“Leisure and I have taken leave of one another. I propose to be busy as long as I live, if my health is so long indulged to me.”—John Wesley.
“To seek fame is even a solemn duty for men endowed with more than ordinary powers of mind. First, as multiplying the ways and chances by which a useful work comes into the hands of such as are prepared to avail themselves of it; secondly, as securing for such a work that submissiveness of heart, that docility, without which nothing really good can be really acquired; and lastly, because the individuality of the author, with all the associations connected with his name and history, adds greatly to the effect of a work.”—Coleridge to Sir G. Beaumont.
“For ever I wrastle, for ever I am behind.”—Gower, Confessio Amantis.
“’Tis not in mortals to command success;
But we’ll do more, Sempronius—we’ll deserve it”
—Addison, Cato.
THE success of “Walks in Rome,” and the great pleasure which I had derived from the preparation of my “Days near Rome,” made me undertake, in the spring of 1874, the more ambitious work of “Cities of Northern and Central Italy,” in preparation for which I left England at the end of January, accepting on the way an oft-repeated invitation from Mr. and Mrs. de Wesselow to their beautiful home at Cannes.
Journal.
“Villa La Cava, Cannes, Jan. 30, 1874.—What a view I look upon here from my beautiful room!—a pure blue sky all around, fading into the softest most delicate golden hues where it meets the waveless expanse of sea, upon which the islands seem asleep in the sunshine; on one side the old town of Cannes, with its pier and shipping and the white sails of its boats; on the other, the endless villas, and Mougins, and the mountains—all rising from a wealth of orange and cypress groves; and, close at hand, masses of geraniums and roses and the ‘sunshine tree’ (golden mimosa) in full blossom,—and thus, they say, it has been all winter.
“Paris was at its ugliest. I had a pleasant dinner at the Embassy, and I went to see old Madame Dubois at the top of a house, in her room which is at once sitting-room, bedroom, and kitchen. She was full of the wretchedness of living in a country where your servant had no scruple in telling you she was your equal, and that she was jealous of your being richer than herself. She showed her household treasures, especially a little silver owl, ‘qui est restée longtemps sans se marier, et puis a fait un petit hibou.’
“I left in the evening for my four-and-twenty hours’ journey. The train was crowded, every place full, but, in spite of my seven companions and their twenty-eight handbags, which obliged me to sit bolt upright the whole way, I rather enjoyed it. There is something so interesting in the rapid transitions: the plains of Central France: the rolling hills of Burgundy in the white moonlight: the great towns, Dijon and Lyons, deep down below, and mapped out by their lamps: the dawn over the Rhone valley: the change to blue sky melting into delicate amber: the first stunted olives: the white roads leading, dust-surrounded, to the white cities, Avignon and Tarascon and Arles: the desolate stone-laden Crau: the still blue Mediterranean, and Marseilles with its shipping, and then the granite phase of southern Provence and its growth of heath and lavender and pines.
“On this, the eastern side, Cannes is a new world to me, but on Sunday, with Marcus Hare and G., I went up to the other side, to the Villa S. François and our beloved pine-wood, alive still with sacred memories, where the dear form still might seem to wander with her sunshade and camp-stool, and where we sat on the very stone she used to rest on in ‘the Shepherdesses’ Walk.’ G. is too matter of fact to enjoy this country. When I exclaimed over the glorious beauty and variety of the view of the Rocher de Bilheres, standing out as it does from the supreme point of the forest promontory, with the purple shadows behind it in the deep rift, she could only say, ‘I should be better satisfied if I could ascertain exactly what it is mineralogically.’