ver.... Numberless are the
caves at Capri. The so-called Green Grotto has the beauty of moss agate
in its liquid floor; the Red Grotto shows a warmer chord of color; and
where there is no other charm to notice, endless beauty may be found in
the play of sunlight upon roofs of limestone, tinted with yellow,
orange, and pale pink, mossed over, hung with fern, and catching tones
of blue or green from the still deeps beneath.... After a day upon the
water it is pleasant to rest at sunset in the loggia above the sea. The
Bay of Naples stretches far and wide in front, beautiful by reason of
the long fine line descending from Vesuvius, dipping almost to a level,
and then gliding up to join the highlands of the north. Now sun and moon
begin to mingle: waning and waxing splendors. The cliffs above our heads
are still blushing like the heart of some tea-rose; when lo, the touch
of the huntress is laid upon those eastern pinnacles, and the horizon
glimmers with her rising. Was it on such a night that Ferdinand of
Aragon fled from his capital before the French, with eyes turned ever to
the land he loved, chanting, as he leaned from his galley's stern, that
melancholy psalm, 'Except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh
but in vain,' and seeing Naples dwindle to a white blot on the purple
shore?"

The roses of Capri would form a chapter alone. What walks there are
where the air is all fragrance of acacia and rose and orange blossoms!
Cascades of roses in riotous luxuriance festoon the old gray stone
walls; the pale pink of the early dawn or of a shell by the seashore,
the amber of the Banskeia rose, the great golden masses of the Marechal
Niel, their faint yellow gleaming against the deep green leaves of
myrtle and frond. The intense glowing scarlet of the gladiolus flames
from rocks and roadside, and rosemary and the purple stars of hyacinths
garland the ways, until one feels like journeying only in his singing
robes. The deep, solemn green of stone pines forms canopies under the
sapphire skies, and through their trunks one gazes on the sapphire sea.
Is Capri the isle of Epipsychidion?

"Is there now any one that knows
What a world of mystery lies deep down in the heart of a rose?"

One walks among these rose-lined lanes, hearing in the very air that
exquisite lyric by Louise Chandler Moulton:--

"Roses that briefly live,
Joy is your dower;
Blest be the Fates that give