Greeks could make them into chaplets—­how Lycidas wore his crown of white violets[5] lying by the fireside elbow-deep in withered asphodel, watching the chestnuts in the embers, and softly drinking deep healths to Ageanax far off upon the waves.  It is impossible to go wrong in these valleys.  They are cultivated to the height of about five hundred feet above the sea, in terraces laboriously built up with walls, earthed and manured, and irrigated by means of tanks and aqueducts.  Above this level, where the virgin soil has not been yet reclaimed, or where the winds of winter bring down freezing currents from the mountains through a gap or gully of the lower hills, a tangled growth of heaths and arbutus, and pines, and rosemarys, and myrtles, continue the vegetation, till it finally ends in bare grey rocks and peaks some thousand feet in height.  Far above all signs of cultivation on these arid peaks, you still may see villages and ruined castles, built centuries ago for a protection from the Moorish pirates.  To these mountain fastnesses the people of the coast retreated when they descried the sails of their foes on the horizon.  In Mentone, not very long ago, old men might be seen who in their youth were said to have been taken captive by the Moors; and many Arabic words have found their way into the patois of the people.

There is something strangely fascinating in the sight of these ruins on the burning rocks, with their black sentinel cypresses, immensely tall and far away.  Long years and rain and sunlight have made these castellated eyries one with their native stone.  It is hard to trace in their foundations where Nature’s workmanship ends and where man’s begins.  What strange sights the mountain villagers must see!  The vast blue plain of the unfurrowed deep, the fairy range of Corsica hung midway between the sea and sky at dawn or sunset, the stars so close above their heads, the deep dew-sprinkled valleys, the green pines!  On penetrating into one of these hill-fortresses, you find that it is a whole village, with a church and castle and piazza, some few feet square, huddled together on a narrow platform.  We met one day three magnates of Gorbio taking a morning stroll backwards and forwards, up and down their tiny square.  Vehemently gesticulating, loudly chattering, they talked as though they had not seen each other for ten years, and were but just unloading their budgets of accumulated news.  Yet these three men probably had lived, eaten, drunk, and talked together from the cradle to that hour:  so true it is that use and custom quicken all our powers, especially of gossiping and scandal-mongering.  S. Agnese is the highest and most notable of all these villages.  The cold and heat upon its absolutely barren rock must be alike intolerable.  In appearance it is not unlike the Etruscan towns of Central Italy; but there is something, of course, far more imposing in the immense antiquity and the historical associations of a Narni, a Fiesole,