rapid flame, and a change beneath so swift, such anger on the sea, such
an indescribable and awful gleaming hue, not purple, nor green, nor red,
but a commingling of all these--a revelation of the wrath of colour! The
waves were wild with the fallen tempest; quick and heavy the surf came
thundering on the sands; the light went out as if it were extinguished,
and the dark rain came down; and I said, "'Tis one of Virgil's storms."
Such a one you will find also in Theocritus, where he hymns the children
of Leda, succourers of the ships that, "defying the stars that set and
rise in heaven, have encountered the perilous breath of storms. The
winds raise huge billows about their stern, yea, or from the prow, or
even as each wind wills, and cast them into the hold of the ship, and
shatter both bulwarks, while with the sail limits nil the gear confused
and broken, and the wide sea rings, being lashed by the gusts and by
showers of iron hail."

I must leave these older memories, to tell, so far as it is possible in
words, of that land of the idyl which of all enchanted retreats of the
imagination is the hardest for him without the secret to enter. Yet here
I find it all about me in the places where the poets first unveiled it.
Once before I had a sight of it, as all over Italy it glimpses at times
from the hills and the campagna. Descending under the high peak of
Capri, I heard a flute, and turned and saw on the neighbouring slopes
the shepherd-boy leading his flock, the music at his lips. Then the
centuries rolled together like a scroll, and I heard the world's morning
notes. That was a single moment; but here, day-long is the idyl world. I
read the old verses over, and in my walks the song keeps breaking in.
The idyls are full of streams and fountains, just such as I meet with
wherever I turn, and the water counts in the landscape as in the poems.
It is always tumbling over rocks in cascades, brawling with rounded
forms among the stones of the shallow brooks, bubbling in fountains, or