clime! We were in haste to reach Milan, and there being nothing to detain us at Como, we secured the only two remaining seats in the diligence, and passed on. A tree fell directly across the road in one part of our way, and falling between the horses and the carriage, stopped us completely, so that the laborers were obliged to cut through the tree on both sides of the road, before we could be extricated. Besides this, we were delayed by an angry altercation between our conductor and an English coachman, with whom he got into a squabble, raising the whole populace, together with the officers of justice, in a little village on the road. Such a clatter and storm of fierce words and furious gesticulations would have been rare to meet anywhere else out of Bedlam; but after all, we arrived safe, though late, the same evening at Milan.

How heavenly the enchantment which, from the Italian side, distance lends to the mountains of Switzerland! Every step we departed from them seemed to render the view more beautiful. They began to appear like another world floating in mid-heaven; it was as if we were coasting a neighboring planet, battlemented and turreted with crags of diamond, and divided from us by fields of cerulean space. Meantime, the open country, through which we are travelling, is full of luxuriance. One can never forget the transcendent glory of the horizon, with the evening sun against it. It is the picture drawn by Milton, but reduplicated in broad space in the heavens.

"Meanwhile in utmost longitude, where heaven
With earth and ocean meets, the setting sun

Slowly descended; and with right aspect

Against the eastern gate of Paradise

Levelled his evening rays: it was a rock
Of alabaster, piled up to the clouds,
Conspicuous far.”

The day shuts upon such scenery, just as the thickening thoroughfares, the passing and repassing peasantry, with wains and donkey-wagons, and the glimmering of suburban lights, tell you that you are nearing a great city. At length you drive under its proud arches, and in the strange romance that surrounds you,

on first being set down at dusk among new ranges of buildings and faces, as in the transitions of a dream, you wait for the examination of your passports. That done, you drive on again through streets, now deserted and murky, and now gay and crowded, into the well lighted centres of evening life and activity; perhaps you are whirled past the blaze of the great theatre. What creature in all the crowd cares for you, or knows of your existence? You are as a water-drop falling into a great river. But you need not fear; you are to be carefully sponged up and preserved separate. There is now a watch over you, on earth as well as in heaven.

But if you find as much difficulty in getting lodgings as we did, you will begin to wish you had stayed away from Italy. It was past midnight before we found any other shelter than the ante-room of the post-house, for the city was literally crammed with strangers; but we did at length, by dint of runners, discover a fine range of rooms over a common pot-house, where we established ourselves very pleasantly. A fine range of rooms over a common pot-house, and established pleasantly! What! and decently also? Yes, and far more respectably and comfortably, than just at that time we could have been at any of the crowded hotels at which we applied in vain for entrance. The juxta-position of the extremes of refinement and of low life is no uncommon thing in these countries. You may have luxury and quiet, unsuspected and unenvied, far enough away from palaces. It was amusing to us to see the goings on of life in the tavern below our suite of apartments. The common people seemed to enjoy themselves as freely and heartily, as if they were eating and drinking in an atmosphere of genuine liberty. But no man can forget that the quiet here is maintained by Austrian bayonets.

Milan is one of the first cities in Italy, though there is not so much of curious and beautiful sight-seeing as in Florence or Naples, nor so fine a climate, neither a volcano with Pompeii at its feet, nor a splendid bay in the Mediterranean. It is more healthful than many places in the kingdom. One might find many things of the deepest interest to say of its legendary history, but we cannot dwell upon this, nor upon the statistical province of the guide books. I had visited Milan some years before, but had

entered it in the rain, stayed in it through the rain, and passed from it in a rain-storm; circumstances not the most favorable for seeing a fine city. Almost the only thing I remembered was its white glittering Cathedral, and its college of fine old paintings, the College of Brera.

