Further, on a gentle slope, is the tomb of “the wealthiest Roman’s wife,” familiar to every one through Childe Harold’s musings.  It is a round, massive tower, faced with large blocks of marble, and still bearing the name of Cecilia Metella.  One side is much ruined, and the top is overgrown with grass and wild bushes.  The wall is about thirty feet thick, so that but a small round space is left in the interior, which is open to the rain and filled will rubbish.  The echoes pronounced hollowly after us the name of the dead for whom it was built, but they could tell us nothing of her life’s history—­

    “How lived, how loved, how died she?”

I made a hurried drawing of it, and we then turned to the left, across the Campagna, to seek the grotto of Egeria.  Before us, across the brown plain, extended the Sabine Mountains; in the clear air the houses of Tivoli, twenty miles distant, were plainly visible.  The giant aqueduct stretched in a long line across the Campagna to the mountain of Albano, its broken and disjointed arches resembling the vertebrae of some mighty monster.  With the ruins of temples and tombs strewing the plain for miles around it, it might be called the spine to the skeleton of Rome.

We passed many ruins, made beautiful by the clinging ivy, and reached a solemn grove of ever-green oak, overlooking a secluded valley.  I was soon in the meadow, leaping ditches, rustling through cane-brakes, and climbing up to mossy arches to find out the fountain of Numa’s nymph; while my companion, who had less taste for the romantic, looked on complacently from the leeward side of the hill.  At length we found an arched vault in the hill-side, overhung with wild vines, and shaded in summer by umbrageous trees that grow on the soil above.  At the further end a stream of water gushed out from beneath a broken statue, and an aperture in the wall revealed a dark cavern behind.  This, then, was “Egeria’s grot.”  The ground was trampled by the feet of cattle, and the taste of the water was anything but pleasant.  But it was not for Numa and his nymph alone, that I sought it so ardently.  The sunbeam of another mind lingers on the spot.  See how it gilds the ruined and neglected fount!

    “The mosses of thy fountain still are sprinkled
      With thine Elysian water-drops; the face
    Of thy cave-guarded spring, with years unwrinkled,
      Reflects the meek-eyed genius of the place,
    Whose wild, green margin, now no more erase
      Art’s works; no more its sparkling waters sleep,
    Prisoned in marble; bubbling from the base
      Of the cleft statue, with a gentle leap,
    The rill runs o’er, and ’round, fern, flowers and ivy creep,
      Fantastically tangled.”

I tried to creep into the grotto, but it was unpleasantly dark, and no nymph appeared to chase away the shadow with her lustrous eyes.  The whole hill is pierced by subterranean chambers and passages.