shiver in the open doorways,
crowd into corners where the sun comes, and try to keep up the
beautiful pretense. The picturesque groups of idlers and traffickers
were more interesting to us than the palaces with sculptured fronts
and old Roman busts, or tombs of the Scaligers, and old gates.
Perhaps I ought to except the wonderful and perfect Roman
amphitheater, over every foot of which a handsome boy in rags
followed us, looking over every wall that we looked over, peering
into every hole that we peered into, thus showing his fellowship with
us, and at every pause planting himself before us, and throwing a
somerset, and then extending his greasy cap for coppers, as if he
knew that the modern mind ought not to dwell too exclusively on hoary
antiquity without some relief.

Anxious, as I have said, to find the sunny South, we left Verona that
afternoon for Florence, by way of Padua and Bologna. The ride to
Padua was through a plain, at this season dreary enough, were it not,
here and there, for the abrupt little hills and the snowy Alps, which
were always in sight, and towards sundown and between showers
transcendently lovely in a purple and rosy light. But nothing now
could be more desolate than the rows of unending mulberry-trees,
pruned down to the stumps, through which we rode all the afternoon.
I suppose they look better when the branches grow out with the tender
leaves for the silk-worms, and when they are clothed with grapevines.
Padua was only to us a name. There we turned south, lost mountains
and the near hills, and had nothing but the mulberry flats and
ditches of water, and chilly rain and mist. It grew unpleasant as we
went south. At dark we were riding slowly, very slowly, for miles
through a country overflowed with water, out of which trees and
houses loomed up in a ghastly show. At all the stations soldiers
were getting on board, shouting and singing discordantly choruses
from the operas; for there was a rising at Padua, and one feared at
Bologna the populace getting up insurrections against the enforcement
of the grist-tax,--a tax which has made the government very
unpopular, as it falls principally upon the poor.

Creeping along at such a slow rate, we reached Bologna too late for
the Florence train, It was eight o'clock, and still raining. The
next train went at two o'clock in the morning, and was the best one
for us to take. We had supper in an inn near by, and a fair attempt
at a fire in our parlor. I sat before it, and kept it as lively as
possible, as the hours wore away, and tried to make believe that I
was ruminating on the ancient greatness of Bologna and its famous
university, some of whose chairs had been occupied by women, and upon
the fact that it was on a little island in the Reno, just below here,
that Octavius and Lepidus and Mark Antony formed the second
Triumvirate, which put an end to what little liberty Rome had left;
but in reality I was thinking of the draught on my back, and the
comforts of a sunny clime. But the time came at length for starting;
and in luxurious cars we finished the night very comfortably, and
rode into Florence at eight in the morning to find, as we had hoped,
on the other side of the Apennines, a sunny sky and balmy air.

As this is strictly a chapter of travel and weather, I may not stop
to say how impressive and beautiful Florence seemed to us; how
bewildering in art treasures, which one sees at a glance in the
streets; or scarcely to hint how lovely were the Boboli Gardens
behind the Pitti Palace, the roses, geraniums etc, in bloom, the
birds singing, and all in a soft, dreamy air. The next day was not
so genial; and we sped on, following our original intention of
seeking the summer in winter. In order to avoid trouble with baggage
and passports in Rome, we determined to book through for Naples,
making the trip in about twenty hours. We started at nine o'clock in
the evening, and I do not recall a more thoroughly uncomfortable
journey. It grew colder as the night wore on, and we went farther
south. Late in the morning we were landed at the station outside of
Rome. There was a general appearance of ruin and desolation. The
wind blew fiercely from the hills, and the snowflakes from the flying
clouds added to the general chilliness. There was no chance to get
even a cup of coffee, and we waited an hour in the cold car. If I
had not been so half frozen, the consciousness that I was actually on
the outskirts of the Eternal City, that I saw the Campagna and the
aqueducts, that yonder were the Alban Hills, and that every foot of
soil on which I looked was saturated with history, would have excited
me. The sun came out here and there as we went south, and we caught
some exquisite lights on the near and snowy hills; and there was
something almost homelike in the miles and miles of olive orchards,
that recalled the apple-trees, but for their shining silvered leaves.
And yet nothing could be more desolate than the brown marshy ground,
the brown hillocks, with now and then a shabby stone hut or a bit of
ruin, and the flocks of sheep shivering near their corrals, and their
shepherd, clad in sheepskin, as his ancestor was in the time of
Romulus, leaning on his staff, with his back to the wind. Now and
then a white town perched on a hillside, its houses piled above each
other, relieved the eye; and I could imagine that it might be all the
poets have sung of it, in the spring, though the Latin poets, I am
convinced, have wonderfully imposed upon us.

To make my long story short, it happened to be colder next morning at
Naples than it was in Germany. The sun shone; but the northeast
wind, which the natives poetically call the Tramontane, was blowing,
and the white smoke of Vesuvius rolled towards the sea. It would
only last three days, it was very unusual, and all that. The next
day it was colder, and the next colder yet. Snow fell, and blew
about unmelted: I saw it in the streets of Pompeii.

The fountains were frozen, icicles hung from the locks of the marble
statues in the Chiaia. And yet the oranges glowed like gold among
their green leaves; the roses, the heliotrope, the geraniums, bloomed
in all the gardens. It is the most contradictory climate. We
lunched one day, sitting in our open carriage in a lemon grove, and
near at hand the Lucrine Lake was half frozen over. We feasted our
eyes on the brilliant light and color on the sea, and the lovely
outlined mountains round the shore, and waited for a change of wind.
The Neapolitans declare that they have not had such weather in twenty
years. It is scarcely one's ideal of balmy Italy.

Before the weather changed, I began to feel in this great Naples,
with its roaring population of over half a million, very much like
the sailor I saw at the American consul's, who applied for help to be
sent home, claiming to be an American. He was an oratorical bummer,
and told his story with all the dignity and elevated language of an
old Roman. He had been cast away in London. How cast away? Oh! it
was all along of a boarding-house. And then he found himself shipped
on an English vessel, and he had lost his discharge-papers; and
"Listen, your honor," said he, calmly extending his right hand, "here
I am cast away on this desolate island with nothing before me but
wind and weather."

RAVENNA

A DEAD CITY

Ravenna is so remote from the route of general travel in Italy, that
I am certain you can have no late news from there, nor can I bring
you anything much later than the sixth century. Yet, if you were to
see Ravenna, you would say that that is late enough. I am surprised
that a city which contains the most interesting early Christian
churches and mosaics, is the richest in undisturbed specimens of
early Christian art, and contains the only monuments of Roman
emperors still in their original positions, should be so seldom
visited. Ravenna has been dead for some centuries; and because
nobody has cared to bury it, its ancient monuments are yet above
ground. Grass grows in its wide streets, and its houses stand in a
sleepy, vacant contemplation of each other: the wind must like to
mourn about its silent squares. The waves of the Adriatic once
brought the commerce of the East to its wharves; but the deposits of
the Po and the tides have, in process of time, made it an inland
town, and the sea is four miles away.

In the time of Augustus, Ravenna was a favorite Roman port and harbor
for fleets of war and merchandise. There Theodoric, the great king
of the Goths, set up his palace, and there is his enormous mausoleum.
As early as A. D. 44 it became an episcopal see, with St.
Apollinaris, a disciple of St. Peter, for its bishop. There some of
the later Roman emperors fixed their residences, and there they
repose. In and about it revolved the adventurous life of Galla
Placidia, a woman of considerable talent and no principle, the
daughter of Theodosius (the great Theodosius, who subdued the Arian
heresy, the first emperor baptized in the true faith of the Trinity,
the last who had a spark of genius), the sister of one emperor, and
the mother of another,--twice a slave, once a queen, and once an
empress; and she, too, rests there in the great mausoleum builded for
her. There, also, lies Dante, in his tomb "by the upbraiding shore;"
rejected once of ungrateful Florence, and forever after passionately
longed for. There, in one of the earliest Christian churches in
existence, are the fine mosaics of the Emperor Justinian and
Theodora, the handsome courtesan whom he raised to the dignity and
luxury of an empress on his throne in Constantinople. There is the
famous forest of pines, stretching--unbroken twenty miles down the
coast to Rimini, in whose cool and breezy glades Dante and Boccaccio
walked and meditated, which Dryden has commemorated, and Byron has
invested with the fascination of his genius; and under the whispering
boughs of which moved the glittering cavalcade which fetched the
bride to Rimini,--the fair Francesca, whose sinful confession Dante
heard in hell.

We went down to Ravenna from Bologna one afternoon, through a country
level and rich, riding along toward hazy evening, the land getting
flatter as we proceeded (you know, there is a difference between
level and flat), through interminable mulberry-trees and vines, and
fields with the tender green of spring, with church spires in the
rosy horizon; on till the meadows became marshes, in which millions
of frogs sang the overture of the opening year. Our arrival, I have
reason to believe, was an event in the old town. We had a crowd of
moldy loafers to witness it at the station, not one of whom had
ambition enough to work to earn a sou by lifting our traveling-bags.
We had our hotel to ourselves, and wished that anybody else had it.
The rival house was quite aware of our advent, and watched us with
jealous eyes; and we, in turn, looked wistfully at it, for our own
food was so scarce that, as an old traveler says, we feared that we
shouldn't have enough, until we saw it on the table, when its quality
made it appear too much. The next morning, when I sallied out to hire
a conveyance, I was an object of interest to the entire population,
who seemed to think it very odd that any one should walk about and
explore the quiet streets. If I were to describe Ravenna, I should
say that it is as flat as Holland and as lively as New London. There
are broad streets, with high houses, that once were handsome, palaces
that were once the abode of luxury, gardens that still bloom, and
churches by the score. It is an open gate through which one walks
unchallenged into the past, with little to break the association with
the early Christian ages, their monuments undimmed by time, untouched
by restoration and innovation, the whole struck with ecclesiastical
death. With all that we saw that day,--churches, basilicas, mosaics,
statues, mausoleums,--I will not burden these pages; but I will set
down   is enough to give you the local color, and to recall some
of the most interesting passages in Christian history in this
out-of-the-way city on the Adriatic.

Our first pilgrimage was to the Church of St. Apollinare Nuova; but
why it is called new I do not know, as Theodoric built it for an
Arian cathedral in about the year 500. It is a noble interior,
having twenty-four marble columns of gray Cippolino, brought from
Constantinople, with composite capitals, on each of which is an
impost with Latin crosses sculptured on it. These columns support
round arches, which divide the nave from the aisles, and on the whole
length of the wall of the nave so supported are superb mosaics,
full-length figures, in colors as fresh as if done yesterday, though
they were executed thirteen hundred years ago. The mosaic on the
left side--which is, perhaps, the finest one of the period in
existence--is interesting on another account. It represents the city
of Classis, with sea and ships, and a long procession of twenty-two
virgins presenting offerings to the Virgin and Child, seated on a
throne. The Virgin is surrounded by angels, and has a glory round
her head, which shows that homage is being paid to her. It has been
supposed, from the early monuments of Christian art, that the worship
of the Virgin is of comparatively recent origin; but this mosaic
would go to show that Mariolatry was established before the end of
the sixth century. Near this church is part of the front of the
palace of Theodoric, in which the Exarchs and Lombard kings
subsequently resided. Its treasures and marbles Charlemagne carried
off to Germany.

DOWN TO THE PINETA

We drove three miles beyond the city, to the Church of St. Apollinare
in Classe, a lonely edifice in a waste of marsh, a grand old
basilica, a purer specimen of Christian art than Rome or any other
Italian town can boast. Just outside the city gate stands a Greek
cross on a small fluted column, which marks the site of the once
magnificent Basilica of St. Laurentius, which was demolished in the
sixteenth century, its stone built into a new church in town, and its
rich marbles carried to all-absorbing Rome. It was the last relic of
the old port of Caesarea, famous since the time of Augustus. A
marble column on a green meadow is all that remains of a once
prosperous city. Our road lay through the marshy plain, across an
elevated bridge over the sluggish united stream of the Ronco and
Montone, from which there is a wide view, including the Pineta (or
Pine Forest), the Church of St. Apollinare in the midst of
rice-fields and marshes, and on a clear day the Alps and Apennines.

