Romance in Naples. 75 always in love, always singing, always devoted to beauty and to nature! Every thing about them is softening and satisfying, rebuking to awkwardness and discouraging to ambition. The bay invites them to a continued spectacle and dream. The dim, soft islands in the distance pillow their thoughts and soothe them to rest. The ripple of the mild sea is ever teaching them music; the orange and lemon groves scent their emotions with spicy breath; they palpitate beneath the brilliancy of a nine-months summer with glowing sympathies. Love is their life; they are romantic to the core, and not ashamed of their attachments. You see the rough sailors as they meet and part kissing each other with earnest passion. The coachman is exchanging glances with the girls at the windows. The girls are all innocent coquettes, not vile and abandoned, but passionate, and feeling that life has but one object, to love and be loved. Their eyes are full of fire; their hair is an ambush; they move gracefully, even in coarse garments, and look as if a little water and mantua-making would at once change them into ladies. We left Naples hurriedly (to secure a passage from Messina to Alexandria, on the 11th January), before half satisfying ourselves with its beauties. The steamer Tirreno (fit vessel to cross the Tyrrhenian Sea) carried us safely to Messina in twenty-six hours. The Mediterranean was on its best behavior, and the vessel comfortable and clean, with an elaborate Italian cuisine. One breakfast would have answered just as well for a dinner, particularly as wine, in all the earlier courses, took the place of tea and coffee. It consisted, first, of macaroni and cheese; second, slices of sausage, pickles and olives; third, omelette and herbs; fourth, fried shell-fish (a sort of crab) and lemons; fifth, fried chicken and potatoes; sixth, oranges, pears, nuts and grapes; seventh, coffee and bread and butter. It takes only a very short time to learn how conventional are our local notions of what things go together at the table. Here in Messina, for instance, before the soup, Bologna sausage is served, and the fish comes in at dinner in the middle of the courses. But this is an "aside" for housekeepers. To return to our vessel and voyage. The coast, volcanic and far from beautiful in its grey January attire, lay about ten miles from our course. We had the comfort of recollecting that St. Paul had made this voyage, and, as we touched at Paolo, we tried to think he had been there; at any rate, we knew he passed through the Straits, and stopped at Rhegium, Reggio now called, and visible from the hills above Messina. Here, too, we passed Scylla, where a town of that name still commemorates the old terror of Greek and Roman navigators. earthquake, in 1783, threw down so much of the promontory to the west that the sea was driven out of its bed and engulfed fifteen hundred souls, who had fled to the shore for protection. It is doubtful if Scylla, in all antiquity, ever destroyed as many lives as this. Charybdis has no whirlpool now, and its very site is disputed; but such changes go on in these volcanic regions that it is impossible to expect to verify whirlpools in waters changing their level and their channels. every generation. The crew and forward passengers were a more interesting study for us than the scenery. At least a couple of hundred recruits were crowded into the narrow midships, directly under our eyes. An They paved the whole deck with flesh as they lay down at night, and by day they were as much in each other's way as mackerel in a keg. But dead fish could not have been more amicable, nor live fish more active than these Italian recruits. Inconvenience or discomfort seemed not even to have occurred to any of them. If they had been oysters on a rock they could not have seemed more used or more reconciled to their situation. All day long they were talking with a glibness and persistency that only Southern Italians can display; and their gesticulations were as incessant as their articulations. They talked to their fingers' ends and to the ends of their toes. Indeed they might easily have spared their tongues, their fingers were so expressive. They were full of gentle gibes and practical jokes; they made faces at each other; they sang and danced whenever they could get a yard square to waltz in. They seemed as unembarrassed at spectators as cattle in a field, and yet they were polite and decorous, making way for the first-class passengers at the greatest inconvenience to themselves when we wished to pass through them. They ate from a common dish, each putting in his spoon and swallowing down his great spoonful of macaroni (chopped into pieces of bean size) at one gulp. There was no care, no aspiration in these soldiers. The government was their providence, and their ambition seemed completed in entering the public service. It was melancholy to see such a quantity of young, vigorous life, taken out of civil occupation and useful industry, and devoted to the barren service of arms. They did not look like the stuff for good soldiers, but they were engaging, though clearly ignorant youth. I saw not one book, paper or letter in their hands. They had, however, the wit, intelligence and grace of men who have somehow drawn a kind of education from the nature about them and the attrition of each other's nimble spirits. There was no stupidity in the whole company. MESSINA. SICILY, January 10. We ran into the safe harbor of Messina too late to go on shore, and next morning the rain made our landing disagree able. The town looks commercial and flourishing to an unexpected degree. The streets are dirty, but well lighted. The great horned oxen, the numerous donkeys, with mountains of carrots and cabbages moving on their backs; the oranges and lemons lying in piles about, the thick-leaved trees, the half-tropical hills, all tell us we are in Sicily. There seems a freer and more modern spirit here than on the main-land. Garibaldi is immensely popular, and Italian unity and liberty are freely praised and predicted. streets contain many costly buildings, which show some anterior condition of a splendor now lost. The cathedral is rich in marble columns, with gilded capitals, evidently, by their unequal heights and dissimilar finish, the spoils of old temples. There are orange groves around the town, but the rain shuts us up, and we wait impatiently our release by the steamer, which is to arrive to-morrow evening. There is not one book-store in town! Life is insecure. Brigands abound in the island. The commerce with America is considerable, carried on in foreign bottoms, chiefly in fruits; no imports. FROM MESSINA TO EGYPT. Aboard the "Said," Steamer of the "Messagerie Imperiale," THE LEVANT, off Crete, } MESSINA, which we left on the night of the 11th inst., did not grow upon us with experience. It is an unhappy town in its recent experience. Last year a torrent from the mountains above the town, swollen by an hour's rain, drowned 300 people in one of its principal streets. Last summer the cholera carried off 250 lives daily for over three months. There seems little enterprise, industry or modern intelligence in the place. The commerce is all one of exportation of fruits, and vessels come in empty to carry off the annual crops. There were ten vessels in port loading for America, but they were all foreign bottoms. The city collects a considerable tribute from its own citizens in the shape of an octroi, and expends it upon public improvements. It is building a fine cemetery a mile or two out of town, in the form of a Campo Santo. Though of stone and with enormous arches, it was to cost only about $50,000; it could not be built in America for five times that amount. The Catholic religion is said to have lost its hold upon the commercial class in Messina, but it is very strong in its possession of the popular heart. The superstition of the lower class seems very profound. Even the brigands, who abound in Sicily, are very devout. An Arab pilot, who regularly accompanies the "Said," and remains at Messina while the steamer goes |