long-horned grey oxen; a bull-calf canters among them. Between us and St. Peter's is a dell full of scrub ilex; walls also, full of valerian and that grey myrrh-like weed.

From that little height we face a tremendous black storm, against which all the Sabine and Alban hills flash in the low sunlight, above the green Campagna pale like a strip of sea.

May 12.

SPRING 1897.

I.

RETURN AT MIDNIGHT.

Driving from the station at midnight, the immensity of everything, gigantic proportions of silent palaces and closed churches. Passing in front of the Quirinal, the colossal Dioscuri with their horses, the fountain flowing down and spurting upwards between them, white under the electric light, against the deep blue darkness.

Even the incredible huge vulgarity of modern things, advertisements, yards long at the street corners under the gas, and immense rows of jerry-built houses, somehow help to make up the impression of Rome as a theatre of the ages: a gigantic stage, splendidly impressive to eye and fancy, where Time has strutted and ranted, and ever will continue.

At night particularly one feels the Piranesi grandeur, but also the Callot picturesqueness which are secondary qualities of Rome. As a whole the town belongs mainly to the shabby and magnificent seventeenth century. Those hundreds of architecturally worthless Jesuit churches are not, as we are apt stupidly to say, absurd or meaningless, but quite the contrary; admirably suited to their place and function among ruins and vagueness. The beggars and loafers, the inconceivable squalor and lousiness, are also, in this sense, in their rights.

March 24.

II.

VILLA MADAMA.

The great empty, unfinished, hulk, very grand and with delicate details, stranded like the ark on Ararat on its hillside of brushwood and market-garden, seems to sum up, in a shape only a little more splendid than usual, the story told on all sides. For on all sides there are great mouldering unfinished villas, barrocco casinos, even fifteenth-century small palaces, deserted among the fields; and everywhere monumental gateways leading to nothing. Their story is that of the unceasing enterprise of pope after pope, and cardinal after cardinal against the inexorable climate of Rome. Each shortlived generation of old men, come to Rome too late to learn, already accustomed to order about and to swagger, refusing to see the ruins left by its predecessors; insisting on having its way with those malarious hillocks and riversides; only to die like the rest, leaving another gaunt enclosure behind.

One of the fascinations of Rome is undoubtedly not its murderous quality as such, but the character of which that seems a part, the quality of being a living creature, with unbreakable habits and unanswerable reasons, making it massacre quite quietly, whatever came in its way.

Rome, as perhaps only Venice, is an organic city, almost a living being; its genius loci no allegory, but its own real self.

March.

III.

FROM VALMONTONE TO OLEVANO.

Valmontone, on the railway line to Naples, to which we bicycled back from Segni—a savage village on a hill, pigs burrowing and fighting at its foot—and on its skirt a great stained Palazzo Farnese-like palace.

Crossing the low hills of the wide valley between the Alban and Sabine chains, magnificent bare mountains appear seated opposite, crystalline, almost gemlike; and splendid, almost crepuscular, colours in the valley even at noon: deep greens and purples, the pointed straw stacks replacing, as black accents, our Tuscan cypresses. Quantities of blue and white wind-flowers on the banks, and wine-coloured anemones under the thick ilex-like olives; and all round the splendid pale-blue chains of jagged and conical mountains. A population of tattered people and galled horses; much misery; a sort of more savage Umbrian landscape, and without Umbrian serenity; deserted, deserted roads. I am writing from the olive yard above the inn; the rugged little Olevano hanging, almost sliding, down the hillside opposite, black houses and yellow-lichened roofs.

Olevano March 28.

IV.

FROM OLEVANO TO SUBIACO.

Yesterday afternoon bicycled and walked from Olevano to Subiaco. A steep mile and a half up to the very crest of the mountains, and then down some sharp corners and one or two very precipitous zigzags, letting myself run down; the first time I have had such a sensation, a sensation largely of fear, partly of joy: a changing view in front, on the side—steeps of sere woods, great mountains, like jasper or some other stone that should be veined amethyst, a smell of freshness, whiffs of violets, at one point a small green lake deep, deep below (Stagno di Rojate); yet an annihilation of both space and time. It was better when Ch. Br. and I dismounted and walked down; the road cut out of the steep wooded hills; on the shady side trickling with water and delicious with moss, primroses, and violets among the sere chestnuts. Here and there a cherry-tree in the valley deep below, like a little puff of smoke. The sweetness of those mountain woods with the great bare lilac mountains all round!

A sharp zigzag, a swish over a bridge, where as one rather felt than saw the full green Anio dashing through rocks; and just at sunset we came upon Subiaco—rising violet, with its great pointing castle mound, from the green valley of water and budding poplars into a purple and fiery sky. Then in the dusk through the little town, where the bells were ringing.

Tivoli March 29.

V.

ACQUA MARCIA.

I sha'n't forget, on the long bleak road from Subiaco to Vicovaro, a violent dry wind against us, veiling all things in dust, a spring near Spiagge: a wide runnel of water spirting out of the travertine and running off into clear rills where the mules drink. The water they collect up here for the Acqua Marcia, whose aqueducts we see about, old arches and new; water, cold, infinitely pure, exquisite, one might say almost fragrant. It was such spirts from the rock, as well as the sight of pure mountain streams, which taught St. Francis his verse about Suor Acqua. St. Francis must have wandered in these fastnesses which (totally unlike the country between Segni and Olevano) are very Umbrian in character. There is a portrait of him, said to be by a contemporary monk, on a pilaster of one of the subterranean chapels of the Sacro Speco above Subiaco: blond, wide-eyed, the cowl drawn over his head.

Tivoli March 29.

VI.

THE SACRO SPECO.

The Sacro Speco was a very charming surprise. The series of little churches and chapels up and down flights of steps, vaulted and painted in Gothic style, with shrine lamps here and there, were quite open and empty. We walked into them, or rather into a crooked vestibule frescoed by some Umbrian, with no sudden transition from the splendid grove of ilexes, immense branches like beams overhead, from the great hillside of bluish-grey tufo, with only a few bitter herbs on it. The convent of the Sacro Speco is a half-fortified little place into which we could not penetrate. Only a surly monk, found with difficulty (another entered the chapels with a great bundle of wall-flowers and irises), took us into the microscopic garden under the convent