Ravenna is so remote from the route of general travel in Italy, that I am certain you can have no late news from there, nor can I bring you anything much later than the sixth century.  Yet, if you were to see Ravenna, you would say that that is late enough.  I am surprised that a city which contains the most interesting early Christian churches and mosaics, is the richest in undisturbed specimens of early Christian art, and contains the only monuments of Roman emperors still in their original positions, should be so seldom visited.  Ravenna has been dead for some centuries; and because nobody has cared to bury it, its ancient monuments are yet above ground.  Grass grows in its wide streets, and its houses stand in a sleepy, vacant contemplation of each other:  the wind must like to mourn about its silent squares.  The waves of the Adriatic once brought the commerce of the East to its wharves; but the deposits of the Po and the tides have, in process of time, made it an inland town, and the sea is four miles away.

In the time of Augustus, Ravenna was a favorite Roman port and harbor for fleets of war and merchandise.  There Theodoric, the great king of the Goths, set up his palace, and there is his enormous mausoleum.  As early as A. D. 44 it became an episcopal see, with St. Apollinaris, a disciple of St. Peter, for its bishop.  There some of the later Roman emperors fixed their residences, and there they repose.  In and about it revolved the adventurous life of Galla Placidia, a woman of considerable talent and no principle, the daughter of Theodosius (the great Theodosius, who subdued the Arian heresy, the first emperor baptized in the true faith of the Trinity, the last who had a spark of genius), the sister of one emperor, and the mother of another,—­twice a slave, once a queen, and once an empress; and she, too, rests there in the great mausoleum builded for her.  There, also, lies Dante, in his tomb “by the upbraiding shore;” rejected once of ungrateful Florence, and forever after passionately longed for.  There, in one of the earliest Christian churches in existence, are the fine mosaics of the Emperor Justinian and Theodora, the handsome courtesan whom he raised to the dignity and luxury of an empress on his throne in Constantinople.  There is the famous forest of pines, stretching—­unbroken twenty miles down the coast to Rimini, in whose cool and breezy glades Dante and Boccaccio walked and meditated, which Dryden has commemorated, and Byron has invested with the fascination of his genius; and under the whispering boughs of which moved the glittering cavalcade which fetched the bride to Rimini,—­the fair Francesca, whose sinful confession Dante heard in hell.