These he gives
himself indoors; and who prizes, with any self-respect, the things
carefully provided by self-love? But when that _farouche_ Nature, who
has never spoken to him, and to whom he has never had the opportunity of
hinting his wishes or his tastes--when she reveals the suggestions of his
form and the desire of his eyes, and amongst her numberless purposes lets
him surprise in her the purpose to accord with him, and lets him suspect
further harmonies which he has not yet learnt to understand--then man
becomes conscious of having received a token from her lowliness, and a
favour from her loveliness, compared with which the care wherewith his
tailor himself has fitted him might leave his gratitude cool.
BY THE RAILWAY SIDE
My train drew near to the Via Reggio platform on a day between two of the
harvests of a hot September; the sea was burning blue, and there were a
sombreness and a gravity in the very excesses of the sun as his fires
brooded deeply over the serried, hardy, shabby, seaside ilex-woods. I
had come out of Tuscany and was on my way to the Genovesato: the steep
country with its profiles, bay by bay, of successive mountains grey with
olive-trees, between the flashes of the Mediterranean and the sky; the
country through the which there sounds the twanging Genoese language, a
thin Italian mingled with a little Arabic, more Portuguese, and much
French.
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