When they came through the midst of those glimmering palaces, the ships, to the stationary ones, they found the people in the ecstasy of a saint's festival. He was compelled to bury the blue day and the sea in temples, in picture-halls, in fourth stories, where, according to the custom, several of the grandees dwelt, to whom he delivered letters from his father, and more beautifully in the subterranean, gloomy street which arches itself through the blooming Posilippo. Only the prospect that, in the very next solitude, he should converse with his distant heart quieted his spirit, which was always flying away from the present. At evening they ascended the finest of the heights above Naples, the cloister of Camaldole, where, among the pleasures of the prospect, he saw, standing in gray distance behind Posilippo, the lofty Epomeo. He could no longer contain himself, but began, in a spot more thickly hidden with blossoms than others, which he had sought out for the purpose, the following letter to Linda:-- "At last, noble soul, I can speak to thee, and behold again thy island, although only as a sunny-red evening cloud looming in the horizon. Linda, Linda, O that I have and have had thee! Does, then, the two days' divine dream last even over into the cold to-day? Thou art now so far off and dumb, and I hear no yes. When, in Rome, on the dome of St. Peter's, I looked into the blue morning heavens, and life swelled and sounded around me as the breezes swept by, then it seemed to me as if I must fling myself into a flying royal ship, and seek a shore which grows green under the farthest constellation; as if I must flutter down, like a cascade, through the heavens, and tear my way below there through this stony life, pressing onward, and destroying and bearing everything before me and with me. And so is it with me again at this moment, and still more emphatically. I could fly over to thee, and say, 'Thou art my glory, my laurel-wreath, my eternity, but I must deserve thee; I can do nothing for thee, except what I do for myself.' In the olden time, beloved youths were great, deeds were their graces, and the coat of mail their festal dress. Today, as I looked across on the Gulf of Baja, and on the ruins where the gardens and palaces of the great Romans still lie in ruins or names, and when I saw the old, defying giants stand in the midst of flowers and oranges, and in tepid, incense-breathing breezes, refreshed and quickened by them, but not softened and subdued,--lifting with the hand the heavy trident which moved three quarters of the globe, and with sinewy breast going forth to meet winter in the north, burning heat in Africa, and every wound,--then did my whole heart ask, 'Is it so with thee?' O Linda, can a man be otherwise? The lion roams over the earth, the eagle sweeps through the heavens, and the king of these kings should have his path on the earth and in the heavens at once. I have as yet been and done