VI. SCHAFFHAUSEN AND MILAN 117

and rowed down the whole way of waters, passing another Sunday at Cadenabbia, and then, from villa to villa, across the lake, and across, to Como,¹ and so to Milan by Monza.

It was then full, though early, summer time; and the first impression of Italy always ought to be in her summer. It was also well that, though my heart was with the Swiss cottager, the artificial taste in me had been mainly formed by Turner’s rendering of those very scenes, in Rogers’s Italy. The “Lake of Como,” the two moonlight villas, and the “Farewell,”² had prepared me for all that was beautiful and right in the terraced gardens, proportioned arcades, and white spaces of sunny wall, which have in general no honest charm for the English mind. But to me, they were almost native through Turner,-familiar at once, and revered. I had no idea then of the Renaissance evil in them; they were associated only with what I had been told of the “divine art” of Raphael and Lionardo, and, by my ignorance of dates, associated with the stories of Shakespeare. Portia’s villa,-Juliet’s palace,-I thought to have been like these.

Also, as noticed in the preface³ to reprint of vol. ii. of Modern Painters, I had always a quite true perception of size, whether in mountains or buildings, and with the perception, joy in it; so that the vastness of scale in the Milanese palaces, and the “mount of marble, a hundred spires,”⁴ of the duomo, impressed me to the full at once: and not having yet the taste to discern good Gothic from bad, the mere richness and fineness of lace-like tracery against the sky was a consummate rapture to me-how much more getting up to it and climbing among it, with the Monte Rosa seen between its pinnacles across the plain!

137. I had been partly prepared for this view by the admirable presentment of it in London, a year or two

¹ [Compare the Notes on Prout, Vol. XIV. p. 397.]

² [The engravings at pp. 32, 115, 223, 233 in the Italy. Turner’s drawings for the subjects are Nos. 215, 221, 223, and 208 in the National Gallery: see Vol. XIII. pp. 617, 618.]

³ [That is, to the separate edition of 1883: see § 9 of it; in this edition, Vol. IV. p. 8 (where other passages to like effect are now noted).]

⁴ [Tennyson: The Daisy.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]