[Illustration:  Castle at ostia.]

The fairy-tale went on next day, when, after wending our way through the dirty, crooked little streets, we crossed a courtyard and descended a long subterranean stairway to emerge on a magnificent terrace with a heavy marble balustrade, whence flights of steps led down to lower grades, amid statues, urns, vases, fountains, reservoirs, camellias in bloom mingled with laurel and myrtle and laurustinums covered with creamy flowers, cypresses tall as cathedral spires, ilex avenues, and broad straight walks between huge walls of box:  the whole space was filled with the song of nightingales, the tinkle of falling water, with whiffs of aromatic shrubs and the breath of hidden roses and violets;—­a princely garden, a royal pleasaunce, but in exquisite disorder and neglect; the shrubbery too thick and straggling, the flowers straying beyond their rightful boundaries, the statues stained and moss-grown, the balusters entangled in clinging luxuriance, the fountains dripping through fern and maiden-hair—­Nature supreme, as one always sees her in this land of Art.  It was the Villa d’Este, famous these three hundred years for its fountains and cypresses.  Nor did the wonder cease when we forsook this enchanting spot for the mountain-road which overhangs the great ravine.  Opposite, backed by mountains, rose the crags topped by the clustering town and all its towers, arches, niches, battlements, bridges, long lines of classic ruins, and on the edge of the abyss the perfect little temple of the Sibyl; rushing down from everywhere the waterfalls, one great column plunging at the head of the gorge, and countless frolic streams, the cascatelle, leaping and dancing from rock to rock through mist and rainbow and extravagance of emerald moss and herbage, down among sea-green, silvery olives, finally sliding away, between softer foliage and verdure, through the valley into the plain—­the immense azure plain, with its grand symphonic harmonies of form and color.  O land of dreams fulfilled, of satisfied longing! when across these thousands of miles I recall your entrancing charm, your unimaginable beauty, I sometimes wonder if you were not a dream, if you have any place in this real existence, this lower earth:  are you still delighting other eyes with the rapture of your loveliness, or were you only an illusion, a vision, which vanishes like the glow of sunset or “golden exhalations of the dawn “?

The Campagna has one more aspect, different from all the rest, where the Tiber, weary with his long wanderings, rolls lazily to the sea.  It is a dreary waste of swamp and sandhill and scrub growth, but with a forlorn beauty of its own, and the beauty of color, never absent in Italy.  The tall, coarse grass and reeds pass through a series of vivid tones, culminating in tawny gold and deep orange, against which the silver-fretted violet blue-green of the Mediterranean assumes a magical