XX.


Truly, I grow aged. I have no longer much delight in wine.

But then, no wine ever much rejoiced me save that of Italy. Wine-drinking
in England is, after all, only make-believe, a mere playing with an
exotic inspiration. Tennyson had his port, whereto clings a good old
tradition; sherris sack belongs to a nobler age; these drinks are not for
us. Let him who will, toy with dubious Bordeaux or Burgundy; to get good
of them, soul's good, you must be on the green side of thirty. Once or
twice they have plucked me from despair; I would not speak unkindly of
anything in cask or bottle which bears the great name of wine. But for
me it is a thing of days gone by. Never again shall I know the mellow
hour _cum regnat rosa, cum madent capilli_. Yet how it lives in memory!

"What call you this wine?" I asked of the temple-guardian at Paestum,
when he ministered to my thirst. "_Vino di Calabria_," he answered, and
what a glow in the name! There I drank it, seated against the column of
Poseidon's temple. There I drank it, my feet resting on acanthus, my
eyes wandering from sea to mountain, or peering at little shells niched
in the crumbling surface of the sacred stone. The autumn day declined; a
breeze of evening whispered about the forsaken shore; on the far summit
lay a long, still cloud, and its hue was that of my Calabrian wine.

How many such moments come back to me as my thoughts wander! Dim little
_trattorie_ in city byways, inns smelling of the sun in forgotten
valleys, on the mountain side, or by the tideless shore, where the grape
has given me of its blood, and made life a rapture. Who but the veriest