The men do not share in these characteristics; some priestess, well beloved of the powers of old religion, must have called down an especial blessing on her sex in this town.
Hence to Marseilles,--where is little for the traveller to see, except the mixture of Oriental blood in the crowd of the streets.

Thence by steamer to Genoa.

Of this transit, he who has been on the Mediterranean in a stiff breeze well understands I can have nothing to say, except "I suffered." It was all one dull, tormented dream to me, and, I believe, to most of the ship's company,--a dream too of thirty hours' duration, instead of the promised sixteen.
The excessive beauty of Genoa is well known, and the impression upon the eye alone was correspondent with what I expected; but, alas! the weather was still so cold I could not realize that I had actually touched those shores to which I had looked forward all my life, where it seemed that the heart would expand, and the whole nature be turned to delight.

Seen by a cutting wind, the marble palaces, the gardens, the magnificent water-view of Genoa, failed to charm,--"I _saw, not felt_, how beautiful they were." Only at Naples have I found _my_ Italy, and here not till after a week's waiting,--not till I began to believe that all I had heard in praise of the climate of Italy was fable, and that there is really no spring anywhere except in the imagination of poets.

For the first week was an exact copy of the miseries of a New England spring; a bright sun came for an hour or two in the morning, just to coax you forth without your cloak, and then came up a villanous, horrible wind, exactly like the worst east wind of Boston, breaking the heart, racking the brain, and turning hope and fancy to an irrevocable green and yellow hue, in lieu of their native rose.
However, here at Naples I _have_ at last found _my_ Italy; I have passed through the Grotto of Pausilippo, visited Cuma, Baiae, and Capri, ascended Vesuvius, and found all familiar, except the sense of enchantment, of sweet exhilaration, this scene conveys.
"Behold how brightly breaks the morning!" and yet all new, as if never yet described, for Nature here, most prolific and exuberant in her gifts, has touched them all with a charm unhackneyed, unhackneyable, which the boots of English dandies cannot trample out, nor the raptures of sentimental tourists daub or fade.
Baiae had still a hid divinity for me, Vesuvius a fresh baptism of fire, and Sorrento--O Sorrento was beyond picture, beyond poesy, for the greatest Artist had been at work there in a temper beyond the reach of human art.
Beyond this, reader, my old friend and valued acquaintance on other themes, I shall tell you nothing of Naples, for it is a thing apart in the journey of life, and, if represented at all, should be so in a fairer form than offers itself at present.