Descending next day to Avignon, I had the mortification of finding the banks of the Rhone still sheeted with white, and there waded through melting snow to Laura’s tomb.  We did not see Mr. Dickens’s Tower and Goblin,—­it was too late in the day,—­but we saw a snowball fight between two bands of the military in the castle yard that was gay enough to make a goblin laugh.  And next day on to Arles, still snow,—­snow and cutting blasts in the South of France, where everybody had promised us bird-songs and blossoms to console us for the dreary winter of Paris.  At Arles, indeed, I saw the little saxifrage blossoming on the steps of the Amphitheatre, and fruit-trees in flower amid the tombs.  Here for the first time I saw the great handwriting of the Romans in its proper medium of stone, and I was content.  It looked us grand and solid as I expected, as if life in those days was thought worth the having, the enjoying, and the using.  The sunlight was warm this day; it lay deliciously still and calm upon the ruins.  One old woman sat knitting where twenty-five thousand persons once gazed down in fierce excitement on the fights of men and lions.  Coming back, we were refreshed all through the streets by the sight of the women of Arles.  They answered to their reputation for beauty; tall, erect, and noble, with high and dignified features, and a full, earnest gaze of the eye, they looked as if the Eagle still waved its wings over their city.  Even the very old women still have a degree of beauty, because when the colors are all faded, and the skin wrinkled, the face retains this dignity of outline.  The men do not share in these characteristics; some priestess, well beloved of the powers of old religion, must have called down an especial blessing on her sex in this town.

Hence to Marseilles,—­where is little for the traveller to see, except the mixture of Oriental blood in the crowd of the streets.  Thence by steamer to Genoa.  Of this transit, he who has been on the Mediterranean in a stiff breeze well understands I can have nothing to say, except “I suffered.”  It was all one dull, tormented dream to me, and, I believe, to most of the ship’s company,—­a dream too of thirty hours’ duration, instead of the promised sixteen.

The excessive beauty of Genoa is well known, and the impression upon the eye alone was correspondent with what I expected; but, alas! the weather was still so cold I could not realize that I had actually touched those shores to which I had looked forward all my life, where it seemed that the heart would expand, and the whole nature be turned to delight.  Seen by a cutting wind, the marble palaces, the gardens, the magnificent water-view of Genoa, failed to charm,—­“I saw, not felt, how beautiful they were.”  Only at Naples have I found my Italy, and here not till after a week’s waiting,—­not till I began to believe that all I had heard in praise of the climate of Italy was fable, and that there