The Saint's Afternoon and Others

Before and above all was the sense that, with the narrow limits
of past adventure, I had never yet had such an impression of what
the summer could be in the south or the south in the summer; but
I promptly found it, for the occasion, a good fortune that my
terms of comparison were restricted. It was really something, at
a time when the stride of the traveller had become as long as it
was easy, when the seven-league boots positively hung, for
frequent use, in the closet of the most sedentary, to have kept
one's self so innocent of strange horizons that the Bay of Naples
in June might still seem quite final. That picture struck me--a
particular corner of it at least, and for many reasons--as the
last word; and it is this last word that comes back to me, after
a short interval, in a green, grey northern nook, and offers me
again its warm, bright golden meaning before it also inevitably
catches the chill. Too precious, surely, for us not to suffer it
to help us as it may is the faculty of putting together again in
an order the sharp minutes and hours that the wave of time has
been as ready to pass over as the salt sea to wipe out the
letters and words your stick has traced in the sand. Let me, at
any rate, recover a sufficient number of such signs to make a
sort of sense.

I

Far aloft on the great rock was pitched, as the first note, and
indeed the highest, of the wondrous concert, the amazing creation
of the friend who had offered me hospitality, and whom, more
almost than I had ever envied anyone anything, I envied the
privilege of being able to reward a heated, artless pilgrim with
a revelation of effects so incalculable. There was none but the
loosest prefigurement as the creaking and puffing little boat,
which had conveyed me only from Sorrento, drew closer beneath the
prodigious island--beautiful, horrible and haunted--that does
most, of all the happy elements and accidents, towards making the
Bay of Naples, for the study of composition, a lesson in the
grand style. There was only, above and below, through the blue of
the air and sea, a great confused shining of hot cliffs and crags
and buttresses, a loss, from nearness, of the splendid couchant
outline and the more comprehensive mass, and an opportunity--oh,
not lost, I assure you--to sit and meditate, even moralise, on
the empty deck, while a happy brotherhood of American and German
tourists, including, of course, many sisters, scrambled down into
little waiting, rocking tubs and, after a few strokes, popped
systematically into the small orifice of the Blue Grotto. There
was an appreciable moment when they were all lost to view in that
receptacle, the daily "psychological" moment during which it must
so often