I can imagine nothing more desolate than this solitary church, or the
approach to it. Laborers were busy spading up the heavy, wet ground,
or digging trenches, which instantly filled with water, for the whole
country was afloat. The frogs greeted us with clamorous chorus out
of their slimy pools, and the mosquitoes attacked us as we rode
along. I noticed about on the bogs, wherever they could find
standing-room, half-naked wretches, with long spears, having several
prongs like tridents, which they thrust into the grass and shallow
water. Calling one of them to us, we found that his business was
fishing, and that he forked out very fat and edible-looking fish with
his trident. Shaggy, undersized horses were wading in the water,
nipping off the thin spears of grass. Close to the church is a
rickety farmhouse. If I lived there, I would as lief be a fish as a
horse.

The interior of this primitive old basilica is lofty and imposing,
with twenty-four handsome columns of the gray Cippolino marble, and
an elevated high altar and tribune, decorated with splendid mosaics
of the sixth century,--biblical subjects, in all the stiff
faithfulness of the holy old times. The marble floor is green and
damp and slippery. Under the tribune is the crypt, where the body of
St. Apollinaris used to lie (it is now under the high altar above);
and as I desired to see where he used to rest, I walked in. I also
walked into about six inches of water, in the dim, irreligious light;
and so made a cold-water Baptist devotee of myself. In the side
aisles are wonderful old sarcophagi, containing the ashes of
archbishops of Ravenna, so old that the owners' names are forgotten
of two of them, which shows that a man may build a tomb more enduring
than his memory. The sculptured bas-reliefs are very interesting,
being early Christian emblems and curious devices,--symbols of sheep,
palms, peacocks, crosses, and the four rivers of Paradise flowing
down in stony streams from stony sources, and monograms, and pious
rebuses. At the entrance of the crypt is an open stone book, called
the Breviary of Gregory the Great. Detached from the church is the
Bell Tower, a circular campanile of a sort peculiar to Ravenna, which
adds to the picturesqueness of the pile, and suggests the notion that
it is a mast unshipped from its vessel, the church, which
consequently stands there water-logged, with no power to catch any
wind, of doctrine or other, and move. I forgot to say that the
basilica was launched in the year 534.

A little weary with the good but damp old Christians, we ordered our
driver to continue across the marsh to the Pineta, whose dark fringe
bounded all our horizon toward the Adriatic. It is the largest
unbroken forest in Italy, and by all odds the most poetic in itself
and its associations. It is twenty-five miles long, and from one to
three in breadth, a free growth of stately pines, whose boughs are
full of music and sweet odors,--a succession of lovely glades and
avenues, with miles and miles of drives over the springy turf. At
the point where we entered is a farmhouse. Laborers had been
gathering the cones, which were heaped up in immense windrows,
hundreds of feet in length. Boys and men were busy pounding out the
seeds from the cones. The latter are used for fuel, and the former
are pressed for their oil. They are also eaten: we have often had
them served at hotel tables, and found them rather tasteless, but not
unpleasant. The turf, as we drove into the recesses of the forest,
was thickly covered with wild flowers, of many colors and delicate
forms; but we liked best the violets, for they reminded us of home,
though the driver seemed to think them less valuable than the seeds
of the pine-cones. A lovely day and history and romance united to
fascinate us with the place. We were driving over the spot where,
eighteen centuries ago, the Roman fleet used to ride at anchor.
Here, it is certain, the gloomy spirit of Dante found congenial place
for meditation, and the gay Boccaccio material for fiction. Here for
hours, day after day, Byron used to gallop his horse, giving vent to
that restless impatience which could not all escape from his fiery
pen, hearing those voices of a past and dead Italy which he, more
truthfully and pathetically than any other poet, has put into living
verse. The driver pointed out what is called Byron's Path, where he
was wont to ride. Everybody here, indeed, knows of Byron; and I
think his memory is more secure than any saint of them all in their
stone boxes, partly because his poetry has celebrated the region,
perhaps rather from the perpetuated tradition of his generosity. No
foreigner was ever so popular as he while he lived at Ravenna. At
least, the people say so now, since they find it so profitable to
keep his memory alive and to point out his haunts. The Italians, to
be sure, know how to make capital out of poets and heroes, and are
quick to learn the curiosity of foreigners, and to gratify it for a
compensation. But the evident esteem in which Byron's memory is held
in the Armenian monastery of St. Lazzaro, at Venice, must be
otherwise accounted for. The monks keep his library-room and table
as they were when he wrote there, and like to show his portrait, and
tell of his quick mastery of the difficult Armenian tongue. We have
a notable example of a Person who became a monk when he was sick; but
Byron accomplished too much work during the few months he was on the
Island of St. Lazzaro, both in original composition and in
translating English into Armenian, for one physically ruined and
broken.

DANTE AND BYRON

The pilgrim to Ravenna, who has any idea of what is due to the genius
of Dante, will be disappointed when he approaches his tomb. Its
situation is in a not very conspicuous corner, at the foot of a
narrow street, bearing the poet's name, and beside the Church of San
Francisco, which is interesting as containing the tombs of the
Polenta family, whose hospitality to the wandering exile has rescued
their names from oblivion. Opposite the tomb is the shabby old brick
house of the Polentas, where Dante passed many years of his life. It
is tenanted now by all sorts of people, and a dirty carriage-shop in
the courtyard kills the poetry of it. Dante died in 1321, and was at
first buried in the neighboring church; but this tomb, since twice
renewed, was erected, and his body removed here, in 1482. It is a
square stuccoed structure, stained light green, and covered by a
dome,--a tasteless monument, embellished with stucco medallions,
inside, of the poet, of Virgil, of Brunetto Latini, the poet's
master, and of his patron, Guido da Polenta. On the sarcophagus is
the epitaph, composed in Latin by Dante himself, who seems to have
thought, with Shakespeare, that for a poet to make his own epitaph
was the safest thing to do. Notwithstanding the mean appearance of
this sepulcher, there is none in all the soil of Italy that the
traveler from America will visit with deeper interest. Near by is
the house where Byron first resided in Ravenna, as a tablet records.

The people here preserve all the memorials of Byron; and, I should
judge, hold his memory in something like affection. The Palace
Guiccioli, in which he subsequently resided, is in another part of
the town. He spent over two years in Ravenna, and said he preferred
it to any place in Italy. Why I cannot see, unless it was remote
from the route of travel, and the desolation of it was congenial to
him. Doubtless he loved these wide, marshy expanses on the Adriatic,
and especially the great forest of pines on its shore; but Byron was
apt to be governed in his choice of a residence by the woman with
whom he was intimate. The palace was certainly pleasanter than his
gloomy house in the Strada di Porta Sisi, and the society of the
Countess Guiccioli was rather a stimulus than otherwise to his
literary activity. At her suggestion he wrote the "Prophecy of
Dante;" and the translation of "Francesca da Rimini" was "executed at
Ravenna, where, five centuries before, and in the very house in which
the unfortunate lady was born, Dante's poem had been composed." Some
of his finest poems were also produced here, poems for which Venice
is as grateful as Ravenna. Here he wrote "Marino Faliero," "The Two
Foscari," "Morganti Maggiore," "Sardanapalus," "The Blues," "The
fifth canto of Don Juan," "Cain," "Heaven and Earth," and "The
Vision of Judgment." I looked in at the court of the palace,--a
pleasant, quiet place,--where he used to work, and tried to guess
which were the windows of his apartments. The sun was shining
brightly, and a bird was singing in the court; but there was no other
sign of life, nor anything to remind one of the profligate genius who
was so long a guest here.

RESTING-PLACE OF CAESARS--PICTURE OF A BEAUTIFUL HERETIC

Very different from the tomb of Dante, and different in the
associations it awakes, is the Rotunda or Mausoleum of Theodoric the
Goth, outside the Porta Serrata, whose daughter, Amalasuntha, as it
is supposed, about the year 530, erected this imposing structure as a
certain place "to keep his memory whole and mummy hid" for ever. But
the Goth had not lain in it long before Arianism went out of fashion
quite, and the zealous Roman Catholics despoiled his costly
sleeping-place, and scattered his ashes abroad. I do not know that
any dead person has lived in it since. The tomb is still a very
solid affair,--a rotunda built of solid blocks of limestone, and
resting on a ten-sided base, each side having a recess surmounted by
an arch. The upper story is also decagonal, and is reached by a
flight of modern stone steps. The roof is composed of a single block
of Istrian limestone, scooped out like a shallow bowl inside; and,
being the biggest roof-stone I ever saw, I will give you the
dimensions. It is thirty-six feet in diameter, hollowed out to the
depth of ten feet, four feet thick at the center, and two feet nine
inches at the edges, and is estimated to weigh two hundred tons.
Amalasuntha must have had help in getting it up there. The lower
story is partly under water. The green grass of the inclosure in
which it stands is damp enough for frogs. An old woman opened the
iron gate to let us in. Whether she was any relation of the ancient
proprietor, I did not inquire; but she had so much trouble in,
turning the key in the rusty lock, and letting us in, that I presume
we were the only visitors she has had for some centuries.

Old women abound in Ravenna; at least, she was not young who showed
us the mausoleum of Galla Placidia. Placidia was also prudent and
foreseeing, and built this once magnificent sepulcher for her own
occupation. It is in the form of a Latin cross, forty-six feet in
length by about forty in width. The floor is paved with rich
marbles; the cupola is covered with mosaics of the time of the
empress; and in the arch over the door is a fine representation of
the Good Shepherd. Behind the altar is the massive sarcophagus of
marble (its cover of silver plates was long ago torn off) in which
are literally the ashes of the empress. She was immured in it as a
mummy, in a sitting position, clothed in imperial robes; and there
the ghastly corpse sat in a cypress-wood chair, to be looked at by
anybody who chose to peep through the aperture, for more than eleven
hundred years, till one day, in 1577, some children introduced a
lighted candle, perhaps out of compassion for her who sat so long in
darkness, when her clothes caught fire, and she was burned up,--a
warning to all children not to play with a dead and dry empress. In
this resting-place are also the tombs of Honorius II., her brother,
of Constantius III., her second husband, and of Honoria, her
daughter.

There are no other undisturbed tombs of the Caesars in existence.
Hers is almost the last, and the very small last, of a great
succession. What thoughts of a great empire in ruins do not force
themselves on one in the confined walls of this little chamber!
What a woman was she whose ashes lie there! She saw and aided the
ruin of the empire; but it may be said of her, that her vices were
greater than her misfortunes. And what a story is her life! Born to
the purple, educated in the palace at Constantinople, accomplished
but not handsome, at the age of twenty she was in Rome when Alaric
besieged it. Carried off captive by the Goths, she became the not
unwilling object of the passion of King Adolphus, who at length
married her at Narbonne. At the nuptials the king, in a Roman habit,
occupied a seat lower than hers, while she sat on a throne habited as
a Roman empress, and received homage. Fifty handsome youths bore to
her in each hand a dish of gold, one filled with coin, and the other
with precious stones,--a small part only, these hundred vessels of
treasure, of the spoils the Goths brought from her country. When
Adolphus, who never abated his fondness for his Roman bride, was
assassinated at Barcelona, she was treated like a slave by his
assassins, and driven twelve miles on foot before the horse of his
murderer. Ransomed at length for six hundred thousand measures of
wheat by her brother Honorius, who handed her over struggling to
Constantius, one of his generals. But, once married, her reluctance
ceased; and she set herself to advance the interests of herself and
husband, ruling him as she had done the first one. Her purpose was
accomplished when he was declared joint emperor with Honorius. He
died shortly after; and scandalous stories of her intimacy with her
brother caused her removal to Constantinople; but she came back
again, and reigned long as the regent of her son, Valentinian III.,
--a feeble youth, who never grew to have either passions or talents,
and was very likely, as was said, enervated by his mother in
dissolute indulgence, so that she might be supreme. But she died at
Rome in 450, much praised for her orthodoxy and her devotion to the
Trinity. And there was her daughter, Honoria, who ran off with a
chamberlain, and afterward offered to throw herself into the arms of
Attila who wouldn't take her as a gift at first, but afterward
demanded her, and fought to win her and her supposed inheritance.
But they were a bad lot altogether; and it is no credit to a
Christian of the nineteenth century to stay in this tomb so long.

