It was a strange, gaunt wilderness of stone, this old villa of the Marchioni. It would have held hundreds of serving-men. It had as many chambers as one of the palaces down in Rome; but life is homely and frugal here, and has few graces. The ways of everyday Italian life in these grand old places are like nettles and thistles set in an old majolica vase that has had knights and angels painted on it. You know what I mean, you who know Italy. Do you remember those pictures of Vittario Carpacio and of Gentile? They say that is the life our Italy saw once in her cities and her villas;—that is the life she wants. Sometimes when you are all alone in these vast deserted places the ghosts of all that pageantry pass by you, and they seem fitter than the living people for these courts and halls.

I had been no saint. I had always been ready for jest or dance or intrigue with a pretty woman, and sometimes women far above me had cast their eyes down on the arena as in Spain ladies do in the bull-ring to pick a lover out thence for his strength: but I had never cared. I had loved, laughed, and wandered away with the stroller's happy liberty; but I had never cared. Now all at once the whole world seemed dead; dead, heaven and earth; and only one woman's two eyes left living in the universe; living, and looking into my soul and burning it to ashes. Do you know what I mean? No?—ay, then you know not love.

Sometimes I think love is the darkest mystery of life: mere desire will not explain it, nor will the passions or the affections. You pass years amidst crowds, and know naught of it; then all at once you meet a stranger's eyes, and never are you free. That is love. Who shall say whence it comes? It is a bolt from the gods that descends from heaven and strikes us down into hell. We can do nothing.

In Italy one wants so little; the air and the light, and a little red wine, and the warmth of the wind, and a handful of maize or of grapes, and an old guitar, and a niche to sleep in near a fountain that murmurs and sings to the mosses and marbles—these are enough in Italy.

Petty laws breed great crimes. Few rulers, little or big, remember that.

L'esprit du clocher is derided nowadays. But it may well be doubted whether the age which derides it will give the world anything one-half as tender and true in its stead. It is peace because it is content; and it is a peace which has in it the germ of heroism: menaced, it produces patriotism—the patriotism whose symbol is Tell.

The tyrannies of petty law hurt the authority of the State more with the populace than all the severity of a Draconian code against great offences. Petty laws may annoy but can never harm the rich, for they can always evade them or purchase immunity; but petty laws for the poor are as the horse-fly on the neck and on the eyelids of the horse.

It was in the month of April; outside the walls and on the banks of Tiber, still swollen by the floods of winter, one could see the gold of a million daffodils and the bright crimson and yellow of tulips in the green corn. The scent of flowers and herbs came into the town and filled its dusky and narrow ways; the boatmen had green branches fastened to their masts; in the stillness of evening one heard the song of crickets, and even a mosquito would come and blow his shrill little trumpet, and one was willing to say to him "Welcome!" because on his little horn he blew the glad news, "Summer is here!"