first glimpse of Italy and of the Mediterranean, and plenty of the rough
homely intercourse with men which he loved. He travelled, in a fashion
that suited his purse and his hardy nature, by a merchant vessel from
London to the Adriatic. The food was uneatable, the horrors of dirt and
discomfort portentous; but he bore them cheerfully for the sake of one
advantage,--"the solitariness of the _one_ passenger among all those
rough new creatures, _I_ like it much, and soon get deep into their
friendship."[7] Grim tragedies of the high-seas, too, came within his
ken.[8] Two or three moments of the voyage stand out for us with
peculiar distinctness: the gorgeous sunset off Cadiz bay, when he
watched the fading outlines of Gibraltar and Cape St Vincent,--ghostly
mementos of England,--not as Arnold's weary Titan, but as a Herakles
stretching a hand of help across the seas; the other sunset on the
Mediterranean, when Etna loomed against the flaming sky;[9] and, between
them, that glaring noontide on the African shore, when the "solitary
passenger," weary of shipboard and sea sickness, longed for his good
horse York in the stable at home, and scribbled his ballad of brave
horses, _How they brought the Good News_, in a blank leaf of Bartoli's
_Simboli_. The voyage ended at Trieste; and thence he passed to Venice,
brooded among her ruined palaces over Sordello, and "English Eyebright"
and all the destiny and task of the poet; and so turned homeward,
through the mountains, gathering vivid glimpses as he went of "all my
places and castles,"[10] and laying by a memory, soon to germinate, of
"delicious Asolo," "palpably fire-clothed" in the glory of his young
imagination.

[Footnote 7: _R.B._ to _E.B.B._, i. 505.]

[Footnote 8: Cf. the long letter to Miss Haworth, Orr, _Life_, p. 96.]