The South Downs are very good, and by making
believe very much I have sometimes been half able to fancy when
upon them that I might be on the Monte Generoso, but they are only
good as a quartet is good if one cannot get a symphony.
I think there are more wild-flowers upon the Monte Generoso than
upon any other that I know, and among them numbers of beautiful
wild narcissuses, as on the Monte Cenere. At the top of the Monte
Generoso, among the rocks that jut out from the herbage, there
grows - unless it has been all uprooted - the large yellow auricula,
and this I own to being my favourite mountain wild-flower. It is
the only flower which, I think, fairly beats cowslips. Here too I
heard, or thought I heard, the song of that most beautiful of all
bird songsters, the passero solitario, or solitary sparrow-if it is
a sparrow, which I should doubt.
Nobody knows what a bird can do in the way of song until he has
heard a passero solitario. I think they still have one at the
Hotel Mendrisio, but am not sure. I heard one there once, and can
only say that I shall ever remember it as the most beautiful
warbling that I ever heard come out of the throat of bird. All
other bird singing is loud, vulgar, and unsympathetic in
comparison. The bird itself is about as big as a starling, and is
of a dull blue colour.
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