month of April was spent at Venice, and bidding farewell to the
beloved land he would never visit again, Milton passed the Alps to
Geneva.

No Englishman's foreign pilgrimage was complete without touching at
this marvellous capital of the reformed faith, which with almost no
resources had successfully braved the whole might of the Catholic
reaction. The only record of Milton's stay at Geneva is the album of a
Neapolitan refugee, to which Milton contributed his autograph, under
date 10th June, 1639, with the following quotation:--

If virtue feeble were,
Heaven itself would stoop to her.
(From _Comus_).

Caelum non animum muto, dum trans mare curro.
(From _Horace_.)

But it is probable that he was a guest in the house of one of the
leading pastors, Giovanni Diodati, whose nephew Charles, a physician
commencing practice in London, was Milton's bosom friend. Here Milton
first heard of the death, in the previous August, of that friend. It
was a heavy blow to him, for one of the chief pleasures of being at
home again would have been to pour into a sympathetic Italian ear the
story of his adventures. The sadness of the homeward journey from
Geneva is recorded for us in the _Epitaphium Damonis_. This piece is
an elegy to the memory of Charles Diodati. It unfortunately differs
from the elegy on King in being written in Latin, and is thus
inaccessible to uneducated readers. As to such readers the topic of
Milton's Latin poetry is necessarily an ungrateful subject, I