I.

THEY lie in the lap of the mountains like jewels dropped from the sky, and Nature has lavished her love and man his labor on the setting. By political geography they belong in part to Switzerland; but if there be any force in the theory of natural boundaries, the Alps bar her claim with tremendous emphasis, and in climate, scenery, religion, custom, and speech they are Italian. No sooner does the traveler by the St. Gothard railway reach Locarno, the first station on Lago Maggiore, than he finds another heaven and another earth from those which vanished when he entered the great tunnel, a few hours earlier. The mountain peaks are sharper and more serrate, the curves and indentations of the shore more delicate, the outlines of the landscape more finished and perfect; the light is at once softer and more splendid, the sky has a deeper and more tender blue, the verdure is richer and darker; the very weeds give the wayside the grace of a garden run wild. Already there are terraced vineyards to be seen, and vines trained over a sort of trellised arbor called pergola, the supports of which are stone, of the most ancient modes of growing grapes in Italy, and orange walks, hanging gardens, arcades of shrubbery, walls of evergreen, stone stairways and balustrades, pillars, vases and fountains among the flower beds, a different cultivation, a different style of gardening, which adorns the humblest plot. The gleaming towns upon the water's edge have irregular tiers of red-tiled roofs, broken by arched porticoes in the attic story, by slender Lombard bell-towers, cupolas, long, blank palace-fronts, different architecture. All this can be seen from Locarno, which is yet but a

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poor place compared with the towns. lower down the lake. It is worth while to stop there, though, to wash off the dust of the long journey in great white marble bath-tubs, of antique form, filled with cool, diamond-clear water, and to rest and attune the spirit to a softer key. There is a new hotel, a remarkably fine building, with a lofty hall of entrance, from each end of which a marble staircase leads to galleries with balusters, colonnades rising one above the other, and intersecting long perspectives, like the backgrounds of Paul Veronese's banquet pictures; -a Palladian interior, every corridor ending in an arch draped with muslin embroidered in Oriental patterns, through which a mellow picture of lake and mountain is visible.

At Locarno, moreover, there is the first glimpse of the art of Lombardy, in which some of the towns on the smaller lakes are so rich, and which has adorned the entire region with countless churches and palaces. The front of the Chiesa Nuova is by Tommaso Rodari, the foremost of three brothers who have left their mark on the architecture and sculpture of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries throughout Northern Italy. In the pilgrimage church of the Madonna del Sasso (Our Lady of the Rock), half an hour's walk above the town, the mild Luini's influence is seen in an altar-piece by one of his followers. I trudged up to this sanctuary one afternoon, to be rewarded by the expedition itself beyond my expectations, which were not great. Two deep gorges bring down two noisy, demonstrative brooks by so precipitous a path that the water is ready to leap into cascades at every step, until they unite and seek the lake together. Up the strip of wooded rock between them, which rises higher and higher, broadening until it

joins the mountain, winds the way to the church. It is very steep and laid in cordonate, a pavement of cobble-stones crossed by a curb at every few feet, much like a railway track, ballast and sleepers, without rails, raised to an angle of seventy degrees from the level; the curbs are about as far apart as cross-ties, and it is as hard to walk either upon or between them. The pilgrimage to the Madonna del Sasso should be made by all but penitents only after the sun has sunk behind the western mountains. It is a pretty walk, although disfigured by the stations of the cross at short intervals; the wayfarer passes out of the village under a long, vine-wreathed pergola, then over a bridge, then up the Barrow hillside, between the ravines, to the foot of the foundation-walls of the building, and by a few more sharp twists to the solitary little stone piazza from which he enters the church. It dates from a miraculous appearance of the Virgin four hundred years ago, but has few signs of its age: within it is as freshly gilded, painted, and frescoed as a hotel dining-room, and is in so far a surprise after the lonely scramble beside the bed of the torrent. I reached it at the hour of the Ave Maria. The church was empty save for a woman and two children, who were kneeling together telling their beads. There was a murmur of prayers and responses uttered by two invisible ministrants; the voices seemed to come from behind the high altar, but priest or acolyte there was none to be seen. The effect was so mysterious at that sunset hour that the renovated church grew venerable to the quickened sense of awe. After the last amen, while looking for the Luini scholar's painting, I came upon a picture of the Entombment, a work of considerable beauty and religious feeling, by a Signor Cerusi, of Florence, as my fellow-worshiper told me. A modern picture from our Saviour's history, painted with talent and skill, yet reverently, and hidden in VOL. LIV. NO. 323.