Near this mausoleum is the magnificent Basilica of St. Vitale, built
in the reign of Justinian, and consecrated in 547, I was interested
to see it because it was erected in confessed imitation of St. Sophia
at Constantinople, is in the octagonal form, and has all the
accessories of Eastern splendor, according to the architectural
authorities. Its effect is really rich and splendid; and it rather
dazzled us with its maze of pillars, its upper and lower columns, its
galleries, complicated capitals, arches on arches, and Byzantine
intricacies. To the student of the very early ecclesiastical art, it
must be an object of more interest than even of wonder. But what I
cared most to see were the mosaics in the choir, executed in the time
of Justinian, and as fresh and beautiful as on the day they were
made. The mosaics and the exquisite arabesques on the roof of the
choir, taken together, are certainly unequaled by any other early
church decoration I have seen; and they are as interesting as they
are beautiful. Any description of them is impossible; but mention
may be made of two characteristic groups, remarkable for execution,
and having yet a deeper interest.

In one compartment of the tribune is the figure of the Emperor
Justinian, holding a vase with consecrated offerings, and surrounded
by courtiers and soldiers. Opposite is the figure of the Empress
Theodora, holding a similar vase, and attended by ladies of her
court. There is a refinement and an elegance about the empress, a
grace and sweet dignity, that is fascinating. This is royalty,
--stately and cold perhaps: even the mouth may be a little cruel, I
begin to perceive, as I think of her; but she wears the purple by
divine right. I have not seen on any walls any figure walking out of
history so captivating as this lady, who would seem to have been
worthy of apotheosis in a Christian edifice. Can there be any doubt
that this lovely woman was orthodox? She, also, has a story, which
you doubtless have been recalling as you read. Is it worth while to
repeat even its outlines? This charming regal woman was the daughter
of the keeper of the bears in the circus at Constantinople; and she
early went upon the stage as a pantomimist and buffoon. She was
beautiful, with regular features, a little pale, but with a tinge of
natural color, vivacious eyes, and an easy motion that displayed to
advantage the graces of her small but elegant figure. I can see all
that in the mosaic. But she sold her charms to whoever cared to buy
them in Constantinople; she led a life of dissipation that cannot be
even hinted at in these days; she went off to Egypt as the concubine
of a general; was deserted, and destitute even to misery in Cairo;
wandered about a vagabond in many Eastern cities, and won the
reputation everywhere of the most beautiful courtesan of her time;
reappeared in Constantinople; and, having, it is said, a vision of
her future, suddenly took to a pretension of virtue and plain sewing;
contrived to gain the notice of Justinian, to inflame his passions as
she did those of all the world besides, to captivate him into first
an alliance, and at length a marriage. The emperor raised her to an
equal seat with himself on his throne; and she was worshiped as
empress in that city where she had been admired as harlot. And on
the throne she was a wise woman, courageous and chaste; and had her
palaces on the Bosphorus; and took good care of her beauty, and
indulged in the pleasures of a good table; had ministers who kissed
her feet; a crowd of women and eunuchs in her secret chambers, whose
passions she indulged; was avaricious and sometimes cruel; and
founded a convent for the irreclaimably bad of her own sex, some of
whom liked it, and some of whom threw themselves into the sea in
despair; and when she died was an irreparable loss to her emperor.
So that it seems to me it is a pity that the historian should say
that she was devout, but a little heretic.

A HIGH DAY IN ROME

PALM SUNDAY IN ST. PETER'S

The splendid and tiresome ceremonies of Holy Week set in; also the
rain, which held up for two days. Rome without the sun, and with
rain and the bone-penetrating damp cold of the season, is a wretched
place. Squalor and ruins and cheap splendor need the sun; the
galleries need it; the black old masters in the dark corners of the
gaudy churches need it; I think scarcely anything of a cardinal's
big, blazing footman, unless the sun shines on him, and radiates from
his broad back and his splendid calves; the models, who get up in
theatrical costumes, and get put into pictures, and pass the world
over for Roman peasants (and beautiful many of them are), can't sit
on the Spanish Stairs in indolent pose when it rains; the streets are
slimy and horrible; the carriages try to run over you, and stand a
very good chance of succeeding, where there are no sidewalks, and you
are limping along on the slippery round cobble-stones; you can't get
into the country, which is the best part of Rome: but when the sun
shines all this is changed; the dear old dirty town exercises, its
fascinations on you then, and you speedily forget your recent misery.

Holy Week is a vexation to most people. All the world crowds here to
see its exhibitions and theatrical shows, and works hard to catch a
glimpse of them, and is tired out, if not disgusted, at the end. The
things to see and hear are Palm Sunday in St. Peter's; singing of the
Miserere by the pope's choir on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday in
the Sistine Chapel; washing of the pilgrims' feet in a chapel of St.
Peter's, and serving the apostles at table by the pope on Thursday,
with a papal benediction from the balcony afterwards; Easter Sunday,
with the illumination of St. Peter's in the evening; and fireworks
(this year in front of St. Peter's in Montorio) Monday evening.
Raised seats are built up about the high altar under the dome in St.
Peter's, which will accommodate a thousand, and perhaps more, ladies;
and for these tickets are issued without numbers, and for twice as
many as they will seat. Gentlemen who are in evening dress are
admitted to stand in the reserved places inside the lines of
soldiers. For the Miserere in the Sistine Chapel tickets are also
issued. As there is only room for about four hundred ladies, and a
thousand and more tickets are given out, you may imagine the
scramble. Ladies go for hours before the singing begins, and make a
grand rush when the doors are open. I do not know any sight so
unseemly and cruel as a crowd of women intent on getting in to such a
ceremony: they are perfectly rude and unmerciful to each other. They
push and trample one another under foot; veils and dresses are torn;
ladies faint away in the scrimmage, and only the strongest and most
unscrupulous get in. I have heard some say, who have been in the
pellmell, that, not content with elbowing and pushing and pounding,
some women even stick pins into those who are in the way. I hope
this latter is not true; but it is certain that the conduct of most
of the women is brutal. A weak or modest or timid woman stands no
more chance than she would in a herd of infuriated Campagna cattle.
The same scenes are enacted in the efforts to see the pope wash feet,
and serve at the table. For the possession of the seats under the
dome on Palm Sunday and Easter there is a like crush. The ceremonies
do not begin until half-past nine; but ladies go between five and six
o'clock in the morning, and when the passages are open they make a
grand rush. The seats, except those saved for the nobility, are soon
all taken, and the ladies who come after seven are lucky if they can
get within the charmed circle, and find a spot to sit down on a
campstool. They can then see only a part of the proceedings, and
have a weary, exhausting time of it for hours. This year Rome is
more crowded than ever before. There are American ladies enough to
fill all the reserved places; and I fear they are energetic enough to
get their share of them.

It rained Sunday; but there was a steady stream of people and
carriages all the morning pouring over the Bridge of St. Angelo, and
discharging into the piazza of St. Peter's. It was after nine when I
arrived on the ground. There was a crowd of carriages under the
colonnades, and a heavy fringe in front of them; but the hundreds of
people moving over the piazza, and up the steps to the entrances,
made only the impression of dozens in the vast space. I do not know
if there are people enough in Rome to fill St. Peter's; certainly
there was no appearance of a crowd as we entered, although they had
been pouring in all the morning, and still thronged the doors. I
heard a traveler say that he followed ten thousand soldiers into the
church, and then lost them from sight: they disappeared in the side
chapels. He did not make his affidavit as to the number of soldiers.
The interior area of the building is not much greater than the square
of St. Mark in Venice. To go into the great edifice is almost like
going outdoors. Lines of soldiers kept a wide passage clear from the
front door away down to the high altar; and there was a good mass of
spectators on the outside. The tribunes for the ladies, built up
under the dome, were of course, filled with masses of ladies in
solemn black; and there was more or less of a press of people surging
about in that vicinity. Thousands of people were also roaming about
in the great spaces of the edifice; but there was nowhere else
anything like a crowd. It had very much the appearance of a large
fair-ground, with little crowds about favorite booths. Gentlemen in
dress-coats were admitted to the circle under the dome. The pope's
choir was stationed in a gallery there opposite the high altar. Back
of the altar was a wide space for the dignitaries; seats were there,
also, for ambassadors and those born to the purple; and the pope's
seat was on a raised dais at the end. Outsiders could see nothing of
what went on within there; and the ladies under the dome could only
partially see, in the seats they had fought so gallantly to obtain.

St. Peter's is a good place for grand processions and ceremonies; but
it is a poor one for viewing them. A procession which moves down the
nave is hidden by the soldiers who stand on either side, or is
visible only by sections as it passes: there is no good place to get
the grand effect of the masses of color, and the total of the
gorgeous pageantry. I should like to see the display upon a grand
stage, and enjoy it in a coup d'oeil. It is a fine study of color
and effect, and the groupings are admirable; but the whole affair is
nearly lost to the mass of spectators. It must be a sublime feeling
to one in the procession to walk about in such monstrous fine
clothes; but what would his emotions be if more people could see him!
The grand altar stuck up under the dome not only breaks the effect of
what would be the fine sweep of the nave back to the apse, but it
cuts off all view of the celebration of the mass behind it, and, in
effect, reduces what should be the great point of display in the
church to a mere chapel. And when you add to that the temporary
tribunes erected under the dome for seating the ladies, the entire
nave is shut off from a view of the gorgeous ceremony of high mass.
The effect would be incomparable if one could stand in the door, or
anywhere in the nave, and, as in other churches, look down to the end
upon a great platform, with the high altar and all the sublime
spectacle in full view, with the blaze of candles and the clouds of
incense rising in the distance.

At half-past nine the great doors opened, and the procession began,
in slow and stately moving fashion, to enter. One saw a throng of
ecclesiastics in robes and ermine; the white plumes of the Guard
Noble; the pages and chamberlains in scarlet; other pages, or what
not, in black short-clothes, short swords, gold chains, cloak hanging
from the shoulder, and stiff white ruffs; thirty-six cardinals in
violet robes, with high miter-shaped white silk hats, that looked not
unlike the pasteboard "trainer-caps" that boys wear when they play
soldier; crucifixes, and a blazoned banner here and there; and, at
last, the pope, in his red chair, borne on the shoulders of red
lackeys, heaving along in a sea-sicky motion, clad in scarlet and
gold, with a silver miter on his head, feebly making the papal
benediction with two upraised fingers, and moving his lips in
blessing. As the pope came in, a supplementary choir of men and
soprano hybrids, stationed near the door, set up a high, welcoming
song, or chant, which echoed rather finely through the building. All
the music of the day is vocal.

The procession having reached its destination, and disappeared behind
the altar of the dome, the pope dismounted, and took his seat on his
throne. The blessing of the palms began, the cardinals first
approaching, and afterwards the members of the diplomatic corps, the
archbishops and bishops, the heads of the religious orders, and such
private persons as have had permission to do so. I had previously
seen the palms carried in by servants in great baskets. It is,
perhaps, not necessary to say that they are not the poetical green
waving palms, but stiff sort of wands, woven out of dry, yellow,
split palm-leaves, sometimes four or five feet in length, braided
into the semblance of a crown on top,--a kind of rough basket-work.
The palms having been blessed, a procession was again formed down the
nave and out the door, all in it "carrying palms in their hands," the
yellow color of which added a new element of picturesqueness to the
splendid pageant. The pope was carried as before, and bore in his
hand a short braided palm, with gold woven in, flowers added, and the
monogram "I. H. S." worked in the top. It is the pope's custom to
give this away when the ceremony is over. Last year he presented it
to an American lady, whose devotion attracted him; this year I saw it
go away in a gilded coach in the hands of an ecclesiastic. The
procession disappeared through the great portal into the vestibule,
and the door closed. In a moment somebody knocked three times on the
door: it opened, and the procession returned, and moved again to the
rear of the altar, the singers marching with it and chanting. The
cardinals then changed their violet for scarlet robes; and high mass,
for an hour, was celebrated by a cardinal priest: and I was told that
it was the pope's voice that we heard, high and clear, singing the
passion. The choir made the responses, and performed at intervals.
The singing was not without a certain power; indeed, it was marvelous
how some of the voices really filled the vast spaces of the edifice,
and the choruses rolled in solemn waves of sound through the arches.
The singing, with the male sopranos, is not to my taste; but it
cannot be denied that it had a wild and strange effect.

