IN THE LIFE OF THE PAINTER ANGELICA KAUFFMANN. BY MISS H. B. MACDONALD. PART I. There is perhaps no scenery in the world so ravishingly beautiful as that offered by those vast plains of northern Italy situated at the base of the Rhætian Alps. A champaign elaborately tilled, and laid out into those regular divisions of meadow, corn-field, and vineyard, which make so much of the beauty of cultivated landscape; groves and belts of trees so disposed as to be productive of the highest effect; classic looking villas, villages and towns, with their surrounding orchards and pleasure-grounds; bright rivers winding their way through all this beauty till they lose themselves in those magic lakes, which, with their green banks kissed by the waters, and bordered on every winding promontory and inlet by belts of overshadowing trees, reflect the sunset splendors of the Alps, and seem, in every rainbow grotto and crystal palace mirrored in their lucid depths, meet homes for those genii of the waters with which a graceful superstition peoples their enchanted caverns. All these, with the back ground of gigantic mountains, pile on pile, that seem to raise a barrier from earth to heaven between this Paradise and a ruder world beyond, fill us with the idea of wandering amid some remnant of the scenery of the Golden Age, where of old, as the fables tell, the primeval deities used to dwell with a purer humanity, and in a younger and lovelier earth. From a village situated at a considerable elevation on the surface of the slopes into which these smiling plains incline themselves as they approach the mountains, one bright spring evening, a troop of young girls might have been seen issuing, apparently as if broken loose from school, so joyous were their gestures, so wild their mirth, as with the vivacious grace belonging to the children of the South they bounded over the grass, some gliding in imitation of the motions of a dance, some skipping, some chasing others with the speed of the wind, till at a call from one, “to the water—to the water!” echoed by a dozen voices, they descended a hollow leading to the bed of the bright Ticino, and in a few moments were plunging and gliding in the stream.