He had planned spending a portion of his time in Spain, and took lessons in Spanish in Dresden, but finally abandoned the notion. His host and hostess, with whom he talked, assured him that he made astonishing progress in German. “What a language it is to be sure!” he wrote; “with nominatives sending out as many roots as that witch-grass which is the pest of all child-gardens, and sentences in which one sets sail like an admiral with sealed orders, not knowing, where the devil he is going to till he is in mid-ocean!” To his friend Stillman he wrote, as the winter wore away: “To say all in one word, I have been passing a very wretched winter. I have been out of health and out of spirits, gnawed a great part of the time by an insatiable homesickness, and deprived of my usual means of ridding myself of bad thoughts by putting them into verse, for I have always felt that I was here for the specific end of learning German, and not of pleasing myself.” Fifteen years later, looking back, he wrote: “I once spent a winter in Dresden, a southern climate compared with England, and really almost lost my respect for the sun when I saw him groping among the chimney-pots opposite my windows as he described his impoverished arc in the sky.”[104] As spring drew on he was possessed with a longing for Italy, especially for the near friends who were there, his sister Mary who had left Dresden for Rome, the Storys, the Nortons, and others. He turned his face thitherward the first of March, meaning to be absent for two or three weeks only, but he was not back in Dresden till the beginning of June. “My journey in Italy,” he wrote to his father on his return, “was of much benefit to me. I spent a fortnight with Mary in Rome, went with her to Naples and spent another fortnight with her there. At Naples we parted. I went to Sicily and made the tour of the island, hoping to find Mary still in Naples when I returned. But Sicily required much more time than I had expected, and when I came back I found Mary gone back to Rome. I could not follow her thither, but took the steamer to Genoa, and so over the Alps back to Germany. I found Sicily very interesting in scenery and associations, and very saddening in its political aspect. I believe it is the worst governed country in Europe. With every advantage of climate and soil, it is miserably poor,--there are no roads, and vexatious restrictions repress trade in every direction. The people struck me as looking more depressed than any I have seen.”