While this was going on behind the altar, the people outside were
wandering about, looking at each other, and on the watch not to miss
any of the shows of the day. People were talking, chattering, and
greeting each other as they might do in the street. Here and there
somebody was kneeling on the pavement, unheeding the passing throng.
At several of the chapels, services were being conducted; and there
was a large congregation, an ordinary church full, about each of
them. But the most of those present seemed to regard it as a
spectacle only; and as a display of dress, costumes, and
nationalities it was almost unsurpassed. There are few more
wonderful sights in this world than an Englishwoman in what she
considers full dress. An English dandy is also a pleasing object.
For my part, as I have hinted, I like almost as well as anything the
big footmen,--those in scarlet breeches and blue gold-embroidered
coats. I stood in front of one of the fine creations for some time,
and contemplated him as one does the Farnese Hercules. One likes to
see to what a splendor his species can come, even if the brains have
all run down into the calves of the legs. There were also the pages,
the officers of the pope's household, in costumes of the Middle Ages;
the pope's Swiss guard in the showy harlequin uniform designed by
Michael Angelo; the foot-soldiers in white short-clothes, which
threatened to burst, and let them fly into pieces; there were fine
ladies and gentlemen, loafers and loungers, from every civilized
country, jabbering in all the languages; there were beggars in rags,
and boors in coats so patched that there was probably none of the
original material left; there were groups of peasants from the
Campagna, the men in short jackets and sheepskin breeches with the
wool side out, the women with gay-colored folded cloths on their
heads, and coarse woolen gowns; a squad of wild-looking Spanish
gypsies, burning-eyed, olive-skinned, hair long, black, crinkled, and
greasy, as wild in raiment as in face; priests and friars, Zouaves in
jaunty light gray and scarlet; rags and velvets, silks and serge
cloths,--a cosmopolitan gathering poured into the world's great place
of meeting,--a fine religious Vanity Fair on Sunday.

There came an impressive moment in all this confusion, a point of
august solemnity. Up to that instant, what with chanting and singing
the many services, and the noise of talking and walking, there was a
wild babel. But at the stroke of the bell and the elevation of the
Host, down went the muskets of the guard with one clang on the
marble; the soldiers kneeled; the multitude in the nave, in the
aisles, at all the chapels, kneeled; and for a minute in that vast
edifice there was perfect stillness: if the whole great concourse had
been swept from the earth, the spot where it lately was could not
have been more silent. And then the military order went down the
line, the soldiers rose, the crowd rose, and the mass and the hum
went on.

It was all over before one; and the pope was borne out again, and the
vast crowd began to discharge itself. But it was a long time before
the carriages were all filled and rolled off. I stood for a half
hour watching the stream go by,--the pompous soldiers, the peasants
and citizens, the dazzling equipages, and jaded, exhausted women in
black, who had sat or stood half a day under the dome, and could get
no carriage; and the great state coaches of the cardinals, swinging
high in the air, painted and gilded, with three noble footmen hanging
on behind each, and a cardinal's broad face in the window.

VESUVIUS

CLIMBING A VOLCANO

Everybody who comes to Naples,--that is, everybody except the lady
who fell from her horse the other day at Resina and injured her
shoulder, as she was mounting for the ascent,--everybody, I say, goes
up Vesuvius, and nearly every one writes impressions and descriptions
of the performance. If you believe the tales of travelers, it is an
undertaking of great hazard, an experience of frightful emotions.
How unsafe it is, especially for ladies, I heard twenty times in
Naples before I had been there a day. Why, there was a lady thrown
from her horse and nearly killed, only a week ago; and she still lay
ill at the next hotel, a witness of the truth of the story. I
imagined her plunged down a precipice of lava, or pitched over the
lip of the crater, and only rescued by the devotion of a gallant
guide, who threatened to let go of her if she didn't pay him twenty
francs instantly. This story, which will live and grow for years in
this region, a waxing and never-waning peril of the volcano, I found,
subsequently, had the foundation I have mentioned above. The lady
did go to Resina in order to make the ascent of Vesuvius, mounted a
horse there, fell off, being utterly unhorsewomanly, and hurt
herself; but her injury had no more to do with Vesuvius than it had
with the entrance of Victor Emanuel into Naples, which took place a
couple of weeks after. Well, as I was saying, it is the fashion to
write descriptions of Vesuvius; and you might as well have mine,
which I shall give to you in rough outline.

There came a day when the Tramontane ceased to blow down on us the
cold air of the snowy Apennines, and the white cap of Vesuvius, which
is, by the way, worn generally like the caps of the Neapolitans,
drifted inland instead of toward the sea. Warmer weather had come to
make the bright sunshine no longer a mockery. For some days I had
been getting the gauge of the mountain. With its white plume it is a
constant quantity in the landscape: one sees it from every point of
view; and we had been scarcely anywhere that volcanic remains, or
signs of such action,--a thin crust shaking under our feet, as at
Solfatara, where blasts of sulphurous steam drove in our faces,--did
not remind us that the whole ground is uncertain, and undermined by
the subterranean fires that have Vesuvius for a chimney. All the
coast of the bay, within recent historic periods, in different spots
at different times, has risen and sunk and risen again, in simple
obedience to the pulsations of the great fiery monster below. It
puffs up or sinks, like the crust of a baking apple-pie. This region
is evidently not done; and I think it not unlikely it may have to be
turned over again before it is. We had seen where Herculaneum lies
under the lava and under the town of Resina; we had walked those
clean and narrow streets of Pompeii, and seen the workmen picking
away at the imbedded gravel, sand, and ashes which still cover nearly
two thirds of the nice little, tight little Roman city; we had looked
at the black gashes on the mountain-sides, where the lava streams had
gushed and rolled and twisted over vineyards and villas and villages;
and we decided to take a nearer look at the immediate cause of all
this abnormal state of things.

In the morning when I awoke the sun was just rising behind Vesuvius;
and there was a mighty display of gold and crimson in that quarter,
as if the curtain was about to be lifted on a grand performance, say
a ballet at San Carlo, which is the only thing the Neapolitans think
worth looking at. Straight up in the air, out of the mountain, rose
a white pillar, spreading out at the top like a palm-tree, or, to
compare it to something I have seen, to the Italian pines, that come
so picturesquely into all these Naples pictures. If you will believe
me, that pillar of steam was like a column of fire, from the sun
shining on and through it, and perhaps from the reflection of the
background of crimson clouds and blue and gold sky, spread out there
and hung there in royal and extravagant profusion, to make a highway
and a regal gateway, through which I could just then see coming the
horses and the chariot of a southern perfect day. They said that the
tree-shaped cloud was the sign of an eruption; but the hotel-keepers
here are always predicting that. The eruption is usually about two
or three weeks distant; and the hotel proprietors get this
information from experienced guides, who observe the action of the
water in the wells; so that there can be no mistake about it.

We took carriages at nine o'clock to Resina, a drive of four miles,
and one of exceeding interest, if you wish to see Naples life. The
way is round the curving bay by the sea; but so continuously built up
is it, and so inclosed with high walls of villas, through the open
gates of which the golden oranges gleam, that you seem never to leave
the city. The streets and quays swarm with the most vociferous,
dirty, multitudinous life. It is a drive through Rag Fair. The
tall, whitey-yellow houses fronting the water, six, seven, eight
stories high, are full as beehives; people are at all the open
windows; garments hang from the balconies and from poles thrust out;
up every narrow, gloomy, ascending street are crowds of struggling
human shapes; and you see how like herrings in a box are packed the
over half a million people of Naples. In front of the houses are the
markets in the open air,--fish, vegetables, carts of oranges; in the
sun sit women spinning from distaffs or weaving fishing-nets; and
rows of children who were never washed and never clothed but once,
and whose garments have nearly wasted away; beggars, fishermen in red
caps, sailors, priests, donkeys, fruit-venders, street-musicians,
carriages, carts, two-wheeled break-down vehicles,--the whole tangled
in one wild roar and rush and babel,--a shifting, varied panorama of
color, rags,--a pandemonium such as the world cannot show elsewhere,
that is what one sees on the road to Resina. The drivers all drive
in the streets here as if they held a commission from the devil,
cracking their whips, shouting to their horses, and dashing into the
thickest tangle with entire recklessness. They have one cry, used
alike for getting more speed out of their horses or for checking
them, or in warning to the endangered crowds on foot. It is an
exclamatory grunt, which may be partially expressed by the letters
"a-e-ugh." Everybody shouts it, mule-driver, "coachee," or
cattle-driver; and even I, a passenger, fancied I could do it to
disagreeable perfection after a time. Out of this throng in the
streets I like to select the meek, patient, diminutive little
donkeys, with enormous panniers that almost hide them. One would
have a woman seated on top, with a child in one pannier and cabbages
in the other; another, with an immense stock of market-greens on his
back, or big baskets of oranges, or with a row of wine-casks and a
man seated behind, adhering, by some unknown law of adhesion, to the
sloping tail. Then there was the cart drawn by one diminutive
donkey, or by an ox, or by an ox and a donkey, or by a donkey and
horse abreast, never by any possibility a matched team. And,
funniest of all, was the high, two-wheeled caleche, with one seat,
and top thrown back, with long thills and poor horse. Upon this
vehicle were piled, Heaven knows how, behind, before, on the thills,
and underneath the high seat, sometimes ten, and not seldom as many
as eighteen people, men, women, and children,--all in flaunting rags,
with a colored scarf here and there, or a gay petticoat, or a scarlet
cap,--perhaps a priest, with broad black hat, in the center,--driving
along like a comet, the poor horse in a gallop, the bells on his
ornamented saddle merrily jingling, and the whole load in a roar of
merriment.

But we shall never get to Vesuvius at this rate. I will not even
stop to examine the macaroni manufactories on the road. The long
strips of it were hung out on poles to dry in the streets, and to get
a rich color from the dirt and dust, to say nothing of its contact
with the filthy people who were making it. I am very fond of
macaroni. At Resina we take horses for the ascent. We had sent
ahead for a guide and horses for our party of ten; but we found
besides, I should think, pretty nearly the entire population of the
locality awaiting us, not to count the importunate beggars, the hags,
male and female, and the ordinary loafers of the place. We were
besieged to take this and that horse or mule, to buy walking-sticks
for the climb, to purchase lava cut into charms, and veritable
ancient coins, and dug-up cameos, all manufactured for the demand.
One wanted to hold the horse, or to lead it, to carry a shawl, or to
show the way. In the midst of infinite clamor and noise, we at last
got mounted, and, turning into a narrow lane between high walls,
began the ascent, our cavalcade attended by a procession of rags and
wretchedness up through the village. Some of them fell off as we
rose among the vineyards, and they found us proof against begging;
but several accompanied us all day, hoping that, in some unguarded
moment, they could do us some slight service, and so establish a
claim on us. Among these I noticed some stout fellows with short
ropes, with which they intended to assist us up the steeps. If I
looked away an instant, some urchin would seize my horse's bridle;
and when I carelessly let my stick fall on his hand, in token for him
to let go, he would fall back with an injured look, and grasp the
tail, from which I could only loosen him by swinging my staff and
preparing to break his head.

The ascent is easy at first between walls and the vineyards which
produce the celebrated Lachryma Christi. After a half hour we
reached and began to cross the lava of 1858, and the wild desolation
and gloom of the mountain began to strike us. One is here conscious
of the titanic forces at work. Sometimes it is as if a giant had
ploughed the ground, and left the furrows without harrowing them to
harden into black and brown stone. We could see again how the broad
stream, flowing down, squeezed and squashed like mud, had taken all
fantastic shapes,--now like gnarled tree roots; now like serpents in
a coil; here the human form, or a part of it,--a torso or a limb,--in
agony; now in other nameless convolutions and contortions, as if
heaved up and twisted in fiery pain and suffering,--for there was
almost a human feeling in it; and again not unlike stone billows. We
could see how the cooling crust had been lifted and split and turned
over by the hot stream underneath, which, continually oozing from the
rent of the eruption, bore it down and pressed it upward. Even so
low as the point where we crossed the lava of 1858 were fissures
whence came hot air.

