It was just the season for gathering and pressing the grape, and the romantic vineyards were full of the happy peasants, of all ages, mounting the ladders adventurously for the tall clusters, heaping the baskets and carts, driving in the stately gray oxen with their loads, and talking and singing as merrily as if it were Arcadia. Oh how beautiful these scenes are in Italy. The people are picturesque, the land is like the poetry of nature, the habits are all as they were described centuries ago, and as the still living pictures of the glorious old masters represent them. The most every-day traveller smiles and wonders, as he lets down his carriage windows to look at the vintage. * * * * * We have been three or four days in Verona, visiting Juliet's tomb, and riding through the lovely environs. The opera here is excellent, and we went last night to see "Romeo and Juliet" performed in the city renowned by their story. The _prima donna_ was one of those syrens found often in Italy--a young singer of great promise, with that daring brilliancy which practice and maturer science discipline, to my taste, too severely. It was like the wild, ungovernable trill of a bird, and my ear is not so nice yet, that I even would not rather feel a roughness in the harmony than lose it. Malibran delighted me more in America than in Paris. The opera was over at twelve, and, as we emerged from the crowded lobby, the moon full, and as clear and soft as the eye of a child, burst through the arches of the portico. The theatre is opposite the celebrated Roman amphitheatre, and the wish to visit it by moonlight was expressed spontaneously by the whole party. The _custode_ was roused, and we entered the vast arena and stood in the midst, with the gigantic ranges of stone seats towering up in a receding circle, as if to the very sky, and the lofty arches and echoing dens lying black and silent in the dead shadows of the moon. A hundred thousand people could sit here; and it was in these arenas, scattered through the Roman provinces, that the bloody gladiator fights, and the massacre of Christians, and every scene of horror, amused the subjects of the mighty mistress of the world. You would never believe it, if you could have seen how peacefully the moonlight now sleeps on the moss-gathering walls, and with what untrimmed grace the vines and flowers creep and blossom on the rocky crevices of the windows.