he sea-wall, with here and there a bell-tower shooting
into the blue. Below is the busy, many-colored port. Above towers the
dark double fortress on its rock. And, finally, the dense, grove-like
vegetation of the island encircles all, and its own mountain-peaks rise
behind, one of them attaining a height of three thousand feet. There are
other islands of which all this, or almost all, can be said--Capri, for
instance. But at Corfu there are two attributes peculiar to the region;
these are: first, the color; second, the transparency. Although the
voyage from Brindisi hardly occupies twelve hours, the atmosphere is
utterly unlike that of Italy; there is no haze; all is clear. Some of us
love the Italian haze (which is not in the least a mist), that soft veil
which makes the mountains look as if they were covered with velvet. But
a love of this softness need not, I hope, make us hate everything that
is different. Greece (and Corfu is a Greek island) seemed to me all
light--the lightest country in the world. In other lands, if we climb a
high mountain and stand on its bald summit at noon, we feel as if we
were taking a bath in light; in Greece we have this feeling everywhere,
even in the valleys. Euripides described his countrymen as "forever
delicately tripping through the pellucid air," and so their modern
descendants trip to this day. This dry atmosphere has an exciting effect
upon the nervous energy, and the faces of the people show it. It has
also, I believe, the defect of this good quality--namely, an
over-stimulation, which sometimes produces neuralgia. In some respects
Americans recognize this clearness of the atmosphere, and its influence,
good and bad; the air of northern New England in the summer, and of
California at the same season, is not unlike it. But in America the
transparency is more white, more blank; we have little of the coloring
that exists in Greece, tints whose intensity must be seen to be
believed. The mountains, the hills, the fields, are sometimes bathed in
lilac. Then comes violet for the plains, while the mountains are rose
that deepens into crimson. At other times salmon, pink, and purple
tinges are seen, and ochre, saffron, and cinnamon brown. This
description applies to the whole of Greece, but among the Ionian Islands
the effect of the color is doubled by the wonderful tint of the
surrounding sea. I promise not to mention this hue again; hereafter it
can be taken for granted, for it is always