The Argosy — page 293: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

268 A VISIT TO MARY COWDEN-CLARKE. By HELEN ZIMMERN. EXT to the sunshine of child smiles, and the music of child laughter, is there anything in life more charming and attractive than the society of the old who have kept their hearts unwrinkled ; and especially old people who have known intimately the best and finest minds of their day ; old people who can sing at threescore with the American poet George Calvert : ‘‘T am not old and will not be ; I daily grow, and joys are piled About my life.” Of such Mary Cowden-Clarke (née Mary Novello) is a rare and notable example, and I never availed myself of the proud privilege of visiting her without feeling that I was entering a sanctuary of which she was the priestess, keeping alive with sacred care the memories of great departed spirits. It is in Italy that Mrs. Cowden-Clarke has elected to spend the closing years of a busy and useful life: Italy, ‘‘ Europe’s Eden,” where the old, shipwrecked, and weary may find the rest they seek in vain, in the surging turbulent life of England or America; and it is in Genoa, one of Italy’s many fascinating spots, that the family Novello, returning in the second generation to their paternal home, have pitched their tent. Those who have not visited that proud, queenly city, self-styled Za Superba, ‘whose marble round the bosom of the sea its arm enclasps,” are probably weary of hearing its beauties praised ; while for those who know it well, ‘ that of which the heart is full, the mouth runeth over,” and they cannot cease from extolling its varied and luxurious beauty, its blue sweep of bay, its hills that girdle the city, its palaces, its orange groves and orange plantations. As for views, there is no city in Europe that I know which can compare with Genoa. Every house, every garret boasts a vista, It is in the fairest, and for views most fortunate point, that is situated the Villa Novello, standing, as it does, upon a promontory that juts out to sea, commanding, on the one side, the wide sweep of harbour, and the curving, graceful mountain-flanked coast, where bay threads itself on bay, far away down to Nice; and on the other, the Ligurian chain of hills, closed by Porto Fino’s sphinx-like rock, of ever varying amethystine hue, while at the back expands “the wide opaque blue breadth of sea without a break,” affording a feeling of immensity by the thought that here nothing intervenes ’twixt us and the far distant continent of Africa. One of those narrow, tortuous, cobble-stone paved vzcol/z, mere mule tracks, that thread between high stone walls, and jealously hide Gomicbooks.co m