PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. (continued 4)

We passed a picturesque chateau, built very widely on a rock washed by the river, called "La Roche de Glun," and twilight soon after fell, closing in our view to all but the river edge. The wind died away, but the stars were bright and the air mild; and, quite fatigued to silence, our little party leaned on the sides of the boat, and waited till the current should float us down to our resting-place for the night. We reached Valence at ten, and with a merry dinner and supper in one, which kept us up till after midnight, we got to our coarse but clean beds, and slept soundly.

The following forenoon we ran under the Pont St. Esprit, an experiment the guide-book calls very dangerous. The Rhone is rapid and noisy here, and we shot under the arches of the fine old structure with great velocity; but the "Rapids of the St. Lawrence" are passed constantly without apprehension by travellers in America, and those of the Rhone are a mere millrace in comparison. We breakfasted just below, at a village where we could scarce understand a syllable, the patois was so decided, and at sunset we were far down between the provinces of Dauphiny and Languedoc, with the villages growing thicker and greener, and a high mountain within ten or fifteen miles, covered with snow nearly to the base. We stopped opposite the old castle of Rocheméuse to pay the droit. It was a demi-fete day, and the inhabitants of a village back from the river had come out to the green bank in their holyday costume for a revel. The bank swelled up from the stream to a pretty wood, and the green sward between was covered with these gay people, arrested in their amusements by our arrival. We jumped out for a moment, and I walked up the bank and endeavored to make the acquaintance of a strikingly handsome woman about thirty, but the patois was quite too much. After several vain attempts to understand each other, she laughed and turned on her heel, and I followed the call of the padrone to the batteau. For five or six miles below, the river passed through a kind of meadow, and an air more loaded with fragrance I never breathed. The sun was just down, and with the mildness of the air, and quiet glide of the boat on the water, it was quite enchanting. Conversation died away, and I went forward and lay down in the bow alone, with a fit of desperate musing. It is as singular as it is certain, that the more one enjoys the loveliness of a foreign land, the more he feels how absolutely his heart is at home in his own country.

LETTER XXV.

INFLUENCE OF A BOATMAN—THE TOWN OF ARLES—ROMAN RUINS—THE CATHEDRAL—MARSEILLES—THE PASS OF OLLIOULES—THE VINEYARDS—TOULON—ANTIBES—LAZARETTO—VILLA FRANCA, ETC.

I entered Avignon after a delicious hour on the Rhone, quite in the mood to do poetical homage to its associations. My dreams of Petrarch and Vaucluse were interrupted by a scene between my friend the captain, and a stout boatman, who had brought his baggage from the batteau. The result was an appeal to the mayor, who took the captain aside after the matter was argued, and told him in his ear that he must compromise the matter, for he dared not give a judgment in his favor! The man had demanded twelve francs where the regulations allowed him but one, and palpable as the imposition was, the magistrate refused to interfere. The captain curled his mustache and walked the room in a terrible passion, and the boatman, an herculean fellow, eyed him with a look of assurance which quite astonished me. After the case was settled, I asked an explanation of the mayor. He told me frankly, that the fellow belonged to a powerful class of men of the lowest description, who, having declared first for the present government, were and would be supported by it in almost any question where favor could be shown—that all the other classes of inhabitants were malcontents, and that, between positive strength and royal favor, the boatmen and their party had become too powerful even for the ordinary enforcement of the law.

The following day was so sultry and warm, that I gave up all idea of a visit to Vaucluse. We spent the morning under the trees which stand before the door of the café in the village square, and at noon we took the steamboat upon the Rhone for Arles. An hour or two brought us to this ancient town, where we were compelled to wait till the next day, the larger boat which goes hence by the mouths of the Rhone to Marseilles, being out of order.

We left our baggage in the boat, and I walked up with the captain to see the town. An officer whom we addressed for information on the quay politely offered to be our guide, and we passed three or four hours rambling about, with great pleasure. Our first object was the Roman ruins, for which the town is celebrated. We traversed several streets, so narrow, that the old time-worn houses on either side seemed to touch at the top, and in the midst of a desolate and poverty-stricken neighborhood, we came suddenly upon a noble Roman amphitheatre of gigantic dimensions, and sufficiently preserved to be a picturesque ruin. It was built on the terrace of a hill, overlooking the Rhone. From the towers of the gateway, the view across the river into the lovely province of Languedoc, is very extensive. The arena is an excavation of perhaps thirty feet in depth, and the rows of seats, all built of vast blocks of stone, stretch round it in retreating and rising platforms to the surface of the hill. The lower story is surrounded with dens; and the upper terrace is enclosed with a circle of small apartments, like boxes in a theatre, opening by handsome arches upon the scene. It is the ruin of a noble structure, and, even without the help of the imagination, exceedingly impressive. It seems to be at present turned into a play-ground. The dens and cavities were full of black-eyed and happy creatures, hiding and hallooing with all the delightful spirit and gayety of French children. Probably it was never appropriated to a better use.

We entered the cathedral in returning. It is an antique, and considered a very fine one. The twilight was just falling; and the candles burning upon the altar, had a faint, dull glare, making the dimness of the air more perceptible. I walked up the long aisle to the side chapel, without observing that my companions had left me, and, quite tired with my walk, seated myself against one of the Gothic pillars, enjoying the quiet of the place, and the momentary relief from exciting objects. It struck me presently that there was a dead silence in the church, and, as much to hear the sound of English as for any better motive, I approached the priest's missal, which lay open on a stand near me, and commenced translating a familiar psalm aloud. My voice echoed through the building with a fullness which startled me, and looking over my shoulder, I saw that a simple, poor old woman was kneeling in the centre of the church, praying alone. She had looked up at my interruption of the silence of the place, but her beads still slipped slowly through her fingers, and, feeling that I was intruding possibly between a sincere worshipper and her Maker, I withdrew to the side aisle, and made my way softly out of the cathedral.

Arles appears to have modernized less than any town I have seen in France. The streets and the inhabitants look as if they had not changed for a century. The dress of the women is very peculiar; the waist of the gown coming up to a point behind, between the shoulder blades, and consequently very short in front, and the high cap bound to the head with broad velvet ribands, suffering nothing but the jet black curls to escape over the forehead. As a class, they are the handsomest women I have seen. Nothing could be prettier than the small-featured lively brunettes we saw sitting on the stone benches at every door.

We ran down the next morning, in a few hours to Marseilles. It was a cloudy, misty day, and I did not enjoy, as I expected, the first view of the Mediterranean from the mouths of the Rhone. We put quite out into the swell of the sea, and the passengers were all strewn on the deck in the various gradations of sickness. My friend the captain, and myself, had the only constant stomachs on board. I was very happy to distinguish Marseilles through the mist, and as we approached nearer, the rocky harbor and the islands of Chateau d'If and Pomègue, with the fortress at the mouth of the harbor, came out gradually from the mist, and the view opened to a noble amphitheatre of rocky mountains, in whose bosom lies Marseilles at the edge of the sea. We ran into the narrow cove which forms the inner harbor, passing an American ship, the "William Penn," just arrived from Philadelphia, and lying in quarantine. My blood started at the sight of the starred flag; and as we passed closer and I read the name upon her stern, a thousand recollections of that delightful city sprang to my heart, and I leaned over to her from the boat's side, with a feeling of interest and pleasure to which the foreign tongue that called me to bid adieu to newer friends, seemed an unwelcome interruption.

I parted from my pleasant Parisian friend and his family, however, with real regret. They were polite and refined, and had given me their intimacy voluntarily and without reserve. I shook hands with them on the quay, and wished the pale and quiet invalid better health, with more of feeling than is common with acquaintances of a day. I believe them kind and sincere, and I have not found these qualities growing so thickly in the world that I can thrust aside anything that resembles them, with a willing mistrust.

The quay of Marseilles is one of the most varied scenes to be met with in Europe. Vessels of all nations come trading to its port, and nearly every costume in the world may be seen in its busy crowds. I was surprised at the number of Greeks. Their picturesque dresses and dark fine faces meet you at every step, and it would be difficult, if it were not for the shrinking eye, to believe them capable of an ignoble thought. The mould of the race is one for heroes, but if all that is said of them be true, the blood has become impure. Of the two or three hundred I must have seen at Marseilles, I scarce remember one whose countenance would not have been thought remarkable.

I have remained six days in Marseilles by the advice of the Sardinian consul, who assured me that so long a residence in the south of France, is necessary to escape quarantine for the cholera, at the ports or on the frontiers of Italy. I have obtained his certificate to-day, and depart to-morrow for Nice. My forced sejour here has been far from an amusing or a willing one. The "mistral" has blown chilly and with suffocating dryness, so that I have scarce breathed freely since I entered the town, and the streets, though handsomely laid out and built, are intolerable from the dust. The sun scorches your skin to a blister, and the wind chills your blood to the bone. There are beautiful public walks, which, at the more moist seasons, must be delightful, but at present the leaves on the trees are all white, and you cannot keep your eyes open long enough to see from one end of the promenade to the other. Within doors, it is true, I have found everything which could compensate for such evils; and I shall carry away pleasant recollections of the hospitality of the Messrs. Fitch, and others of my countrymen, living here—gentlemen whose courtesies are well-remembered by every American traveller through the south of France.

