with which we are totally unacquainted; and if some amateurs of real taste and feeling prefer a rural cattle scene of Paul Potter or Cuyp, to all the grand or lovely creations of Salvator, or Claude, or Poussin, it is perhaps, because the former are associated in their minds with reality and familiar nature, while the latter appear in comparison mere inventions of the painter’s fertile fancy, mere visionary representations of what may or might exist but which do not come home to the memory or the mind with the force of truth or delighted recollection.  So when I have been travelling in Italy how often I have exclaimed, “How like a picture!” and I remember once, while contemplating a most glorious sunset from the banks of the Arno, I caught myself saying, “This is truly one of Claude’s sunsets!” Now should I live to see again one of my favourite Grosvenor Claudes I shall probably exclaim, “How natural! how like what I have seen so often on the Arno, or from the Monte Pincio!”

And, in conclusion, let it be remembered by those who are inclined to smile (as I have often done) when travellers fresh from Italy rave almost in blank verse, and think it all as unmeaning as

    “Lutes, laurels, seas of milk, and ships of amber!”

let them recollect that it is not alone the visible picturesque of Italy which thus intoxicates; it is not only her fervid skies, her sunsets, which envelope one-half of heaven from the horizon to the zenith, in living blaze; nor her soaring pine-clad mountains; nor her azure seas; nor her fields, “ploughed by the sunbeams;” nor her gorgeous cities, spread out with all their domes and towers, unobscured by cloud or vapours;—­but it is something more than these, something beyond, and over all—­

                   ——­The gleam,
    The light that never was on sea or land
    The consecration, and the poet’s dream!

Genoa, 30.—­We arrived here late, and I should not write now, weary, weak, sick, and down-spirited as I am, did I not know how the impressions of one day efface those of the former; and as I cannot sleep, it is better to scribble than to think.

As to describing all I have seen, thought, and felt in three days, that were indeed impossible:  I think I have exhausted all my prose eloquence, and all allowable raptures; so that unless I ramble into absolute poetry, I dare not say a word of the scenery around Sarzana and Lerici.  After spending one evening at Sarzana, in lingering through green lanes and watching the millions of fire-flies, sparkling in the dark shade of the trees, and lost again in the brilliant moonlight—­we left it the next morning about sunrise, to embark in a felucca at Lerici, as the road between Spezia and Sestri is not yet completed.  The groves and vineyards on each side of the road were filled with nightingales, singing in concert loud enough to overpower the sound of our carriage-wheels, and the whole scene, as the sun rose over it, and the purple shadows drew off and disclosed it gradually to the eye, was so enchanting—­that positively I will say nothing about it.