cross the water, I
would advise no one to go abroad with this assurance solely. My
success--if so that can be called which yielded me life, not
profit--was circumstantial, and cannot be repeated. I should be loth to
try it again upon purely literary merits.

After nine months of experiment I bade the insular metropolis adieu, and
returned no more. The Continent was close and beckoning; I heard the
confusion of her tongues, and saw the shafts of her Gothic Babels
probing the clouds, and for another year I roamed among her cities, as
ardent and errant as when I went afield on my pony to win the spurs of a
War Correspondent.

CHAPTER XXVII.

SPURS IN THE PICTURE GALLERIES.

Florence, city of my delight! how do I thrill at the recollection of the
asylum afforded me by thee in the Via Parione. The room was tiled, and
cool, and high, and its single window looked out upon a real palace,
where the family of Corsini, presided over by a porter in cocked hat and
an exuberance of gold lace, gave me frequent glimpses of gauze dresses
and glorious eyes, whose owners sometimes came to the casement to watch
the poor little foreigner, writing so industriously.

Every young traveller has two or three subjects of unrest. Mine were
girls and art. The copyists in the galleries were more beautiful studies
to me than the paintings. The next time I go to Europe, I shall take
enough money along to give all the pretty ones an order; this will be an
introduction, and I shall know how they live, and how much money they
make, and what passions have heaved their beautiful bosoms, to make
their slow, quiet lives forever haunted and longing.

Love, love! There are only two grand, unsatiated passions, which keep us
forever in freshness and fever,--love and art.

In Italy I breathed the purest atmosphere; all the world was a
landscape picture; all the skies were spilling blueness and crimson
upon the mountains; all the faces were Madonnas; all the perspectives
were storied architecture. Westward the star of Empire takes its way,
but that of art shines steadily in the East. Thither look our American
young men, no matter at which of its altars they make their
devotions,--painting, sculpture, or architecture. And I, who had known
some fondness for the pencil till lured into the wider, wilder field of
letters, felt almost an artist's joy when I stood in the presence of
those solemn masters whose works are inspired and imperishable, like
rel