the climate of the
British Isles. The low tones of the atmosphere of those islands, the
shifting veils of fog and rain rising and falling over them, the soft
gray light filtered through mist and cloud--all these have caused the
blue skies and endless sunshine of Italy to seem divinely fair to
visitors from English shores; and as among these visitors have come the
poets and the romance writers, this fairness, embalmed in prose and
verse, has taken its place in literature, has become classic. The
imaginative New World student, eager to learn, passionately desirous to
appreciate, has read these pages reverently; he knows them by heart. And
when at last the longed-for day comes when he too can make his
pilgrimage to these scenes of legend and story, so dominated is he, for
the most part, by the spell of tradition that he does not even perceive
that these long-chanted heavens are no bluer than his own; or if by
chance his eye, accurate in spite of himself, notes such a possibility,
he puts it from him purposely, preferring the blueness which is
historic. The heavens lying over Venice and her palaces are, must be,
softer than those which expand distantly over miles of prairie and
forest; the hue of the sky which bends over Rome is, must be, of a
deeper, richer tint than any which a New World has attained. But
generally this preference of the imaginative American is not a choice so
much as an unconscious faith which he has cherished from childhood, and
from which he would hardly know how to dissent; he is gazing at these
foreign skies through a long, enchanting vista of history, poetry, and
song; he simply does not remember his own sky at all.

Only recently has he begun to remember it, only recently has he begun to
discover that, in the matter of blue at least, he has been gazing
through glasses adjusted to the scale of English atmosphere and English
comparisons, and that, divested of these aids to vision, he can find
above his own head and in his own country an azure as deep as any that
the Old World can show.

When this has been discovered it remains but blue sky. The other
treasure of those old lands beyond the sea--their ruins, their art,
their ancient story--these he has not and can never have, and these he
loves with that deep American worship which must seem to those old gods
like the arrival of Magi from afar, men of distant birth, sometimes of
manners strange, but bringing costly gifts and bowing the knee with
reve