ent of Sion; beneath, in a
rudely inclosed square at the outskirts of the town, a still more
ancient Lombardic church raises its grey tower, a kind of esplanade
extending between it and the Episcopal palace, and laid out as a plot of
grass, intersected by gravel walks; but the grass, in strange sympathy
with the inhabitants, will not grow _as_ grass, but chokes itself with a
network of grey weeds, quite wonderful in its various expression of
thorny discontent and savageness; the blue flower of the borage, which
mingles with it in quantities, hardly interrupting its character, for
the violent black spots in the centre of its blue takes away the
tenderness of the flower, and it seems to have grown there in some
supernatural mockery of its old renown of being good against melancholy.
The rest of the herbage is chiefly composed of the dwarf mallow, the
wild succory, the wall-rocket, goose-foot, and milfoil;[105] plants,
nearly all of them, jagged in the leaf, broken and dimly clustered in
flower, haunters of waste ground and places of outcast refuse.

Beyond this plot of ground the Episcopal palace, a half-deserted,
barrack-like building, overlooks a _neglected vineyard_, of which the
clusters, black on the under side, snow-white on the other with
lime-dust, gather around them a melancholy hum of flies. Through the
arches of its trelliswork the avenue of the great valley is seen in
descending distance, enlarged with line beyond line of tufted foliage,
languid and rich, degenerating at last into leagues of grey Maremma,
wild with the thorn and the willow; on each side of it, sustaining
themselves in mighty slopes and unbroken reaches of colossal promontory,
the great mountains secede into supremacy through rosy depths of burning
air, and the crescents of snow gleam over their dim summits as--if there
could be Mourning, as once there was War, in Heaven--a line of waning
moons might be set for lamps along the sides of some sepulchral chamber
in the Infinite.

Sec. 32. I know not how far this universal grasp of the sorrowful spirit
might be relaxed if sincere energy were directed to amend the ways of
life of the Valaisan. But it has always appeared to me that there was,
even in more healthy mountain districts, a certain degree of inevitable
melancholy; nor could I ever escape from the feeling that here, where
chiefly the beauty of God's working was manifested to men, warning was
also given, and that to the full, of the endurin