onlit water-ways of Venice, and
dreamily chiming her well-pleased lute with the plash of the oars of
the gondolier. It is the chant of the flower-girl with large eyes
shining under the palm-branches in the market-place of Milan; and with
the distant echoing notes come the sweet breath of her violets and the
unquenchable odors of her crushed geraniums borne on many a white sail
from the glorified Adriatic. Bronzed cheek and swart brow under my
window, I shall by and by throw you a paltry nickel cent for your
tropical dreams; meanwhile tell me, did the sun of Dante's Florence
give your blood its fierce flow and the tawny hue to your bared and
brawny breast? Is it the rage of Tasso's madness that burns in your
uplifted eyes? Do you take shelter from the fervid noon under the
cypresses of Monte Mario? Will you meet queenly Marguerite with myrtle
wreath and myrtle fragrance, as she wanders through the chestnut vales?
Will you sleep tonight between the colonnades under the golden moon of
Napoli? Go back, O child of the Midland Sea! Go out from this cold
shore, that yields crabbed harvests for your threefold vintages of
Italy. Go, suck the sunshine from Seville oranges under the elms of
Posilippo. Go, watch the shadows of the vines swaying in the
mulberry-trees from Epomeo's gales. Bind the ivy in a triple crown
above Bianca's comely hair, and pipe not so wailingly to the Vikings of
this frigid Norseland.

But Italy, remember, my frigid Norseland has a heart of fire in her
bosom beneath its overlying snows, before which yours dies like the
white sick hearth-flame before the noonday sun. Passion, but not
compassion, is here "cooled a long age in the deep-delved earth." We
lure our choristers with honeyed words and gentle ways: you lay your
sweetest songsters on the gridiron. Our orchards ring with the
full-throated happiness of a thousand birds: your pomegranate groves
are silent, and your miserable cannibal kitchens would tell the reason
why, if outraged spits could speak. Go away, therefore, from my
window, Giuseppo; the air is growing damp and chilly, and I do not
sleep in the shadows of broken temples.

Yet I love music; not as you love it, my friend, with intelligence,
discrimination, and delicacy, but in a dull, woodeny way, as the "gouty
oaks" loved it, when they felt in their fibrous frames the stir of
Amphion's lyre, and "floundered into hornpipes"; as the gray, stupid
rocks loved it, when they came roll