His letters of that period are one continuous picture, glowing with his impressions of the things which they describe. The same words will repeat themselves as the same subject presents itself to his pen; but the impulse to iteration scarcely ever affects us as mechanical. It seems always a fresh response to some new stimulus to thought or feeling, which he has received. These reach him from every side. It is not only the Asolo of this peaceful later time which has opened before him, but the Asolo of 'Pippa Passes' and 'Sordello'; that which first stamped itself on his imagination in the echoes of the Court life of Queen Catharine,* and of the barbaric wars of the Eccelini. Some of his letters dwell especially on these early historical associations: on the strange sense of reopening the ancient chronicle which he had so deeply studied fifty years before. The very phraseology of the old Italian text, which I am certain he had never glanced at from that distant time, is audible in an account of the massacre of San Zenone, the scene of which he has been visiting. To the same correspondent he says that his two hours' drive to Asolo 'seemed to be a dream;' and again, after describing, or, as he thinks, only trying to describe some beautiful feature of the place, 'but it is indescribable!' * Catharine Cornaro, the dethroned queen of Cyprus. A letter addressed to Mrs. FitzGerald, October 8, 1889, is in part a fitting sequel to that which he had written to her from the same spot, eleven years before. '. . . Fortunately there is little changed here: my old Albergo,--ruinous with earthquake--is down and done with--but few novelties are observable--except the regrettable one that the silk industry has been transported elsewhere--to Cornuda and other places nearer the main railway. No more Pippas--at least of the silk-winding sort! 'But the pretty type is far from extinct. 'Autumn is beginning to paint the foliage, but thin it as well; and the sea of fertility all round our height, which a month ago showed pomegranates and figs and chestnuts,--walnuts and apples all rioting together in full glory,--all this is daily disappearing. I say nothing of the olive and the vine. I find the Turret rather the worse for careful weeding--the hawks which used to build there have been "shot for food"--and the echo is sadly curtailed of its replies; still, things are the same in the main. Shall I ever see them again, when--as I suppose--we leave for Venice in a fortnight? . . .' In the midst of this imaginative delight he carried into his walks the old keen habits of observation. He would peer into the hedges for what living things were to be found there. He would whistle softly to the lizards basking on the low walls which border the roads, to try his old power of attracting them. On the 15th of October he wrote to Mrs. Skirrow, after some preliminary description: