ingnagian grasshopper. The creature is born
to chirp; to progress in chirping; to chirp louder, louder, louder; till
it gives one tremendous chirp and bursts itself. That is its life and
death. Everything is 'in a concatenation accordingly.' The day gets
brighter, brighter, brighter, till it's night. The summer gets hotter,
hotter, hotter, till it explodes. The fruit gets riper, riper, riper,
till it tumbles down and rots. . . . Ask me a question or two about fresco:
will you be so good? All the houses are painted in fresco, hereabout
(the outside walls I mean, the fronts, backs, and sides), and all the
colour has run into damp and green seediness; and the very design has
straggled away into the component atoms of the plaster. Beware of
fresco! Sometimes (but not often) I can make out a Virgin with a
mildewed glory round her head, holding nothing in an undiscernible lap
with invisible arms; and occasionally the leg or arm of a cherub. But
it is very melancholy and dim. There are two old fresco-painted vases
outside my own gate, one on either hand, which are so faint that I never
saw them till last night; and only then, because I was looking over the
wall after a lizard who had come upon me while I was smoking a cigar
above, and crawled over one of these embellishments in his retreat. . . ."

That letter sketched for me the story of his travel through France, and
I may at once say that I thus received, from week to week, the "first
sprightly runnings" of every description in his _Pictures from Italy_.
But my rule as to the American letters must be here observed yet more
strictly; and nothing resembling his printed book, however distantly,
can be admitted into these pages. Even so my difficulty of rejection
will not be less; for as he had not actually decided, until the very
last, to publish his present experiences at all, a larger number of the
letters were left unrifled by him. He had no settled plan from the
first, as in the other case.

[Illustration]

His most valued acquaintance at Albaro was the French consul-general, a
student of our literature who had written on his books in one of the
French reviews, and who with his English wife lived in the very next
villa, though so oddly shut away by its vineyard that to get from the
one adjoining house to the other was a mile's journey.[82] Describing,
in that August letter, his first call from this new friend thus
pleasantly self-recommended, he makes the visit his excus