I

2. Once again I am on the shore of the Mediterranean. saw it only from a distance when I was last in Italy, but now I am once more on its very edge, and have been on it and in it. True it is, that the Mediterranean is no more than a vast mass of salt water, if people choose to think it so ; but it is also the most magnificent thing in the world, if you choose to think it so; and it is as truly the latter as it is the former. And as the pococurante temper is not the happiest, and that which can admire heartily is much more akin to that which can love heartily, ὁ δὲ ἀγαπῶν, θεῷ ἤδη ἔμοιος, so, my children, I wish that if ever you come to Genoa, you may think the Mediterranean to be more than any common sea, and may be unable to look upon it without a deep stirring of delight.

On the Lake of Como, August 3, 1829.

3. I fancy how delightful it would be to bring one's family and live here; but, then, happily, I think and feel how little such voluptuous enjoyment would repay for abandoning the line of usefulness and activity which I have in England, and how the feeling myself helpless and useless, living merely to look about me, and training up my children in the same way, would soon make all this beauty pall, and appear even wearisome. But to see it as we are now doing, in our moments of recreation, to strengthen us for work to come, and to gild with beautiful recollections our daily life of home duties;· - this, indeed, is delightful, and is a pleasure which I think we may enjoy without restraint. England has other destinies than these countries, I use the word in no foolish or unchristian sense, but she has other destinies; her people have more required of them; with her full intelligence, her restless activity, her enormous means and enormous difficulties; her pure religion and unchecked freedom; her form of society, with so much of evil, yet so much of good in it, and such immense power conferred by it; - her citizens, least of all men, should think of their own rest or enjoyment, but should cherish every faculty and improve every opportunity to the uttermost, to do good to themselves and to the world. Therefore these lovely valleys, and this surpassing beauty of lake and mountain, and garden and wood, are least, of all men, for us to covet; and our country, so entirely subdued as it is to man's uses, with its gentle hills and valleys, its innumerable canals and coaches, is best suited as an instrument of usefulness.

Zurich, August 7, 1829.

4. Once more I must recross the Alps, to Chiavenna, which certainly is amongst the most extraordinary places I ever beheld. Its situation resembles that of Aosta and Bellinzona, and I think, if possible, it surpasses them both. The mountains by which it is enclosed are formed of that hard dark rock which is so predominant in the lower parts of the Alps on the Italian side, and which gives them so decided a character. Above Chiavenna their height is unusually great, and their magnificence, both in the ruggedness of their form and the steepness of their cliffs, as in the gigantic size of the fragments which they have thrown down into the valley, and in the luxuriance of their chestnut woods, is of the very highest degree. The effect too is greater, because the valley is so much narrower than that of the Ticino at Bellinzona, or of the Dorea Baltea at Aosta; in fact the stream is rather a torrent than a river, but full and impetuous, and surprisingly clear, although the snowy Alps from which it takes its source rise at a very little distance; but their substance apparently is harder than that of the Alps about Mont Blanc, and the torrents, therefore, are far purer than the Dorea or the Arve. In the very midst of the town of Chiavenna, now covered with terrace walls and vineyards to its very summit, stands an enormous fragment of rock, once detached from the neighboring mountains, and rising to the height, I suppose, of seventy or eighty feet. It was formerly occupied by a fortress built on its top by the Spaniards, in their wars in the north of Italy; but it all looks quiet and peaceful now. Miss H., her brother, and I wandered about before dinner to take a scramble amidst the rocks and chestnuts. We followed a path between the walls of the vineyards, wide enough for one person only, till it led us out amid the rocks, and then continued to wind about amongst them, leading to the little grotto-like dwellings which were scattered amongst them, or built on to the enormous fragments which cover the whole mountain side. On the tops of these fragments, however, as well as between them, a vegetation of fine grass has contrived to establish itself, and the chestnuts twist their knotty roots about in every direction till they find some fissure by which they can strike down into the soil. It is impossible, therefore, to picture anything more beautiful than a scramble about these mountains. You are in a wood of the most magnificent trees, shaded from the sun, yet not treading on mouldering leaves or damp earth, but on a

carpet of the freshest spring turf, rich with all sorts of flowers. You have the softness of an upland meadow and the richness of an English park, yet you are amidst masses of rock, now rearing their steep sides in bare cliffs, now hung with the senna and the broom, now carpeted with turf, and only showing their existence by the infinitely varied form which they give to the ground, the numberless deep dells, and green amphitheatres, and deliciously smooth platforms, all caused by the ruins of the mountain which have thus broken and studded its surface, and are yet so mellowed by the rich vegetation which time has given them, that they now only soften its character.