An hour brought us to the resting-place called the Hermitage, an
osteria and observatory established by the government. Standing upon
the end of a spur, it seems to be safe from the lava, whose course
has always been on either side; but it must be an uncomfortable place
in a shower of stones and ashes. We rode half an hour longer on
horseback, on a nearly level path, to the foot of the steep ascent,
the base of the great crater. This ride gave us completely the wide
and ghastly desolation of the mountain, the ruin that the lava has
wrought upon slopes that were once green with vine and olive, and
busy with the hum of life. This black, contorted desert waste is
more sterile and hopeless than any mountain of stone, because the
idea of relentless destruction is involved here. This great
hummocked, sloping plain, ridged and seamed, was all about us,
without cheer or relaxation of grim solitude. Before us rose, as
black and bare, what the guides call the mountain, and which used to
be the crater. Up one side is worked in the lava a zigzag path,
steep, but not very fatiguing, if you take it slowly. Two thirds of
the way up, I saw specks of people climbing. Beyond it rose the cone
of ashes, out of which the great cloud of sulphurous smoke rises and
rolls night and day now. On the very edge of that, on the lip of it,
where the smoke rose, I also saw human shapes; and it seemed as if
they stood on the brink of Tartarus and in momently imminent peril.

We left our horses in a wild spot, where scorched boulders had fallen
upon the lava bed; and guides and boys gathered about us like
cormorants: but, declining their offers to pull us up, we began the
ascent, which took about three quarters of an hour. We were then on
the summit, which is, after all, not a summit at all, but an uneven
waste, sloping away from the Cone in the center. This sloping lava
waste was full of little cracks,--not fissures with hot lava in them,
or anything of the sort,--out of which white steam issued, not unlike
the smoke from a great patch of burned timber; and the wind blew it
along the ground towards us. It was cool, for the sun was hidden by
light clouds, but not cold. The ground under foot was slightly warm.
I had expected to feel some dread, or shrinking, or at least some
sense of insecurity, but I did not the slightest, then or afterwards;
and I think mine is the usual experience. I had no more sense of
danger on the edge of the crater than I had in the streets of Naples.

We next addressed ourselves to the Cone, which is a loose hill of
ashes and sand,--a natural slope, I should say, of about one and a
half to one, offering no foothold. The climb is very fatiguing,
because you sink in to the ankles, and slide back at every step; but
it is short,--we were up in six to eight minutes,--though the ladies,
who had been helped a little by the guides, were nearly exhausted,
and sank down on the very edge of the crater, with their backs to the
smoke. What did we see? What would you see if you looked into a
steam boiler? We stood on the ashy edge of the crater, the sharp
edge sloping one way down the mountain, and the other into the
bowels, whence the thick, stifling smoke rose. We rolled stones
down, and heard them rumbling for half a minute. The diameter of the
crater on the brink of which we stood was said to be an eighth of a
mile; but the whole was completely filled with vapor. The edge where
we stood was quite warm.

We ate some rolls we had brought in our pockets, and some of the
party tried a bottle of the wine that one of the cormorants had
brought up, but found it anything but the Lachryma Christi it was
named. We looked with longing eyes down into the vapor-boiling
caldron; we looked at the wide and lovely view of land and sea; we
tried to realize our awful situation, munched our dry bread, and
laughed at the monstrous demands of the vagabonds about us for money,
and then turned and went down quicker than we came up.

We had chosen to ascend to the old crater rather than to the new one
of the recent eruption on the side of the mountain, where there is
nothing to be seen. When we reached the bottom of the Cone, our
guide led us to the north side, and into a region that did begin to
look like business. The wind drove all the smoke round there, and we
were half stifled with sulphur fumes to begin with. Then the whole
ground was discolored red and yellow, and with many more gay and
sulphur-suggesting colors. And it actually had deep fissures in it,
over which we stepped and among which we went, out of which came
blasts of hot, horrid vapor, with a roaring as if we were in the
midst of furnaces. And if we came near the cracks the heat was
powerful in our faces, and if we thrust our sticks down them they
were instantly burned; and the guides cooked eggs; and the crust was
thin, and very hot to our boots; and half the time we couldn't see
anything; and we would rush away where the vapor was not so thick,
and, with handkerchiefs to our mouths, rush in again to get the full
effect. After we came out again into better air, it was as if we had
been through the burning, fiery furnace, and had the smell of it on
our garments. And, indeed, the sulphur had changed to red certain of
our clothes, and noticeably my pantaloons and the black velvet cap of
one of the ladies; and it was some days before they recovered their
color. But, as I say, there was no sense of danger in the adventure.

We descended by a different route, on the south side of the mountain,
to our horses, and made a lark of it. We went down an ash slope,
very steep, where we sank in a foot or little less at every step, and
there was nothing to do for it, but to run and jump. We took steps
as long as if we had worn seven-league boots. When the whole party
got in motion, the entire slope seemed to slide a little with us, and
there appeared some danger of an avalanche. But we did n't stop for
it. It was exactly like plunging down a steep hillside that is
covered thickly with light, soft snow. There was a gray-haired
gentleman with us, with a good deal of the boy in him, who thought it
great fun.

I have said little about the view; but I might have written about
nothing else, both in the ascent and descent. Naples, and all the
villages which rim the bay with white, the gracefully curving arms
that go out to sea, and do not quite clasp rocky Capri, which lies at
the entrance, made the outline of a picture of surpassing loveliness.
But as we came down, there was a sight that I am sure was unique. As
one in a balloon sees the earth concave beneath, so now, from where
we stood, it seemed to rise, not fall, to the sea, and all the white
villages were raised to the clouds; and by the peculiar light, the
sea looked exactly like sky, and the little boats on it seemed to
float, like balloons in the air. The illusion was perfect. As the
day waned, a heavy cloud hid the sun, and so let down the light that
the waters were a dark purple. Then the sun went behind Posilipo in
a perfect blaze of scarlet, and all the sea was violet. Only it
still was not the sea at all; but the little chopping waves looked
like flecked clouds; and it was exactly as if one of the violet,
cloud-beautified skies that we see at home over some sunsets had
fallen to the ground. And the slant white sails and the black specks
of boats on it hung in the sky, and were as unsubstantial as the
whole pageant. Capri alone was dark and solid. And as we descended
and a high wall hid it, a little handsome rascal, who had attended me
for an hour, now at the head and now at the tail of my pony, recalled
me to the realities by the request that I should give him a franc.
For what? For carrying signor's coat up the mountain. I rewarded
the little liar with a German copper. I had carried my own overcoat
all day.

SORRENTO DAYS

OUTLINES

The day came when we tired of the brilliancy and din of Naples, most
noisy of cities. Neapolis, or Parthenope, as is well known, was
founded by Parthenope, a siren who was cast ashore there. Her
descendants still live here; and we have become a little weary of
their inherited musical ability: they have learned to play upon many
new instruments, with which they keep us awake late at night, and
arouse us early in the morning. One of them is always there under
the window, where the moonlight will strike him, or the early dawn
will light up his love-worn visage, strumming the guitar with his
horny thumb, and wailing through his nose as if his throat was full
of seaweed. He is as inexhaustible as Vesuvius. We shall have to
flee, or stop our ears with wax, like the sailors of Ulysses.

The day came when we had checked off the Posilipo, and the Grotto,
Pozzuoli, Baiae, Cape Misenum, the Museum, Vesuvius, Pompeii,
Herculaneum, the moderns buried at the Campo Santo; and we said, Let
us go and lie in the sun at Sorrento. But first let us settle our
geography.

The Bay of Naples, painted and sung forever, but never adequately,
must consent to be here described as essentially a parallelogram,
with an opening towards the southwest. The northeast side of this,
with Naples in the right-hand corner, looking seaward and
Castellamare in the left-hand corner, at a distance of some fourteen
miles, is a vast rich plain, fringed on the shore with towns, and
covered with white houses and gardens. Out of this rises the
isolated bulk of Vesuvius. This growing mountain is manufactured
exactly like an ant-hill.

The northwest side of the bay, keeping a general westerly direction,
is very uneven, with headlands, deep bays, and outlying islands.
First comes the promontory of Posilipo, pierced by two tunnels,
partly natural and partly Greek and Roman work, above the entrance of
one of which is the tomb of Virgil, let us believe; then a beautiful
bay, the shore of which is incrusted with classic ruins. On this bay
stands Pozzuoli, the ancient Puteoli where St. Paul landed one May
day, and doubtless walked up this paved road, which leads direct to
Rome. At the entrance, near the head of Posilipo, is the volcanic
island of "shining Nisida," to which Brutus retired after the
assassination of Caesar, and where he bade Portia good-by before he
departed for Greece and Philippi: the favorite villa of Cicero, where
he wrote many of his letters to Atticus, looked on it. Baiae,
epitome of the luxury and profligacy, of the splendor and crime of
the most sensual years of the Roman empire, spread there its temples,
palaces, and pleasure-gardens, which crowded the low slopes, and
extended over the water; and yonder is Cape Misenum, which sheltered
the great fleets of Rome.

This region, which is still shaky from fires bubbling under the thin
crust, through which here and there the sulphurous vapor breaks out,
is one of the most sacred in the ancient world. Here are the Lucrine
Lake, the Elysian Fields, the cave of the Cumean Sibyl, and the Lake
Avernus. This entrance to the infernal regions was frozen over the
day I saw it; so that the profane prophecy of skating on the
bottomless pit might have been realized. The islands of Procida and
Ischia continue and complete this side of the bay, which is about
twenty miles long as the boat sails.

At Castellamare the shore makes a sharp bend, and runs southwest
along the side of the Sorrentine promontory. This promontory is a
high, rocky, diversified ridge, which extends out between the bays of
Naples and Salerno, with its short and precipitous slope towards the
latter. Below Castellamare, the mountain range of the Great St.
Angelo (an offshoot of the Apennines) runs across the peninsula, and
cuts off that portion of it which we have to consider. The most
conspicuous of the three parts of this short range is over four
thousand seven hundred feet above the Bay of Naples, and the highest
land on it. From Great St. Angelo to the point, the Punta di
Campanella, it is, perhaps, twelve miles by balloon, but twenty by
any other conveyance. Three miles off this point lies Capri.

This promontory has a backbone of rocky ledges and hills; but it has
at intervals transverse ledges and ridges, and deep valleys and
chains cutting in from either side; so that it is not very passable
in any direction. These little valleys and bays are warm nooks for
the olive and the orange; and all the precipices and sunny slopes are
terraced nearly to the top. This promontory of rocks is far from
being barren.

From Castellamare, driving along a winding, rockcut road by the bay,
--one of the most charming in southern Italy,--a distance of seven
miles, we reach the Punta di Scutolo. This point, and the opposite
headland, the Capo di Sorrento, inclose the Piano di Sorrento, an
irregular plain, three miles long, encircled by limestone hills,
which protect it from the east and south winds. In this amphitheater
it lies, a mass of green foliage and white villages, fronting Naples
and Vesuvius.

If nature first scooped out this nook level with the sea, and then
filled it up to a depth of two hundred to three hundred feet with
volcanic tufa, forming a precipice of that height along the shore, I
can understand how the present state of things came about.

This plain is not all level, however. Decided spurs push down into
it from the hills; and great chasms, deep, ragged, impassable, split
in the tufa, extend up into it from the sea. At intervals, at the
openings of these ravines, are little marinas, where the fishermen
have their huts' and where their boats land. Little villages,
separate from the world, abound on these marinas. The warm volcanic
soil of the sheltered plain makes it a paradise of fruits and
flowers.

Sorrento, ancient and romantic city, lies at the southwest end of
this plain, built along the sheer sea precipice, and running back to
the hills,--a city of such narrow streets, high walls, and luxuriant
groves that it can be seen only from the heights adjacent. The
ancient boundary of the city proper was the famous ravine on the east
side, a similar ravine on the south, which met it at right angles,
and was supplemented by a high Roman wall, and the same wall
continued on the west to the sea. The growing town has pushed away
the wall on the west side; but that on the south yet stands as good
as when the Romans made it. There is a little attempt at a mall,
with double rows of trees, under that wall, where lovers walk, and
ragged, handsome urchins play the exciting game of fives, or sit in
the dirt, gambling with cards for the Sorrento currency. I do not
know what sin it may be to gamble for a bit of printed paper which
has the value of one sou.

