e up here to-day, and here I am, established to write.

I am here above most earthly annoyances, and on a level with the
heavenly influences. It has always seemed to me that the higher one
gets, the easier it must be to write; and that, especially at a great
elevation, one could strike into lofty themes, and launch out,
without fear of shipwreck on any of the earthly headlands, in his
aerial voyages. Yet, after all, he would be likely to arrive
nowhere, I suspect; or, to change the figure, to find that, in
parting with the taste of the earth, he had produced a flavorless
composition. If it were not for the haze in the horizon to-day, I
could distinguish the very house in Naples--that of Manso, Marquis of
Villa,--where Tasso found a home, and where John Milton was
entertained at a later day by that hospitable nobleman. I wonder, if
he had come to the Villa Nardi and written on the roof, if the
theological features of his epic would have been softened, and if he
would not have received new suggestions for the adornment of the
garden. Of course, it is well that his immortal production was not
composed on this roof, and in sight of these seductive shores, or it
would have been more strongly flavored with classic mythology than it
is. But, letting Milton go, it may be necessary to say that my
writing to-day has nothing to do with my theory of composition in an
elevated position; for this is the laziest place that I have yet
found.

I am above the highest olive-trees, and, if I turned that way, should
look over the tops of what seems a vast grove of them, out of which a
white roof, and an old time-eaten tower here and there, appears; and
the sun is flooding them with waves of light, which I think a person
delicately enough organized could hear beat. Beyond the brown roofs
of the town, the terraced hills arise, in semicircular embrace of the
plain; and the fine veil over them is partly the natural shimmer of
the heat, and partly the silver duskiness of the olive-leaves. I sit
with my back to all this, taking the entire force of this winter sun,
which is full of life and genial heat, and does not scorch one, as I
remember such a full flood of it would at home. It is putting
sweetness, too, into the oranges, which, I observe, are getting
redder and softer day by day. We have here, by the way, such a habit
of taking up an orange, weighing it in the hand, and guessing if it
is ripe, that the test is extending to other things. I