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a side-chapel of this inaccessible and unvisited little church, was a strange thing and worth coming to find. The view of the lake from the steps is fine, and still better from a little pillared side-porch, which looks as if it were the oldest part of the building, and overhangs the landscape like the parapet of a castle. The scene was very lovely: the peaks were pale rose-color, and a bluish moisture, like the dew on dark grapes, rested upon

the surface of the lake.

There is an older and more interesting church on the outskirts of the town, near the railway station, bearing an indelible stamp of long-past times, notwithstanding many restorations. Set into the side of its rough square tower is a fine equestrian statue of St. Victor in alto-rilievo of the quattro cento, a stiff but striking figure, distinguished by the unsophisticated genius of that age, which lost its simplicity so rapidly in the following century. On each side of the principal doorway there is an inscription of startling import. One is in memory of Margherita Paganetti, "sweet, loyal, tender, an angel of consolation to the poor, the delight of her husband, the dearest hope of her children, who in the forty-second year of her age fell a victim to the most detestable treachery; her last articulate accents being, Pardon.'" The other is to Giovanni Battista Giacometti, "a patrician of Eschina, disideratissimo per pieta e schietezza, a true master of arts and learning, who died a violent death. ... The prayers of his widow and sons are offered for his undaunted soul" (pro anima sua intemerata). As the church is in a sequestered situation, although the haunts of men are not far off, and from the spot where the traveler reads these ominous tablets he can see only high walls shutting in lonely roads, it gives him a shudder to learn from the last lines of the inscriptions that the victims met their fate little more than thirty years ago, which is not reassuring

as to modern manners in the neighborhood; if he is a man of imagination he goes away a little faster than he came. Yet this is only Locarno, the threshold of the Italian lake region, and few people will be tempted to stop there more than a night. The little steamboats, which make the round of the lake three times a day, lose half the usual vulgarity of their species by the leisurely way in which they move from point to point; crossing and recrossing, touching at every small town, or pausing a little out from shore while a clumsy boat, with a white awning on hoops, like a Conestoga wagon, pulls off from the wharf to exchange passengers. The motley crowd on deck is not vulgar, either, until September brings the full tide of travel. At one place three peasant women, two of them handsome, clamber on board from the row-boat: one wears a bright flowered headkerchief, another a black lace veil; the third is bare-headed, and her thick coil of plats is stuck about close with big, flat, round-headed silver skewers, forming an obscure halo to her Madonna-like face. The next passengers may be a party of tourists, not unpicturesque, with sun-hats wrapped in muslin pugarees, Chinese silk coats and umbrellas, alpenstocks, and bunches of wild flowers. Then a couple of black-robed, broad-brimmed priests come aboard.

At the little quays many Italian humors are to be studied: men and women meet and embrace fondly, or part kissing and weeping without constraint, although the journey one of them is to take is no further than to the opposite shore. At one landing I saw a lean, haggard old man, of shabby-genteel aspect, with a white handkerchief in his hand, lean over the rail, looking intently at the steamboat; the white handkerchief was an unusual refinement, colored cotton ones being universally used by the poorer middle class. He seemed to be counting the passengers, for as his eyes moved along the deck he nodded

and his lips moved incessantly. Suddenly, as we cast off, he caught sight of somebody, for whom perhaps he had been looking, and in an instant his face and person expressed the maddest hatred. He hissed, spat, shook his fingers, stuck them into his mouth, made the sign against the evil eye, while his poor withered features and limbs writhed and quivered with rage. As we receded he turned from the pier and tottered towards the town, shaking his head and burying his face in the conspicuous handkerchief. The necessity of Italians for expressing the emotion of the moment and their unconcern about lookers-on give every-day life among them a dramatic interest for us of a colderblooded and more reticent race. One never knows what tragedy or comedy may be enacted before one's eyes at any minute.

