a stiff breeze well understands I can have nothing to
say, except "I suffered." It was all one dull, tormented dream to me,
and, I believe, to most of the ship's company,--a dream too of thirty
hours' duration, instead of the promised sixteen.

The excessive beauty of Genoa is well known, and the impression upon
the eye alone was correspondent with what I expected; but, alas! the
weather was still so cold I could not realize that I had actually
touched those shores to which I had looked forward all my life, where
it seemed that the heart would expand, and the whole nature be turned
to delight. Seen by a cutting wind, the marble palaces, the gardens,
the magnificent water-view of Genoa, failed to charm,--"I _saw, not
felt_, how beautiful they were." Only at Naples have I found _my_
Italy, and here not till after a week's waiting,--not till I began
to believe that all I had heard in praise of the climate of Italy
was fable, and that there is really no spring anywhere except in the
imagination of poets. For the first week was an exact copy of the
miseries of a New England spring; a bright sun came for an hour or two
in the morning, just to coax you forth without your cloak, and then
came up a villanous, horrible wind, exactly like the worst east wind
of Boston, breaking the heart, racking the brain, and turning hope and
fancy to an irrevocable green and yellow hue, in lieu of their native
rose.

However, here at Naples I _have_ at last found _my_ Italy; I have
passed through the Grotto of Pausilippo, visited Cuma, Baiae, and
Capri, ascended Vesuvius, and found all familiar, except the sense of
enchantment, of sweet exhilaration, this scene conveys.

"Behold how brightly breaks the morning!"

and yet all new, as if never yet described, for Nature here, most
prolific and exuberant in her gifts, has touched them all with a charm
unhackneyed, unhackneyable, which the boots of English dandies cannot
trample out, nor the raptures of sentimental tourists daub or fade.
Baiae had still a hid divinity for me, Vesuvius a fresh baptism of
fire, and Sorrento--O Sorrento was beyond picture, beyond poesy, for
the greatest Artist had been at work there in a temper beyond the
reach of human art.

Beyond this, reader, my old friend and valued acquaintance on other
themes, I shall tell you nothing of Naples, for it is a thing apart
in the journey of life, and, if represented at all, should be so in a
fairer form than offers itself at