The great ravine, three quarters of a mile long, the ancient boundary
which now cuts the town in two, is bridged where the main street, the
Corso, crosses, the bridge resting on old Roman substructions, as
everything else about here does. This ravine, always invested with
mystery, is the theme of no end of poetry and legend. Demons inhabit
it. Here and there, in its perpendicular sides, steps have been cut
for descent. Vines and lichens grow on the walls: in one place, at
the bottom, an orange grove has taken root. There is even a mill
down there, where there is breadth enough for a building; and
altogether, the ravine is not so delivered over to the power of
darkness as it used to be. It is still damp and slimy, it is true;
but from above, it is always beautiful, with its luxuriant growth of
vines, and at twilight mysterious. I like as well, however, to look
into its entrance from the little marina, where the old fishwives are
weaving nets.

These little settlements under the cliff, called marinas, are worlds
in themselves, picturesque at a distance, but squalid seen close at
hand. They are not very different from the little fishing-stations
on the Isle of Wight; but they are more sheltered, and their
inhabitants sing at their work, wear bright colors, and bask in the
sun a good deal, feeling no sense of responsibility for the world
they did not create. To weave nets, to fish in the bay, to sell
their fish at the wharves, to eat unexciting vegetables and fish, to
drink moderately, to go to the chapel of St. Antonino on Sunday, not
to work on fast and feast days, nor more than compelled to any day,
this is life at the marinas. Their world is what they can see, and
Naples is distant and almost foreign. Generation after generation is
content with the same simple life. They have no more idea of the bad
way the world is in than bees in their cells.

THE VILLA NARDI

The Villa Nardi hangs over the sea. It is built on a rock, and I
know not what Roman and Greek foundations, and the remains of yet
earlier peoples, traders, and traffickers, whose galleys used to rock
there at the base of the cliff, where the gentle waves beat even in
this winter-time with a summer swing and sound of peace.

It was at the close of a day in January that I first knew the Villa
Nardi,--a warm, lovely day, at the hour when the sun was just going
behind the Capo di Sorrento, in order to disrobe a little, I fancy,
before plunging into the Mediterranean off the end of Capri, as is
his wont about this time of year. When we turned out of the little
piazza, our driver was obliged to take off one of our team of three
horses driven abreast, so that we could pass through the narrow and
crooked streets, or rather lanes of blank walls. With cracking whip,
rattling wheels, and shouting to clear the way, we drove into the
Strada di San Francisca, and to an arched gateway. This led down a
straight path, between olives and orange and lemon-trees, gleaming
with shining leaves and fruit of gold, with hedges of rose-trees in
full bloom, to another leafy arch, through which I saw tropical
trees, and a terrace with a low wall and battered busts guarding it,
and beyond, the blue sea, a white sail or two slanting across the
opening, and the whiteness of Naples some twenty miles away on the
shore.

The noble family of the Villa did not descend into the garden to
welcome us, as we should have liked; in fact, they have been absent
now for a long time, so long that even their ghosts, if they ever
pace the terrace-walk towards the convent, would appear strange to
one who should meet them; and yet our hostess, the Tramontano, did
what the ancient occupants scarcely could have done, gave us the
choice of rooms in the entire house. The stranger who finds himself
in this secluded paradise, at this season, is always at a loss
whether to take a room on the sea, with all its changeable
loveliness, but no sun, or one overlooking the garden, where the sun
all day pours itself into the orange boughs, and where the birds are
just beginning to get up a spring twitteration. My friend, whose
capacity for taking in the luxurious repose of this region is
something extraordinary, has tried, I believe, nearly every room in
the house, and has at length gone up to a solitary room on the top,
where, like a bird on a tree he looks all ways, and, so to say,
swings in the entrancing air. But, wherever you are, you will grow
into content with your situation.

At the Villa Nardi we have no sound of wheels, no noise of work or
traffic, no suggestion of conflict. I am under the impression that
everything that was to have been done has been done. I am, it is
true, a little afraid that the Saracens will come here again, and
carry off more of the nut-brown girls, who lean over the walls, and
look down on us from under the boughs. I am not quite sure that a
French Admiral of the Republic will not some morning anchor his
three-decker in front, and open fire on us; but nothing else can
happen. Naples is a thousand miles away. The boom of the saluting
guns of Castel Nuovo is to us scarcely an echo of modern life. Rome
does not exist. And as for London and New York, they send their
people and their newspapers here, but no pulse of unrest from them
disturbs our tranquillity. Hemmed in on the land side by high walls,
groves, and gardens, perched upon a rock two hundred feet above the
water, how much more secure from invasion is this than any fabled
island of the southern sea, or any remote stream where the boats of
the lotus-eaters float!

There is a little terrace and flower-plat, where we sometimes sit,
and over the wall of which we like to lean, and look down the cliff
to the sea. This terrace is the common ground of many exotics as
well as native trees and shrubs. Here are the magnolia, the laurel,
the Japanese medlar, the oleander, the pepper, the bay, the
date-palm, a tree called the plumbago, another from the Cape of Good
Hope, the pomegranate, the elder in full leaf, the olive, salvia,
heliotrope; close by is a banana-tree.

I find a good deal of companionship in the rows of plaster busts that
stand on the wall, in all attitudes of listlessness, and all stages
of decay. I thought at first they were penates of the premises; but
better acquaintance has convinced me that they never were gods, but
the clayey representations of great men and noble dames. The stains
of time are on them; some have lost a nose or an ear; and one has
parted with a still more important member--his head,--an accident
that might profitably have befallen his neighbor, whose curly locks
and villainously low forehead proclaim him a Roman emperor. Cut in
the face of the rock is a walled and winding way down to the water.
I see below the archway where it issues from the underground recesses
of our establishment; and there stands a bust, in serious expectation
that some one will walk out and saunter down among the rocks; but no
one ever does. Just at the right is a little beach, with a few old
houses, and a mimic stir of life, a little curve in the cliff, the
mouth of the gorge, where the waves come in with a lazy swash. Some
fishing-boats ride there; and the shallow water, as I look down this
sunny morning, is thickly strewn with floating peels of oranges and
lemons, as if some one was brewing a gigantic bowl of punch. And
there is an uncommon stir of life; for a schooner is shipping a cargo
of oranges, and the entire population is in a clamor. Donkeys are
coming down the winding way, with a heavy basket on either flank;
stout girls are stepping lightly down with loads on their heads; the
drivers shout, the donkeys bray, the people jabber and order each
other about; and the oranges, in a continual stream, are poured into
the long, narrow vessel, rolling in with a thud, until there is a
yellow mass of them. Shouting, scolding, singing, and braying, all
come up to me a little mellowed. The disorder is not so great as on
the opera stage of San Carlo in Naples; and the effect is much more
pleasing.

This settlement, the marina, under the cliff, used to extend along
the shore; and a good road ran down there close by the water. The
rock has split off, and covered it; and perhaps the shore has sunk.
They tell me that those who dig down in the edge of the shallow water
find sunken walls, and the remains of old foundations of Roman
workmanship. People who wander there pick up bits of marble,
serpentine, and malachite,--remains of the palaces that long ago fell
into the sea, and have not left even the names of their owners and
builders,-the ancient loafers who idled away their days as everybody
must in this seductive spot. Not far from here, they point out the
veritable caves of the Sirens, who have now shut up house, and gone
away, like the rest of the nobility. If I had been a mariner in
their day, I should have made no effort to sail by and away from
their soothing shore.

I went, one day, through a long, sloping arch, near the sailors'
Chapel of St. Antonino, past a pretty shrine of the Virgin, down the
zigzag path to this little marina; but it is better to be content
with looking at it from above, and imagining how delightful it would
be to push off in one of the little tubs of boats. Sometimes, at
night, I hear the fishermen coming home, singing in their lusty
fashion; and I think it is a good haven to arrive at. I never go
down to search for stones on the beach: I like to believe that there
are great treasures there, which I might find; and I know that the
green and brown and spotty appearance of the water is caused by the
showing through of the pavements of courts, and marble floors of
palaces, which might vanish if I went nearer, such a place of
illusion is this.

The Villa Nardi stands in pleasant relations to Vesuvius, which is
just across the bay, and is not so useless as it has been
represented; it is our weather-sign and prophet. When the white
plume on his top floats inland, that is one sort of weather; when it
streams out to sea, that is another. But I can never tell which is
which: nor in my experience does it much matter; for it seems
impossible for Sorrento to do anything but woo us with gentle
weather. But the use of Vesuvius, after all, is to furnish us a
background for the violet light at sundown, when the villages at its
foot gleam like a silver fringe. I have become convinced of one
thing: it is always best when you build a house to have it front
toward a volcano, if you can. There is just that lazy activity about
a volcano, ordinarily, that satisfies your demand for something that
is not exactly dead, and yet does not disturb you.

Sometimes when I wake in the night,--though I don't know why one ever
wakes in the night, or the daytime either here,--I hear the bell of
the convent, which is in our demesne,--a convent which is suppressed,
and where I hear, when I pass in the morning, the humming of a
school. At first I tried to count the hour; but when the bell went
on to strike seventeen, and even twenty-one o'clock, the absurdity of
the thing came over me, and I wondered whether it was some frequent
call to prayer for a feeble band of sisters remaining, some reminder
of midnight penance and vigil, or whether it was not something more
ghostly than that, and was not responded to by shades of nuns, who
were wont to look out from their narrow latticed windows upon these
same gardens, as long ago as when the beautiful Queen Joanna used to
come down here to repent--if she ever did repent--of her wanton ways
in Naples.

On one side of the garden is a suppressed monastery. The narrow
front towards the sea has a secluded little balcony, where I like to
fancy the poor orphaned souls used to steal out at night for a breath
of fresh air, and perhaps to see, as I did one dark evening, Naples
with its lights like a conflagration on the horizon. Upon the tiles
of the parapet are cheerful devices, the crossbones tied with a cord,
and the like. How many heavy-hearted recluses have stood in that
secluded nook, and been tempted by the sweet, lulling sound of the
waves below; how many have paced along this narrow terrace, and felt
like prisoners who wore paths in the stone floor where they trod; and
how many stupid louts have walked there, insensible to all the charm
of it!

If I pass into the Tramontano garden, it is not to escape the
presence of history, or to get into the modern world, where travelers
are arriving, and where there is the bustle and proverbial discontent
of those who travel to enjoy themselves. In the pretty garden, which
is a constant surprise of odd nooks and sunny hiding-places, with
ruins, and most luxuriant ivy, is a little cottage where, I am told
in confidence, the young king of Bavaria slept three nights not very
long ago. I hope he slept well. But more important than the sleep,
or even death, of a king, is the birth of a poet, I take it; and
within this inclosure, on the eleventh day of March, 1541, Torquato
Tasso, most melancholy of men, first saw the light; and here was born
his noble sister Cornelia, the descendants of whose union with the
cavalier Spasiano still live here, and in a manner keep the memory of
the poet green with the present generation. I am indebted to a
gentleman who is of this lineage for many favors, and for precise
information as to the position in the house that stood here of the
very room in which Tasso was born. It is also minutely given in a
memoir of Tasso and his family, by Bartolommeo Capasso, whose careful
researches have disproved the slipshod statements of the guidebooks,
that the poet was born in a house which is still standing, farther to
the west, and that the room has fallen into the sea. The descendant
of the sister pointed out to me the spot on the terrace of the
Tramontano where the room itself was, when the house still stood;
and, of course, seeing is believing. The sun shone full upon it, as
we stood there; and the air was full of the scent of tropical fruit
and just-coming blossoms. One could not desire a more tranquil scene
of advent into life; and the wandering, broken-hearted author of
"Jerusalem Delivered" never found at court or palace any retreat so
soothing as that offered him here by his steadfast sister.

If I were an antiquarian, I think I should have had Tasso born at the
Villa Nardi, where I like best to stay, and where I find traces of
many pilgrims from other countries. Here, in a little corner room on
the terrace, Mrs. Stowe dreamed and wrote; and I expect, every
morning, as I take my morning sun here by the gate, Agnes of Sorrento
will come down the sweet-scented path with a basket of oranges on her
head.

