Let us come back to happier themes! Many and enchanting books have been written about Italian cities and Italian country, but none about our Italian seas. People who look at the map may think this a limited subject; there is the Mediterranean and there is the Adriatic, what more can be said? _Amici miei_, to a sea-lover there are as many seas as ports; the dear salt water and the sunrise and the sunset know it, and have a separate caress for each. They make—or fit into—the thousand moods of mind that colour a pilgrim’s life, and the pictures of them in my gallery of remembrance are clearer than any of my landscapes and more helpful—because they never hurt. The landscapes, all except the loveliest ones where the spirit poised for one longing instant—like a bird on the topmast of a ship and, like the bird, was given no more than time to take breath and wing away again—are mostly inhabited. Here your friend quarrelled with you; there your true love kissed you and betrayed; further on your child was sick and every aspect of the most beautiful scenery in the world brings back only the poignant watches when a flush of colour in the little face sent you crazy with joy and something wrong again with the little pulse froze your heart with fear. On land we cannot get away from ourselves and others; earth is greedily dominant, monstrously exacting. But the sea repudiates all individual ties. You must be empty of yourself or it will not speak to you at all. Its laws are not our laws, and the first thing it does, if you are docile to its magic, is to wash out your personality, and, oh, how glad some of us are—or would be—if we only could utterly forget that irritant, insistent factor of existence! In our long wanderings most paths, as we look back on them, show the little red stains where we cut our feet; we have left shreds of our soul’s garments on many a thorn by the way; but for me, and I fancy for some of you others, the breath and the sound and the touch of the sea has been nothing but coolness and healing, a sunbath for life’s chillinesses, a fountain of strength in its languors. I think I should know now the right point to make for, according to the distemper that might be assailing me; and, though twenty years ago I sought and loved the onslaught of the Atlantic and the Valhalla of the March tides in the Channel, to-day I would fare no further than my home seas, those that lap and sing on the Italian shores.