VIETRI There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, BYRON. Il nome del bel fior, ch' io sempre invoco DANTE. THE vivid, deep-glowing pictures of the sunny south are once more before us; the fresh, warm, airs of Italy seem for the last time to breathe around us; and the tourist, in our fourth volume, will gaze upon her landscapes, of which-from us at least-he will see no more. Still, her deep rich skies, reflecting their varied and most brilliant hues on hills, and lakes, and shores, immortal amidst the ruins of empires, over which nature is fast drawing a thicker and darker veil,-her strange destiny,-fallen monuments like the fortunes of her children, and her old ancestral fame, would bid us linger in the birth-place of all that is most lovely, most grand, most absorbing to the eye and to the mind. For where is the country of which the history presents so terrible a lesson to humanity, so marked a beacon to future times, so well worthy the deep meditation of the statesman, the philosopher, the student of every age and every class? What wonderful revolutions have levelled her successive dynasties with the dust; leaving not a trace of the stern heroic republic-the mightier empire of the Roman-the competition of bold, free, - B and polished states that rose from the night of barbarism which had so long shrouded the vanquished mistress of the world! Could the old republican have revisited, "by glimpses of the moon," the scene of Rome's early triumphs, vainly would he have tried to recognise his descendant in the corrupt, voluptuous imperialists who fell before the Goth; as vainly would they have traced their countrymen in the free spirit of Italy's young republics; and least of all would the latter be enabled to trace one feature of their heroic age in the broken, enfeebled character of the modern Italian, withering under the malignant influence of an outworn system of government and religion, supported by the power of foreign bayonets. It is a system, however, which happily cannot last; events beyond the control of princes show that it is tottering to its fall; while other and nobler prospects open before the country of a Brutus, a Cicero, a Dante, a Cosmo, and a Lorenzo de' Medici-of thousands of martyred patriots; prospects such as must eventually rescue her from the grasp of foreign aggression, and tyranny and superstition at home. Yet, with her broken chains, how much of her romantic charms, and of her monumental beauty and grandeur in the lost fortunes both of her ancient and modern state, would vanish from the surface of her soil, when the genius of freedom and commerce shall once more repeople her solitudes, rebuild her manufactories, replenish her banks, and send forth her well-freighted vessels to every quarter of the globe! The shadows of the past, the magnificence of ruin, the desert air of her plains, her groves, her hills, and every wreck-strewed shore, will then gradually disappear. Italy will cease to be a land of wonder and enchantment in her mere external aspect; but beauty and glory of a different kind may then fall to her dower. No more on her rich southern plains and shores will only the lowly peasant's roof receive the traveller, the solitary wild flowers burst on his quiet path, the silence of La Cava's valleys be broken only by the vesper-song, and the lone convent's bell. The vintage songs will come more frequently on the ear; wild picturesque retreats, studded with their white hamlets, glow richer with the dark budding vine; and the deep blue waters of the lakes, fed by the foaming torrents of the far hills, no longer resting in their unsought solitudes, be enlivened with the white sails and the voices of rural industry or of mirth. Then her fruitful and delicious campagnas will no more present the sight of paupers, and wretched children, prostrated along the road, and kissing the dust for the smallest mark of charity; a generous people will no longer groan under their "little tyrants of the field;" the lovers of freedom will cease to bleed upon the scaffold; and moral power, independence, and prosperity, at length raise Italy into something nobler than a relic of antiquity, the romantic ruin of departed greatness, and the tomb of her once boasted liberties. Such at least, with all our veneration for classic antiquities, will be our earnest prayer. But we have done! The genius of landscape, love, and fiction, shrink from the voice of war and tumult, and summon us to more attractive and congenial themes. The bright-gemmed region of Naples,-her wild, picturesque shores, bays, lakes, and caverned isles, teeming alike with fable and with truth," the retreat of the syrens, and the adoration of the sons of painting and of song, glowing in all the brilliancy of Italian sunset, burst with confused magnificence upon the view. Here the Phlegræan fields, Virgil and his Sibyls, Cumæ, the delicious Baiæ, the gloomy Cimimeriæ, Portici, Vesuvius, famed Pompeii, the walls of Pæstum, the plains of Sorrento, old Salerno, its castle and picturesque hermitages; and, lastly, the wild, broken shore, and summits of Vietri, crowned with its little white hamlet that seems hung in air; its abrupt declivities, varied with dark foliage, through which you discern houses and villas, the darker convents frowning in the distance, and the blue shining waters of the bay that break and murmur at the foot of yon bold promontory. Seen from the cliffs, the prospect is most imposing and magnificent; and the tourist feels, as on first beholding the scenery at Pæstum, the power of deepest solitude, and a strange religious thrill, inspired, as it were, by the awful and the vast. "Yet here methinks Truth wants no ornament, in her own shape By turns inclining to wild ecstacy, And soberest meditation." ITALY. But a truce to description; the neighbourhood of Vietri is associated with more affecting details. In one of those secluded and romantic spots, embosomed amid the grand amphitheatre of hill, and dale, and rocky coast, which once made the southern shores of Italy, with the abrupt picturesque head-lands, and the splendid sea-views they command, so beloved by her young poets and painters, is situated a half-ruined monastery, the more venerable from its contrast with the aspect of surrounding little hamlets and modern villas. To the impressive character of its natural scenery a more stirring interest is given by some events of no distant date, produced by the most fearful and absorbing of passions,-not the less strong and vivid for their too frequent display-those of thwarted love and revenge. In that monastery sought a last refuge, as she herself has left it on record, the suffering object of a tale of deep treachery and wrong; one which conveys more painful and thrilling sympathy from the circumstance of its being founded wholly in truth. Near this religious edifice was the residence of an officer of distinction, who had retired from the French army soon after its occupation of Naples, under the unfortunate Joachim Murat, and apparently with the design of making Italy his future country. At that period he was not more than forty-five years of age; but he had more powerful reasons, it would appear, than mere taste for thus early courting retirement. An occasional gloom—a presentiment, as if of some evil, seemed to hang over him; the clear unquailing eye, the voice, the frank and radiant spirit of the true soldier, were not the companions of Colville's retreat. Yet he enjoyed all the advantages which high reputation, fortune, or beauty, could confer; his wife, a very |