Florence, April 5th, 1874.—They told me I should findItaly greatly changed; and in seven-and-twenty years there is room forchanges. But to me everything is so perfectly the same that Iseem to be living my youth over again; all the forgotten impressionsof that enchanting time come back to me. At the moment they werepowerful enough; but they afterwards faded away. What in the worldbecame of them? Whatever becomes of such things, in the long intervalsof consciousness? Where do they hide themselves away? in whatunvisited cupboards and crannies of our being do they preserve themselves? They are like the lines of a letter written in sympathetic ink; holdthe letter to the fire for a while and the grateful warmth brings outthe invisible words. It is the warmth of this yellow sun of Florencethat has been restoring the text of my own young romance; the thinghas been lying before me today as a clear, fresh page. There havebeen moments during the last ten years when I have felt so portentouslyold, so fagged and finished, that I should have taken as a very badjoke any intimation that this present sense of juvenility was stillin store for me. It won’t last, at any rate; so I had bettermake the best of it. But I confess it surprises me. I haveled too serious a life; but that perhaps, after all, preserves one’syouth. At all events, I have travelled too far, I have workedtoo hard, I have lived in brutal climates and associated with tiresomepeople. When a man has reached his fifty-second year without being,materially, the worse for wear—when he has fair health, a fairfortune, a tidy conscience and a complete exemption from embarrassingrelatives—I suppose he is bound, in delicacy, to write himselfhappy. But I confess I shirk this obligation. I have notbeen miserable; I won’t go so far as to say that—or at leastas to write it. But happiness—positive happiness—wouldhave been something different. I don’t know that it wouldhave been better, by all measurements—that it would have leftme better off at the present time. But it certainly would havemade this difference—that I should not have been reduced, in pursuitof pleasant images, to disinter a buried episode of more than a quarterof a century ago. I should have found entertainment more—whatshall I call it?—more contemporaneous. I should have hada wife and children, and I should not be in the way of making, as theFrench say, infidelities to the present. Of course it’sa great gain to have had an escape, not to have committed an act ofthumping folly; and I suppose that, whatever serious step one mighthave taken at twenty-five, after a struggle, and with a violent effort,and however one’s conduct might appear to be justified by events,there would always remain a certain element of regret; a certain senseof loss lurking in the sense of gain; a tendency to wonder, rather wishfully,what might have been. What might have been, in this case,would, without doubt, have been very sad, and what has been has beenvery cheerful and comfortable; but there are nevertheless two or threequestions I might ask myself. Why, for instance, have I nevermarried—why have I never been able to care for any woman as Icared for that one? Ah, why are the mountains blue and why isthe sunshine warm? Happiness mitigated by impertinent conjectures—that’sabout my ticket.
6th.—I knew it wouldn’t last; it’s already passingaway. But I have spent a delightful day; I have been strollingall over the place. Everything reminds me of something else, andyet of itself at the same time; my imagination makes a great circuitand comes back to the starting-point. T