An hour after leaving Locarno the lake is in view in the utmost length and breadth that can be seen from any point. It is majestic among its grand, encompassing mountains, which crowd closer as we advance; the nearer ones dark green, the further ones purple. As we traverse the water from shore to shore snow-peaks rise into sight, hiding themselves behind intervening crests when the boat draws near land. I am writing of a day near the end of August, almost the only time I felt excessive heat in this part of Italy. The sky blazed like a burnished reflector, the lake glowed like molten silver and the shore like a furnace, but the cool breath of the invisible ice-mountains tempered the atmosphere. Amidst the incandescence we passed a grassy islet covered with small trees, called Isola dei Conigli (Coney Island!), showing some prosaic ruins above the verdure, but uninhabited now even by the feeble folk from whom it takes its name. On the neighboring heights there are ruined castles, always strong adjuncts to scenery; one of them, as well as the hill it stands upon, claims

the archangel Michael for sponsor. Warlike Italians in the Middle Ages swore by the sword of St. Michael, and these waters and marges must often have reechoed the oath; for they have a long, bloody history, beginning with the Gauls and not ending with Garibaldi. One cares little for dates and facts in Italy; the enjoyment of the moment asks and gains nothing directly from association; there, as everywhere else in Central Europe, natural beauty is enhanced by the mere consciousness of a great past. It is worth recalling, however, that Frederic Barbarossa abode in more than one of those crumbling piles, and that two hundred years before his day the small town of Maccagno was known as Corte Imperiale, in honor of the great emperor Otho, who sojourned there during a campaign against the Lombard King Berenger II. Maccagno is extremely picturesque, fit to be put upon the sketching block as it stands: a gray tower overtopping a yellow Renaissance church, built on a table rock rising from the lake, with a front broken by two irregular, ivied arches, its southern side bristling with aloes. Before this picture had grown dim on my mind another came into sight. Standing out against the dark green, thickly wooded slopes above Cannero, the ruins of two castles emerge from the water close together: one is formidable even in dilapidation; the other and the stone on which it stands are so small that they look like a fragment of the original rock and fort, which have been cut off from it by a rise in the lake. They were always two, however, and were built in the very beginning of the fifteenth century by five brothers named Mazzarda, sons of a butcher. They called their stronghold Malpaga, Ill-Toll, and held the shores in terror, waging a piratical warfare against the inhabitants and everybody who ventured upon the waters. They kept their sway for ten years, every attempt to dislodge them failing, until the unhappy

villagers appealed to Filippo Visconti, Duke of Milan, who came to the rescue with a flotilla and four hundred men-atarms. Even then the robbers' kennel was not carried by assault, but was starved out after a two years' siege. The place was impregnable, in fact, for one of the later Visconti was besieged there in 1523, and after some months the assailants were forced to withdraw.

