And mine the distant sea
Obedient to the least command
Thine eyes impose on me._"

III

DAY-DREAMS IN NAPLES, AMALFI, AND CAPRI

"With dreamful eyes
My spirit lies
Where summer sings but never dies."

Naples is the paradise of excursions. It is set in the heart of
incomparable loveliness. Over its sapphire sea one sails away--to the
Fortunate Isles, or some others equally alluring. Its heights and
adjacent mountains offer views that one might well cross the ocean to
enjoy. Its atmosphere is full of classic interest; of song, and story,
and legend, and romance; of history, too, which in its tragic and
exciting episodes is not less vivid in color and in strange studies of
human life than is any romance. Naples is the city of fascination. Rome
is stately and impressive; Florence is all beauty and enchantment;
Genoa is picturesque; Venice is a dream city; but Naples is
simply--fascinating. There is the common life of the streets and the
populace continually _en scene_; the people who are at home on the sunny
side in winter, or the shady side in summer; there is the social life of
the nobility, which is brilliant and vivacious. The excursions, of which
Naples is the centre, are the chief interest to travellers, and these,
while possible in winter, are far more enjoyable in the early spring.
Still even in midwinter the days are sunny, and while the air is crisp
and cool, it is not cold. The grass is as green as in June; but the
foliage and flowers are more or less withered. Naples has the high and
the lower town, the former the more desirable, and the fine hotels
perched on the terraces, with the view all over the Bay of Naples,
Capri, Sorrento, and Vesuvius, offer a vista hardly to be duplicated in
the entire world. The lower town has its fine hotels on the water's
edge, with a beautiful view over the bay, less enchanting than when seen
from above. The Bay of Naples is enclosed in two semicircular arms that
extend far out at sea, the southern reaching nearly to Capri, while near
the termination of the northern,

"Fair Ischia smiles
O'er liquid miles."

Far out at sea the sun shines dazzlingly on the blue Mediterranean. The
landscape is full of those curious formations that are always inherent
in volcanic regions. The region surrounding Naples is abrupt,
picturesque, with the same irregular outline of hills that characterizes
the elevations in the Tonto basin in Arizona. The veg