“Capricious Heart! thou art now forsooth in Italy—why singest thou not like the lark? Perhaps the old German Sorrows, the little serpents, that hid themselves deep within thee have come with us into Italy, and are making merry now, and their common jubilee awakens in my breast that picturesque sorrow, which so strangely stings and dances and whistles? And why should not the old sorrows make merry for once? Here in Italy it is indeed so beautiful, suffering itself is here so beautiful,—in these ruinous marble palaces sighs sound far more romantically, than in our neat brick houses,—beneath yon laurel trees one can weep far more voluptuously, than under our surly, jagged pines,—and gaze with looks of far sweeter longing at the ideal cloud-landscapes of celestial Italy, than at the ash-gray, German work-day heaven, where the very clouds wear the looks of decent burghers, and yawn so tediously down upon us! Stay then in my heart, ye sorrows! Nowhere will you find a better lodging. You are dear and precious to me; and no man knows better how to father and cherish you, than I; and I confess to you, you give me pleasure. And after all, what is pleasure? Pleasure is nothing else than a highly agreeable Pain.” I believe that the music, which, without my taking note of it, sounded before the _Botega_, and had already drawn round itself a circle of spectators, had melo-dramatically accompanied this monologue. It was a strange trio, consisting of two men, and a young girl, who played the harp. One of the men, warmly clad in a white shaggy coat, was a robust fellow, with a dark-red bandit-face, that gleamed from his black hair and beard, like a portentous comet; and between his legs he held a monstrous bass-viol, upon which he sawed as furiously, as if he had thrown down a poor traveller in the Abruzzi, and was in haste to fiddle his windpipe in two. The other was a tall, meagre graybeard, whose mouldering bones shook in their thread-bare, black garments, and whose snow-white hair formed a lamentable contrast with his _buffo_ song and his foolish capers. It is sad enough, when an old man must barter for bread the respect we owe to his years, and give himself up to buffoonery; but more melancholy still, when he does this before or with his own child! For that girl was the daughter of the old _Buffo_, and accompanied with the harp the lowest jests of her gray-headed father; or, laying her harp aside sang with him a comic duet, in which he represented an amorous old dotard and she the young coquettish _inamorata_. Moreover the girl seemed hardly to have passed the threshold of childhood; as if the child, before it had grown to maidenhood, had been made a woman, and not an honest woman. Hence that pallid, faded look, and the expression of nervous discontent in her beautiful face, whose proudly rounded features as it were disdained all show of compassion;—hence the secret sorrowfulness of the eyes, that