I must leave these older memories, to tell, so far as it is possible in words, of that land of the idyl which of all enchanted retreats of the imagination is the hardest for him without the secret to enter.  Yet here I find it all about me in the places where the poets first unveiled it.  Once before I had a sight of it, as all over Italy it glimpses at times from the hills and the campagna.  Descending under the high peak of Capri, I heard a flute, and turned and saw on the neighbouring slopes the shepherd-boy leading his flock, the music at his lips.  Then the centuries rolled together like a scroll, and I heard the world’s morning notes.  That was a single moment; but here, day-long is the idyl world.  I read the old verses over, and in my walks the song keeps breaking in.  The idyls are full of streams and fountains, just such as I meet with wherever I turn, and the water counts in the landscape as in the poems.  It is always tumbling over rocks in cascades, brawling with rounded forms among the stones of the shallow brooks, bubbling in fountains, or dripping from the cliff, or shining like silver in the plain.  The run that comes down from Mola, the torrent under the olive and lemon branches toward Letojanni, the more open course in the ravine of the mill down by Giardini, the cimeter of the far-seen Alcantara lying on the campagna in the meadows, and that further fiume freddo, the cold stream,—­“chill water that for me deep-wooded Etna sends down from the white snow, a draught divine,”—­each of these seems inhabited by a genius of its own, so that it does not resemble its neighbours.  But all alike murmur of ancient song, and bring it near, and make it real.

On the beach one feels most keenly the actuality of much of the idyls, and finds the continuousness of the human life that enters into them.  No idyl appeals so directly to modern feeling, I suspect, as does that of the two fishermen and the dream of the golden fish.  Go down to the shore; you will find the old men still at their toil, the same implements, the same poverty, the same sentiment for the heart.  Often as I look at them I recall the old words, while the goats hang their heads over the scant herbage, and the blue sea breaks lazily and heavily on the sands.

“Two fishers, on a time, two old men, together lay and slept; they had strewn the dry sea-moss for a bed in their wattled cabin, and there lay against the leafy wall.  Beside them wore strewn the instruments of their toilsome bands, the fishing-creels, the rods of reed, the hooks, the sails bedraggled with sea-spoil, the lines, the weels, the lobster-pots woven of rushes, the seines, two oars, and an old cobble upon props.  Beneath their heads was a scanty matting, their clothes, their sailors’ caps.  Here was all their toil, here all their wealth.  The threshold had never a door nor a watch-dog.  All things, all, to them seemed superfluity, for Poverty was their sentinel; they had no neighbour by them, but ever against their narrow cabin gently floated up the sea.”