, through the soft circling
of the dial's shadow, was loveliness and quiet unutterable. Never, I
could fancy, did autumn clothe in such magnificence the elms and beeches;
never, I should think, did the leafage on my walls blaze in such royal
crimson. It was no day for wandering; under a canopy of blue or gold,
where the eye could fall on nothing that was not beautiful, enough to be
at one with Nature in dreamy rest. From stubble fields sounded the long
caw of rooks; a sleepy crowing ever and anon told of the neighbour farm;
my doves cooed above their cot. Was it for five minutes, or was it for
an hour, that I watched the yellow butterfly wafted as by an insensible
tremor of the air amid the garden glintings? In every autumn there comes
one such flawless day. None that I have known brought me a mind so
touched to the fitting mood of welcome, and so fulfilled the promise of
its peace.

XIX.

I was at ramble in the lanes, when, from somewhere at a distance, there
sounded the voice of a countryman--strange to say--singing. The notes
were indistinct, but they rose, to my ear, with a moment's musical
sadness, and of a sudden my heart was stricken with a memory so keen that
I knew not whether it was pain or delight. For the sound seemed to me
that of a peasant's song which I once heard whilst sitting among the
ruins of Paestum. The English landscape faded before my eyes. I saw
great Doric columns of honey-golden travertine; between them, as I looked
one way, a deep strip of sea; when I turned, the purple gorges of the
Apennine; and all about the temple, where I sat in solitude, a wilderness
dead and still but for that long note of wailing melody. I had not
thought it possible that here, in my beloved home, where regret and
desire are all but unknown to me, I could have been so deeply troubled by
a thought of things far off. I returned with head bent, that voice
singing in my memory. All the delight I have known in Italian travel
burned again within my heart. The old spell has not lost its power.
Never, I know, will it again draw me away from England; but the Southern
sunlight cannot fade from my imagination, and to dream of its glow upon
the ruins of old time wakes in me the voiceless desire which once was
anguish.

In his _Italienische Reise_, Goethe tells that at one moment of his life
the desire for Italy became to him a scarce endurable suffering; at
length he could not bear to hear or to read of thi