CHAPTER 4.VIII.
Thus man pursues his weary calling, And wrings the hard life from the sky, While happiness unseen is falling Down from God's bosom silently.
-- Schiller.
In one of those islands whose history the imperishable literature and renown of Athens yet invest with melancholy interest, and on which Nature, in whom "there is nothing melancholy," still bestows a glory of scenery and climate equally radiant for the freeman or the slave,--the Ionian, the Venetian, the Gaul, the Turk, or the restless Briton,--Zanoni had fixed his bridal home.

There the air carries with it the perfumes of the plains for miles along the blue, translucent deep.
(See Dr.Holland's "Travels to the Ionian Isles," etc., page 18.) Seen from one of its green sloping heights, the island he had selected seemed one delicious garden.

The towers and turrets of its capital gleaming amidst groves of oranges and lemons; vineyards and olive-woods filling up the valleys, and clambering along the hill-sides; and villa, farm, and cottage covered with luxuriant trellises of dark-green leaves and purple fruit.

For there the prodigal beauty yet seems half to justify those graceful superstitions of a creed that, too enamoured of earth, rather brought the deities to man, than raised the man to their less alluring and less voluptuous Olympus.
And still to the fishermen, weaving yet their antique dances on the sand; to the maiden, adorning yet, with many a silver fibula, her glossy tresses under the tree that overshadows her tranquil cot,--the same Great Mother that watched over the wise of Samos, the democracy of Corcyra, the graceful and deep-taught loveliness of Miletus, smiles as graciously as of yore.

For the North, philosophy and freedom are essentials to human happiness; in the lands which Aphrodite rose from the waves to govern, as the Seasons, hand in hand, stood to welcome her on the shores, Nature is all sufficient.