cloud shadows slowly sailing over purple slopes, island gardens, distant glimpses of snow-capped mountains, breadth, air, immensity, and flooding sunlight, will choose Maggiore.  But scarcely has he cast his vote for this, the Juno of the divine rivals, when he remembers the triple lovelinesses of the Larian Aphrodite, disclosed in all their placid grace from Villa Serbelloni;—­the green blue of the waters, clear as glass, opaque through depth; the millefleurs roses clambering into cypresses by Cadenabbia; the laburnums hanging their yellow clusters from the clefts of Sasso Eancio; the oleander arcades of Varenna; the wild white limestone crags of San Martiuo, which he has climbed to feast his eyes with the perspective, magical, serene, Lionardesquely perfect, of the distant gates of Adda.  Then while this modern Paris is yet doubting, perhaps a thought may cross his mind of sterner, solitary Lake Iseo—­the Pallas of the three.  She offers her own attractions.  The sublimity of Monte Adamello, dominating Lovere and all the lowland like Hesiod’s hill of Virtue reared aloft above the plain of common life, has charms to tempt heroic lovers.  Nor can Varese be neglected.  In some picturesque respects, Varese is the most perfect of the lakes.  Those long lines of swelling hills that lead into the level, yield an infinite series of placid foregrounds, pleasant to the eye by contrast with the dominant snow-summits, from Monte Viso to Monte Leone:  the sky is limitless to southward; the low horizons are broken by bell-towers and farmhouses; while armaments of clouds are ever rolling in the interval of Alps and plain.

Of a truth, to decide which is the queen of the Italian lakes, is but an infinita quaestio; and the mere raising of it is folly.  Still each lover of the beautiful may give his vote; and mine, like that of shepherd Paris, is already given to the Larian goddess.  Words fail in attempting to set forth charms which have to be enjoyed, or can at best but lightly be touched with most consummate tact, even as great poets have already touched on Como Lake—­from Virgil with his ’Lari maxume,’ to Tennyson and the Italian Manzoni.  The threshold of the shrine is, however, less consecrated ground; and the Cathedral of Como may form a vestibule to the temple where silence is more golden than the speech of a describer.

The Cathedral of Como is perhaps the most perfect building in Italy for illustrating the fusion of Gothic and Renaissance styles, both of a good type and exquisite in their sobriety.  The Gothic ends with the nave.  The noble transepts and the choir, each terminating in a rounded tribune of the same dimensions, are carried out in a simple and decorous Bramantesque manner.  The transition from the one style to the other is managed so felicitously, and the sympathies between them are so well developed, that there is no discord.  What we here call Gothic, is conceived in a truly southern spirit, without fantastic efflorescence or