I sank into the corner of the coupé of the diligence for Toulon, at nine o'clock in the evening, and awoke with the gray of the dawn at the entrance of the pass of Ollioules, one of the wildest defiles I ever saw. The gorge is the bed of a winter torrent, and you travel three miles or more between two mountains seemingly cleft asunder, on a road cut out a little above the stream, with naked rock to the height of two or three hundred feet almost perpendicularly above you. Nothing could be more bare and desolate than the whole pass, and nothing could be richer or more delightfully cultivated than the low valleys upon which it opens. It is some four or five miles hence to Toulon, and we traversed the road by sunrise, the soft, gray light creeping through the olive and orange trees with which the fields are laden, and the peasants just coming out to their early labor. You see no brute animal here except the mule; and every countryman you meet is accompanied by one of these serviceable little creatures, often quite hidden from sight by the enormous load he carries, or pacing patiently along with a master on his back, who is by far the larger of the two.

The vineyards begin to look delightfully; for the thick black stump which was visible over the fields I have hitherto passed, is in these warm valleys covered already with masses of luxuriant vine leaves, and the hill sides are lovely with the light and tender verdure. I saw here for the first time, the olive and date trees in perfection. They grow in vast orchards planted regularly, and the olive resembles closely the willow, and reaches about the same height and shape. The leaves are as slender but not quite so long, and the color is more dusky, like the bloom upon a grape. Indeed, at a short distance, the whole tree looks like a mass of untouched fruit.

I was agreeably disappointed in Toulon. It is a rural town with a harbor—not the dirty seaport one naturally expects to find it. The streets are the cleanest I have seen in France, some of them lined with trees, and the fountains all over it freshen the eye delightfully. We had an hour to spare, and with Mr. Doyle, an Irish gentleman, who had been my travelling companion, since I parted with my friend the Swiss, I made the circuit of the quays. They were covered with French naval officers and soldiers, promenading and conversing in the lively manner of this gayest of nations. A handsome child, of perhaps six years, was selling roses at one of the corners, and for a sous, all she demanded, I bought six of the most superb damask buds just breaking into flower. They were the first I had seen from the open air since I left America, and I have not often purchased so much pleasure with a copper coin.

Toulon was interesting to me as the place where Napoleon's career began. The fortifications are very imposing. We passed out of the town over the draw-bridge, and were again in the midst of a lovely landscape, with an air of bland and exhilarating softness, and everything that could delight the eye. The road runs along the shore of the Mediterranean, and the fields are green to the water edge.

We arrived at Antibes to-day at noon, within fifteen miles of the frontier of Sardinia. We have run through most of the south of France, and have found it all like a garden. The thing most like it in our country is the neighborhood of Boston, particularly the undulated country about Brookline and Dorchester. Remove all the stone fences from that sweet country, put here and there an old chateau on an eminence, and change the pretty white mock cottages of gentlemen, for the real stone cottages of peasantry, and you have a fair picture of the scenery of this celebrated shore. The Mediterranean should be added as a distance, with its exquisite blue, equalled by nothing but an American sky in a July noon—its crowds of sail, of every shape and nation, and the Alps in the horizon crested with snow, like clouds half touched by the sun. It is really a delicious climate. Out of the scorching sun the air is bracing and cool; and though my ears have been blistered in walking up the hills in a travelling cap, I have scarcely experienced an uncomfortable sensation of heat, and this in my winter dress, with flannels and a surtout, as I have worn them for the six months past in Paris. The air could not be tempered more accurately for enjoyment. I regret to go in doors. I regret to sleep it away.

Antibes was fortified by the celebrated Vauban, and it looks impregnable enough to my unscientific eye. If the portcullises were drawn up, I would not undertake to get into the town with the full consent of the inhabitants. We walked around the ramparts which are washed by the Mediterranean, and got an appetite in the sea-breeze, which we would willingly have dispensed with. I dislike to abuse people, but I must say that the cuisine of Madame Agarra, at the "Gold Eagle," is rather the worst I have fallen upon in my travels. Her price, as is usual in France, was proportionably exorbitant. My Irish friend, who is one of the most religious gentlemen of his country I ever met, came as near getting into a passion with his supper and bill, as was possible for a temper so well disciplined. For myself, having acquired only polite French, I can but "look daggers" when I am abused. We depart presently for Nice, in a ricketty barouche, with post-horses, the courier, or post-coach, going no farther. It is a roomy old affair, that has had pretensions to style some time since Henri Quatre, but the arms on its panels are illegible now, and the ambitious driving-box is occupied by the humble materials to remedy a probable break-down by the way. The postillion is cracking his whip impatiently, my friend has called me twice, and I must put up my pencil.

Antibes again! We have returned here after an unsuccessful attempt to enter the Sardinian dominions. We were on the road by ten in the morning, and drove slowly along the shores of the Mediterranean, enjoying to the utmost the heavenly weather and the glorious scenery about us. The driver pointed out to us a few miles from Antibes, the very spot on which Napoleon landed on his return from Elba, and the tree, a fine old olive, under which he slept three hours, before commencing his march. We arrived at the Pont de Var about one, and crossed the river, but here we were met by a guard of Sardinian soldiers, and our passports were demanded. The commissary came from the guard-house with a long pair of tongs, and receiving them open, read them at the longest possible distance. They were then handed back to us in the same manner, and we were told we could not pass. We then handed him our certificates of quarantine at Marseilles; but were told it availed nothing, a new order having arrived from Turin that very morning, to admit no travellers from infected or suspected places across the frontier. We asked if there were no means by which we could pass; but the commissary only shook his head, ordered us not to dismount on the Sardinian side of the river, and shut his door. We turned about and recrossed the bridge in some perplexity. The French commissary at St. Laurent, the opposite village, received us with a suppressed smile, and informed us that several parties of travellers, among others an English gentleman and his wife and sister, were at the auberge, waiting for an answer from the Prefect of Nice, having been turned back in the same manner since morning. We drove up, and they advised us to send our passports by the postillion, with a letter to the consuls of our respective nations, requesting information, which we did immediately.

Nice is three miles from St. Laurent, and as we could not expect an answer for several hours, we amused ourselves with a stroll along the banks of the Var to the Mediterranean. The Sardinian side is bold, and wooded to the tops of the hills very richly. We kept along a mile or more through the vineyards, and returned in time to receive a letter from the American consul, confirming the orders of the commissary, but advising us to return to Antibes, and sail thence for Villa Franca, a lazaretto in the neighborhood of Nice, whence we could enter Italy, after seven days quarantine! By this time several travelling-carriages had collected, and all, profiting by our experience, turned back together. We are now at the "Gold Eagle," deliberating. Some have determined to give up their object altogether, but the rest of us sail to-morrow morning in a fishing-boat for the lazaretto.

Lazaretto, Villa Franca.—There were but eight of the twenty or thirty travellers stopped at the bridge who thought it worth while to persevere. We are all here in this pest-house, and a motley mixture of nations it is. There are two young Sicilians returning from college to Messina; a Belgian lad of seventeen, just started on his travels; two aristocratic young Frenchmen, very elegant and very ignorant of the world, running down to Italy in their own carriage, to avoid the cholera; a middle-aged surgeon in the British navy, very cool and very gentlemanly; a vulgar Marseilles trader, and myself.

We were from seven in the morning till two, getting away from Antibes. Our difficulties during the whole day are such a practical comparison of the freedom of European states and ours, that I may as well detail them.

First of all, our passports were to be vised by the police. We were compelled to stand an hour with our hats off, in a close, dirty office, waiting our turn for this favor. The next thing was to get the permission of the prefect of the marine to embark; and this occupied another hour. Thence we were taken to the health-office, where a bill of health was made out for eight persons going to a lazaretto! The padrone's freight duties were then to be settled, and we went back and forth between the Sardinian consul and the French, disputing these for another hour or more. Our baggage was piled upon the charrette, at last, to be taken to the boat. The quay is outside the gate, and here are stationed the douanes, or custom-officers, who ordered our trunks to be taken from the cart, and searched them from top to bottom. After a half hour spent in repacking our effects in the open street, amid a crowd of idle spectators, we were suffered to proceed. Almost all these various gentlemen expect a fee, and some demand a heavy one; and all this trouble and expense of time and money to make a voyage of fifteen miles in a fishing-boat!

We hoisted the fisherman's latteen sail, and put out of the little harbor in very bad temper. The wind was fair, and we ran along the shore for a couple of hours, till we came to Nice, where we were to stop for permission to go to the lazaretto. We were hailed, off the mole, with a trumpet, and suffered to pass. Doubling a little point, half a mile farther on, we ran into the bay of Villa Franca, a handful of houses at the base of an amphitheatre of mountains. A little round tower stood in the centre of the harbor, built upon a rock, and connected with the town by a draw-bridge, and we were landed at a staircase outside, by which we mounted to show our papers to the health-officer. The interior was a little circular yard, separated from an office on the town side by an iron grating, and looking out on the sea by two embrasures for cannon. Two strips of water and the sky above was our whole prospect for the hour that we waited here. The cause of the delay was presently explained by clouds of smoke issuing from the interior. The tower filled, and a more nauseating odor I never inhaled. We were near suffocating with the intolerable smell, and the quantity of smoke deemed necessary to secure his majesty's officers against contagion.

