suggestively than if their historical associations were fully known.  The mystic light from a sky which over this place seems ever to brood with a sad smile more touching than tears, falls upon the endless arches of the Claudian Aqueduct that remind one, as Ruskin has finely said, of a funeral procession departing from a nation’s grave.  The afternoon sun paints them with ruby splendours, and gleams vividly upon the picturesque vegetation which a thousand springs have sown upon their crumbling sides.  They lead the eye on to the Alban Hills, which form on the horizon a fitting frame to the great picture, tender-toned, with delicate pearly and purple shadows clothing every cliff and hollow, like “harmonies of music turned to shape.”

I shall never forget my first walk over this enchanted ground.  The day was warm and bright, though a little breeze, like the murmur of a child’s sleep, occasionally stirred the languid calm.  April had just come in; but in this Southern clime spring, having no storms or frosts to fear, lingers in a strange way and unfolds, with slow, patient tenderness, her beauties; not like our Northern spring, which rushes to verdure and bloom as soon as the winter snows have disappeared.  And hence, though the few trees along the road had only put forth their first leaves, tender and flaccid as butterfly’s wings, the grass was ready to be cut down and was thickly starred with wild flowers.  Horace of old said that one could not travel rapidly along the Appian Way, on account of the number and variety of its objects of interest; and the same remark holds good at the present day.  It would take months to go over in detail all its wonderful relics of the past.  At every step you are arrested by something that opens up a fascinating vista into the old family life of the imperial city.  At every step you “set your foot upon some reverend history.”  From morning to sunset I lingered on this haunted path, and tried to enter into sympathy with old-world sorrows that have left behind no chronicles save these silent stones.  It is indeed a path sacred to meditation!  One has there an overpowering sense of waste—­a depressing feeling of vanity.  On every side are innumerable tokens of a vast expenditure of human toil, and love, and sorrow; and it seems as if it had been all thrown away.  For two miles and a half from the tomb of Caecilia Metella I counted fifty-three tombs on the right and forty-eight on the left.  The margin of the road on either side is strewn with fragments of hewn marble, travertine, and peperino.  Broken tablets, retaining a few letters of the epitaphs of the dead; mutilated statues and alto-relievos; drums and capitals of pillars; a hand or a foot, or a fold of marble drapery,—­every form and variety of sculpture, the mere crumbs that had fallen from a profuse feast of artistic beauty, which nobody considers it worth while to pick up, lie mouldering among the grass.  At frequent intervals, facing the road, you see with mournful interest the exposed