mount of country,
volcanic and isolated; they are a kind of living whole in themselves,
with their towns, woods, and those two deep lakes hidden in their
fastnesses. The most living range of hills, surely, out of which the
greatest life has spread, the vastest, perhaps, in the world.

Up there one looks not merely into space unlimited, but into time.
What a strange country this Roman one! How different from the rest of
Italy; this, with its great plain, its isolated groups of hills, its
disdain of river-valley and gorge; a country set aside for different
destinies.

And yet I own that what these hills represent most to me is the
keenness of the air, the sweetness of those straight-boled, pinkish,
leafless woods, the freshness of sprouting grass and flowers.

_March_ 20.

IV.

A RIVER GOD.

We have been bicycling these two days in the campagna; sunny, windy
days, the hills faint in the general blueness. About three miles along
the Via Ardeatina we alighted and sat on the grass in a little valley.
A little valley between two low grass hills; a stream, a few reeds,
two or three scant trees in bud, and the usual fences, leading up to
the mountain, framed in, with its white towns, between the green
slopes. Grass still short and dry; larks, invisible, singing; a flock
of sheep going along with shepherds stopping to set the new-born,
tottering lambs to suck.

At the valley's mouth, over a wide horse-trough where a donkey cart
was watering, a little recumbent river god, rudely carved and much
time-stained.

_March_ 16.

V.

THE PANTHEON.

A bright day of iciest tramontana, cutting you in two in the square,
under the colonnades, and in the narrow chink-opening of the great
green bronze doors.

Almost entirely empty, that great round place, the light, the cold
haunting its grey dome. At the high-altar some priests in purple; the
Crucifix and pictures veiled in violet silk. And in the organ loft,
buttoned up in great coats, five wretched musicians; not on high, but
in a sort of cage set down by the altar. Such singing! but an alto,
two tenors and a bass, as in Marcello's psalms. And, frightful as was
the performance, I was fascinated by their unaccompanied song:
something of long vague passages, and suspended cadences, fitting, in
its mixture of complexity and primitiveness, its very rudeness,
barbarousness of execution, into the great round bleak temple, with
the cold windy sky looking down its