A cautious-looking old gentleman, with gray hair, emerged at last from the smoke, with a long cane-pole in his hand, and, coughing at every syllable, requested us to insert our passports in the split at the extremity, which he thrust through the gate. This being done, we asked him for bread. We had breakfasted at seven, and it was now sundown—near twelve hours fast. Several of my companions had been seasick with the swell of the Mediterranean, in coming from Antibes, and all were faint with hunger and exhaustion. For myself, the villainous smell of our purification had made me sick, and I had no appetite; but the rest ate very voraciously of a loaf of coarse bread, which was extended to us with a tongs and two pieces of paper.

After reading our passports, the magistrate informed us that he had no orders to admit us to the lazaretto, and we must lie in our boat till he could send a messenger to Nice with our passports and obtain permission. We opened upon him, however, with such a flood of remonstrance, and with such an emphasis from hunger and fatigue, that he consented to admit us temporarily on his own responsibility, and gave the boatmen orders to row back to a long, low stone building, which we had observed at the foot of a precipice at the entrance to the harbor.

He was there before us, and as we mounted the stone ladder he pointed through the bars of a large inner gate to a single chamber, separated from the rest of the building, and promising to send us something to eat in the course of the evening, left us to take possession. Our position was desolate enough. The building was new, and the plaster still soft and wet. There was not an article of furniture in the chamber, and but a single window; the floor was of brick, and the air as damp within as a cellar. The alternative was to remain out of doors, in the small yard, walled up thirty feet on three sides, and washed by the sea on the other; and here, on a long block of granite, the softest thing I could find, I determined to make an al fresco night of it.

Bread, cheese, wine, and cold meat, seethed, Italian fashion, in nauseous oil, arrived about nine o'clock; and, by the light of a candle standing in a boot, we sat around on the brick floor, and supped very merrily. Hunger had brought even our two French exquisites to their fare, and they ate well. The navy surgeon had seen service, and had no qualms; the Sicilians were from a German university, and were not delicate; the Marseilles trader knew no better; and we should have been less contented with a better meal. It was superfluous to abuse it.

A steep precipice hangs immediately over the lazaretto, and the horn of the half moon was just dipping below it, as I stretched myself to sleep. With a folded coat under me, and a carpet-bag for a pillow, I soon fell asleep, and slept soundly till sunrise. My companions had chosen shelter, but all were happy to be early risers. We mounted our wall upon the sea, and promenaded till the sun was broadly up, and the breeze from the Mediterranean sharpened our appetites, and then finishing the relics of our supper, we waited with what patience we might the appearance of our breakfast.

The magistrate arrived at twelve, yesterday, with a commissary from Villa Franca, who is to be our victualler during the quarantine. He has enlarged our limits, by a stone staircase and an immense chamber, on condition that we pay for an extra guard, in the shape of a Sardinian soldier, who is to sleep in our room, and eat at our table. By the way, we have a table, and four rough benches, and these, with three single mattresses, are all the furniture we can procure. We are compelled to sleep across the latter of course, to give every one his share.

We have come down very contentedly to our situation, and I have been exceedingly amused at the facility with which eight such different tempers can amalgamate, upon compulsion. Our small quarters bring us in contact continually, and we harmonize like schoolboys. At this moment the Marseilles trader and the two Frenchmen are throwing stones at something that is floating out with the tide; the surgeon has dropped his Italian grammar to decide upon which is the best shot; the Belgian is fishing off the wall, with a pin hook and a bit of cheese; and the two Sicilians are talking lingua franca, at the top of their voices, to Carolina, the guardian's daughter, who stands coquetting on the pier just outside the limits. I have got out my books and portfolio, and taken possession of the broad stair, depending on the courtesy of my companions to jump over me and my papers when they go up and down. I sit here most of the day laughing at the fun below, and writing or reading alternately. The climate is too delicious for discontent. Every breath is a pleasure. The hills of the amphitheatre opposite to us are covered with olive, lemon, and orange trees; and in the evening, from the time the land breeze commences to blow off shore until ten or eleven, the air is impregnated with the delicate perfume of the orange-blossom, than which nothing could be more grateful. Nice is called the hospital of Europe; and truly, under this divine sky, and with the inspiriting vitality and softness of the air, and all that nature can lavish of luxuriance and variety upon the hills, it is the place, if there is one in the world, where the drooping spirit of the invalid must revive and renew. At this moment the sun has crept from the peak of the highest mountain across the bay, and we shall scent presently the spicy wind from the shore. I close my book to go upon the wall, which I see the surgeon has mounted already with the same object, to catch the first breath that blows seaward.

It is Sunday, and an Italian summer morning. I do not think my eyes ever woke upon so lovely a day. The long, lazy swell comes in from the Mediterranean as smooth as glass; the sails of a beautiful yacht, belonging to an English nobleman at Nice, and lying becalmed just now in the bay, are hanging motionless about the masts; the sky is without a speck, the air just seems to me to steep every nerve and fibre of the frame with repose and pleasure. Now and then in America I have felt a June morning that approached it, but never the degree, the fulness, the sunny softness of this exquisite clime. It tranquilizes the mind as well as the body. You cannot resist feeling contented and genial. We are all out of doors, and my companions have brought down their mattresses, and are lying along the shade of the east wall, talking quietly and pleasantly; the usual sounds of the workmen on the quays of the town are still, our harbor-guard lies asleep in his boat, the yellow flag of the lazaretto clings to the staff, everything about us breathes tranquillity. Prisoner as I am, I would not stir willingly to-day.

We have had two new arrivals this morning—a boat from Antibes, with a company of players bound for the theatre at Milan; and two French deserters from the regiment at Toulon, who escaped in a leaky boat, and have made this voyage along the coast to get into Italy. They knew nothing of the quarantine, and were very much surprised at their arrest. They will, probably, be delivered up to the French consul. The new comers are all put together in the large chamber next us, and we have been talking with them through the grate. His majesty of Sardinia is not spared in their voluble denunciations.

Our imprisonment is getting to be a little tedious. We lengthen our breakfasts and dinners, go to sleep early and get up late, but a lazaretto is a dull place after all. We have no books except dictionaries and grammars, and I am on my last sheet of paper. What I shall do, the two remaining days, I cannot divine. Our meals were amusing for a while. We have but three knives and four glasses; and the Belgian, having cut his plate in two on the first day, has eaten since from the wash-bowl. The salt is in a brown paper, the vinegar in a shell; and the meats, to be kept warm during their passage by water, are brought in the black utensils in which they are cooked. Our tablecloth appeared to-day of all the colors of the rainbow. We sat down to breakfast with a general cry of horror. Still, with youth and good spirits, we manage to be more contented than one would expect; and our lively discussions of the spot on the quay where the table shall be laid, and the noise of our dinners en plein air, would convince the spectator that we were a very merry and sufficiently happy company.

I like my companions, on the whole, very much. The surgeon has been in Canada and the west of New York, and we have travelled the same routes, and made in several instances, the same acquaintances. He has been in almost every part of the world also, and his descriptions are very graphic and sensible. The Belgian talks of his new king Leopold, the Sicilians of the German universities; and when I have exhausted all they can tell me, I turn to our Parisians, whom I find I have met all last winter without noticing them, at the parties; and we discuss the belles, and the different members of the beau monde, with all the touching air and tone of exiles from paradise. In a case of desperate ennui, wearied with studying and talking, the sea wall is a delightful lounge, and the blue Mediterranean plays the witch to the indolent fancy, and beguiles it well. I have never seen such a beautiful sheet of water. The color is peculiarly rich and clear, like an intensely blue sky, heaving into waves. I do not find the often-repeated description of its loveliness exaggerated.

Our seven days expire to-morrow, and we are preparing to eat our last dinner in the lazaretto with great glee. A temporary table is already laid upon the quay, and two strips of board raised upon some ingenious contrivance, I can not well say what, and covered with all the private and public napkins that retained any portion of their maiden whiteness. Our knives are reduced to two, one having disappeared unaccountably; but the deficiency is partially remedied. The surgeon has "whittled" a pine knot, which floated in upon the tide, into a distant imitation; and one of the company has produced a delicate dagger, that looks very like a keepsake from a lady; and, by the reluctant manner in which it was put to service, the profanation cost his sentiment an effort. Its white handle and silver sheath lie across a plate, abridged of its proportions by a very formidable segment. There was no disguising the poverty of the brown paper that contained the salt. It was too necessary to be made an "aside," and lies plump in the middle of the table. I fear there has been more fun in the preparation than we shall feel in eating the dinner when it arrives. The Belgian stands on the wall, watching all the boats from town; but they pass off down the harbor, one after another, and we are destined to keep our appetites to a late hour. Their detestable cookery needs the "sauce of hunger."

The Belgian's hat waves in the air, and the commissary's boat must be in sight. As we get off at six o'clock to-morrow morning, my portfolio shuts till I find another resting place, probably Genoa.

LETTER XXVI.

SHORE OF THE MEDITERRANEAN—NICE—FUNERAL SERVICES OF MARIA THERESA, ARCHDUCHESS OF AUSTRIA—PRINCIPALITY OF MONACO—ROAD TO GENOA—SARDINIA—PRISON OF THE POPE—HOUSE OF COLUMBUS—GENOA.

