twenty miles, I begin to look out for the south, pre-
pared as I am to find the careless grace of those lati-
tudes even in things of which it may, be said that
they may be south of something, but are not southern.
To go from Boston to New York (in this state of
mind) is almost as soft a sensation as descending the
Italian side, of the Alps; and to go from New York to
Philadelphia is to enter a zone of tropical luxuriance
and warmth. Given this absurd disposition, I could
not fail to flatter myself, on reaching La Rochelle,
that I was already in the Midi, and to perceive in
everything, in the language of the country, the _ca-
ractere meridional._ Really, a great many things had
a hint of it. For that matter, it seems to me that to
arrive in the south at a bound - to wake up there, as
it were - would be a very imperfect pleasure. The
full pleasure is to approach by stages and gradations;
to observe the successive shades of difference by
which it ceases to be the north. These shades are
exceedingly fine, but your true south-lover has an eye
for them all. If he perceive them at New York and
Philadelphia, - we imagine him boldly as liberated
from Boston, - how could he fail to perceive them at
La Rochelle? The streets of this dear little city are
lined with arcades, - good, big, straddling arcades of
stone, such as befit a land of hot summers, and which
recalled to me, not to go further, the dusky portions
of Bayonne. It contains, moreover, a great wide
_place d'armes_, which looked for all the world like the
piazza of some dead Italian town, empty, sunny,