d with myself during the sweet long
days I hardly know how to tell. But in Rome a mighty hunger after
solitude had fallen on me. I could satisfy it here to the full. It was
early spring-time, the leaves of the chestnut trees shone in luxuriant
freshness; the ravines were filled by the song of birds, and the murmur
of brooks; and as of late a large body of banditti who had rendered
this wild district insecure, had been in part captured, and in part
driven into the Abruzzi, it ensued that a lonely wanderer might without
any apprehension climb the remotest crags, and there give himself up
undisturbed to profoundest meditations.

From the first I declined all intercourse with the German artists, a
good number of whom had taken possession of both miserable inns the
village possessed, and as to the desire of every now and then hearing
one's own voice, which impels hermits to converse with their domestic
animals, I could gratify it quite sufficiently within my own walls. For
as it happened I lodged with the apothecary, and he had the utmost
indulgence for my very defective Italian. True he indemnified himself
for his outlay in patience by not unfrequently taking advantage of
mine, for as soon as the first shyness had worn off, he showered a
whole cornucopia of his own verses on me, confessing that despite his
fifty and five years he was still unable entirely to shake off this
childish malady. "What would you have?" he pleaded, "when at evening I
step to my window and see the moon coming up behind the rocks, and the
fire-flies on the wing about my little garden,--why I must be a brute
if it does not set me off poetising." And indeed he was anything but a
brute this good Signor Angelo, whom owing to a natural tonsure--a rim
of black hair still circling his smooth bald head--his friends were
wont to nickname Fra Angelico. He had never indeed left his native
place more than twice in his life, nor on either occasion gone further
than Rome. But then Rome is the world, he would say. He who has seen
Rome, has seen everything. And forthwith he proceeded to speak of
everything, partly according to the very miscellaneous and chaotic
knowledge he owed to a few books accidentally picked up, partly from
the audacity of unbridled poetical fancy. Of all the worthies who
according to old Italian custom were wont to gather at evening in his
apothecary's shop: priest, schoolmaster, surgeon, tax-gatherer, and a
few unofficial well-to-do proprieto