The health-magistrate arrived at an early hour, on the morning of our departure from the lazaretto of Villa Franca. He was accompanied by a physician, who was to direct the fumigation. The iron pot was placed in the centre of the chamber, our clothes were spread out upon the beds, and the windows shut. The chlorin soon filled the room, and its detestable odor became so intolerable that we forced the door, and rushed past the sentinel into the open air, nearly suffocated. This farce over, we were permitted to embark, and, rounding the point, put into Nice.

The Mediterranean curves gracefully into the crescented shore of this lovely bay, and the high hills lean away from the skirts of the town in one unbroken slope of cultivation to the top. Large, handsome buildings face you on the long quay, as you approach; and white chimneys, and half-concealed parts of country-houses and suburban villas, appear through the olive and orange trees with which the whole amphitheatre is covered. We landed amid a crowd of half-naked idlers, and were soon at a hotel, where we ordered the best breakfast the town would afford, and sat down once more to clean cloths and unrepulsive food.

As we rose from the table, a note, edged with black, and sealed and enveloped with considerable circumstance, was put into my hand by the master of the hotel. It was an invitation from the governor to attend a funeral service, to be performed in the cathedral that day, at ten o'clock, for the "late Queen-mother, Maria Theresa, Archduchess of Austria." Wondering not a little how I came by the honor, I joined the crowd flocking from all parts of the town to see the ceremony. The central door was guarded by a file of Sardinian soldiers; and, presenting my invitation to the officer on duty, I was handed over to the master of ceremonies, and shown to an excellent seat in the centre of the church. The windows were darkened, and the candles of the altar not yet lit; and, by the indistinct light that came in through the door, I could distinguish nothing clearly. A little silver bell tinkled presently from one of the side-chapels, and boys dressed in white appeared, with long tapers, and the house was soon splendidly illuminated. I found myself in the midst of a crowd of four or five hundred ladies, all in deep mourning. The church was hung from the floor to the roof in black cloth, ornamented gorgeously with silver; and, under the large dome, which occupied half the ceiling, was raised a pyramidal altar, with tripods supporting chalices for incense at the four corners, a walk round the lower base for the priests, and something in the centre, surrounded with a blaze of light, representing figures weeping over a tomb. The organ commenced pealing, there was a single beat on the drum, and a procession entered. It was composed of the nobility of Nice, and the military and civil officers, all in uniform and court dresses. The gold and silver flashing in the light, the tall plumes of the Sardinian soldiery below, the solemn music, and the moving of the censers from the four corners of the altar, produced a very impressive effect. As soon as the procession had quite entered, the fire was kindled in the four chalices; and, as the white smoke rolled up to the roof, an anthem commenced with the full power of the organ. The singing was admirable, and there was one female voice in the choir, of singular power and sweetness.

The remainder of the service was the usual ceremonies of the Catholic church, and I amused myself with observing the people about me. It was little like a scene of mourning. The officers gradually edged in between the seats, and every woman with the least pretension to prettiness was engaged in anything but her prayers for the soul of the late Archduchess. Some of these, the very young girls, were pretty; and the women, of thirty-five or forty apparently, were fine-looking; but, except a decided air of style and rank, the fairly grown-up belles seemed to me of very small attraction.

I saw little else in Nice to interest me. I wandered about with my friend the surgeon, laughing at the ridiculous figures and villainous uniforms of the Sardinian infantry, and repelling the beggars, who radiated to us from every corner; and, having traversed the terrace of a mile on the tops of the houses next the sea, unravelled all the lanes of the old town, and admired all the splendor of the new, we dined and got early to bed, anxious to sleep once more between sheets, and prepare for an early start on the following morning.

We were on the road to Genoa with the first gray of the dawn: the surgeon, a French officer, and myself, three passengers of a courier barouche. We were climbing up mountains and sliding down with locked wheels for several hours, by a road edging on precipices, and overhung by tremendous rocks, and, descending at last to the sea-level, we entered Mentone, a town of the little principality of Monaco. Having paid our twenty sous tribute to this prince of a territory not larger than a Kentucky farm, we were suffered to cross his borders once more into Sardinia, having posted through a whole State in less than half an hour.

It is impossible to conceive a route of more grandeur than the famous road along the Mediterranean from Nice to Genoa. It is near a hundred and fifty miles, over the edges of mountains bordering the sea for the whole distance. The road is cut into the sides of the precipice, often hundreds of feet perpendicular above the surf, descending sometimes into the ravines formed by the numerous rivers that cut their way to the sea, and mounting immediately again to the loftiest summits. It is a dizzy business, from beginning to end. There is no parapet, usually, and there are thousands of places where half a "shie" by a timid horse, would drop you at once some hundred fathoms upon rocks wet by the spray of every sea that breaks upon the shore. The loveliest little nests of valleys lie between that can be conceived. You will see a green spot, miles below you in turning the face of a rock; and right in the midst, like a handful of plaster models on a carpet, a cluster of houses, lying quietly in the warm southern exposure, embosomed in everything refreshing to the eye, the mountain sides cultivated in a large circle around, and the ruins of an old castle to a certainty on the eminence above. You descend and descend, and wind into the curves of the shore, losing and regaining sight of it constantly, till, entering a gate on the sea-level, you find yourself in a filthy, narrow, half-whitewashed town, with a population of beggars, priests, and soldiers; not a respectable citizen to be seen from one end to the other, nor a clean woman, nor a decent house. It is so, all through Sardinia. The towns from a distance lie in the most exquisitely-chosen spots possible. A river comes down from the hills and washes the wall; the uplands above are always of the very choicest shelter and exposure. You would think man and nature had conspired to complete its convenience and beauty; yet, within, all is misery, dirt, and superstition. Every corner has a cross—every bench a priest, idling in the sun—every door a picture of the Virgin. You are delighted to emerge once more, and get up a mountain to the fresh air.

As we got farther on toward Genoa, the valleys became longer by the sea, and the road ran through gardens, down to the very beach, of great richness and beauty. It was new to me to travel for hours among groves of orange and lemon trees, laden with both fruit and flower, the ground beneath covered with the windfalls, like an American apple-orchard. I never saw such a profusion of fruit. The trees were breaking under the rich yellow clusters. Among other things, there were hundreds of tall palms, spreading out their broad fans in the sun, apparently perfectly strong and at home under this warm sky. They are cultivated as ornaments for the churches on sacred days.

I caught some half dozen views on the way that I shall never get out of my memory. At one place particularly, I think near Fenale, we ran round the corner of a precipice by a road cut right into the face of a rock, two hundred feet at least above the sea; and a long view burst upon us at once of a sweet green valley, stretching back into the mountains as far as the eye could go, with three or four small towns, with their white churches, just checkering the broad sweeps of verdure, a rapid river winding through its bosom, and a back ground of the Piedmontese Alps, with clouds half-way up their sides, and snow glittering in the sun on their summits. Language cannot describe these scenes. It is but a repetition of epithets to attempt it. You must come and see them to feel how much one loses to live always at home, and read of such things only.

The courier pointed out to us the place in which Napoleon imprisoned the Pope of Rome—a low house, surrounded with a wall close upon the sea—and the house a few miles from Genoa, believed to have been that of Columbus.

We entered Genoa an hour after sunrise, by a noble gate, placed at the western extremity of the crescented harbor. Thence to the centre of the city was one continued succession of sumptuous palaces. We drove rapidly along the smooth, beautifully paved streets, and my astonishment was unbroken till we were set down at the hotel. Congratulating ourselves on the hindrances which had conspired to bring us here against our will, we took coffee, and went to bed for a few hours, fatigued with a journey more wearisome to the body than the mind.

I have spent two days in merely wandering about Genoa, looking at the exterior of the city. It is a group of hills, piled with princely palaces. I scarce know how to commence a description of it. If there were but one of these splendid edifices, or if I could isolate a single palace, and describe it to you minutely, it would be easy to convey an impression of the surprise and pleasure of a stranger in Genoa. The whole city, to use the expression of a French guide-book, "respire la magnificence"—breathes of splendor! The grand street, in which most of the palaces stand, winds around the foot of a high hill; and the gardens and terraces are piled back, with palaces above them; and gardens, and terraces, and palaces still above these; forming, wherever you can catch a vista, the most exquisite rising perspective. On the summit of this hill stands the noble fortress of St. George; and behind it a lovely open garden, just now alive with millions of roses, a fountain playing into a deep oval basin in the centre, and a view beneath and beyond of a broad winding valley, covered with the country villas of the nobility and gentry, and blooming with all the luxuriant vegetation of a southern clime.

My window looks out upon the bay, across which I see the palace of Andria Doria, the great winner of the best glory of the Genoese; and just under me floats an American flag, at the peak of a Baltimore schooner, that sails to-morrow morning for the United States. I must close my letter, to send by her. I shall remain in Genoa a week, and will write you of its splendor more minutely.

LETTER XXVII.

FLORENCE—THE GALLERY—THE VENUS DE MEDICIS—THE TRIBUNE—THE FORNARINA—THE CASCINE—AN ITALIAN FESTA—MADAME CATALANI.

