landscapes.  The art of the pen (we write on darkness) is to rouse the inward vision, instead of labouring with a Drop-scene brush, as if it were to the eye; because our flying minds cannot contain a protracted description.  That is why the poets, who spring imagination with a word or a phrase, paint lasting pictures.  The Shakespearian, the Dantesque, are in a line, two at most.  He lends an attentive ear when I speak, agrees or has a quaint pucker of the eyebrows dissenting inwardly.  He lacks mental liveliness—­cheerfulness, I should say, and is thankful to have it imparted.  One suspects he would be a dull domestic companion.  He has a veritable thirst for hopeful views of the world, and no spiritual distillery of his own.  He leans to depression.  Why!  The broken reed you call your Tony carries a cargo, all of her manufacture—­she reeks of secret stills; and here is a young man—­a sapling oak—­inclined to droop.  His nature has an air of imploring me que je d’arrose!  I begin to perform Mrs. Dr. Pangloss on purpose to brighten him—­the mind, the views.  He is not altogether deficient in conversational gaiety, and he shines in exercise.  But the world is a poor old ball bounding down a hill—­to an Irish melody in the evening generally, by request.  So far of Mr. Percy Dacier, of whom I have some hopes—­distant, perhaps delusive—­that he may be of use to our cause.  He listens.  It is an auspicious commencement.’

Lugano is the Italian lake most lovingly encircled by mountain arms, and every height about it may be scaled with esce.  The heights have their nest of waters below for a home scene, the southern Swiss peaks, with celestial Monta Rosa, in prospect.  It was there that Diana reawakened, after the trance of a deadly draught, to the glory of the earth and her share in it.  She wakened like the Princess of the Kiss; happily not to kisses; to no sign, touch or call that she could trace backward.  The change befell her without a warning.  After writing deliberately to her friend Emma, she laid down her pen and thought of nothing; and into this dreamfulness a wine passed, filling her veins, suffusing her mind, quickening her soul:  and coming whence? out of air, out of the yonder of air.  She could have imagined a seraphic presence in the room, that bade her arise and live; take the cup of the wells of youth arrested at her lips by her marriage; quit her wintry bondage for warmth, light, space, the quick of simple being.  And the strange pure ecstasy was not a transient electrification; it came in waves on a continuous tide; looking was living; walking flying.  She hardly knew that she slept.  The heights she had seen rosy at eve were marked for her ascent in the dawn.  Sleep was one wink, and fresh as the dewy field and rockflowers on her way upward, she sprang to more and more of heaven, insatiable, happily chirruping over her possessions.  The threading of the town among the dear common people before others were abroad,