The contrast between these violent scenes and the theatre on which they were enacted helps to throw them into remote distance. The physiognomy of the lake grows more smiling, the vege tation more luxuriant and southern, at every landing. The cypress, that most distinctively meridional tree and strongest feature of the Italian landscape, begins to appear among the masses of foliage, standing up as solid in form and color as a tree cut in stone, but soft as fur to the eye. Light-tinted towns, each with its tall, slender church-tower, are perched along the mountain sides, from the base to the top, and many a solitary convent and shrine. The finest point of the voyage is between Intra and Baveno, where the snow range of the Mischabel Alpine group is suddenly manifest as one looks skyward to the west, and the lake divides into the two great bays of Arona and Pallanza, the latter strewn with garden isles. Behind Pallanza the mountains stand back on each hand, and reveal Monte Rosa drawing a snow mantle over his black shoulders. Baveno and Stresa are also upon this bay, and great rivalry exists between the three towns, which are the favorite halting places on Lago Maggiore. Travelers who have stayed at only one of them become violent partisans of that one. Knowing them all well, I prefer Stresa, partly because the town is smaller than either of the others, and its best hotel, the Iles Borromées, stands beyond the last houses in its own pretty grounds; still more because from this point of view the Borromean islands compose" better,

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as painters say, on one hand with the curve in which Pallanza stands, with its long, bright lines of houses and multitudinous red roofs, and on the other with the frowning, many-peaked Sasso di Ferro, the highest mountain on the lake.

The islands are the regalia of Lago Maggiore. There are five in the Borromean group, none of which is more than a quarter of an hour's row from the next in order. Isola San Giovanni is so near Pallanza that nothing could be easier than to join them by a bridge. It is a mere bouquet on a rock; there is just space enough for a garden and a summer-house, but it is disfigured by an ugly villa, which Count Borromeo has built within a few years, to spoil the prospect from the Grand Hôtel, it is said, in revenge for the proprietor's adding a story to his house, and so shutting out the mountains from the count's pretty casino on the island. Isola dei Pescatori (Fishermen's Island) is about fifteen minutes by row-boat from Baveno, and is entirely covered by a fishing village. It is a delightful object: an ir regular cluster of houses, of cheerful yet subdued tints, dark red, pale yellow, gray-white, festooned with vines and creepers, low upon the blue water, with a background of grave-toned mountains. At one end there is a quay, with a little beach, where the fishing-boats are drawn up in line as the sun goes down; at the other, a little green with half a dozen trees, beneath which the population, from three to four hundred souls, dry their nets and take the evening air; they must take it turn about, as there is not room for half of them. Despite the nearness of the village to the main-land, it has so truly isolated an aspect,-cooped within walls, moreover, as if the limits of the rock were not narrow enough, that I was surprised to see two or three houses of rather elegant appearance, although not large, with embroidered muslin window-curtains and balconies full

of flowers. My boatman told me that they belong to men of the island who, having made fortunes elsewhere (one of them in Manchester, England, as a picture dealer), have come back to spend the rest of their days upon their native pebble, and have built themselves "palaces," as he termed their dwellings. The picture dealer has kept a precious Poussin for himself, the joy of his old age, and hoards it in his palace. Nothing, not even the stories of the Greenlanders' mortal home-sickness, is a more singular and touching proof of the strength of that passion which we call love of country than the return of these wealthy people to imprison themselves in an unsavory hamlet which they might almost cover with a fishing-net.

A furlong from Isola dei Pescatori there is a heap of stones, whereon two or three slim willows wave their branches above a tuft of forget-me-nots; nobody has troubled himself to name it, but it is an excellent place to set up an easel. It lies midway between Isola dei Pescatori and the famous Isola Bella, the most overrated and berated island on the globe except Albion.

Isola Bella looks scarce ten acres in extent, but gains room by its height above the water, being terraced and every inch of its surface turned to account. Ou near approach by steamboat from Pallanza, the north end is seen first; and it is ugly, for nothing is visible except a palace front divided by a four-story bow, unfinished yet ruinous, and two big, square wings which might belong to a shabby hotel. Next appears a mean seventeenth-century church and a huddle of dirty little houses, most of them drinking-shops, directly at the entrance of the palace, and sticking like limpets to the base of the hanging-gardens. The Borromei have their private landing and a magnificent flight of granite steps, by which they avoid actually passing through the squalor; but everybody else must do so as the public landing-place is