le of this well-to-do domestic
life; such is the impression of Corinne when from liberal Italy she
passes to rigid and dreary Scotland. And yet there is a certain picture,
a large landscape by Rembrandt, which equals and surpasses all; a dark
sky bursting with showers among flocks of screaming crows; beneath, is
an infinite stretch of country as desolate as a cemetery; on the right a
mass of barren rocks of so mournful and lugubrious a tint as to attain
to the sublime in effect. So is it with an andante of Beethoven after an
Italian Opera.

FLORENCE EIGHTY YEARS AGO[40]

BY WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT

There is a great deal of prattle about Italian skies; the skies and
clouds of Italy, so far as I have had an opportunity of judging, do not
present so great a variety of beautiful appearances as our own; but the
Italian atmosphere is far more uniformly fine than ours. Not to speak of
its astonishing clearness, it is pervaded by a certain warmth of color
which enriches every object. This is more remarkable about the time of
sunset, when the mountains put on an aerial aspect, as if they belonged
to another and fairer world; and a little after the sun has gone down,
the air is flushed with a glory which seems to transfigure all that it
encloses.

Many of the fine old palaces of Florence, you know, are built in a
gloomy tho grand style of architecture, of a dark-colored stone, massive
and lofty, and overlooking narrow streets that lie in almost perpetual
shade. But at the hour of which I am speaking, the bright warm radiance
reflected from the sky to the earth, fills the darkest lanes, streams
into the most shadowy nooks, and makes the prison-like structures
glitter as with a brightness of their own.

It is now nearly the middle of October, and we have had no frost. The
strong summer heats which prevailed when I came hither, have by the
slowest gradations subsided into an agreeable autumnal temperature. The
trees keep their verdure, but I perceive their foliage growing thinner,
and when I walk in the Cascine on the other side of the Arno, the
rustling of the lizards, as they run among the heaps of crisp leaves,
reminds me that autumn is wearing away, tho the ivy which clothes the
old elms has put forth a profuse array of blossoms, and the walks murmur
with bees like our orchards in spring. As I look along the declivities
of the Appenines, I see the raw earth every day more visible between the
ranks of olive-trees and