to see spirits there at noonday."[43] Walpole's letter of about the same
date, also to West,[44] is equally ecstatic. It is written "from a
hamlet among the mountains of Savoy. . . Here we are, the lonely lords
of glorious desolate prospects. . . But the road, West, the road!
Winding round a prodigious mountain, surrounded with others, all shagged
with hanging woods, obscured with pines, or lost in clouds! Below a
torrent breaking through cliffs, and tumbling through fragments of
rocks!. . . Now and then an old foot bridge, with a broken rail, a
leaning cross, a cottage or the ruin of an hermitage! This sounds too
bombast and too romantic to one that has not seen it, too cold for one
that has." Or contrast with Addison's Italian letters passages like
these, which foretoken Rogers and Byron. We get nothing so sympathetic
till at least a half century later. "It is the most beautiful of Italian
nights. . . There is a moon! There are starts for you! Do not you hear
the fountain? Do not you smell the orange flowers? That building yonder
is the convent of St. Isidore; and that eminence with the cypress-trees
and pines upon it, the top of Mt. Quirinal."[45] "The Neapolitans work
till evening: then take their lute or guitar and walk about the city, or
upon the sea shore with it, to enjoy the _fresco_. One sees their little
brown children jumping about stark naked and the bigger ones dancing with
castanets, while others play on the cymbal to them."[46] "Kennst dud as
Land," then already? The

"small voices and an old guitar,
Winning their way to an unguarded heart"?

And then, for a prophecy of Scott, read the description of Netley
Abbey,[47] in a letter to Nicholls in 1764. "My ferryman," writes Gray
in a letter to Brown about the same ruin, "assured me that he would not
go near it in the night time for all the world, though he knew much money
had been found there. The sun was all too glaring and too full of gauds
for such a scene, which ought to be visited only in the dusk of the
evening."

"If thou woulds't view fair Melrose aright
Go visit it by the pale moonlight,
For the gay beams of lightsome day
Gild, but to flout, the ruins, Gray."

In 1765, Gray visited the Scotch Highlands and sent enthusiastic
histories of his trip to Wharton and Mason. "Since I saw the Alps, I
have seen nothing sublime till now." "The Lowlands are worth seeing
once, but the mountains are