Thoreau writes in his journal:

  He [Goethe] jogs along at a snail’s pace, but ever mindful that the earth is beneath and the heavens above him. His Italy is not merely the fatherland of lazzaroni and maccaroui but a solid turf-clad soil, daily illumined by a genial sun and nightly gleaming in the still moonshine,—to say nothing of the frequent showers which are so faithfully recorded. That sail to Palermo was literally a plowing through of the waves from Naples to Trinacria,—the sky overhead, and the sea, with its isles on either hand.