SEA AND SHORE

It is not always easy, when one stands upon the highlands which
encircle the Piano di Sorrento, in some conditions of the atmosphere,
to tell where the sea ends and the sky begins. It seems.
practicable, at such times, for one to take ship and sail up into
heaven. I have often, indeed, seen white sails climbing up there,
and fishing-boats, at secure anchor I suppose, riding apparently like
balloons in the hazy air. Sea and air and land here are all kin, I
suspect, and have certain immaterial qualities in common. The
contours of the shores and the outlines of the hills are as graceful
as the mobile waves; and if there is anywhere ruggedness and
sharpness, the atmosphere throws a friendly veil over it, and tones
all that is inharmonious into the repose of beauty.

The atmosphere is really something more than a medium: it is a
drapery, woven, one could affirm, with colors, or dipped in oriental
dyes. One might account thus for the prismatic colors I have often
seen on the horizon at noon, when the sun was pouring down floods of
clear golden light. The simple light here, if one could ever
represent it by pen, pencil, or brush, would draw the world hither to
bathe in it. It is not thin sunshine, but a royal profusion, a
golden substance, a transforming quality, a vesture of splendor for
all these Mediterranean shores.

The most comprehensive idea of Sorrento and the great plain on which
it stands, imbedded almost out of sight in foliage, we obtained one
day from our boat, as we put out round the Capo di Sorrento, and
stood away for Capri. There was not wind enough for sails, but there
were chopping waves, and swell enough to toss us about, and to
produce bright flashes of light far out at sea. The red-shirted
rowers silently bent to their long sweeps; and I lay in the tossing
bow, and studied the high, receding shore. The picture is simple, a
precipice of rock or earth, faced with masonry in spots, almost of
uniform height from point to point of the little bay, except where a
deep gorge has split the rock, and comes to the sea, forming a cove,
where a cluster of rude buildings is likely to gather. Along the
precipice, which now juts and now recedes a little, are villas,
hotels, old convents, gardens, and groves. I can see steps and
galleries cut in the face of the cliff, and caves and caverns,
natural and artificial: for one can cut this tufa with a knife; and
it would hardly seem preposterous to attempt to dig out a cool, roomy
mansion in this rocky front with a spade.

As we pull away, I begin to see the depth of the plain of Sorrento,
with its villages, walled roads, its groves of oranges, olives,
lemons, its figs, pomegranates, almonds, mulberries, and acacias; and
soon the terraces above, where the vineyards are planted, and the
olives also. These terraces must be a brave sight in the spring,
when the masses of olives are white as snow with blossoms, which fill
all the plain with their sweet perfume. Above the terraces, the eye
reaches the fine outline of the hill; and, to the east, the bare
precipice of rock, softened by the purple light; and turning still to
the left, as the boat lazily swings, I have Vesuvius, the graceful
dip into the plain, and the rise to the heights of Naples, Nisida,
the shining houses of Pozzuoli, Cape Misenum, Procida, and rough
Ischia. Rounding the headland, Capri is before us, so sharp and
clear that we seem close to it; but it is a weary pull before we get
under its rocky side.

Returning from Capri late in the afternoon, we had one of those
effects which are the despair of artists. I had been told that
twilights are short here, and that, when the sun disappeared, color
vanished from the sky. There was a wonderful light on all the inner
bay, as we put off from shore. Ischia was one mass of violet color,
As we got from under the island, there was the sun, a red ball of
fire, just dipping into the sea. At once the whole horizon line of
water became a bright crimson, which deepened as evening advanced,
glowing with more intense fire, and holding a broad band of what
seemed solid color for more than three quarters of an hour. The
colors, meantime, on the level water, never were on painter's
palette, and never were counterfeited by the changeable silks of
eastern looms; and this gorgeous spectacle continued till the stars
came out, crowding the sky with silver points.

Our boatmen, who had been reinforced at Capri, and were inspired
either by the wine of the island or the beauty of the night, pulled
with new vigor, and broke out again and again into the wild songs of
this coast. A favorite was the Garibaldi song, which invariably ended
in a cheer and a tiger, and threw the singers into such a spurt of
excitement that the oars forgot to keep time, and there was more
splash than speed. The singers all sang one part in minor: there was
no harmony, the voices were not rich, and the melody was not
remarkable; but there was, after all, a wild pathos in it. Music is
very much here what it is in Naples. I have to keep saying to myself
that Italy is a land of song; else I should think that people mistake
noise for music.

The boatmen are an honest set of fellows, as Italians go; and, let us
hope, not unworthy followers of their patron, St. Antonino, whose
chapel is on the edge of the gorge near the Villa Nardi. A silver
image of the saint, half life-size, stands upon the rich marble
altar. This valuable statue has been, if tradition is correct, five
times captured and carried away by marauders, who have at different
times sacked Sorrento of its marbles, bronzes, and precious things,
and each time, by some mysterious providence, has found its way back
again,--an instance of constancy in a solid silver image which is
worthy of commendation. The little chapel is hung all about with
votive offerings in wax of arms, legs, heads, hands, effigies, and
with coarse lithographs, in frames, of storms at sea and perils of
ships, hung up by sailors who, having escaped the dangers of the
deep, offer these tributes to their dear saint. The skirts of the
image are worn quite smooth with kissing. Underneath it, at the back
of the altar, an oil light is always burning; and below repose the
bones of the holy man.

The whole shore is fascinating to one in an idle mood, and is good
mousing-ground for the antiquarian. For myself, I am content with
one generalization, which I find saves a world of bother and
perplexity: it is quite safe to style every excavation, cavern,
circular wall, or arch by the sea, a Roman bath. It is the final
resort of the antiquarians. This theory has kept me from entering
the discussion, whether the substructions in the cliff under the
Poggio Syracuse, a royal villa, are temples of the Sirens, or caves
of Ulysses. I only know that I descend to the sea there by broad
interior flights of steps, which lead through galleries and
corridors, and high, vaulted passages, whence extend apartments and
caves far reaching into the solid rock. At intervals are landings,
where arched windows are cut out to the sea, with stone seats and
protecting walls. At the base of the cliff I find a hewn passage, as
if there had once been here a way of embarkation; and enormous
fragments of rocks, with steps cut in them, which have fallen from
above.

Were these anything more than royal pleasure galleries, where one
could sit in coolness in the heat of summer and look on the bay and
its shipping, in the days when the great Roman fleet used to lie
opposite, above the point of Misenum? How many brave and gay
retinues have swept down these broad interior stairways, let us say
in the picturesque Middle Ages, to embark on voyages of pleasure or
warlike forays! The steps are well worn, and must have been trodden
for ages, by nobles and robbers, peasants and sailors, priests of
more than one religion, and traders of many seas, who have gone, and
left no record. The sun was slanting his last rays into the
corridors as I musingly looked down from one of the arched openings,
quite spellbound by the strangeness and dead silence of the place,
broken only by the plash of waves on the sandy beach below. I had
found my way down through a wooden door half ajar; and I thought of
the possibility of some one's shutting it for the night, and leaving
me a prisoner to await the spectres which I have no doubt throng here
when it grows dark. Hastening up out of these chambers of the past,
I escaped into the upper air, and walked rapidly home through the
narrow orange lanes.

ON TOP OF THE HOUSE

The tiptop of the Villa Nardi is a flat roof, with a wall about it
three feet high, and some little turreted affairs, that look very
much like chimneys. Joseph, the gray-haired servitor, has brought my
chair and table up here to-day, and here I am, established to write.

I am here above most earthly annoyances, and on a level with the
heavenly influences. It has always seemed to me that the higher one
gets, the easier it must be to write; and that, especially at a great
elevation, one could strike into lofty themes, and launch out,
without fear of shipwreck on any of the earthly headlands, in his
aerial voyages. Yet, after all, he would be likely to arrive
nowhere, I suspect; or, to change the figure, to find that, in
parting with the taste of the earth, he had produced a flavorless
composition. If it were not for the haze in the horizon to-day, I
could distinguish the very house in Naples--that of Manso, Marquis of
Villa,--where Tasso found a home, and where John Milton was
entertained at a later day by that hospitable nobleman. I wonder, if
he had come to the Villa Nardi and written on the roof, if the
theological features of his epic would have been softened, and if he
would not have received new suggestions for the adornment of the
garden. Of course, it is well that his immortal production was not
composed on this roof, and in sight of these seductive shores, or it
would have been more strongly flavored with classic mythology than it
is. But, letting Milton go, it may be necessary to say that my
writing to-day has nothing to do with my theory of composition in an
elevated position; for this is the laziest place that I have yet
found.

I am above the highest olive-trees, and, if I turned that way, should
look over the tops of what seems a vast grove of them, out of which a
white roof, and an old time-eaten tower here and there, appears; and
the sun is flooding them with waves of light, which I think a person
delicately enough organized could hear beat. Beyond the brown roofs
of the town, the terraced hills arise, in semicircular embrace of the
plain; and the fine veil over them is partly the natural shimmer of
the heat, and partly the silver duskiness of the olive-leaves. I sit
with my back to all this, taking the entire force of this winter sun,
which is full of life and genial heat, and does not scorch one, as I
remember such a full flood of it would at home. It is putting
sweetness, too, into the oranges, which, I observe, are getting
redder and softer day by day. We have here, by the way, such a habit
of taking up an orange, weighing it in the hand, and guessing if it
is ripe, that the test is extending to other things. I saw a
gentleman this morning, at breakfast, weighing an egg in the same
manner; and some one asked him if it was ripe.

It seems to me that the Mediterranean was never bluer than it is
to-day. It has a shade or two the advantage of the sky: though I
like the sky best, after all; for it is less opaque, and offers an
illimitable opportunity of exploration. Perhaps this is because I am
nearer to it. There are some little ruffles of air on the sea, which
I do not feel here, making broad spots of shadow, and here and there
flecks and sparkles. But the schooners sail idly, and the
fishing-boats that have put out from the marina float in the most
dreamy manner. I fear that the fishermen who have made a show of
industry, and got away from their wives, who are busily weaving nets
on shore, are yielding to the seductions of the occasion, and making
a day of it. And, as I look at them, I find myself debating which I
would rather be, a fisherman there in the boat, rocked by the swell,
and warmed by the sun, or a friar, on the terrace of the garden on
the summit of Deserto, lying perfectly tranquil, and also soaked in
the sun. There is one other person, now that I think of it, who may
be having a good time to-day, though I do not know that I envy him.
His business is a new one to me, and is an occupation that one would
not care to recommend to a friend until he had tried it: it is being
carried about in a basket. As I went up the new Massa road the other
day, I met a ragged, stout, and rather dirty woman, with a large
shallow basket on her head. In it lay her husband, a large man,
though I think a little abbreviated as to his legs. The woman asked
alms. Talk of Diogenes in his tub! How must the world look to a man
in a basket, riding about on his wife's head? When I returned, she
had put him down beside the road in the sun, and almost in danger of
the passing vehicles. I suppose that the affectionate creature
thought that, if he got a new injury in this way, his value in the
beggar market would be increased. I do not mean to do this exemplary
wife any injustice; and I only suggest the idea in this land, where
every beggar who is born with a deformity has something to thank the
Virgin for. This custom of carrying your husband on your head in a
basket has something to recommend it, and is an exhibition of faith
on the one hand, and of devotion on the other, that is seldom met
with. Its consideration is commended to my countrywomen at home. It
is, at least, a new commentary on the apostolic remark, that the man
is the head of the woman. It is, in some respects, a happy division
of labor in the walk of life: she furnishes the locomotive power, and
he the directing brains, as he lies in the sun and looks abroad;
which reminds me that the sun is getting hot on my back. The little
bunch of bells in the convent tower is jangling out a suggestion of
worship, or of the departure of the hours. It is time to eat an
orange.

Vesuvius appears to be about on a level with my eyes and I never knew
him to do himself more credit than to-day. The whole coast of the
bay is in a sort of obscuration, thicker than an Indian summer haze;
and the veil extends almost to the top of Vesuvius. But his summit
is still distinct, and out of it rises a gigantic billowy column of
white smoke, greater in quantity than on any previous day of our
sojourn; and the sun turns it to silver. Above a long line of
ordinary looking clouds, float great white masses, formed of the
sulphurous vapor. This manufacture of clouds in a clear, sunny day
has an odd appearance; but it is easy enough, if one has such a
laboratory as Vesuvius. How it tumbles up the white smoke! It is
piled up now, I should say, a thousand feet above the crater,
straight into the blue sky,--a pillar of cloud by day. One might sit
here all day watching it, listening the while to the melodious spring
singing of the hundreds of birds which have come to take possession
of the garden, receiving southern reinforcements from Sicily and
Tunis every morning, and think he was happy. But the morning has
gone; and I have written nothing.

