How Amalfi sets itself to song and music! Who can enter it without hearing in the air Longfellow’s beautiful lines?—
“Sweet the memory is to me
Of a land beyond the sea,
Where the waves and mountains meet,
Where, amid her mulberry-trees,
Sits Amalfi in the heat,
Bathing ever her white feet
In the tideless summer seas.
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’Tis a stairway, not a street,
That ascends the deep ravine,
Where the torrent leaps between
Rocky walls that almost meet.
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This is an enchanted land!
Round the headlands, far away,
Sweeps the blue Salernian bay
With its sickle of white sand;
Further still and furthermost
On the dim discovered coast,
Pæstum with its ruins lies,
And its roses all in bloom.”
If ever a region was dropped out of paradise designed, solely, for a poet’s day-dreams, it is Amalfi, and the even more beautiful Ravello just above. One fancies that it must have been in the mystic loveliness of this eyrie that the poet lost himself in a day-dream while Jupiter was dividing all the goods of the world. When he reproached the god for not saving a portion for him, Jupiter replied that all the goods were gone, it was true, but that his heaven was always open to the poet.
The ancient Amalfi, the city of activities and merchandise, is gone.
“Where are now the freighted barks
From the marts of east and west?
Where the knights in iron sarks
Journeying to the Holy Land,
Glove of steel upon the hand,
Cross of crimson on the breast?
Where the pomp of camp and court?
Where the pilgrims with their prayers?
Where the merchants with their wares?
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