_ in our mind,
may well suggest itself in Southern Italy, where old and new faiths
are so singularly blended. Then there is Ravello on the hills above.
The path winds upward between stone walls tufted with maidenhair;
and ever nearer grow the mountains, and the sea-line soars into the
sky. An Englishman has made his home here in a ruined Moorish villa,
with cool colonnaded cloisters and rose-embowered terraces, lending
far prospect over rocky hills and olive-girdled villages to Paestum's
plain. The churches of Ravello have rare mosaics, and bronze doors,
and marble pulpits, older perhaps than those of Tuscany, which tempt
the archaeologist to ask if Nicholas the Pisan learned his secret
here. But who cares to be a sober antiquary at Amalfi? Far
pleasanter is it to climb the staircase to the Capuchins, and linger
in those caverns of the living rock, and pluck the lemons hanging by
the mossy walls; or to row from cove to cove along the shore,
watching the fishes swimming in the deeps beneath, and the medusas
spreading their filmy bells; to land upon smooth slabs of rock,
where corallines wave to and fro; or to rest on samphire-tufted
ledges, when the shadows slant beneath the westering sun.

There is no point in all this landscape which does not make a
picture. Painters might even complain that the pictures are too easy
and the poetry too facile, just as the musicians find the melodies
of this fair land too simple. No effect, carefully sought and
strenuously seized, could enhance the mere beauty of Amalfi bathed
in sunlight. You have only on some average summer day to sit down
and paint the scene. Little scope is afforded for suggestions of
far-away weird thoughts, or for elaborately studied motives.
Daubigny and Corot are as alien here as Blake or Duerer.

What is wanted, and what no modern artist can successfully recapture
from the wasteful past, is the mythopoeic sense--the apprehension of
primeval powers akin to man, growing into shape and substance on the
borderland between the world and the keen human sympathies it stirs
in us. Greek mythology was the proper form of art for scenery like
this. It gave the final touch to all its beauties, and added to its
sensuous charm an inbreathed spiritual life. No exercise of the
poetic faculty, far less that metaphysical mood of the reflective
consciousness which 'leads from nature up to nature's God,' can now
supply this need. From sea and earth and sky, in those creative age