isolated, silent
and respected. There you feel the terrific power of the Caesars, and the
opulence of a nation intoxicated with its royalty over the world."

So in the Appian Way, the road of tombs, the fascination of
desolation--a desolation there unbroken and undisfigured by modern
buildings or otherwise--she felt to the full. But whatever came under
her notice she looked on with the eye of the poet and artist, not of the
archaeologist, and approved or disapproved or passed over it accordingly.

The beauties of nature, at Tivoli and Frascati, appealed much more
surely to her sympathies. But of certain sites in the Campagna much
vaunted by tourists and hand-books she remarks pertinently: "If you were
to pass this village" (Marino) "on the railway within a hundred miles of
Paris, you would not pay it the slightest attention." Such places had
their individuality, but she upheld that there is not a corner in the
universe, "however common-place it may appear, but has a character of
its own, unique in this world, for any one who is disposed to feel or
comprehend it." In one of her village tales a sagacious peasant
professes his profound contempt for the man who cannot like the place he
belongs to.

Neither the grottoes and cascades of Tivoli, the cypress and ilex
gardens of Frascati and Albano, nor the ruins of Tusculum, were ever so
pleasant to her eyes as the poplar-fringed banks of the Indre, the
corn-land sand hedgerows of Berry, and the rocky borders of the Creuse
at Crozant and Argenton. She had not ceased making fresh picturesque
discoveries in her own neighborhood. Of these she records an instance in
her pleasant _Promenades autour d'un village_, a lively sketch of a few
days' walking-tour on the banks of the Creuse, undertaken by herself and
some naturalist friends in June, 1857. In studying the interesting and
secluded village of Gargilesse, with its tenth-century church and crypt
with ancient frescoes, its simple and independent-minded population, in
following the course of a river whose natural wild beauties, equal to
those of the Wye, are as yet undisfigured here by railroad or the hand
of man, lingering on its banks full of summer flowers and butterflies,
exploring the castles of Chateaubrun and La Prugne au Pot, George Sand
is happier, more herself, more communicative than in Rome, "the museum
of the universe."

The years 1858 to 1861 show her to us in the fullest conservation of her
powers and in the hey