Long time about the world the daughter cast. 
  Up in fair Italy is a lake that laves
    The feet of Alps that lock in Germany: 
    Benaco called.... 
  And Peschiera in strong harness sits
    To front the Brescians and the Bergamasques,
    Where one down-curving shore the other meets. 
  There all the gathered waters outward flow
    That may not in Benaco’s bosom rest,
    And down through, pastures green a river go.

* * * * *

    As far as to Governo, where, its quest
  Ended at last, it falls into me Po. 
    But far it has not sought before a plain
    It finds and floods, out-creeping wide and slow
  To be the steaming summer’s offense and bane. 
    Here passing by, the fierce, unfriendly maid
    Saw land in the middle of the sullen main,
  Wild and unpeopled, and here, unafraid
    Of human neighborhood, she made her lair,
    Rested, and with her menials wrought her trade,
  And lived, and left her empty body there. 
    Then the sparse people that were scattered near
    Gathered upon that island, everywhere
  Compassed about with swamps and kept from fear. 
    They built their city above the witch’s grave,
    And for her sake that first made dwelling there
  The name of Mantua to their city gave.

To this account of the first settlement of Mantua Virgil adds a warning to his charge to distrust all other histories of the city’s foundation; and Dante is so thoroughly persuaded of its truth, that he declares all other histories shall be to him as so many lifeless embers.  Nevertheless, divers chroniclers of Mantua reject the tradition here given as fabulous; and the carefullest and most ruthless of these traces the city’s origin, not to the unfriendly maid, but to the Etruscan King Ocno, fixing the precise date of its foundation at thirty years before the Trojan war, one thousand five hundred and thirty-nine years after the creation of the world, three hundred years before Rome, and nine hundred and fifteen years after the flood, while Abimelech was judge in Israel.  “And whoever,” says the compiler of the “Flower of the Mantuan Chroniclers” (it is a very dry and musty flower, indeed), citing doughty authorities for all his facts and figures,—­“whoever wishes to understand this more curiously, let him read the said authors, and he will be satisfied.”

But I am as little disposed to unsettle the reader’s faith in the Virgilian tradition, as to part with my own; and I therefore uncandidly hold back the names of the authorities cited.  This tradition was in fact the only thing concerning Mantuan history present to my thoughts as I rode toward the city, one afternoon of a pleasant Lombard spring; and when I came in sight of the ancient hold of sorcery, with the languid waters of its lagoons lying sick at its feet, I recognized at least the topographical truth of Virgil’s description.  But old and mighty