th the
healthy, how much more so with the invalid! Some day he will find his
first violet, and be lost in pleasant wonder, by what alchemy the cold
earth of the clods, and the vapid air and rain, can be transmuted into
colour so rich and odour so touchingly sweet. Or perhaps he may see a
group of washerwomen relieved, on a spit of shingle, against the blue
sea, or a meeting of flower-gatherers in the tempered daylight of an
olive-garden; and something significant or monumental in the grouping,
something in the harmony of faint colour that is always characteristic
of the dress of these southern women, will come home to him
unexpectedly, and awaken in him that satisfaction with which we tell
ourselves that we are the richer by one more beautiful experience. Or it
may be something even slighter: as when the opulence of the sunshine,
which somehow gets lost and fails to produce its effect on the large
scale, is suddenly revealed to him by the chance isolation--as he
changes the position of his sunshade--of a yard or two of roadway with
its stones and weeds. And then, there is no end to the infinite variety
of the olive-yards themselves. Even the colour is indeterminate and
continually shifting: now you would say it was green, now grey now blue;
now tree stands above tree, like "cloud on cloud," massed into filmy
indistinctness; and now, at the wind's will, the whole sea of foliage is
shaken and broken up with little momentary silverings and shadows. But
every one sees the world in his own way. To some the glad moment may
have arrived on other provocations; and their recollection may be most
vivid of the stately gait of women carrying burthens on their heads; of
tropical effects, with canes and naked rock and sunlight; of the relief
of cypresses; of the troubled, busy-looking groups of sea-pines, that
seem always as if they were being wielded and swept together by a
whirlwind; of the air coming, laden with virginal perfumes, over the
myrtles and the scented underwood; of the empurpled hills standing up,
solemn and sharp, out of the green-gold air of the east at evening.

There go many elements, without doubt, to the making of one such moment
of intense perception; and it is on the happy agreement of these many
elements, on the harmonious vibration of many nerves, that the whole
delight of the moment must depend. Who can forget how, when he has
chanced upon some attitude of complete restfulness, after long uneasy
rolling to a