Florence.—It is among the pleasantest things in this very pleasant world, to find oneself for the first time in a famous city. We sallied from the hotel this morning an hour after our arrival, and stopped at the first corner to debate where we should go. I could not help smiling at the magnificence of the alternatives. "To the Gallery, of course," said I, "to see the Venus de Medicis." "To Santa Croce," said one, "to see the tombs of Michael Angelo, and Alfieri, and Machiavelli." "To the Palazzo Pitti," said another, "the Grand Duke's palace, and the choicest collection of pictures in the world." The embarrassment alone was quite a sensation.

The Venus carried the day. We crossed the Piazza de Granduca, and inquired for the gallery. A fine court was shown us, opening out from the square, around the three sides of which stood a fine uniform structure, with a colonnade, the lower story occupied by shops and crowded with people. We mounted a broad staircase, and requested of the soldier at the door to be directed to the presence of the Venus, without delay. Passing through one of the long wings of the gallery, without even a glance at the statues, pictures, and bronzes that lined the walls, we arrived at the door of a cabinet, and, putting aside the large crimson curtain at the entrance, stood before the enchantress. I must defer a description of her. We spent an hour there, but, except that her divine beauty filled and satisfied my eye, as nothing else ever did, and that the statue is as unlike a thing to the casts one sees of it as one thing could well be unlike another, I made no criticism. There is an atmosphere of fame and circumstantial interest about the Venus, which bewilders the fancy almost as much as her loveliness does the eye. She has been gazed upon and admired by troops of pilgrims, each of whom it were worth half a life to have met at her pedestal. The painters, the poets, the talent and beauty, that have come there from every country under the sun, and the single feeling of love and admiration that she has breathed alike into all, consecrate her mere presence as a place for revery and speculation. Childe Harold has been here, I thought, and Shelley and Wordsworth and Moore; and, farther removed from our sympathies, but interesting still, the poets and sculptors of another age, Michael Angelo and Alfieri, the men of genius of all nations and times; and, to stand in the same spot, and experience the same feeling with them, is an imaginative pleasure, it is true, but as truly a deep and real one. Exceeding, as the Venus does beyond all competition, every image of loveliness painted or sculptured that one has ever before seen, the fancy leaves the eye gazing upon it, and busies itself irresistibly with its pregnant atmosphere of recollections. At least I found it so, and I must go there again and again, before I can look at the marble separately, and with a merely admiring attention.

Three or four days have stolen away, I scarce know how. I have seen but one or two things, yet have felt so unequal to the description, that but for my promise I should never write a line about them. Really, to sit down and gaze into one of Titian's faces for an hour, and then to go away and dream of putting into language its color and expression, seems to me little short of superlative madness. I only wonder at the divine faculty of sight. The draught of pleasure seems to me immortal, and the eye the only Ganymede that can carry the cup steadily to the mind. How shall I begin to give you an idea of the Fornarina? What can I tell you of the St. John in the desert, that can afford you a glimpse, even, of Raphael's inspired creations?

The Tribune is the name of a small octagonal cabinet in the gallery, devoted to the masterpieces of the collection. There are five statues, of which one is the Venus de Medicis; and a dozen or twenty pictures, of which I have only seen as yet Titian's two Venuses, and Raphael's St. John and Fornarina. People walk through the other parts of the gallery, and pause here and there a moment before a painting or a statue; but in the Tribune they sit down, and you may wait hours before a chair is vacated, or often before the occupant shows a sign of life. Everybody seems entranced there. They get before a picture, and bury their eyes in it, as if it had turned them to stone. After the Venus, the Fornarina strikes me most forcibly, and I have stood and gazed at it till my limbs were numb with the motionless posture. There is no affectation in this. I saw an English girl yesterday gazing at the St. John. She was a flighty, coquettish-looking creature, and I had felt that the spirit of the place was profaned by the way she sailed into the room. She sat down, with half a glance at the Venus, and began to look at this picture. It is a glorious thing, to be sure, a youth of apparently seventeen, with a leopard-skin about his loins, in the very pride of maturing manliness and beauty. The expression of the face is all human, but wrought to the very limit of celestial enthusiasm. The wonderful richness of the coloring, the exquisite ripe fulness of the limbs, the passionate devotion of the kindling features, combine to make it the faultless ideal of a perfect human being in youth. I had quite forgotten the intruder, for an hour. Quite a different picture had absorbed all my attention. The entrance of some one disturbed me, and as I looked around I caught a glance of my coquette, sitting with her hands awkwardly clasped over her guide-book, her mouth open, and the lower jaw hanging down with a ludicrous expression of unconsciousness and astonished admiration. She was evidently unaware of everything in the world except the form before her, and a more absorbed and sincere wonder I never witnessed.

I have been enjoying all day an Italian Festa. The Florentines have a pleasant custom of celebrating this particular festival, Ascension-day, in the open air; breakfasting, dining, and dancing under the superb trees of the Cascine. This is, by the way, quite the loveliest public pleasure-ground I ever saw—a wood of three miles in circumference, lying on the banks of the Arno, just below the town; not, like most European promenades, a bare field of clay or ground, set out with stunted trees, and cut into rectangular walks, or without a secluded spot or an untrodden blade of grass; but full of sward-paths, green and embowered, the underbrush growing wild and luxuriant between; ivy and vines of all descriptions hanging from the limbs, and winding about every trunk; and here and there a splendid opening of velvet grass for half a mile, with an ornamental temple in the centre, and beautiful contrivances of perspective in every direction. I have been not a little surprised with the enchantment of so public a place. You step into the woods from the very pavement of one of the most populous streets in Florence; from dust and noise and a crowd of busy people to scenes where Boccacio might have fitly laid his "hundred tales of love." The river skirts the Cascine on one side, and the extensive grounds of a young Russian nobleman's villa on the other; and here at sunset come all the world to walk and drive, and on festas like this, to encamp, and keep holy-day under the trees. The whole place is more like a half-redeemed wild-wood in America, than a public promenade in Europe.

It is the custom, I am told, for the Grand Duke and the nobles of Tuscany to join in this festival, and breakfast in the open air with the people. The late death of the young and beautiful Grand-Duchess has prevented it this year, and the merry-makings are diminished of one half their interest. I should not have imagined it, however, without the information. I took a long stroll among the tents this morning, with two ladies from Albany, old friends, whom I have encountered accidentally in Florence. The scenes were peculiar and perfectly Italian. Everything was done fantastically and tastefully. The tables were set about the knolls, the bonnets and shawls hung upon the trees, and the dark-eyed men and girls, with their expressive faces full of enjoyment, leaned around upon the grass, with the children playing among them, in innumerable little parties, dispersed as if it had been managed by a painter. At every few steps a long embowered alley stretched off to the right or left, with strolling groups scattered as far as the eye could see under the trees, the red ribands and bright colored costumes contrasting gayly with the foliage of every tint, from the dusky leaf of the olive to the bright soft green of the acacia. Wherever there was a circular opening there were tents just in the edges of the wood, the white festoons of the cloth hung from the limbs, and tables spread under them, with their antique-looking Tuscan pitchers wreathed with vines, and tables spread with broad green leaves, making the prettiest cool covering that could be conceived. I have not come up to the reality in this description, and yet, on reading it, it sounds half a fiction. One must be here to feel how little language can convey an idea of this "garden of the world."

The evening was the fashionable hour, and, with the addition of Mr. Greenough, the sculptor, to our party, we drove to the Cascine about an hour before sunset to see the equipages, and enjoy the close of the festival. The drives intersect these beautiful grounds irregularly in every direction, and the spectacle was even more brilliant than in the morning. The nobility and the gay world of Florence flew past us, in their showy carriages of every description, the distinguished occupants differing in but one respect from well-bred people of other countries—they looked happy. If I had been lying on the grass, an Italian peasant, with my kinsmen and friends, I should not have felt that among the hundreds who were rolling past me, richer and better born. there was one face that looked on me contemptuously or condescendingly. I was very much struck with the universal air of enjoyment and natural exhilaration. One scarce felt like a stranger in such a happy-looking crowd.

Near the centre of the grounds is an open space, where it is the custom for people to stop in driving to exchange courtesies with their friends. It is a kind of fashionable open air soirée. Every evening you may see from fifty to a hundred carriages at a time, moving about in this little square in the midst of the woods, and drawing up side by side, one after another, for conversation. Gentlemen come ordinarily on horseback, and pass round from carriage to carriage, with their hats off, talking gayly with the ladies within. There could not be a more brilliant scene, and there never was a more delightful custom. It keeps alive the intercourse in the summer months, when there are no parties, and it gives a stranger an opportunity of seeing the lovely and the distinguished without the difficulty and restraint of an introduction to society. I wish some of these better habits of Europe were imitated in our country as readily as worse ones.

After threading the embowered roads of the Cascine for an hour, and gazing with constant delight at the thousand pictures of beauty and happiness that met us at every turn, we came back and mingled in the gay throng of carriages at the centre. The valet of our lady-friends knew everybody, and, taking a convenient stand, we amused ourselves for an hour, gazing at them as they were named in passing. Among others, several of the Bonaparte family went by in a splendid barouche; and a heavy carriage, with a showy, tasselled hammer-cloth, and servants in dashy liveries, stopped just at our side, containing Madame Catalani, the celebrated singer. She has a fine face yet, with large expressive features, and dark, handsome eyes. Her daughter was with her, but she has none of her mother's pretensions to good looks.

