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and immutable scene! It is like the contrast between the dappled sky of cheerful morning, when eye and ear are on the alert to catch any transitory gleam and to welcome each distant echo, and the awful immovable stillness of noon, when Pan is sleeping, and will be wroth if he is awakened, when the whole life of nature is still, and we look down shuddering into its unfathomable depth! Standing on the heights of Tusculum, or on the sacred pavement of the Latian Jupiter, every glance we send forth into the objects around us, returns laden with matter to cherish forebodings and despondencies. The ruins speak of an immovable past, the teeming growths which mantle them, the abundant source of future malaria, of a destructive future, and _activity_, the only spell by which we can evoke the cheerful spirit of the present--activity within us, or around us, there is _none_. What wonder if we now feel as though the weight of all those grim ruins had been heaved from off the mind, and left it buoyant and eager to greet the present as though we were but the creatures of it! Whatever denizen of the vegetable or the animal kingdom we were familiar with in Italy and miss hereabouts, is replaced by some more cheerful race. What a _variety_ of trees! and how various their _shades_ of green! Though not equal to thy pines, Pamfili, and to thy fair cypresses, Borghese, whose feet lie cushioned in crocuses and anemones, yet a fine tree is the poplar; and yonder, extending for a couple of miles, is an avenue of their stateliest masts. The leaves of those nearest to us are put into a tremulous movement by a breeze too feeble for our skins to feel it; and as the rustling foliage from above gently _purrs_ as instinct with life from _within_, this peculiar sound comes back to us like a voice we have heard and forgotten. No "marble wilderness" or olive-darkened upland, no dilapidated "Osterie," famine within doors and fever without, here press desolation into the service of the picturesque. Neither here have we those huge masses of arched brickwork, consolidated with Roman cement, pierced by wild fig-trees, crowned with pink valerians or acanthus, and giving issue to companies of those gloomy funeral-paced insects of the _Melasome_ family, (the Avis, the Pimelia, and the Blaps,) whose dress is _deep mourning_, and whose favoured haunt is the tomb! But in their place, a richly endowed, thickly inhabited plain, filled with cottages and their gardens,
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