in number, and the _valets de place_, whether they know how to read
and write or not, would be starved to death. Even the learning of
Italy is poetic; and an Italian would rather enjoy a fiction than know
a fact--in which preference I am not ready to pronounce him unwise.
But this characteristic of his embroiders the stranger's progress
throughout the whole land with fanciful improbabilities; so that if
one use his eyes half as much as his wonder, he must see how much
better it would have been to visit, in fancy, scenes that have an
interest so largely imaginary. The utmost he can make out of the most
famous place is, that it is possibly what it is said to be, and
is more probably as near that as any thing local enterprise could
furnish. He visits the very cell in which Tasso was confined, and has
the satisfaction of knowing that it was the charcoal-cellar of the
hospital in which the poet dwelt. And the _genius loci_--where is
that? Away in the American woods, very likely, whispering some dreamy,
credulous youth,--telling him charming fables of its _locus_, and
proposing to itself to abandon him as soon as he sets foot upon its
native ground. You see, though I cared little about Tasso, and nothing
about his prison, I was heavily disappointed in not being able to
believe in it, and felt somehow that I had been awakened from a
cherished dream.


II.

But I have no right to cast the unbroken shadow of my skepticism upon
the reader, and so I tell him a story about Ferrara which I actually
believe. He must know that in Ferrara the streets are marvelous long
and straight. On the corners formed by the crossing of two of the
longest and straightest of these streets stand four palaces, in only