TABLE OF CONTENTS
MAY, 1914
JUNE, 1914
JULY, 1914
AUGUST, 1914
SEPTEMBER, 1915
OCTOBER, 1915
DECEMBER, 1915
JANUARY, 1917
FEBRUARY, 1917
MARCH, 1917
APRIL, 1917
I do not know whether in remote generations some trickle of Italianblood went to the making of that entity which I feel to be myself,or whether in some previous incarnation I enjoyed a Latin existence,nor do I greatly care: all that really concerns me is that the momentthe train crawls out from its burrowings through the black rootsof pine-scented mountains into the southern openings of the Alpinetunnels, I am conscious that I have come home. I greet the new heavenand the new earth, or, perhaps more accurately, the beloved old heavenand the beloved old earth; I hail the sun, and know that somethingwithin me has slept and dreamed and yearned while I lived up in thenorth, and wakes again now with the awakening of Brünnhilde....
The conviction is as unfathomable and as impervious to analysis as thesprings of character, and if it is an illusion I am deceived by it ascompletely as by some master-trick of conjuring. It is not merely thatI love for their own sakes the liquid and dustless thoroughfares ofVenice, the dim cool churches and galleries that glow with the jewelsof Bellini and Tintoret, the push of the gliding gondola round thecorners of the narrow canals beneath the mouldering cornices and mellowbrickwork, for I should love these things wherever they happened to be,and the actual spell of Venice would be potent if Venice was situatedin the United States of America or in Manchester. But right at the backof all Venetian sounds and scents and sights sits enthroned the factthat the theatre of those things is in Italy. Florence has her spell,too, when from the hills above it in the early morning you see herhundred towers pricking the mists; Rome the imperial has her spell,when at sunset you wander through the Forum and see the small bluecampanulas bubbling out of the crumbling travertine, while the Coliseumglows like a furnace of molten amber, or pushing aside the leathercurtain you pass into the huge hushed halls of St. Peter's; Naples hasher spell, and the hill-side of Assisi hers, but all these are but theblossoms that cluster on the imperishable stem that nourishes them. Yetfor all the waving of these wands, it is not Bellini nor Tintoret, norPope nor Emperor who gives the spells their potency, but Italy, thefact of Italy. Indeed (if in soul you are an Italian) you will findthe spell not only and not so fully in the churches and forums andgalleries of cities, but on empty hill-sides and in orchards, where thevine grows in garlands from tree to tree, and the purple clusters ofshadowed grapes alternate with the pale sunshine of the ripened lemons.There, more than among marbles, you get close to that which the loverof Italy adores in her inviolable shrine, and if you say that suchadoration is very easily explicable since lemon trees and vines are