Excerpt from The Catanese, or the Real and the Ideal

The scene was rich in picturesque beauty, while around upon the shore, at various distances were grouped the fisher men's huts, most of them formed of plastered mud and clay dried hard by the beams of the sun, with here and there one of rather superior appearance, by the side of which a few bushes or a graceful tree relieved the sameness of the sandy soil. Even these little improvements bespoke some degree of refinement, the pure offspring of nature, as the poor have little time to waste in mere ornament, and are far more oc cupied with the rugged realities of life, than with the graceful effect of a clustering vine, or the pleasant foliage of a noble tree. In the dark, cheerless streets of the crowded city the carefully treasured box of flowering plants that fills the window ledge, so placed as to catch every scanty gleam of sunshine, insensibly reminds us of a delicate taste, that throw ing aside cheap and gaudy ornament, substitutes these children of Heaven, that their pure and modest beauty may perchance throw a cheerful ray on the comfortless chamber of the invalid. We look for a degree of refinement in that squalid abode from the simple circumstance - a refinement that shrinks from association with the coarse, unsympathizing characters around. The fishermen of Catania perhaps never associated these unwonted objects with ideas of the pure and beautiful; perchance regarded them but as the sea-weed which they flung from their nets, without once admiring the delicate and changing tints - murmuring that no heavier bur den rewarded their toil.

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