_diligence_.

Our course lay along the southern shore of the lake, over a fine rolling
country, richly covered with vineyards, and where the rich red soil was
being ploughed with bullocks. Such bullocks I had never before seen. The
stateliest of their kind which graze the meadows of England and
Scotland are but as grasshoppers in comparison. Truly, I saw before me
the Anakims of the cattle tribe. To them the yoke was no burden. As they
marched on with vast outspread horns, they could have dragged a hundred
ploughs after them. They were not unworthy of Virgil's verse. And it
gave additional charms to the region to think that Mantua, the poet's
birthplace, lay not a long way to the south, and that, doubtless, the
author of the Bucolics often visited in his youth this very spot, and
walked by the margin of these waters, and marked the light and shade on
these noble hills; or, turning to the rich agricultural country on the
right, had seen exactly such bullocks as those I now saw, drawing
exactly such ploughs, and making exactly such furrows in the red earth;
and, spreading the beauty of his own mind over the picture, he had gone
and imprinted it eternally on his page. The true poet is a real
clairvoyant. He may not give you the shape, or colour, or size of
objects; he may not tell how tall the mountains, or how long the
hedge-rows, or how broad the fields; but by some wonderful art he can
convey to your mind what is present to his own. On this principle it
was, perhaps, that the landscape, with all its scenery, was familiar to
me. I had seen it long years before. These were the very fields, the
very bullocks, the very ploughs, the very swains, my imagination had
painted in my schoolboy days, when I sat with the page of the great
pastoral poet of Italy open before me,--too frequently, alas! only open.
On these shores, too, had dwelt the poet Catullus; and a doubtful ruin
which the traveller sees on the point of the long sharp promontory of
Sermio, which runs up into the lake from the south, still bears the name
of Catullus' Villa. If these are the ruins of Catullus' house, which is
very questionable, he must have lived in a style of magnificence which
has fallen to the lot of but few poets.

The complexion of a day or of a lifetime may hang upon the commonest
occurrence. A shoe here dropped from the foot of one of the horses; and
the postilion, diving into the recesses of the _diligence_, and drawing
forth a box with the r