r on a point of the crag, so strange that I was startled; but
straightway I knew the goatherd, the curling locks, the olive face, the
garments of goatskin and leather on his limbs. It came on me like a
flash--_eccola_ the country of Theocritus!

I have never seen it set down among the advantages of travel that one
learns to understand the poets better. To see courts and governments,
manners and customs, works of architecture, statues and pictures and
ruins--this, since modern travel began, is to make the grand tour; but
though I have diligently sought such obvious and common aims, and had my
reward, I think no gain so great as that I never thought of, the light
which travel sheds upon the poets; unless, indeed, I should except that
stronger hold on the reality of the ideal creations of the imagination
which comes from familiar life with pictures, and statues, and kindred
physical renderings of art. This latter advantage must necessarily be
more narrowly availed of by men, since it implies a certain peculiar
temperament; but poetry, in its less exalted forms, is open and common
to all who are not immersed in the materialism of their own lives, and
whatever helps to unlock the poetic treasures of other lands for our
possession may be an important part of life. I think none can fully
taste the sweetness, or behold the beauty, of English song even, until
he has wandered in the lanes and fields of the mother-country; and in
the case of foreign, and especially of the ancient, poets, so much of
whose accepted and assumed world of fact has perished, the loss is very
great. I had trodden many an Italian hillside before I noticed how
subtly Dante's landscape had become realized in my mind as a part of
nature. I own to believing that Virgil's storms never blew on the sea
until once, near Salerno, as I rode back from Paestum, there came a
storm over the wide gulf that held my eyes enchanted--such masses of
ragged, full clouds, such darkness in their broad bosoms broken with
rapid flame, and a change beneath so swift, such anger on the sea, such
an indescribable and awful gleaming hue, not purple, nor green, nor red,
but a commingling of all these--a revelation of the wrath of colour! The
waves were wild with the fallen tempest; quick and heavy the surf came
thundering on the sands; the light went out as if it were extinguished,
and the dark rain came down; and I said, "'Tis one of Virgil's storms."
Such a one you will find also in T