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 Theocritus, where he hymns the children of Leda, succourers of the ships that, “defying the stars that set and rise in heaven, have encountered the perilous breath of storms.  The winds raise huge billows about their stern, yea, or from the prow, or even as each wind wills, and cast them into the hold of the ship, and shatter both bulwarks, while with the sail limits nil the gear confused and broken, and the wide sea rings, being lashed by the gusts and by showers of iron hail.”