LETTER XXVIII.

THE PITTI PALACE—TITIAN'S BELLA—AN IMPROVISATRICE—VIEW FROM A WINDOW—ANNUAL EXPENSE OF RESIDENCE AT FLORENCE.

I have got into the "back-stairs interest," as the politicians say, and to-day I wound up the staircase of the Pitti Palace, and spent an hour or two in its glorious halls with the younger Greenough, without the insufferable and usually inevitable annoyance of a cicerone. You will not of course, expect a regular description of such a vast labyrinth of splendor. I could not give it to you even if I had been there the hundred times that I intend to go, if I live long enough in Florence. In other galleries you see merely the Arts, here you are dazzled with the renewed and costly magnificence of a royal palace. The floors and ceilings and furniture, each particular part of which it must have cost the education of a life to accomplish, bewilder you out of yourself, quite; and, till you can tread on a matchless pavement or imitated mosaic, and lay your hat on a table of inlaid gems, and sit on a sofa wrought with you know not what delicate and curious workmanship, without nervousness or compunction, you are not in a state to appreciate the pictures upon the walls with judgment or pleasure.

I saw but one thing well—Titian's Bella, as the Florentines call it. There are two famous Venuses by the same master, as you know, in the other gallery, hanging over the Venus de Medicis—full-length figures reclining upon couches, one of them usually called Titian's mistress. The Bella in the Pitti gallery, is a half-length portrait, dressed to the shoulders, and a different kind of picture altogether. The others are voluptuous, full-grown women. This represents a young girl of perhaps seventeen; and if the frame in which it hangs were a window, and the loveliest creature that ever trod the floors of a palace stood looking out upon you, in the open air, she could not seem more real, or give you a stronger feeling of the presence of exquisite, breathing, human beauty. The face has no particular character. It is the look with which a girl would walk to the casement in a mood of listless happiness, and gaze out, she scarce knew why. You feel that it is the habitual expression. Yet, with all its subdued quiet and sweetness, it is a countenance beneath which evidently sleeps warm and measureless passion, capacities for loving and enduring and resenting everything that makes up a character to revere and adore. I do not know how a picture can express so much—but it does express all this, and eloquently too.

In a fresco on the ceiling of one of the private chambers, is a portrait of the late lamented Grand-duchess. On the mantelpiece in the Duke's cabinet also is a beautiful marble bust of her. It is a face and head corresponding perfectly to the character given her by common report, full of nobleness and kindness. The Duke, who loved her with a devotion rarely found in marriages of state, is inconsolable since her death, and has shut himself from all society. He hardly slept during her illness, watching by her bedside constantly. She was a religious enthusiast, and her health is said to have been first impaired by too rigid an adherence to the fasts of the church, and self-inflicted penance. The Florentines talk of her still, and she appears to have been unusually loved and honored.

I have just returned from hearing an improvisatrice. At a party last night I met an Italian gentleman, who talked very enthusiastically of a lady of Florence, celebrated for her talent of improvisation. She was to give a private exhibition to her friends the next day at twelve, and he offered politely to introduce me. He called this morning, and we went together.

Some thirty or forty people were assembled in a handsome room, darkened tastefully by heavy curtains. They were sitting in perfect silence when we entered, all gazing intently on the improvisatrice, a lady of some forty or fifty years, of a fine countenance, and dressed in deep mourning. She rose to receive us; and my friend introducing me, to my infinite dismay, as an improvisatore Americano, she gave me a seat on the sofa at her right hand, an honor I had not Italian enough to decline. I regretted it the less that it gave me an opportunity of observing the effects of the "fine phrensy," a pleasure I should otherwise certainly have lost through the darkness of the room.

We were sitting in profound silence, the head of the improvisatrice bent down upon her breast, and her hands clasped over her lap, when she suddenly raised herself, and with both hands extended, commenced in a thrilling voice, "Patria!" Some particular passage of Florentine history had been given her by one of the company, and we had interrupted her in the midst of her conception. She went on with astonishing fluency, in smooth harmonious rhyme, without the hesitation of a breath, for half an hour. My knowledge of the language was too imperfect to judge of the finish of the style, but the Italians present were quite carried away with their enthusiasm. There was an improvisatore in company, said to be the second in Italy; a young man, of perhaps twenty-five, with a face that struck me as the very beau ideal of genius. His large expressive eyes kindled as the poetess went on, and the changes of his countenance soon attracted the attention of the company. She closed and sunk back upon her seat, quite exhausted; and the poet, looking round for sympathy, loaded her with praises in the peculiarly beautiful epithets of the Italian language. I regarded her more closely as she sat by me. Her profile was beautiful; and her mouth, which at the first glance had exhibited marks of age, was curled by her excitement into a firm, animated curve, which restored twenty years at least by its expression.

After a few minutes one of the company went out of the room, and wrote upon a sheet of paper the last words of every line for a sonnet; and a gentleman who had remained within, gave a subject to fill it up. She took the paper, and looking at it a moment or two, repeated the sonnet as fluently as if it had been written out before her. Several other subjects were then given her, and she filled the same sonnet with the same terminations. It was wonderful. I could not conceive of such facility. After she had satisfied them with this, she turned to me and said, that in compliment to the American improvisatore she would give an ode upon America. To disclaim the character and the honor would have been both difficult and embarrassing even for one who knew the language better than I, so I bowed and submitted. She began with the discovery of Columbus, claimed him as her countryman; and with some poetical fancies about the wild woods and the Indians, mingled up Montezuma and Washington rather promiscuously, and closed with a really beautiful apostrophe to liberty. My acknowledgments were fortunately lost in the general murmur.

A tragedy succeeded, in which she sustained four characters. This, by the working of her forehead and the agitation of her breast, gave her more trouble, but her fluency was unimpeded; and when she closed, the company was in raptures. Her gestures were more passionate in this performance, but, even with my imperfect knowledge of the language, they always seemed called for and in taste. Her friends rose as she sunk back on the sofa, gathered round her, and took her hands, overwhelming her with praises. It was a very exciting scene altogether, and I went away with new ideas of poetical power and enthusiasm.

One lodges like a prince in Florence, and pays like a beggar. For the information of artists and scholars desirous to come abroad, to whom exact knowledge on the subject is important, I will give you the inventory and cost of my whereabout.

I sit at this moment in a window of what was formerly the archbishop's palace—a noble old edifice, with vast staircases and resounding arches, and a hall in which you might put a dozen of the modern brick houses of our country. My chamber is as large as a ball-room, on the second story, looking out upon the garden belonging to the house, which extends to the eastern wall of the city. Beyond this lies one of the sweetest views in the world—the ascending amphitheatre of hills, in whose lap lies Florence, with the tall eminence of Fiesolé in the centre, crowned with the monastery in which Milton passed six weeks, while gathering scenery for his Paradise. I can almost count the panes of glass in the windows of the bard's room; and, between the fine old building and my eye, on the slope of the hill, lie thirty or forty splendid villas, half-buried in trees (Madame Catalani's among them), piled one above another on the steep ascent, with their columns and porticoes, as if they were mock temples in a vast terraced garden. I do not think there is a window in Italy that commands more points of beauty. Cole, the American landscape painter, who occupied the room before me, took a sketch from it. For neighbors, the Neapolitan ambassador lives on the same floor, the two Greenoughs in the ground-rooms below, and the palace of one of the wealthiest nobles of Florence overlooks the garden, with a front of eighty-five windows, from which you are at liberty to select any two or three, and imagine the most celebrated beauty of Tuscany behind the crimson curtains—the daughter of this same noble bearing that reputation. She was pointed out to me at the Opera a night or two since, and I have seen as famous women with less pretensions.

For the interior, my furniture is not quite upon the same scale, but I have a clean snow-white bed, a calico-covered sofa, chairs and tables enough, and pictures three deep from the wall to the floor.

For all this, and the liberty of the episcopal garden, I pay three dollars a month! A dollar more is charged for lamps, boots, and service, and a dark-eyed landlady of thirty-five mends my gloves, and pays me two visits a day—items not mentioned in the bill. Then for the feeding, an excellent breakfast of coffee and toast is brought me for six cents; and, without wine, one may dine heartily at a fashionable restaurant for twelve cents, and with wine, quite magnificently for twenty-five. Exclusive of postage and pleasures, this is all one is called upon to spend in Florence. Three hundred dollars a year would fairly and largely cover the expenses of a man living at this rate; and a man who would not be willing to live half as well for the sake of his art, does not deserve to see Italy. I have stated these unsentimental particulars, because it is a kind of information I believe much wanted. I should have come to Italy years ago if I had known as much, and I am sure there are young men in our country, dreaming of this paradise of art in half despair, who will thank me for it, and take up at once "the pilgrim's sandal-shoon and scollop-shell."

LETTER XXIX.

EXCURSION TO VENICE—AMERICAN ARTISTS—VALLEY OF FLORENCE—MOUNTAINS OF CARRARA—TRAVELLING COMPANIONS—HIGHLAND TAVERN—MIST AND SUNSHINE—ITALIAN VALLEYS—VIEW OF THE ADRIATIC—BORDER OF ROMAGNA—SUBJECTS FOR THE PENCIL—HIGHLAND ITALIANS—ROMANTIC SCENERY—A PAINFUL OCCURRENCE—AN ITALIAN HUSBAND—A DUTCHMAN, HIS WIFE AND CHILDREN—BOLOGNE—THE PILGRIM—MODEL FOR A MAGDALEN.

