The muscular gymnastics, which modern Italy has imposed upon the world as dancing, are as dissimilar from the real thing as the fiorituri singing is from the old bel canto. The Spaniards make dancing--as all arts should be made--the poetical expression of life and love. Such ardour and seduction, such abandon to the joy of living, such rage and daring, such delicate coquetry and wild wooing!... there is nothing like it out of Spain, the country where they torture helpless animals for sport. Is there, perhaps, some secret tie between cruelty and beauty; between crime and art? It is certain that religious reformers have always thought so, and have acted with logical fury. In our peaceful, decent country, beauty, except such as Nature herself affords, is rare. A race that loves its neighbour as itself seems incapable of creating an art. The good Swiss have done nothing for the mind's delight: the virtuous Spartans could not even appreciate loveliness when they saw it. Nearly all the great periods of flowering in art come after the roots of a nation have been watered in blood, after some frightful _crise_ of suffering. It would seem as if bringing forth must be always accompanied by birth-pangs. May 7. Granada. The Duke of Wellington's Trees. H---- said that the greatness of a people depended upon its trees. This sounded rather cryptic, and I entreated him to be more diffuse. We were walking home from that enchanted garden, owned by the Pallavicini, which rewarded the Moor for betraying his city. The May moon was shining on the white mountain tops, and the jargoning of the snow-brooks sounded about our feet. The air smelled of orange flowers and roses, and the nightingales were _shouting_ in the gloom of those one hundred thousand trees planted by the Duke of Wellington. "This Spanish peninsula," H---- said, "under the rule of the Moors, supported thirty millions of people in comfort. The Christian kings allowed the upland forests to be ruthlessly sacrificed, and now look at Spain." "One swallow"--I quoted. "Will one instance support a theory?" "No; but I could give you a dozen. Carlyle and the rest of the historians have talked the fearfulest rot about France under the monarchy which preserved her forests. Of course, every one has weakly credited the stories of oppression and starvation in aristocratic France. And yet the sons of these peasants, who were pitifully pictured snatching at leaves of those forests for food, overran Europe. I don't believe that children bred in starvation could ever have had the vitality to be conquerors. At all events, when the land was divided and the forests delivered to spoliation, the population of France began to decline. Possibly the modern effort at reforesting the country may arrest that decline." "Just listen to the noise of those nightingales," I said. "Do you suppose we shall be able to sleep?" May 15. Naples. The Boy with the Goose.