Then there is the dim shadowy spectre of Leonardo da Vinci's great painting of the Last Supper. No man would visit it, if it were not for what it had been; it is like visiting the house in which Shakspeare lived, or the room in which Milton died; the occupant is gone. In looking at the picture, you find yourself gazing not so much at what is there, but endeavoring to see what is not there. It is as if one led you to a dim room filled with apparitions, some ante-chamber to the land of shades, and you should vainly strain your sight for some known image, but you only see

"the shadowy forms

That seem things dead, and dead again."

Sixteen years did the Artist labor upon this painting with slow and patient toil, the fruit of intense contemplation. He was one of the most universal and commanding geniuses of Italy, and doubtless the painting was in all respects the most perfect the world ever saw. It would have matched the Transfiguration by Raphael, had it been painted on canvas, in undecaying colors. But one half century and a little more, sufficed, by various accidents and exposure, for its almost complete destruction; and by so many hands has it been retouched, mended and painted anew, that it would probably be impossible for the most consummate judge of art to find in it a trace of the pencil of the original

author.

CHAPTER XLIV.

The Cathedral of Milan.-The Gospel in Italy.

You have Nature in Switzerland and Art in Italy. The transition is great from cloud and snow-capped mountains and thundering waterfalls, to the ribbed chapels and aisles of cathedrals, with saints and angels sculptured upon slender spires, and the organ solemnly pealing. The Duomo of Milan is the first full introduction for the stranger from the North into the Ecclesiastical splendors of a past artistic world. From great mountains to some gigantic supernatural structure, like the colossal Temple of Karnak in Thebes, would be a change more fitting to the feelings; but coming from the cities or the plains of Lombardy, the sight of the architectural pile at Milan is truly imposing and majestic.

The Cathedral is claimed by the Milanese as the eighth wonder of the world. It rises in the very heart of the city, a magnificent broad pile of white marble, sculptured and entablatured on the face and sides with groups of statuary, and pinnacled at every angle and corner with lofty and delicate spires, which bear upon their summits each a majestic statue of white marble. One hundred and sixteen of these spires are visible at once, and the sculptured forms springing from their slender extremities look as if suspended in the air by magic. The great tower of the Cathedral is an almost interminable labyrinth of marble statuary and tracery at so great height, and so light and delicate, that it seems as if the first strong wind would prostrate the whole, or scatter its rocky lace-work like leaves in autumn.

If you can conceive of a river of liquid white marble shot into the air to the height of five hundred feet, and then suddenly petrified while falling, you will come to some approximation of the beauty and rareness of this magnificent vision. It seems like a petrified oriental dream, and if it had stood in Venice, opposite

St. Mark's Church and the Doge's Palace, it would have been more in keeping. There is a broad, ample, open space in front of it, so that you command a full satisfactory view from a sufficient distance, uninterrupted. The first time I saw it, I came upon it suddenly and unexpectedly, on turning a corner in the street, as if it had sprung from the earth before me like an exhalation, and it instantly reminded me, with its multitudinous white spires and images, of the very imaginative reference to it by Wordsworth in his poem on an eclipse of the Sun. This is one of the most exquisitely beautiful compositions in all the volumes of this great Poet, and the measure in which it is written is most melodious and perfect.

But Fancy, with the speed of fire,
Hath fled to Milan's loftiest spire,
And there alights, mid that aerial host
Of figures human and divine,
White as the snows of Appenine
Indurated by frost.

Awe-stricken she beholds the array

That guards the Temple night and day;

Angels she sees, that might from heaven have flown;
And Virgin Saints, who not in vain

Have striven by purity to gain

The beatific crown.

Far-stretching files, concentric rings,
Each narrowing above each ;--the wings,
The uplifted palms, the silent marble lips,
The starry zone of sovereign height,

All steeped in this portentous light,
All suffering dim eclipse.

Look now abroad at evening from this starry zone, over the horizon around you. The sun is sinking towards the Mediterranean, and the long snowy ranges of the Alps on one side, and the Appenines on the other, are burning with almost crimson radiance. The City and the vast luxuriant plains lie beneath you. Can the human imagination conceive a sight more glorious, than those distant flashing mountains, ascending pile after pile, chain behind chain, whiter and more brilliant into the heavens? How