University of Virginia Library

All is Italian here!—the orange grove,
Through whose cool shade we every morning rove
To pluck its glowing fruit—our villa white
With loggias broad, where far into the night
We sit and breathe the intoxicating air
With orange-blossoms filled, or free from care
In the cool shadow of the morning lie
And dream and watch the lazy boats go by
Laden with fruits for Naples—the soft gales
Swelling and straining in their lateen sails,—
Or, with their canvas, hanging all adroop,
While the oars flash, and rowers rise and stoop.
Look at this broad, flat plain heaped full of trees,
With here and there a villa,—these blue seas
Whispering below the sheer cliffs on the shore,
These ochre mountains bare or olived o'er,
The road that clings to them along the coast,
The arching viaducts, the thick vines tost
From tree to tree, that swing with every breeze,—
What can be more Italian than all these?
The streets, too, through whose narrow, dusty track
We ride in files, each on our donkey's back,
When evening's shadow o'er the high gray walls,
O'ertopped with oranges and olives, falls,
And at each corner 'neath its roof of tiles,
Hung with poor offerings, the Madonna smiles
In her rude shrine so picturesque with dirt.
Is this not Italy? Your nerves are hurt
By that expression—dirt—nay, then I see
You love not nature, art, nor Italy.
Nature abhors what housewives love,—the clean—
And beauty hides when pail and brush come in—
She joys in grime, mould, rot, mud, spots, and stains,—
Whitewash your wall, and see what curious pains
They take to undo all your hands have done;
Ask help of wind, rain, dust, and sun—
Crack it and twist it, plant its clifts with seeds,
Gray, green, and yellow it with moss and weeds,
Dye it with wet leaves, call the spiders in,
Beseech the lizards there to leave their skin,
Strain every nerve to spoil the work you do;
You do not like it? all the worse for you.

But I forget my theme—just look once more
O'er the blue bay, along whose foam-fringed shore
White Naples glimmers and Resina dreams,—
And 'neath the smoky trail that threatening streams
From bare Vesuvius' cone, through living bloom
Pompeii's ghost peers from its ashy tomb.
Is not this Italy? And that strange song
You hear yon peasant screaming with its long
And drawling minor monotone, has not
That song the very perfume of the spot?
A hard old sailor that Ulysses was,
Or he had never had the heart to pass
These fair Sorrento shores—and rather old
Perhaps, for love, if the plain truth were told.
Faith! if our Menicuccia here should sit
On these high cliffs, and beckon me to it
With her black hair and eyes and sunny smile
Mid grapes and oranges—I'd think a while
Ere I refused. His Sirens, I suppose,
Sang the old song that every girl here knows;
Our Menicuccia sings it now and then,
A Siren fair as his—“Ti voglio ben!”

There comes Antonio, lazy, sunny-faced,
Brown as a nut and naked to the waist,
With the brass coin that saves his ship from wreck
Stamped with the Virgin, on his sun-burnt neck.
See! what a store of tempting fruit he brings
In his great basket, that he lightly swings
From off his head, and smiles, and offers heaps
Of luscious oranges, and figs, and grapes,
And rusted apricots, and purple plums,
For one carlino—one of his brown thumbs
Uplifted, tells the price—you give him half:
He shrugs, and says, “È poco,” with a laugh.
But see! within this corner where he hides
His red tomatoes with their sabred sides—
Those look like home—but what a difference!
“A revederla,—grazie 'Celenz.”

Stop, dearest, here, and let your fancy roam,
Just for the contrast, to old things at home;
From lazy Italy's poetic shows
To stern New England's puritanic prose.
Remember that gray cottage at the foot
Of the hill's slope, where two great elms had root
Beside the porch, like sentinels to guard
The entrance—and the little fenced-in yard,
With its heaped flower-plots, banked and edged with laths,
Through which were cut those narrow sunken paths,—
Oh! what a difference 'twixt that and this!
Yet there we had an unbought happiness.
There grew the autumn flowers our childhood knew,
Rich tiger-lilies, brilliant cockscombs too,
The pale pink clusters of full-flowering flox,
The antique lamps of seedy hollyhocks,
Nasturtiums shedding forth their orange glow
O'er the gray palings, clustering thick below
The freaked sweet-williams, dahlias stiff and bold,
And the rank beauty of the marigold.

Our chamber window, where we used to sit
Long mornings (Ah! how I remember it,)
Looked o'er a slope of green unto a grove,
('Twas there I dared to speak to you of love,)
And 'twixt it and the house a brown slow brook
Slipped through the long rank grass, and singing took
The golden leaves, two willows, old and lopped,
Into its shallow bed as tribute dropped.
And close beneath, our kitchen garden spread,
With a wild grape-vine trained along the shed,
That o'er the whitewashed boards its shadow swung,
And bore a fruit that puckered every tongue.
There oft we saw our hostess, formal, prim,
With parchment forehead, lips compressed and grim,
Stiff as a dahlia, walk beside the fence,
And from the shrub-trees pluck a furry quince;
Or in the hot noon's silence many a day
We watched the cat pick daintily her way
Among the beds, and leap the viny coil
Where golden pumpkins dozed upon the soil.

I seem again to see, while talking thus,
The smoke-like beds of tall asparagus,
The rumpled cabbage squat upon the ground,
The bean-vines from their high poles groping round,
The maize heads rusting in the autumn sun
And dropping many a stiff green gonfalon,
And those sad sunflowers, shorn of summer rays,
Bending to earth their great black seedy face.
Here in this land of orange, olive, vine,
How strange these memories of mine and thine;
Yet dear, for all its prose, New England seems
Hazed with poetic hues by childhood's dreams.

Do you remember too, how many a day
On the brown needles of the pines we lay,
And o'er us heard the murmur of the breeze
Sift through them, like the swell of far-off seas,
While some red maple through the vistas blazed,
And velvet cones the scarlet sumac raised?
Then, while you wove the barberry's coral spray
Round your straw hat, or in your rustic way
Hung at each ear a cluster, far more fair
Than the gold ear-rings they were strung to there,
I lay and read some poem grand and strong
Of Browning's—or with Tennyson's rich song
Revelled awhile, and in your glowing face
Saw the quick answer to its power or grace.
And oft the chickadee's quick voice we heard,
Or the sharp mewing of the shrill cat-bird,
Or the high call from out the upper air
Of some black crow inquiring of us there,
While soft with haze the autumn day passed by,
Till sunset set on fire the western sky.

But see! Domenico the donkey brings,
Now for our ride!—No more New England things—
There come our good friends Nero and his wife,
And there 's our Toffel with them on my life.