I started for Venice yesterday, in company with Mr. Alexander and Mr. Cranch, two American artists. We had taken the vetturino for Bologna, and at daylight we were winding up the side of the amphitheatre of Appenines that bends over Florence, leaving Fiesolé rising sharply on our right. The mist was creeping up the mountain just in advance of us, retreating with a scarcely perceptible motion to the summits, like the lift of a heavy curtain; Florence, and its long, heavenly valley, full of white palaces sparkling in the sun, lay below us, more like a vision of a better world than a scene of human passion; away in the horizon the abrupt heads of the mountains of Carrara rose into the sky; and with the cool, fresh breeze of the hills, and the excitement of the pleasant excursion before us, we were three of as happy travellers probably as were to be met on any highway in this garden of the world.

We had six companions, and a motley crew they were—a little effeminate Venetian, probably a tailor, with a large, noble-looking, handsome contadina for a wife; a sputtering Dutch merchant, a fine, little, coarse, good-natured fellow, with his wife, and two very small and very disagreeable children; an Austrian corporal in full uniform; and a fellow in a straw hat, speaking some unknown language, and a nondescript in every respect. The women and children, and my friends, the artists, were my companions inside, the double dicky in front accommodating the others. Conversation commenced with the journey. The Dutch spoke their dissonant language to each other, and French to us, the contadina's soft Venetian dialect broke in like a flute in a chorus of harsh instruments, and our own hissing English added to a mixture already sufficiently various.

We were all day ascending mountains, and slept coolly under three or four blankets at a highland tavern, on a very wild Appenine. Our supper was gaily eaten, and our mirth served to entertain five or six English families, whose chambers were only separated from the rough raftered dining hall by double curtains. It was pleasant to hear the children and nurses speaking English unseen. The contrast made us realize forcibly the eminently foreign scene about us. The next morning, after travelling two or three hours in a thick, drizzling mist, we descended a sharp hill, and emerged at its foot into a sunshine so sudden and clear, that it seemed almost as if the night had burst into mid-day in a moment. We had come out of a black cloud. The mountain behind us was capped with it to the summit. Beneath us lay a map of a hundred valleys, all bathed and glowing in unclouded light, and on the limit of the horizon, far off as the eye could span, lay a long sparkling line of water, like a silver frame around the landscape. It was our first view of the Adriatic. We looked at it with the singular and indefinable emotion with which one always sees a celebrated water for the first time—a sensation, it seems to me, which is like that of no other addition to our knowledge. The Mediterranean at Marseilles, the Arno at Florence, the Seine at Paris, affected me in the same way. Explain it who will, or can!

An hour after, we reached the border of Romagna, the dominions of the Pope running up thus far into the Appenines. Here our trunks were taken off and searched more minutely. The little village was full of the dark-skinned, romantic-looking Romagnese, and my two friends, seated on a wall, with a dozen curious gazers about them, sketched the heads looking from the old stone windows, beggars, buildings, and scenery, in a mood of professional contentment. Dress apart, these highland Italians are like North American Indians—the same copper complexions, high cheek bones, thin lips, and dead, black hair. The old women particularly, would pass in any of our towns for full-blooded squaws.

The scenery, after this, grew of the kind "which savage Rosa dashed"—the only landscape I ever saw exactly of the tints so peculiar to Salvator's pictures. Our painters were in ecstasies with it, and truly, the dark foliage, and blanched rocks, the wild glens, and wind-distorted trees, gave the country the air of a home for all the tempests and floods of a continent. The Kaatskills are tame to it.

The forenoon came on, hot and sultry, and our little republic began to display its character. The tailor's wife was taken sick; and fatigue, and heat, and the rough motion of the vetturino in descending the mountains, brought on a degree of suffering which it was painful to witness. She was a woman of really extraordinary beauty, and dignified and modest as few women are in any country. Her suppressed groans, her white, tremulous lips, the tears of agony pressing thickly through her shut eyelids, and the clenching of her sculpture-like hands, would have moved anything but an Italian husband. The little effeminate villain treated her as if she had been a dog. She bore everything from him till he took her hand, which she raised faintly to intimate that she could not rise when the carriage stopped, and threw it back into her face with a curse. She roused, and looked at him with a natural majesty and calmness that made my blood thrill. "Aspetta?" was her only answer, as she sunk back and fainted.

The Dutchman's wife was a plain, honest, affectionate creature, bearing the humors of two heated and ill-tempered children, with a patience we were compelled to admire. Her husband smoked and laughed, and talked villainous French and worse Italian, but was glad to escape to the cabriolet in the hottest of the day, leaving his wife to her cares. The baby screamed, and the child blubbered and fretted, and for hours the mother was a miracle of kindness. The "drop too much," came in the shape of a new crying fit from both children, and the poor little Dutchwoman, quite wearied out, burst into a flood of tears, and hiccupped her complaints in her own language, weeping unrestrainedly for a quarter of an hour. After this she felt better, took a gulp of wine from the black bottle, and settled herself once more quietly and resignedly to her duties. We had certainly opened one or two very fresh veins of human character, when we stopped at the gates.

There is but one hotel for American travellers in Bologna, of course. Those who have read Rogers's Italy, will remember his mention of "The Pilgrim," the house where the poet met Lord Byron by appointment, and passed the evening with him which he describes so exquisitely. We took leave of our motley friends at the door, and our artists who had greatly admired the lovely Venetian, parted from her with the regret of old acquaintances. She certainly was, as they said, a splendid model for a Magdalen, "majestical and sad," and, always in attitudes for a picture: sleeping or waking, she afforded a succession of studies of which they took the most enthusiastic advantage.

LETTER XXX.

EXCURSION TO VENICE CONTINUED—BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF BOLOGNA—GALLERY OF THE FINE ARTS—RAPHAEL'S ST. CECILIA—PICTURES OF CARRACCI—DOMENICHINOS' MADONNA DEL ROSARIO—GUIDO'S MASSACRE OF THE INNOCENTS—THE CATHEDRAL AND THE DUOMO—EFFECTS OF THESE PLACES OF WORSHIP, AND THE CEREMONIES, UPON THE MIND—RESORT OF THE ITALIAN PEASANTRY—OPEN CHURCHES—SUBTERRANEAN-CONFESSION CHAPEL—THE FESTA—GRAND PROCESSIONS—ILLUMINATIONS—AUSTRIAN BANDS OF MUSIC—DEPORTMENT OF THE PEOPLE TO A STRANGER.

Another evening is here, and my friends have crept to bed with the exclamation, "how much we may live in a day." Bologna is unlike any other city we have ever seen, in a multitude of things. You walk all over it under arcades, sheltered on either side from the sun, the elegance and ornament of the lines of pillars depending on the wealth of the owner of the particular house, but columns and arches, simple or rich, everywhere. Imagine porticoes built on the front of every house in Philadelphia or New York, so as to cover the sidewalks completely, and, down the long perspective of every street, continued lines of airy Corinthian, or simple Doric pillars, and you may faintly conceive the impression of the streets of Bologna. With Lord Byron's desire to forget everything English, I do not wonder at his selection of this foreign city for a residence, so emphatically unlike, as it is, to everything else in the world.

We inquired out the gallery after breakfast, and spent two or three hours among the celebrated master-pieces of the Carracci, and the famous painters of the Bolognese school. The collection is small, but said to be more choice than any other in Italy. There certainly are five or six among its forty or fifty gems, that deserve each a pilgrimage. The pride of the place is the St. Cecilia, by Raphael. This always beautiful personification of music, a woman of celestial beauty, stands in the midst of a choir who have been interrupted in their anthem by a song, issuing from a vision of angels in a cloud from heaven. They have dropped their instruments, broken, upon the ground, and are listening with rapt attention, all, except the saint, with heads dropped upon their bosoms, overcome with the glory of the revelation. She alone, with her harp hanging loosely from her fingers, gazes up with the most serene and cloudless rapture beaming from her countenance, yet with a look of full and angelic comprehension, and understanding of the melody and its divine meaning. You feel that her beauty is mortal, for it is all woman; but you see that, for the moment, the spirit that breathes through, and mingles with the harmony in the sky, is seraphic and immortal. If there ever was inspiration, out of holy writ, it touched the pencil of Raphael.

It is tedious to read descriptions of pictures. I liked everything in the gallery. The Bolognese style of color suits my eye. It is rich and forcible, without startling or offending. Its delicious mellowness of color, and vigor and triumphant power of conception, show two separate triumphs of the art, which in the same hand are delightful. The pictures of Ludovico Carracci especially fired my admiration. And Domenichino, who died of a broken heart at Rome, because his productions were neglected, is a painter who always touches me nearly. His Madonna del Rosario is crowded with beauty. Such children I never saw in painting—the very ideals of infantile grace and innocence. It is said of him, that, after painting his admirable frescoes in the church of St. Andrew, at Rome, which, at the time, were ridiculed unsparingly by the artists, he used to walk in on his return from his studio, and gazing at them with a dejected air, remark to his friend, that he "could not think they were quite so bad—they might have been worse." How true it is, that, "the root of a great name is in the dead body."

