which so kindly a climate, and so
fertile a portion of Mother Earth's bosom, should have filled them, one
and all. But possibly the peasant inhabitants do not exist in so grimy
a poverty, and in homes so comfortless, as a stranger, with his native
ideas of those matters, would be likely to imagine. The Italians appear
to possess none of that emulative pride which we see in our New England
villages, where every householder, according to his taste and
means, endeavors to make his homestead an ornament to the grassy
and elm-shadowed wayside. In Italy there are no neat doorsteps
and thresholds; no pleasant, vine-sheltered porches; none of those
grass-plots or smoothly shorn lawns, which hospitably invite the
imagination into the sweet domestic interiors of English life.
Everything, however sunny and luxuriant may be the scene around, is
especially disheartening in the immediate neighborhood of an Italian
home.

An artist, it is true, might often thank his stars for those old houses,
so picturesquely time-stained, and with the plaster falling in blotches
from the ancient brick-work. The prison-like, iron-barred windows, and
the wide arched, dismal entrance, admitting on one hand to the stable,
on the other to the kitchen, might impress him as far better worth
his pencil than the newly painted pine boxes, in which--if he be an
American--his countrymen live and thrive. But there is reason to suspect
that a people are waning to decay and ruin the moment that their life
becomes fascinating either in the poet's imagination or the painter's
eye.

As usual on Italian waysides, the wanderers passed great, black crosses,
hung with all the instruments of the sacred agony and passion: there
were the crown of thorns, the hammer and nails, the pincers, the spear,
the sponge; and perched over the whole, the cock that crowed to St.
Peter's remorseful conscience. Thus, while the fertile scene showed the
never-failing beneficence of the Creator towards man in his transitory
state, these symbols reminded each wayfarer of the Saviour's infinitely
greater love for him as an immortal spirit. Beholding these consecrated
stations, the idea seemed to strike Donatello of converting the
otherwise aimless journey into a penitential pilgrimage. At each of them
he alighted to kneel and kiss the cross, and humbly press his forehead
against its foot; and this so invariably, that the sculptor soon learned
to draw bridle of his own accord. It may be, too,