THE PRICE OF ORANGES

If ever a northern wanderer could be suddenly transported to look
down upon the Piano di Sorrento, he would not doubt that he saw the
Garden of the Hesperides. The orange-trees cannot well be fuller:
their branches bend with the weight of fruit. With the almond-trees
in full flower, and with the silver sheen of the olive leaves, the
oranges are apples of gold in pictures of silver. As I walk in these
sunken roads, and between these high walls, the orange boughs
everywhere hang over; and through the open gates of villas I look
down alleys of golden glimmer, roses and geraniums by the walk, and
the fruit above,--gardens of enchantment, with never a dragon, that I
can see, to guard them.

All the highways and the byways, the streets and lanes, wherever I
go, from the sea to the tops of the hills, are strewn with
orange-peel; so that one, looking above and below, comes back from a
walk with a golden dazzle in his eyes,--a sense that yellow is the
prevailing color. Perhaps the kerchiefs of the dark-skinned girls
and women, which take that tone, help the impression. The
inhabitants are all orange-eaters. The high walls show that the
gardens are protected with great care; yet the fruit seems to be as
free as apples are in a remote New England town about cider-time.

I have been trying, ever since I have been here, to ascertain the
price of oranges; not for purposes of exportation, nor yet for the
personal importation that I daily practice, but in order to give an
American basis of fact to these idle chapters. In all the paths I
meet, daily, girls and boys bearing on their heads large baskets of
the fruit, and little children with bags and bundles of the same, as
large as they can stagger under; and I understand they are carrying
them to the packers, who ship them to New York, or to the depots,
where I see them lying in yellow heaps, and where men and women are
cutting them up, and removing the peel, which goes to England for
preserves. I am told that these oranges are sold for a couple of
francs a hundred. That seems to me so dear that I am not tempted
into any speculation, but stroll back to the Tramontano, in the
gardens of which I find better terms.

The only trouble is to find a sweet tree; for the Sorrento oranges
are usually sour in February; and one needs to be a good judge of the
fruit, and know the male orange from the female, though which it is
that is the sweeter I can never remember (and should not dare to say,
if I did, in the present state of feeling on the woman question),--or
he might as well eat a lemon. The mercenary aspect of my query does
not enter in here. I climb into a tree, and reach out to the end of
the branch for an orange that has got reddish in the sun, that comes
off easily and is heavy; or I tickle a large one on the top bough
with a cane pole; and if it drops readily, and has a fine grain, I
call it a cheap one. I can usually tell whether they are good by
splitting them open and eating a quarter. The Italians pare their
oranges as we do apples; but I like best to open them first, and see
the yellow meat in the white casket. After you have eaten a few from
one tree, you can usually tell whether it is a good tree; but there
is nothing certain about it,--one bough that gets the sun will be
better than another that does not, and one half of an orange will
fill your mouth with more delicious juices than the other half.

The oranges that you knock off with your stick, as you walk along the
lanes, don't cost anything; but they are always sour, as I think the
girls know who lean over the wall, and look on with a smile: and, in
that, they are more sensible than the lively dogs which bark at you
from the top, and wake all the neighborhood with their clamor. I
have no doubt the oranges have a market price; but I have been
seeking the value the gardeners set on them themselves. As I walked
towards the heights, the other morning, and passed an orchard, the
gardener, who saw my ineffectual efforts, with a very long cane, to
reach the boughs of a tree, came down to me with a basketful he had
been picking. As an experiment on the price, I offered him a
two-centime piece, which is a sort of satire on the very name of
money,--when he desired me to help myself to as many oranges as I
liked. He was a fine-looking fellow, with a spick-span new red
Phrygian cap; and I had n't the heart to take advantage of his
generosity, especially as his oranges were not of the sweetest. One
ought never to abuse generosity.

Another experience was of a different sort, and illustrates the
Italian love of bargaining, and their notion of a sliding scale of
prices. One of our expeditions to the hills was one day making its
long, straggling way through the narrow street of a little village of
the Piano, when I lingered behind my companions, attracted by a
handcart with several large baskets of oranges. The cart stood
untended in the street; and selecting a large orange, which would
measure twelve inches in circumference, I turned to look for the
owner. After some time a fellow got from the open front of the
neighboring cobbler's shop, where he sat with his lazy cronies,
listening to the honest gossip of the follower of St. Crispin, and
sauntered towards me.

"How much for this?" I ask.

"One franc, signor," says the proprietor, with a polite bow, holding
up one finger.

I shake my head, and intimate that that is altogether too much, in
fact, preposterous.

The proprietor is very indifferent, and shrugs his shoulders in an
amiable manner. He picks up a fair, handsome orange, weighs it in
his hand, and holds it up temptingly. That also is one, franc.

I suggest one sou as a fair price, a suggestion which he only
receives with a smile of slight pity, and, I fancy, a little disdain.
A woman joins him, and also holds up this and that gold-skinned one
for my admiration.

As I stand, sorting over the fruit, trying to please myself with
size, color, and texture, a little crowd has gathered round; and I
see, by a glance, that all the occupations in that neighborhood,
including loafing, are temporarily suspended to witness the trade.
The interest of the circle visibly increases; and others take such a
part in the transaction that I begin to doubt if the first man is,
after all, the proprietor.

At length I select two oranges, and again demand the price. There is
a little consultation and jabber, when I am told that I can have both
for a franc. I, in turn, sigh, shrug my shoulders, and put down the
oranges, amid a chorus of exclamations over my graspingness. My
offer of two sous is met with ridicule, but not with indifference. I
can see that it has made a sensation. These simple, idle children of
the sun begin to show a little excitement. I at length determine
upon a bold stroke, and resolve to show myself the Napoleon of
oranges, or to meet my Waterloo. I pick out four of the largest
oranges in the basket, while all eyes are fixed on me intently, and,
for the first time, pull out a piece of money. It is a two-sous
piece. I offer it for the four oranges.

"No, no, no, no, signor! Ah, signor! ah, signor!" in a chorus from
the whole crowd.

I have struck bottom at last, and perhaps got somewhere near the
value; and all calmness is gone. Such protestations, such
indignation, such sorrow, I have never seen before from so small a
cause. It cannot be thought of; it is mere ruin! I am, in turn, as
firm, and nearly as excited in seeming. I hold up the fruit, and
tender the money.

"No, never, never! The signor cannot be in earnest."

Looking round me for a moment, and assuming a theatrical manner,
befitting the gestures of those about me, I fling the fruit down,
and, with a sublime renunciation, stalk away.

There is instantly a buzz and a hum that rises almost to a clamor. I
have not proceeded far, when a skinny old woman runs after me, and
begs me to return. I go back, and the crowd parts to receive me.

The proprietor has a new proposition, the effect of which upon me is
intently watched. He proposes to give me five big oranges for four
sous. I receive it with utter scorn, and a laugh of derision. I
will give two sous for the original four, and not a centesimo more.
That I solemnly say, and am ready to depart. Hesitation and renewed
conference; but at last the proprietor relents; and, with the look of
one who is ruined for life, and who yet is willing to sacrifice
himself, he hands me the oranges. Instantly the excitement is dead,
the crowd disperses, and the street is as quiet as ever; when I walk
away, bearing my hard-won treasures.

A little while after, as I sat upon the outer wall of the terrace of
the Camaldoli, with my feet hanging over, these same oranges were
taken from my pockets by Americans; so that I am prevented from
making any moral reflections upon the honesty of the Italians.

There is an immense garden of oranges and lemons at the village of
Massa, through which travelers are shown by a surly fellow, who keeps
watch of his trees, and has a bulldog lurking about for the unwary.
I hate to see a bulldog in a fruit orchard. I have eaten a good many
oranges there, and been astonished at the boughs of immense lemons
which bend the trees to the ground. I took occasion to measure one
of the lemons, called a citron-lemon, and found its circumference to
be twenty-one inches one way by fifteen inches the other,--about as
big as a railway conductor's lantern. These lemons are not so sour
as the fellow who shows them: he is a mercenary dog, and his prices
afford me no clew to the just value of oranges.

I like better to go to a little garden in the village of Meta, under
a sunny precipice of rocks overhung by the ruined convent of
Camaldoli. I turn up a narrow lane, and push open the wooden door in
the garden of a little villa. It is a pretty garden; and, besides
the orange and lemon-trees on the terrace, it has other fruit-trees,
and a scent of many flowers. My friend, the gardener, is sorting
oranges from one basket to another, on a green bank, and evidently
selling the fruit to some women, who are putting it into bags to
carry away.

When he sees me approach, there is always the same pantomime. I
propose to take some of the fruit he is sorting. With a knowing air,
and an appearance of great mystery, he raises his left hand, the palm
toward me, as one says hush. Having dispatched his business, he
takes an empty basket, and with another mysterious flourish, desiring
me to remain quiet, he goes to a storehouse in one corner of the
garden, and returns with a load of immense oranges, all soaked with
the sun, ripe and fragrant, and more tempting than lumps of gold. I
take one, and ask him if it is sweet. He shrugs his shoulders,
raises his hands, and, with a sidewise shake of the head, and a look
which says, How can you be so faithless? makes me ashamed of my
doubts.

I cut the thick skin, which easily falls apart and discloses the
luscious quarters, plump, juicy, and waiting to melt in the mouth. I
look for a moment at the rich pulp in its soft incasement, and then
try a delicious morsel. I nod. My gardener again shrugs his
shoulders, with a slight smile, as much as to say, It could not be
otherwise, and is evidently delighted to have me enjoy his fruit. I
fill capacious pockets with the choicest; and, if I have friends with
me, they do the same. I give our silent but most expressive
entertainer half a franc, never more; and he always seems surprised
at the size of the largesse. We exhaust his basket, and he proposes
to get more.

When I am alone, I stroll about under the heavily-laden trees, and
pick up the largest, where they lie thickly on the ground, liking to
hold them in my hand and feel the agreeable weight, even when I can
carry away no more. The gardener neither follows nor watches me; and
I think perhaps knows, and is not stingy about it, that more valuable
to me than the oranges I eat or take away are those on the trees
among the shining leaves. And perhaps he opines that I am from a
country of snow and ice, where the year has six hostile months, and
that I have not money enough to pay for the rich possession of the
eye, the picture of beauty, which I take with me.

FASCINATION

There are three places where I should like to live; naming them in
the inverse order of preference,--the Isle of Wight, Sorrento, and
Heaven. The first two have something in common, the almost mystic
union of sky and sea and shore, a soft atmospheric suffusion that
works an enchantment, and puts one into a dreamy mood. And yet there
are decided contrasts. The superabundant, soaking sunshine of
Sorrento is of very different quality from that of the Isle of Wight.
On the island there is a sense of home, which one misses on this
promontory, the fascination of which, no less strong, is that of a
southern beauty, whose charms conquer rather than win. I remember
with what feeling I one day unexpectedly read on a white slab, in the
little inclosure of Bonchurch, where the sea whispered as gently as
the rustle of the ivy-leaves, the name of John Sterling. Could there
be any fitter resting-place for that most, weary, and gentle spirit?
There I seemed to know he had the rest that he could not have
anywhere on these brilliant historic shores. Yet so impressible was
his sensitive nature, that I doubt not, if he had given himself up to
the enchantment of these coasts in his lifetime, it would have led
him by a spell he could not break.

I am sometimes in doubt what is the spell of Sorrento, and half
believe that it is independent of anything visible. There is said to
be a fatal enchantment about Capri. The influences of Sorrento are
not so dangerous, but are almost as marked. I do not wonder that the
Greeks peopled every cove and sea-cave with divinities, and built
temples on every headland and rocky islet here; that the Romans built
upon the Grecian ruins; that the ecclesiastics in succeeding
centuries gained possession of all the heights, and built convents
and monasteries, and set out vineyards, and orchards of olives and
oranges, and took root as the creeping plants do, spreading
themselves abroad in the sunshine and charming air. The Italian of