This to me unrivalled beauty of the chestnut woods was very remarkable in two or three scenes which we saw the next day; one before we set out for the Splugen, when we drove a little way up the valley of Chiavenna, to see a waterfall. The fall was beautiful in itself, as all waterfalls must be, but its peculiar charm was this, that instead of falling amidst copsewood, as the falls in Wales and the north of England generally do, or amidst mere shattered rocks, like that fine one in the Valais near Martigny, — here, on the contrary, the water fell over a cliff of black rock into a deep rocky basin, and then as it flowed down in its torrent it ran beneath a platform of the most delicious grass, on which the great chestnut-trees stood about as finely as in an English park, and rose almost to a level with the top of the fall, while the turf underneath them was steeped in a perpetual dew from the spray. The other scene was on the road to Isola, on the way to the Splugen, in the valley of the Lina. It is rather a gorge than a valley, so closely do the mountains approach one another, while the torrent is one succession of falls. Yet just in one place, where the road by a succession of zigzags had wound up to the level of the top of the falls, and where the stream was running for a short space as gentle and as limpid as one of the clear rapid chalk streams of the South of Hampshire, the turf sloped down gently from the road to the stream, the great chestnut-trees spread their branches over it, and just on its smooth margin was a little chapel, with those fresco paintings on its walls which are so constant a remembrance of Italy. Across the stream there was the same green turf and the same chestnut shade, and if you did not lift up your eyes high into the sky, to notice the barrier of insurmountable cliff and mountain which surrounded you on each side, you would have had no other images before you than those of the softest and most delicate repose, and of almost luxurious enjoyment.

Champagne, August 12, 1829. Between Brienne and Arcis the valley was full of villages, and they were large and comfortable-looking, almost every cottage having a good garden. These valleys in Champagne are, on a small scale, what Egypt is on a large scale; highly cultivated, and with a crowded population along the streams, because all the country on either side of the valley is an uninhabitable desert. Arcis is a very poor town, and from thence to Chalons it was a country not to be paralleled, I suppose, in civilized Europe, except it be in Castile in Spain. A waste it was not, for it was all cultivated, but the dreariness of a boundless view, all brown and dry, corn-fields either cleared or ready for the harvest, without a tree or a green field, or a house, was exceedingly striking, and Champagne is worth seeing for the very surpassing degree of its ugliness. They are, however, in several places, beginning to plant firs, and if this system be followed, the aspect as well as the value of the country will be greatly improved. Chalons, at a distance looks well; and the green valley and fine stream of the Marne are quite delicious to eyes accustomed to one brown extent of plain or table-land during thirty miles.

VI. TOUR IN NORTH OF ITALY.

Chamberri, July 17, 1830. and the rest of

1. The state of feeling displayed by the party, filled me with thoughts that might make a volume. It was, I fear, certainly unchristian and ultra-liberal; — looking to war with very little dismay, but anxious to spread everywhere what they considered liberal views, "les Idées du Siècle," and so intolerant of anything old, that made it a matter of reproach to our Government that Guernsey and Jersey still retained their old Norman laws. They were strongly Anti-Anglican, regarding England as the great enemy to all improvement all over the world. Now as to mending that is not our concern; but for ourselves, it did fill me with earnest thoughts of the fearful conflict that must soon take place between the friends and enemies of the old system of things, and the provoking intermixture of evil in the latter, which makes it impossible to sympathize wholly in their success. I was struck, too, with the total isolation of England from the European world. We are considered like the inhabitants of another planet, feared perhaps, and respected

and

in many points, but not loved, and in no respect understood or sympathized with. And how much is our state the same with regard to the Continent. How little do we seem to know, or to value their feelings, — how little do we appreciate or imitate their intellectual progress. . . . . . Is it never to be that men shall be at once Christians and really liberal and wise: and shall the improvement of our social condition always be left to unhallowed hands to effect it? I conclude with the lament of the Persian noble: — ἐχθίστ ̓ ὀδύνη πολλὰ φρονέοντα μηδένος κρατέειν ; or rather, I should say, it would be, ἐχθίστη óðún, did we not believe that there was One in whom infinite wisdom was accompanied with infinite power; and whose will for us is that we should follow after what is good ourselves, but should not wonder or be disappointed if "another take the city and it be called after his name." There is a want of moral wisdom among the Continental Liberals, as among their opponents both abroad and at home, which makes one tremble to follow such guides. I gave my Thucydides to

; would that he could read it and profit by it; for, sad to say, Thucydides seems to me to have been not only a fairer and an abler man, but one of a far sounder moral sense, and deeper principle, than the modern Liberals. Between what a Scylla and Charybdis does the state of society seem to be wavering, the brute ignorance and coarse commonplace selfishness of the Tories, and the presumption and intellectual fever of the Liberals. "To the Jews a stumbling-block, and to the Greeks foolishness; but to them who believe, both Jews and Greeks, CHRIST, the power of God, and the wisdom of God.” 'Aμǹv ναὶ ἔρχου Κύριε Ἰησοῦ.

Varese, July 24, 1830.

2. We arrived here, at the Star inn, the post, about a quarter after five, got a hasty dinner, and and I were in our carriage, or rather in a light cabriolet, hired for the purpose, a little after six, to drive about two miles out, to the foot of the mountain of S. Maria. At the foot of the mountain we began to walk, the road being a sort of paved way round the mountain in great zigzags, and passing by in the ascent about twenty chapels or arches, introductory to the one at the summit. Over the first of these was written, "Her foundations are upon the holy hills;" and other passages of Scripture were written over the succeeding ones. In one of these chapels, looking in through the window, we saw that it was full of waxen figures as large as life, representing the Apostles on