“Whose mind is but the mind of his own eyes,
    He is a slave—­the meanest we can meet.”

2.—­Our journey to-day has been long, but delightfully diversified, and abounding in classical beauty and interest.  I scarce know what to say, now that I open my little book to record my own sensations:  they are so many, so various, so painful, so delicious—­my senses and my imagination have been so enchanted, my heart so very heavy—­where shall I begin?

In some of the scenes of to-day—­at Terracina, particularly, there was beauty beyond what I ever beheld or imagined:  the scenery of Switzerland is of a different character, and on a different scale:  it is beyond comparison grander, more gigantic, more overpowering, but it is not so poetical.  Switzerland is not Italy—­is not the enchanting south.  This soft balmy air, these myrtles, orange-groves, palm-trees; these cloudless skies, this bright blue sea, and sunny hills, all breathe of an enchanted land; “a land of Faery.”

Between Velletri and Terracina the road runs in one undeviating line through the Pontine Marshes.  The accounts we have of the baneful effects of the malaria here, and the absolute solitude, (not a human face or a human habitation intervening from one post-house to another,) invest the wild landscape with a frightful and peculiar character of desolation.  As for the mere exterior of the country, I have seen more wretched and sterile looking spots, (in France, for instance,) but none that so affected the imagination and the spirits.  On leaving the Pontine Marshes, we came almost suddenly upon the sunny and luxuriant region near Terracina:  here was the ancient city of Anxur; and the gothic ruins of the castle of Theodoric, which frown on the steep above, are contrasted with the delicate and Grecian proportions of the temple below.  All the country round is famed in classic and poetic lore.  The Promontory (once poetically the island) of Circe is still the Monte Circello:  here was the region of the Lestrygons, and the scene of part of the AEneid and Odyssey; and Corinne has superadded romantic and charming associations quite as delightful, and quite as true.

Antiquarians, who, like politicians, “seem to see the things that are not,” have placed all along this road, the sites of many a celebrated town and fane—­“making hue and cry after many a city which has run away, and by certain marks and tokens pursuing to find it:”  as some old author says so quaintly.  At every hundred yards, fragments of masonry are seen by the road-side; portions of brickwork, sometimes traced at the bottom of a dry ditch, or incorporated into a fence; sometimes peeping above the myrtle bushes on the wild hills, where the green lizards lie basking and glittering on them in thousands, and the stupid ferocious buffalo, with his fierce red eyes, rubs his hide and glares upon us as we pass.  No—­not the grandest monuments of Rome—­not the Coliseum itself,