t can rival this picturesque and sublime route?
Of it George Eliot wrote:--

"It is an unspeakably grand drive round the mighty rocks with the
sea below; and Amalfi itself surpasses all imagination of a
romantic site for a city that once made itself famous in the
world."

Sorrento, with its memories and associations of Tasso, seems a place in
which one cares only to sit on the balcony of the hotel overhanging the
sea and watch the magic spectacle of a panorama unrivalled in all the
beauty of the world. Flowers grow in riotous profusion; the fairy sail
of a flitting boat is caught in the deepening dusk; the dark outline of
Vesuvius is seen against the horizon; and orange orchards gleam against
gray walls. Here Tasso was born, in 1544, fit haunt for a poet, with
tangles of gay blossoms and the aerial line of mountain peaks. A low
parapet borders the precipice, and over it one leans in the air heavy
with perfume of locust blossoms. Has the lovely town anything beside
sunsets and stars and poets' dreams? Who could ask for more?

To La Cava,--to Amalfi,--still all a dream world!

"O summer day, beside the joyous sea!
O summer day so wonderful and white,
So full of gladness and so full of pain!"

How Amalfi sets itself to song and music! Who can enter it without
hearing in the air Longfellow's beautiful lines?--

"Sweet the memory is to me
Of a land beyond the sea,
Where the waves and mountains meet,
Where, amid her mulberry-trees,
Sits Amalfi in the heat,
Bathing ever her white feet
In the tideless summer seas.

* * * * *

'Tis a stairway, not a street,
That ascends the deep ravine,
Where the torrent leaps between
Rocky walls that almost meet.

* * * * *

This is an enchanted land!
Round the headlands, far away,
Sweeps the blue Salernian bay
With its sickle of white sand;
Further still and furthermost
On the dim discovered coast,
Paestum with its ruins lies,
And its roses all in bloom."

If ever a region was dropped out of paradise designed, solely, for a
poet's day-dreams, it is Amalfi, and the even more beautiful Ravello
just above. One fancies that it must have been in the mystic loveliness
of this eyrie that the poet lost himself in a day-dream while Jupiter
was dividing all the goods of the world. When he reproached the god