Guido's celebrated picture of the "Massacre of the Innocents," hangs just opposite the St. Cecilia. It is a powerful and painful thing. The marvel of it to me is the simplicity with which its wonderful effects are produced, both of expression and color. The kneeling mother in the foreground, with her dead children before her, is the most intense representation of agony I ever saw. Yet the face is calm, her eyes thrown up to heaven, but her lips undistorted, and the muscles of her face, steeped as they are in suffering, still and natural. It is the look of a soul overwhelmed—that has ceased to struggle because it is full. Her gaze is on heaven, and in the abandonment of her limbs, and the deep, but calm agony of her countenance, you see that nothing between this and heaven can move her more. One suffers in seeing such pictures. You go away exhausted, and with feelings harassed and excited.

As we returned, we passed the gates of the university. On the walls were pasted a sonnet printed with some flourish, in honor of Camillo Rosalpina, the laureate of one of the academical classes.

We visited several of the churches in the afternoon. The cathedral and the Duomo are glorious places—both. I wish I could convey, to minds accustomed to the diminutive size and proportions of our churches in America, an idea of the enormous and often almost supernatural grandeur of those in Italy. Aisles in whose distance the figure of a man is almost lost—pillars, whose bases you walk round in wonder, stretching into the lofty vaults of the roof, as if they ended in the sky—arches of gigantic dimensions, mingling and meeting with the fine tracery of a cobweb—altars piled up on every side with gold, and marble, and silver—private chapels ornamented with the wealth of nobles, let into the sides, each large enough for a communion—and through the whole extent of the interior, an unencumbered breadth of floor, with here and there a solitary worshipper on his knees, or prostrated on his face—figures so small in comparison with the immense dome above them, that it seems as if, could distance drown a prayer, they were as much lost as if they prayed under the open sky! Without having even a leaning to the Catholic faith, I love to haunt their churches, and I am not sure that the religious awe of the sublime ceremonies and places of worship does not steal upon me daily. Whenever I am heated, or fatigued, or out of spirits, I go into the first cathedral, and sit down for an hour. They are always dark, and cool, and quiet; and the distant tinkling of the bell from some distant chapel and the grateful odor of the incense, and the low, just audible murmur of prayer, settles on my feelings like a mist, and softens and soothes and refreshes me, as nothing else will. The Italian peasantry who come to the cities to sell or bargain, pass their noons in these cool places. You see them on their knees asleep against a pillar, or sitting in a corner, with their heads upon their bosoms; and, if it were as a place of retreat and silence alone, the churches are an inestimable blessing to them. It seems to me, that any sincere Christian, of whatever faith, would find a pleasure in going into a sacred place and sitting down in the heat of the day, to be quiet and devotional for an hour. It would promote the objects of any denomination in our country, I should think, if the churches were thus left always open.

Under the cathedral of Bologna is a subterranean confession-chapel—as singular and impressive a device as I ever saw. It is dark like a cellar, the daylight faintly struggling through a painted window above the altar, and the two solitary wax candles giving a most ghastly intensity to the gloom. The floor is paved with tombstones, the inscriptions and death's heads of which you feel under your feet as you walk through. The roof is so vaulted that every tread is reverberated endlessly in hollow tones. All around are the confession-boxes, with the pierced plates, at which the priest within puts his ear, worn with the lips of penitents, and at one of the sides is a deep cave, far within which, as in a tomb, lies a representation on limestone of our Saviour, bleeding as he came from the cross, with the apostles, made of the same cadaverous material, hanging over him!

We have happened, by a fortunate chance, upon an extraordinary day in Bologna—a festa, that occurs but once in ten years. We went out as usual after breakfast this morning, and found the city had been decorated over-night in the most splendid and singular manner. The arcades of some four or five streets in the centre of the town were covered with rich crimson damask, the pillars completely bound, and the arches dressed and festooned with a degree of gorgeousness and taste as costly as it was magnificent. The streets themselves were covered with cloths stretched above the second stories of the houses from one side to the other, keeping off the sun entirely, and making in each street one long tent of a mile or more, with two lines of crimson columns at the sides, and festoons of gauze, of different colors, hung from window to window in every direction. It was by far the most splendid scene I ever saw. The people were all there in their gayest dresses, and we probably saw in the course of the day every woman in Bologna. My friends, the painters, give it the palm for beauty over all the cities they had seen. There was a grand procession in the morning, and in the afternoon the bands of the Austrian army made the round of the decorated streets, playing most delightfully before the principal houses. In the evening there was an illumination, and we wandered up and down till midnight through the fairy scene, almost literally "dazzled and drunk with beauty."

The people of Bologna have a kind of earnest yet haughty courtesy, very different from that of most of the Italians I have seen. They bow to the stranger, as he enters the café; and if they rise before him, the men raise their hats and the ladies smile and curtsy as they go out; yet without the least familiarity which could authorize farther approach to acquaintance. We have found the officers, whom we meet at the eating-houses, particularly courteous. There is something delightful in this universal acknowledgment of a stranger's claims on courtesy and kindness. I could well wish it substituted in our country, for the surly and selfish manners of people in public-houses to each other. There is neither loss of dignity nor committal of acquaintance in such attentions; and the manner in which a gentleman steps forward to assist you in any difficulty of explanation in a foreign tongue, or sends the waiter to you if you are neglected, or hands you the newspaper or his snuff-box, or rises to give you room in a crowded place, takes away, from me at least, all that painful sense of solitude and neglect one feels as a stranger in a foreign land.

We go to Ferrara to-morrow, and thence by the Po to Venice. My letter must close for the present.

LETTER XXXI.

VENICE—THE FESTA—GONDOLIERS—WOMEN—AN ITALIAN SUNSET—THE LANDING—PRISONS OF THE DUCAL PALACE—THE CELLS DESCRIBED BY BYRON—APARTMENT IN WHICH PRISONERS WERE STRANGLED—DUNGEONS UNDER THE CANAL—SECRET GUILLOTINE—STATE CRIMINALS—BRIDGE OF SIGHS—PASSAGE TO THE INQUISITION AND TO DEATH—CHURCH OF ST. MARC—A NOBLEMAN IN POVERTY, ETC., ETC.

You will excuse me at present from a description of Venice. It is a matter not to be hastily undertaken. It has also been already done a thousand times; and I have just seen a beautiful sketch of it in the public prints of the United States. I proceed with my letters.

The Venetian festa is a gay affair, as you may imagine. If not so beautiful and fanciful as the revels by moonlight, it was more satisfactory, for we could see and be seen, those important circumstances to one's individual share in the amusement. At four o'clock in the afternoon, the links of the long bridge of boats across the Giudecca were cut away, and the broad canal left clear for a mile up and down. It was covered in a few minutes with gondolas, and all the gayety and fashion of Venice fell into the broad promenade between the city and the festal island. I should think five hundred were quite within the number of gondolas. You can scarcely fancy the novelty and agreeableness of this singular promenade. It was busy work for the eyes to the right and left, with the great proportion of beauty, and the rapid glide of their fairy-like boats. And the quietness of the thing was so delightful—no crowding, no dust, no noise but the dash of oars and the ring of merry voices; and we sat so luxuriously upon our deep cushions the while, threading the busy crowd rapidly and silently, without a jar or touch of anything but the yielding element that sustained us.

Two boats soon appeared with wreaths upon their prows, and these had won the first and second prizes at the last year's regatta. The private gondolas fell away from the middle of the canal, and left them free space for a trial of their speed. They were the most airy things I ever saw afloat, about forty feet long, and as slender and light as they could well be, and hold together. Each boat had six oars, and the crews stood with their faces to the beak of their craft; slight, but muscular men, and with a skill and quickness at their oars which I had never conceived. I realized the truth and the force of Cooper's inimitable description of the race in the Bravo. The whole of his book gives you the very air and spirit of Venice, and one thanks him constantly for the lively interest which he has thrown over everything in this bewitching city. The races of the rival boats to-day were not a regular part of the festa, and were not regularly contested. The gondoliers were exhibiting themselves merely, and the people soon ceased to be interested in them.

We rowed up and down till dark, following here and there the boats whose freights attracted us, and exclaiming every moment at some new glimpse of beauty. There is really a surprising proportion of loveliness in Venice. The women are all large, probably from never walking, and other indolent habits consequent upon want of exercise; and an oriental air, sleepy and passionate, is characteristic of the whole race. One feels that he has come among an entirely new class of women, and hence, probably, the far-famed fascination of Venice to foreigners.

The sunset happened to be one of those so peculiar to Italy, and which are richer and more enchanting in Venice than in any other part of it, from the character of its scenery. It was a sunset without a cloud; but at the horizon the sky was dyed of a deep orange, which softened away toward the zenith almost imperceptibly, the whole west like a wall of burning gold. The mingled softness and splendor of these skies is indescribable. Everything is touched with the same hue. A mild, yellow glow is all over the canals and buildings. The air seems filled with glittering golden dust, and the lines of the architecture, and the outlines of the distant islands, and the whole landscape about you is mellowed and enriched with a new and glorious light. I have seen one or two such sunsets in America; but there the sunsets are bolder and clearer, and with much more sublimity—they have rarely the voluptuous coloring of those in Italy.