THE JOURNEY INTO ITALY. What I catch is at present only sketch-ways, as it were; but I prepare myself betimes for the Italian journey. GOETHE'S Faust. On the afternoon of the fifteenth of December, in the year of grace one thousand eight hundred and twenty-seven, I left Marseilles for Genoa, taking the sea-shore road through Toulon, Draguignan, and Nice. This journey is written in my memory with a sunbeam. We were a company whom chance had thrown together,—different in ages, humours, and pursuits,—and yet so merrily the days went by, in sunshine, wind, or rain, that methinks some lucky star must have ruled the hour that brought us five so auspiciously together. But where are now that merry company? One sleeps in his youthful grave; two sit in their fatherland, and "coin their brain for their daily bread;" and the others—where are they? If still among the living, I beg them to remember in their prayers the humble historian of their journey from Marseilles to Genoa. At Toulon we took a private carriage, in order to pursue our journey more leisurely and more at ease. I well remember the strange, outlandish vehicle, and our vetturino Joseph, with his blouse, his short-stemmed pipe, his limping gait, his comical phiz, and the lowland dialect his mother taught him at Avignon. Every scene and incident of the journey is now before me as if written in a book. The sunny landscapes of the Var, the peasant girls, with their broad-brimmed hats of straw,— the inn at Draguignan, with its painting of a lady on horseback, underwritten in French and English, "Une jeune dame à la promenade-a young ladi taking a walk," the mouldering arches of the Roman aqueducts at Frejus, standing in the dim twilight of morning like shadowy apparitions of the past, the wooden bridge across the Var,the glorious amphitheatre of hills, that half-encircle Nice, the midnight scene at the village inn of Monaco, the magnificent scenery of the Col de Tende, with its mountain-road, overhanging the sea at a dizzy height, and its long dark passages cut through the solid rock, the tumbling mountain torrent, and the fortress of Saorgio, perched on a jutting spur of the Alps; these, and a thousand varied scenes and landscapes of this journey, rise before me as if still visible to the eye of sense, and not of memory only. And yet I will not venture upon a minute description of them. I have not colours bright enough for such landscapes; and besides, even the most determined lovers of the picturesque grow weary of long descriptions; though, as the French guide-book says of these scenes, "Tout cela fait sans doute un spectacle admirable." On the tenth day of our journey we reached Genoa, the city of palaces-the superb city. The writer of an old book, called "Time's Storehouse," thus poetically describes its situation. "This cittie is most proudly built upon the seacoast and the downefall of the Appenines, at the foot of a mountaine; even as if she were descended downe the mount, and come to repose herselfe uppon a plaine.” It was Christmas eve-a glorious night! I stood at midnight on the wide terrace of our hotel, which overlooks the sea, and gazing on the tiny |