Page:The Works of J. W. von Goethe, Volume 12.djvu/459

Rh Kniep has come down, quite happy and delighted, and has brought back with him two large sheets of drawing-paper, covered with the clearest outlines. Both will contribute to preserve in my mind a perpetual memory of these glorious days.

It must not be left unrecorded, that on this shore, and beneath the clearest sky, we looked around us, from a little balcony, and saw roses, and heard the nightingales. These we are told sing here during at least six months of the twelve.

2em The activity of the clever artist who accompanies me, and my own more desultory and feeble efforts, having now assured me the possession of well-selected sketches of the country and its most remarkable points (which, either in outline, or, if I like, in well-finished paintings, will be mine for ever), I yielded all the more to an impulse which has been daily growing in strength. I have felt an irresistible impulse to animate the glorious scenes by which I am surrounded,—the sea, the island, the heavens,—with appropriate poetical beings, and here, in and out of this locality, to finish a composition in a tone and spirit such as I have not yet produced. The clear sky, the smell of the sea, the halo which merges, as it were, into one, the sky, the headlands, and the sea,—all these afforded nourishment to my purpose; and whilst I wandered in those beautiful gardens, between blossoming hedges of oleander, and through arbours of fruit-bearing orange and citron trees, and between other trees and shrubs which were unknown to me, I felt the strange influence in the most agreeable way possible.

Convinced that for me there could be no better commentary on the "Odyssey" than even this very neighbourhood, I purchased a copy, and read it, after my own fashion, with incredible interest. But I was also excited by it to produce something of my own, which.