and tufty, which open out and close fanlike in long
green avenues, each with its prismatic star of shivering light, as we
race through in the motor. A place where laurel-crowned poets in white
should wander with verse-like monotony upon the soft green turf.
Beyond, a band of lilac sere field, a band of blue sea; and between
the fringe of the compact round pines, the sun setting, its light
shivering diamond-like among the needles.

_February_ 25.

II.

A WALK AT DUSK.

Yesterday went, in a band at dusk, for a melancholy stroll through the
back streets. The Piranesi effect: yards of palaces, Marescotti,
Massimo alle Colonne, the staircase of Palazzo Altieri. These immense
grass-grown yards, with dreary closed windows all round, fountains
alone breaking their silence, look like a bit of provincial life, of
some tiny mountain town, enclosed in Rome. At Monte Giordano (Palazzo
Gabbrielli) it becomes the walled Umbrian town, castellated. In this
gloom, this sadness of icy evening sky between the high roofs, and
after the appalling sadness of a church, squalid, dark, a few people
kneeling, and the sacristan extinguishing the altars after a
Benediction (every grief, one would think, laid down on that floor
only to pick up a weight of the grief of others); after this there was
something sweet and country-like in the splash of the fountains at
Monte Giordano; the water bringing from the free mountains into this
gloomy city; and to me the recollection of a Tuscan villa, of peace
and serenity.

_February_ 27.

III.

TUSCULUM.

To Tusculum to-day with Maria and Du B. This is the place I carried
away in my thoughts and wishes, a mere rapidly passed steep grassy
hill, topped with pines and leafless chestnuts, from that motor drive
last year round by Monte Compatri and Grottaferrata. The steepness and
bareness of that great grass slope was heightened to-day by the
tremendous gales blowing in a cloudless sky; one felt as if it were
that wind which had kept the place so inaccessible, so virgin of trees
and people, nay, had made the grass slippery, and polished the black
basalt slabs of the path. And that wind struggling upwards against it
in the sunshine, with the great rose and lilac sere hills opposite,
the pale blond valley behind, seemed to clear the soul also of all
rank vegetation, of all thoughts and feelings thick and muddy and
leaden; to sweep away all that gets between the reality of things and
ones