"The brightest star of star-bright Italy."
You shall be stirred by the craggy grandeur of the Apennines, and soothed by the living green of the Tuscan vales, with their hoar castles, their olives, their dark cypresses, and their forests,--
"Where beside his leafy hold The sullen boar hath heard the distant horn, And whets his tusks against the gnarled thorn."
You shall taste the vine of Italy, and drink the waters of the Arno. You shall wander over ancient battle-fields, encounter the fierce Apennine blast, and be rocked on the Mediterranean wave, which the sirocco heaps up, huge and dark, and pours in a foaming cataract upon the strand of Italy. Finally, we shall tread together the sackcloth plain on which Rome sits, with the leaves of her torn laurel and the fragments of her shivered sceptre strewn around her, waiting with discrowned and downcast head the bolt of doom. Entering the gates of the "seven-hilled city," we shall climb the Capitol, and survey a scene which has its equal nowhere on the earth. Mouldering arches, fallen columns, buried palaces, empty tombs, and slaves treading on the dust of the conquerors of the world, are all that now remain of Imperial Rome. What a scene of ruin and woe! When the twilight falls, and the moon begins to climb the eastern arch, mark how the Coliseum projects, as if in pity, its mighty shadow across the Forum, and covers with its kindly folds the mouldering trophies of the past, and draws its mantle around the nakedness of the Cæsars' palace, as if to screen it from the too curious eye of the visitor. Rome, what a history is thine! One other tragedy, terrible as befits the drama it closes, and the curtain will drop in solemn, and, it may be, eternal silence.
The Rhone--Plains of Dauphiny--Mont Blanc and the "Reds"--Landscape by Night--Democratic Club in the _Diligence_--Approach the Alps--Festooned Vines--Begin the Ascent--Chamberry--Uses of War--An Alpine Valley--Sudden Alternations of Beauty and Grandeur--Travellers--Evening--Grandeur of Sunset--Supper at Lanslebourg--Cross the Summit at Midnight--Morning--Sunrise among the Alps--Descent--Italy.
It was wearing late on an evening of early October 1851 when I crossed the Rhone on my way to the Alps. It had rained heavily during the day, and sombre clouds still rested on the towers of Lyons behind me. The river was in flood, and the lamps on the bridge threw a troubled gleam upon the impetuous current as it rolled underneath. It was impossible not to recollect that this was the stream on the banks of which Irenæus, the disciple of Polycarp, himself the disciple of John, had, at almost the identical spot where I crossed it, laboured and prayed, and into the floods of which had been flung the ashes of the first martyrs of Gaul. These murky skies formed no very auspicious commencement of my journey; but I cherished the hope that to-morrow would bring fair weather, and with fair weather would come the green valleys and gleaming tops of the Alps, and, the day after, the sunny plains of Italy. This fair vision beckoned me on through the deep road and the scudding shower.
