Charles Dudley Warner

“ There are beautiful girls in Sorrento, with a beauty more than skin deep, a glowing, hidden fire, a ripeness like that of the grape and the peach which grows in the soft air and the sun. And they wither, like grapes that hang upon the stem. I have never seen a handsome, scarcely a decent-looking, old woman here. They are lank and dry, and their bones are covered with parchment. One of these brown- cheeked girls, with large, longing eyes, gives the stranger a start, now and then, when he meets her in a narrow way with a basket of oranges on her head. ”

“ Finally, as is usual in life, a, compromise prevails. We decide to continue for half an hour longer and see what the weather is. No sooner have we set forward over the brow of a hill than it grows lighter on the sea horizon in the southwest, the ruins on the peak become visible, Capri is in full sunlight. The clouds lift more and more, and still hanging overhead, but with no more rain, are like curtains gradually drawn up, opening to us a glorious vista of sunshine and promise, an illumined, sparkling, illimitable sea, and a bright foreground of slopes and picturesque rocks. ”

“ The scenery is constantly grander as we ascend. The day is not wholly clear; but high on our right are the vast snow-fields of the Weishorn, and out of the very clouds near it seems to pour the Bies Glacier. In front are the splendid Briethorn, with its white, round summit; the black Riffelhorn; the sharp peak of the little Matterhorn; and at last the giant Matterhorn itself rising before us, the most finished and impressive single mountain in Switzerland. Not so high as Mont Blanc by a thousand feet, it appears immense in its isolated position and its slender aspiration. ”

“ The fountains were frozen, icicles hung from the locks of the marble statues in the Chiaia. And yet the oranges glowed like gold among their green leaves; the roses, the heliotrope, the geraniums, bloomed in all the gardens. It is the most contradictory climate. We lunched one day, sitting in our open carriage in a lemon grove, and near at hand the Lucrine Lake was half frozen over. We feasted our eyes on the brilliant light and color on the sea, and the lovely outlined mountains round the shore, and waited for a change of wind. ”

“ Everything here in and about Paris was in the green and bloom of spring, and seemed to me very lovely; but my first glance at an English landscape made it all seem pale and flat. We went up from New Haven to London in the morning, and feasted our eyes all the way. The French foliage is thin, spindling, sparse; the grass is thin and light in color—in contrast. The English trees are massive, solid in substance and color; the grass is thick, and green as emerald; the turf is like the heaviest Wilton carpet. ”

“ As the twilight comes on, the shutters of the shop windows are put up. It is time to go to the opera, for the curtain rises at half-past six, or to the beer-gardens, where delicious music marks, but does not interrupt, the flow of excellent beer.
Or you may if you choose, and I advise you to do it, walk at the same hour in the English Garden, which is but a step from the arcades of the Hof Garden,—but a step to the entrance, whence you may wander for miles and miles in the most enchanting scenery. Art has not been allowed here to spoil nature. ”

“ Antwerp takes hold of you, both by its present and its past, very strongly. It is still the home of wealth. It has stately buildings, splendid galleries of pictures, and a spire of stone which charms more than a picture, and fascinates the eye as music does the ear. It still keeps its strong fortifications drawn around it, to which the broad and deep Scheldt is like a string to a bow, mindful of the unstable state of Europe. While Berlin is only a vast camp of soldiers, every less city must daily beat its drums, and call its muster-roll. ”

“ It offers a rare opportunity to the stranger to study the costumes of the peasants, and to see how they amuse themselves. One can judge a good deal of the progress of a people by the sort of amusements that satisfy them. I am not about to draw any philosophical inferences,—I am a mere looker-on in Munich; but I have never anywhere else seen puppet-shows afford so much delight, nor have I ever seen anybody get more satisfaction out of a sausage and a mug of beer, with the tum-tum of a band near, by, than a Bavarian peasant. ”

“ Warmer weather had come to make the bright sunshine no longer a mockery. For some days I had been getting the gauge of the mountain. With its white plume it is a constant quantity in the landscape: one sees it from every point of view; and we had been scarcely anywhere that volcanic remains, or signs of such action,—a thin crust shaking under our feet, as at Solfatara, where blasts of sulphurous steam drove in our faces,—did not remind us that the whole ground is uncertain, and undermined by the subterranean fires that have Vesuvius for a chimney. ”

“ Shall we take a boat and sail over there, and so destroy forever another island of the imagination? The bane of travel is the destruction of illusions.
We like to talk about Capri, and to talk of going there. The Sorrento people have no end of gossip about the wild island; and, simple and primitive as they are, Capri is still more out of the world. I do not know what enchantment there is on the island; but— whoever sets foot there, they say, goes insane or dies a drunkard. I fancy the reason of this is found in the fact that the Capri girls are raving beauties. ”

“ You know, in imagination at least, how it winds among craggy hills of splendid form, turning so abruptly as to leave you often shut in with no visible outlet from the wall of rock and forest; how the castles, some in ruins so as to be as unsightly as any old pile of rubbish, others with feudal towers and battlements, still perfect, hang on the crags, or stand sharp against the sky, or nestle by the stream or on some lonely island. You know that the Rhine has been to Germans what the Nile was to the Egyptians,—a delight, and the theme of song and story. ”

“ The tall, whitey-yellow houses fronting the water, six, seven, eight stories high, are full as beehives; people are at all the open windows; garments hang from the balconies and from poles thrust out; up every narrow, gloomy, ascending street are crowds of struggling human shapes; and you see how like herrings in a box are packed the over half a million people of Naples. In front of the houses are the markets in the open air,—fish, vegetables, carts of oranges; in the sun sit women spinning from distaffs or weaving fishing-nets ”

“ It was the middle of January, at eleven o'clock at night, that we left Munich, on a mixed railway train, choosing that time, and the slowest of slow trains, that we might make the famous Brenner Pass by daylight. It was no easy matter, at last, to pull up from the dear old city in which we had become so firmly planted, and to leave the German friends who made the place like home to us. One gets to love Germany and the Germans as he does no other country and people in Europe. ”

“ Just at the right is a little beach, with a few old houses, and a mimic stir of life, a little curve in the cliff, the mouth of the gorge, where the waves come in with a lazy swash. Some fishing-boats ride there; and the shallow water, as I look down this sunny morning, is thickly strewn with floating peels of oranges and lemons, as if some one was brewing a gigantic bowl of punch. And there is an uncommon stir of life; for a schooner is shipping a cargo of oranges, and the entire population is in a clamor. Donkeys are coming down the winding way, with a heavy basket on either flank ”