It is like hearing Verdi after Wagner. The East has my real
love. I find that I cannot rave over a pink and white china
shepherdess when I have worshipped the Venus of Milo.
XIII
NAPLES
The point of view is always the pivot of recollection. How ought one
to remember a place? There are a dozen ways of enjoying Naples, and
twenty ways of being miserable in America. Or turn it the other way,
it makes no difference. It depends upon one's self and the state of
the spleen. Before I came to Europe I remember often to have been
disgusted with persons who recalled Germany by its beer and Spain by
its fleas, or those who said: "Cologne! Oh yes; I remember we got such
a good breakfast there."
Ah, ha! It is so easy to sniff when one is mooning in imagination over
cathedrals, but I have since taken back all those sniffs. I did not
realize then the misery of standing on one foot all the morning in
tombs, and on the other all the afternoon in museums, and then of
going home to sleep on an ironing-board. Now I, too, think gratefully
of the Bay of Naples as being near that good bed, and of the Pyramids
as being near the excellent table of Shepheard's.
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