it is perhaps, because the former are associated
in their minds with reality and familiar nature, while the latter
appear in comparison mere inventions of the painter's fertile fancy,
mere visionary representations of what may or might exist but which do
not come home to the memory or the mind with the force of truth or
delighted recollection. So when I have been travelling in Italy how
often I have exclaimed, "How like a picture!" and I remember once,
while contemplating a most glorious sunset from the banks of the Arno,
I caught myself saying, "This is truly one of Claude's sunsets!" Now
should I live to see again one of my favourite Grosvenor Claudes I
shall probably exclaim, "How natural! how like what I have seen so
often on the Arno, or from the Monte Pincio!"

And, in conclusion, let it be remembered by those who are inclined to
smile (as I have often done) when travellers fresh from Italy _rave_
almost in blank verse, and think it all as unmeaning as

"Lutes, laurels, seas of milk, and ships of amber!"

let them recollect that it is not alone the _visible_ picturesque of
Italy which thus intoxicates; it is not only her fervid skies, her
sunsets, which envelope one-half of heaven from the horizon to the
zenith, in living blaze; nor her soaring pine-clad mountains; nor her
azure seas; nor her fields, "ploughed by the sunbeams;" nor her
gorgeous cities, spread out with all their domes and towers,
unobscured by cloud or vapours;--but it is something more than these,
something beyond, and over all--

----The gleam,
The light that never was on sea or land
The consecration, and the poet's dream!

_Genoa, 30._--We arrived here late, and I should not write now, weary,
weak, sick, and down-spirited as I am, did I not know how the
impressions of one day efface those of the former; and as I cannot
sleep, it is better to scribble than to think.

As to describing all I have seen, thought, and felt in three days,
that were indeed impossible: I think I have exhausted all my prose
eloquence, and all allowable raptures; so that unless I ramble into
absolute poetry, I dare not say a word of the scenery around Sarzana
and Lerici. After spending one evening at Sarzana, in lingering
through green lanes and watching the millions of fire-flies, sparkling
in the dark shade of the trees, and lost again in the brilliant
moonlight--we left it the next morning about sunrise, to embark in a
felucca at