In the steamboat was the first peasant girl I have seen here in Swiss costume; the people speak a bad half-French Italian. This is my last letter from Italy, but believe me the Italian lakes are not the least interesting objects in this country; _anzi_,--I never saw any more beautiful. People tried to persuade me that the gigantic forms of the Swiss Alps that have haunted me from my childhood[17] had been exaggerated by my imagination, and that after all a snowy mountain was not in reality so grand as I thought. I almost dreaded being undeceived, but at first sight of the foreground of the Alps from the Lake of Como, veiled in clouds, with here and there a surface of bright snow, sharp black points rearing their heads, and sinking precipitously into the lake, the hills first scattered over with trees and villages, and covered with moss, and then bleak and desolate, and on every side deep ravines filled with snow,--I felt just as I formerly did, and saw that I had exaggerated nothing.
[17] The whole family had been in Switzerland in the year 1821.
In the Alps all is more free, more sharply defined; more uncivilized, if you will: yet I always feel there both healthier and happier. I have just returned from the gardens of the Palace, which I visited in the midst of the rain. I wished to imitate Albano,[18] and sent for a barber to open a vein: he however misunderstood my purpose, and shaved me instead,--a very pardonable mistake. Gondolas are landing on every part of the island, for to-day is the fête following the great festival of yesterday, in honour of which the P. P. Borromeo sent for singers and musicians from Milan, to sing and play to the islanders. The gardener asked me if I knew what a wind instrument was. I said with a clear conscience that I did; and he replied that I ought to try to imagine the effect of thirty such instruments, and violins and basses, all played at once; but indeed I could not possibly imagine it, for it must be heard to be believed. The sounds (continued he) seemed to come from Heaven, and all this was produced by _philharmony_. What he meant by this term I know not; but the music had evidently made more impression on him, than the best orchestra often does on musical connoisseurs. At this moment some one has just begun to play the organ in the church for Divine service, in the following strain:--