or the summit, with the exception of a broken wall and windows supposed to belong to the end of the sixteenth century.  The ancient castle, with its triple circuit of walls, enclosing barracks for the garrison, lodgings for the lord and his retainers, a stately church, a sumptuous monastery, storehouses, stables, workshops, and all the various buildings of a fortified stronghold, have utterly disappeared.  The very passage of approach cannot be ascertained; for it is doubtful whether the present irregular path that scales the western face of the rock be really the remains of some old staircase, corresponding to that by which Mont S. Michel in Normandy is ascended.  One thing is tolerably certain—­that the three walls of which we hear so much from the chroniclers, and which played so picturesque a part in the drama of Henry IV.’s penance, surrounded the cliff at its base, and embraced a large acreage of ground.  The citadel itself must have been but the acropolis or keep of an extensive fortress.

There has been plenty of time since the year 1255, when the people of Reggio sacked and destroyed Canossa, for Nature to resume her undisputed sway by obliterating the handiwork of men; and at present Nature forms the chief charm of Canossa.  Lying one afternoon of May on the crisp short grass at the edge of a precipice purple with iris in full blossom, I surveyed, from what were once the battlements of Matilda’s castle, a prospect than which there is none more spirit-stirring by reason of its beauty and its manifold associations in Europe.  The lower castle-crowded hills have sunk.  Reggio lies at our feet, shut in between the crests of Monte Carboniano and Monte delle Celle.  Beyond Reggio stretches Lombardy—­the fairest and most memorable battlefield of nations, the richest and most highly cultivated garden of civilised industry.  Nearly all the Lombard cities may be seen, some of them faint like bluish films of vapour, some clear with dome and spire.  There is Modena and her Ghirlandina.  Carpi, Parma, Mirandola, Verona, Mantua, lie well defined and russet on the flat green map; and there flashes a bend of lordly Po; and there the Euganeans rise like islands, telling us where Padua and Ferrara nestle in the amethystine haze Beyond and above all to the northward sweep the Alps, tossing their silvery crests up into the cloudless sky from the violet mist that girds their flanks and drowns their basements.  Monte Adamello and the Ortler, the cleft of the Brenner, and the sharp peaks of the Venetian Alps are all distinctly visible.  An eagle flying straight from our eyrie might traverse Lombardy and light among the snow-fields of the Valtelline between sunrise and sundown.  Nor is the prospect tame to southward.  Here the Apennines roll, billow above billow, in majestic desolation, soaring to snow summits in the Pellegrino region.  As our eye attempts to thread that labyrinth of hill and vale, we tell ourselves that those roads wind to Tuscany, and yonder stretches Garfagnana, where Ariosto lived and mused in honourable exile from the world he loved.