shapes upon the ground; how rich and beautiful they are! And every
now and then, a long, long line of trees, will be all bound and
garlanded together: as if they had taken hold of one another, and
were coming dancing down the field!

Parma has cheerful, stirring streets, for an Italian town; and
consequently is not so characteristic as many places of less note.
Always excepting the retired Piazza, where the Cathedral,
Baptistery, and Campanile--ancient buildings, of a sombre brown,
embellished with innumerable grotesque monsters and dreamy-looking
creatures carved in marble and red stone--are clustered in a noble
and magnificent repose. Their silent presence was only invaded,
when I saw them, by the twittering of the many birds that were
flying in and out of the crevices in the stones and little nooks in
the architecture, where they had made their nests. They were busy,
rising from the cold shade of Temples made with hands, into the
sunny air of Heaven. Not so the worshippers within, who were
listening to the same drowsy chaunt, or kneeling before the same
kinds of images and tapers, or whispering, with their heads bowed
down, in the selfsame dark confessionals, as I had left in Genoa
and everywhere else.

The decayed and mutilated paintings with which this church is
covered, have, to my thinking, a remarkably mournful and depressing
influence. It is miserable to see great works of art--something of
the Souls of Painters--perishing and fading away, like human forms.
This cathedral is odorous with the rotting of Correggio's frescoes
in the Cupola. Heaven knows how beautiful they may have been at
one time. Connoisseurs fall into raptures with them now; but such
a labyrinth of arms and legs: such heaps of foreshortened limbs,