ly
works of that master. Thence up a toilsome valley I journeyed to the
Ampezzan country, valley where indeed I saw my white mountains, but,
alas! no longer Celestial. For it rained like Westmorland for five
endless days, while I kicked my heels in an inn and turned a canto of
Aristo into halting English couplets. By-and-by it cleared, and I
headed westward towards Bozen, among the tangle of rocks where the
Dwarf King had once his rose-garden. The first night I had no inn but
slept in the vile cabin of a forester, who spoke a tongue half Latin,
half Dutch, which I failed to master. The next day was a blaze of
heat, the mountain-paths lay thick with dust, and I had no wine from
sunrise to sunset. Can you wonder that, when the following noon I saw
Santa Chiara sleeping in its green circlet of meadows, my thought was
only of a deep draught and a cool chamber? I protest that I am a great
lover of natural beauty, of rock and cascade, and all the properties of
the poet: but the enthusiasm of Rousseau himself would sink from the
stars to earth if he had marched since breakfast in a cloud of dust
with a throat like the nether millstone.

Yet I had not entered the place before Romance revived. The little
town--a mere wayside halting-place on the great mountain-road to the
North--had the air of mystery which foretells adventure. Why is it
that a dwelling or a countenance catches the fancy with the promise of
some strange destiny? I have houses in my mind which I know will some
day and somehow be intertwined oddly with my life; and I have faces in
memory of which I know nothing--save that I shall undoubtedly cast eyes
again upon them. My first glimpses of Santa Chiara gave me this earnest
of romance. It was walled and fortified, the streets were narrow pits
of shade, old tenements with bent fronts swayed to meet each other.
Melons lay drying on flat roofs, and yet now and then would come a
high-pitched northern gable. Latin and Teuton met and mingled in the
place, and, as Mr. Gibbon has taught us, the offspring of this
admixture is something fantastic and unpredictable. I forgot my
grievous thirst and my tired feet in admiration and a certain vague
expectation of wonders. Here, ran my thought, it is fated, maybe, that
romance and I shall at last compass a meeting. Perchance some princess
is in need of my arm, or some affair of high policy is afoot in this
jumble of old masonry. You will laugh at my folly, but I h