Italy previous to my return to England. The physicians, indeed, had
recommended to me that delicious climate as an antidote to the ills my
constitution had sustained in the freezing skies of the north; and in my
own heart I had secretly appointed some more solitary part of the Divine
Land for the scene of my purposed hermitage and seclusion. It is indeed
astonishing how those who have lived much in cold climates yearn for
lands of mellow light and summer luxuriance; and I felt for a southern
sky the same resistless longing which sailors, in the midst of the
vast ocean, have felt for the green fields and various landscape of the
shore.

I traversed, then, the immense tracts of Russia, passed through Hungary,
entered Turkey, which I had wished to visit, where I remained a short
time; and, crossing the Adriatic, hailed, for the first time, the
Ausonian shore. It was the month of May--that month, of whose lustrous
beauty none in a northern clime can dream--that I entered Italy. It may
serve as an instance of the power with which a thought that, however
important, is generally deemed of too abstract and metaphysical a nature
deeply to engross the mind, possessed me then, that I--no cold nor
unenthusiastic votary of the classic Muse--made no pilgrimage to city
or ruin, but, after a brief sojourn at Ravenna, where I dismissed all my
train, set out alone to find the solitary cell for which I now sickened
with a hermit's love.

It was at a small village at the foot of the Apennines that I found
the object of my search. Strangely enough, there blended with my
philosophical ardour a deep mixture of my old romance. Nature, to whose
voice the dweller in cities and struggler with mankind had been so long
obtuse, now pleaded audibly at my heart, and called me to her embraces,
as a mother calls unto her wearied child. My eye, as with a new vision,
became open to the mute yet eloquent loveliness of this most fairy
earth; and hill and valley, the mirror of silent waters, the sunny
stillness of woods, and the old haunts of satyr and nymph, revived in me
the fountains of past poetry, and became the receptacles of a thousand
spells, mightier than the charms of any enchanter save Love, which
was departed,--Youth, which was nearly gone,--and Nature, which (more
vividly than ever) existed for me still.

I chose, then, my retreat. As I was fastidious in its choice, I cannot
refrain from the luxury of describing it. Ah, little did I dream tha