Fort Greene stands out into the foreground, its verdant
scarp so relieved against the blue water that each inward-bound
schooner seems to sail into a cave of grass. In the middle distance is
a white lighthouse, and beyond lie the round tower of old Fort Louis
and the soft low hills of Conanicut.

Behind me an oriole chirrups in triumph amid the birch-trees which wave
around the house of the haunted window; before me a kingfisher pauses
and waits, and a darting blackbird shows the scarlet on his wings.
Sloops and schooners constantly come and go, careening in the wind,
their white sails taking, if remote enough, a vague blue mantle from
the delicate air. Sail-boats glide in the distance,--each a mere white
wing of canvas,--or coming nearer, and glancing suddenly into the cove,
are put as suddenly on the other tack, and almost in an instant seem
far away. There is to-day such a live sparkle on the water, such a
luminous freshness on the grass, that it seems, as is so often the case
in early June, as if all history were a dream, and the whole earth were
but the creation of a summer's day.

If Petrarch still knows and feels the consummate beauty of these
earthly things, it may seem to him some repayment for the sorrows of a
life-time that one reader, after all this lapse of years, should choose
his sonnets to match this grass, these blossoms, and the soft lapse of
these blue waves. Yet any longer or more continuous poem would be out
of place to-day. I fancy that this narrow cove prescribes the proper
limits of a sonnet; and when I count the lines of ripple within yonder
projecting wall, there proves to be room for just fourteen. Nature
meets our whims with such little fitnesses. The words which build these
delicate structures of Petrarch's are as soft and fine and
close-textured as the sands upon this tiny beach, and their monotone,
if such it be, is the monotone of the neighboring ocean. Is it not
possible, by bringing such a book into the open air, to separate it
from the grimness of commentators, and bring it back to life and light
and Italy?

The beautiful earth is the same as when this poetry and passion were
new; there is the same sunlight, the same blue water and green grass;
yonder pleasure-boat might bear, for aught we know, the friends and
lovers of five centuries ago; Petrarch and Laura might be there, with
Boccaccio and Fiammetta as comrades, and with Chaucer as their stranger
guest. It bears, at any rate, i