The Project Gutenberg EBook of Roman Holidays and Others, by W. D. Howells

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Title: Roman Holidays and Others

Author: W. D. Howells

Release Date: February, 2005 [EBook #7422]
Posting Date: July 22, 2009

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND OTHERS ***

Produced by Eric Eldred

[Illustration: 01 GLIMPSE OUTSIDE OF MODERN ROME]

ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND OTHERS

By W. D. Howells

ILLUSTRATED

HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
NEW YORK AND LONDON
Copyright, 1908, by HARPER & BROTHERS.
Copyright, 1908, by THE SUN PRINTING AND PUBLISHING ASSOCIATION.
Published October, 1908.

CONTENTS

I. UP AND DOWN MADEIRA

II. TWO UP-TOWN BLOCKS INTO SPAIN

III. ASHORE AT GENOA

IV. NAPLES AND HER JOYFUL NOISE

V. POMPEII REVISITED

VI. ROMAN HOLIDAYS

VII. A WEEK AT LEGHORN

VIII. OVER AT PISA

IX.. BACK AT GENOA

X. EDEN AFTER THE FALL

ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND OTHERS

I. UP AND DOWN MADEIRA.

No drop-curtain, at any theatre I have seen, was ever so richly
imagined, with misty tops and shadowy clefts and frowning cliffs and
gloomy valleys and long, plunging cataracts, as the actual landscape of
Madeira, when we drew nearer and nearer to it, at the close of a tearful
afternoon of mid-January. The scenery of drop-curtains is often very
boldly beautiful, but here Nature, if she had taken a hint from art, had
certainly bettered her instruction. During the waits between acts at the
theatre, while studying the magnificent painting beyond the trouble of
the orchestra, I have been most impressed by the splendid variety which
the artist had got into his picture, where the spacious frame lent
itself to his passion for saying everything; but I remembered his
thronging fancies as meagre and scanty in the presence of the stupendous
reality before me. I have, for instance, not even mentioned the sea,
which swept smoother and smoother in toward the feet of those precipices
and grew more and more trans-lucently purple and yellow and green, while
half a score of cascades shot straight down their fronts in shafts of
snowy foam, and over their pachyderm