Pebble V.
Meran.
"A glorious amphitheatre of lofty mountains! On one side rugged, sternly rising, crenelated, grey, snow-strewn; on the other, dreamy, far outspreading, gently vanishing, southward luring, softly glowing, wrapt in tints of loveliest azure, gradually blending with the silver-fretted sky. A spreading, fertile gushing valley. Down the sunny, swelling slopes, across the embosomed plain, an endless, curling, wreathing flood of gold-green vines, foaming and eddying with purple grapes. Through the verdant waves, like rushes in a stream, the Indian corn raises its slender form and feathered head in long array. Beneath, outstretched at ease, the pumpkin winks and yawns. At the foot of a steep-fronted, purpling rock, skirting the glowing vineyards, a foaming mountain stream, emerald and silver. Along the heights, nestling in verdure, rise thickly scattered, castellated villas, looking, with their bright, white walls, like smiles on the face of the earth. An epitome of what is rich and joyous and unfettered in landscape. The Alpha and Omega of all that is charming in the Tyrol. Meran!
"I can say no more for it.
"To my mind, it is inferior to Italy only in one respect: it is wanting in that glowing, strongly marked individuality, that earnest beauty, that 'charm that is in melancholy,' which fascinates so powerfully in the land of wine and oil.
Pebble VI.
Italy!
I "realise," as the Americans say,
and find reason to think that I am a queer party.
"To be able to say that, on returning after long years to a country whose image memory has, during the whole of that time, fondled with all the partiality of ardent attachment, one has found one's best expectations realised, is, in this world of disappointments and frustrated expectations, indeed a rare thing; but to find imagination surpassed by reality is rarer still; yet it is my case now that I once more breathe the air and tread the soil of Italy. For this, I feel more grateful than I can say; for to have been disappointed in these hopes would have been to me the greatest of miseries; as it is, my enjoyment is a double one: that which is occasioned by the positive, intrinsic beauty of what I see, and that, not less great, of recalling at the same time a happy, long-dwelt-on past. This I have more particularly experienced since my arrival in Verona; and here a queer feature in my queer idiosyncrasy obtrudes itself to notice, i.e. the extraordinary dominion exercised over me by the senses of smell and hearing! That I do labour under these peculiarities I always knew, but to what a ludicrous extent, I did not find out till, on arriving here (Verona), I was suddenly seized by a gust of a thousand smells and a din of a thousand sounds, some always remembered, others long-forgotten, suddenly rising up again to my memory. I was spellbound, the veil of the past was torn up, I was fairly carried back against the stream of time. Ridiculous as it may sound, my enjoyment of Italy, independently, of course, of the art (which is an extraordinary tissue of reality and illusion), would be very imperfect without this combination of trifles. One thing, I think, must affect every one agreeably; I mean the exquisitely humorous cries of the vendors in the thoroughfares and market-places; who could hear and not remember the loud, expostulatory shriek with which the one dwells on the excellencies of his handkerchiefs, the argumentative and facetious tone in which another infers that comfort is not possible without a supply of his matches, that urgent wail with which a third deplores that man should have so little appreciation of his baked apples, the muddy, half-suffocated tenor with which a fourth proclaims his water-melons, or the rabid, piercing soprano which seems to warn the public that 'if those violets are not bought pretty quick, there will soon be none to buy'?"