rit informed all the beauty and translated its mystic language into
human words? The permanency of nature and the vanity of human life
seemed here to acquire new significance.

The spot on which I sat commands one of the finest views of Rome and
the surrounding country. Down below to the left is the enormous group
of buildings connected with St Peter's and the Vatican, whose yellow
travertine glows in the afternoon sun like dead gold. Beyond rise the
steep green slopes of Monte Mario, with vineyards and olive-groves
nestling in its warm folds, crowned with the Villa Mellini beside the
"Turner pine," a familiar object in many of the great artist's
pictures. Stretching away in the direction of the old diligence road
from Florence is a succession of gentle ridges and bluffs of volcanic
rock covered with brushwood, among which you can trace the bold
headland of the citadel of Fidenae, and the green lonely site of
Antemnae, and the plateau on which are the scanty remains of the almost
mythical Etruscan city of Veii, the Troy of Italy. The view in this
direction is bounded by the advanced guard of the Sabine range, the
blue peak of Soracte looking, as Lord Byron graphically says, like the
crest of a billow about to break. In front, at your feet, is the city,
broken up into the most picturesque masses by the irregularity of the
ground; here and there a brighter light glistening on some stately
campanile or cupola, and flashing back from the graceful columns of
Trajan and Antonine. The Tiber flows between you and that wilderness
of reddish-brown roofs cleaving the city in twain. For a brief space
you see it on both sides of the Bridge of Hadrian, overlooked by the
gloomy mass of the Castle of St. Angelo, and then it hides itself
under the shadow of the Aventine Hill, and at last emerges beyond the
walls, to pursue its desolate way to the sea through one of the
saddest tracts of country in all the world. Away to the right, where
the mass of modern buildings ceases, the great shattered circle of the
Colosseum stands up against the sky, indicating by its presence where
lie, unseen from this point of view, the ruins of the palaces of the
Caesars and the Forum. Beyond the city stretches away the undulating
bosom of the Campagna, bathed in a misty azure light; bridged over by
the weird, endless arches of the Claudian aqueduct, throwing long
shadows before them in the westering sun. Worthy framework for such a
picture, the noble semic