I transferred my wealth, now immense, to England, and, with the pomp
which became the rank and reputation Fortune had bestowed upon me, I
commenced the long land-journey I had chalked out to myself. Although I
had alleged my wish to revisit England as the main reason of my
retirement from Russia, I had also expressed an intention of visiting
Italy previous to my return to England. The physicians, indeed, had
recommended to me that delicious climate as an antidote to the ills my
constitution had sustained in the freezing skies of the north; and in my
own heart I had secretly appointed some more solitary part of the Divine
Land for the scene of my purposed hermitage and seclusion. It is indeed
astonishing how those who have lived much in cold climates yearn for
lands of mellow light and summer luxuriance; and I felt for a southern
sky the same resistless longing which sailors, in the midst of the vast
ocean, have felt for the green fields and various landscape of the
shore.

I traversed, then, the immense tracts of Russia, passed through Hungary,
entered Turkey, which I had wished to visit, where I remained a short
time; and, crossing the Adriatic, hailed, for the first time, the
Ausonian shore. It was the month of May--that month, of whose lustrous
beauty none in a northern clime can dream--that I entered Italy. It may
serve as an instance of the power with which a thought that, however
important, is generally deemed of too abstract and metaphysical a nature
deeply to engross the mind, possessed me then, that I--no cold nor
unenthusiastic votary of the classic Muse--made no pilgrimage to city or
ruin, but, after a brief sojourn at Ravenna, where I dismissed all my
train, set out alone to find the solitary cell for which I now sickened
with a hermit's love.

It was at a small village at the foot of the Apennines that I found the