Among the Sabine Hills

THERE is not a day, and scarcely an hour, of the gentle Roman winter in which the substance of Virgil’s eloquent verse does not recur to the memory of an exile from austere New England. Every phase of light and shade, every change of wind and weather, is such that its like would be hailed at home as a harbinger of spring. The tramontana blows and blusters as if animated by a perverse intent to baffle the dazzling sunshine, but we never take it seriously. It is only a wind of March to us, boisterous because so full of wakeful vitality, with no fierce earnest lurking under its wanton play. Anon the sky darkens, and the scirocco sighs, and then we think of the April showers that bring forth May flowers, and are well content to feel the warm breath, and wait in the temporary shadow. Here, indeed, the May flowers are perennial. The brown grass of the sad Elysian fields outside the city is perpetually starred with daisies ; the pansies never fail from the garden beds, nor the monthly roses from the mossy wall. And here, precisely, lies the distinctive charm of the Roman landscape: in its profound urbanity in the midst of desolation ; in the way it seems to have of putting aside its own overpowering memories, that it may offer the stranger a smiling welcome ; in its faux air of vernal brightness and promise, suffusing the worn patrician lineaments, which tell so plainly, nevertheless, the tale of a life lived out and a destiny long accomplished, — of an artificial composure, never perhaps to be disturbed again before the final catastrophe.

The real spring, when it comes, is but a higher light, lifted by softest gradations from this gracious background. There is no sudden burst of life and blossom ; none of the astonishment and ecstasy of spring in more northern latitudes. The sentiment of mingled rapture and pain which is crowded into a few memorable days with us is here diffused and extended into the tender mood of many weeks; and we neither know nor care just when the almondtrees upon the Aventine became like puffs of thin white smoke, or the billows of jessamine boughs that crest the boundary of the Colonna gardens awoke from their short rest, and began feathering into light green spray.

It was on the 14th of March, about midway of this lingering dream of spring, that a few of us set forth from Rome for a pilgrimage among the Sabine Hills. We had various kinds of vows to pay in that storied region, — some pagan and some Christian; and of the make-up of our party, it may suffice to say that we were of that number which is described in the sententious language of Spain as company par excellence. A company of one, says the proverb, is no company at all,—“ Compañia di uno, compañia di ninguno,” — a company of two is divine, and a company of four is diabolic ; but “ Compañia di tres, compañia es,” and we occupied that safe mean between the joys of the souls above us and the pains of those below most fit for modest mortals.

The Campagna, in the early morning hour at which we crossed it for Tivoli, would have been exciting at any season ; how much more in this, its most perfect moment, when its level reaches were streaked with golden green, while the guardian hills yet held their violet hues, with the lark-songs ringing through the living blue, and the many-hued stars of the anemone shining at our feet! As we drew near the base of the Sabines, and prepared to begin our devious ascent through the immemorial olive-wood to Tivoli upon the mountain side, we were struck by the first of those exquisite contrasts of color which the presence of the olive in a landscape furnishes in such endless variety. Sometimes it is with the clear green of suntouched grass under the hoary boughs, sometimes with the rich brown of the upturned soil ; here it was with the changeful blush of the fruit-orchards at the foot of the mountain, —a beauteous cloud of every possible shade of pure pink, from the hardly tinged blossoms of the almond to the deep crimson of the apricot. Such were, no doubt, the of Horace’s time, which he so sweetly celebrates along with the “ ringing home of the nymph Albunea,” the “ plunging Anio,” and the “Tiburnian shades.” At any other time we should certainly be tempted to tarry awhile at Tivoli, among the strange grottoes and the bright cascades, in the old sibylline temple above the torrent, or the sombre yet sophisticated shades of the far-looking Villa d’Este. But now, since our pilgrimage is, first of all, a Horatian one, we care chiefly to remind ourselves, as we thread the narrow, picturesque streets of ancient Tibur, and come out upon the fine postroad leading upward among the hills, that this is the place where the genial and social poet spent much of the leisure of his latest years. He had prayed that he might do so, —

and his wish was fulfilled, but sadly, and with a difference, as human wishes are apt to be. Read over the letter to Celsus, the eighth in the first book of the Epistles. It is lightly and suavely worded, — he was too polite a correspondent to indulge in long-winded lamentations over personal griefs ; but what a confession it contains of failing powers and irremediable satiety ! “ If

Celsus Albinovanus inquires for me, O my Muse,” he says, in substance, “ you may tell him that, although I threaten all manner of fine things, I am not living either pleasantly or profitably. And this is by no means because the vines have been hurt by the hail, and the olives by the heat, nor because there is sickness among the cattle somewhere a long way off. It is because I am ill myself, yet rather of a mental than of any bodily ailment. Neither have I the slightest desire to hear what would be good for me. I shall offend my faithful physicians, I shall outrage the friends who are trying to make me shake off this deadly lassitude, because I am bound to do the harmful things, and avoid those which might possibly benefit me. I am as fickle as the wind. When I am at Rome I long for Tibur, and the moment I am at Tibur I shall be sighing for Rome.”

How natural and how painful ! But we will not mourn prematurely over the poet’s decline, seeing that our immediate destination is the Sabine farm, his favorite retreat in the heyday of youth and at the height of his literary celebrity and social success. Both as the gift of the generous Mæcenas, and for its own beauty of situation, Horace loved his little country-seat with an ardor which has made all the world love him. Every allusion which he makes to it is full of fond enthusiasm, and yet marked by his own unfailing good taste. He was not in the least a snob, and he had never desired a sumptuous place. It would have oppressed him with care, and a sense of too great obligation even to that free-handed donor.

For the little Sabine estate he could be gratefully thankful. He was entirely, and even exultingly, contented with its modest arrangements, and, so long as health and spirits were unshaken, quite sufficient to himself among them ; yet he triumphantly invited to its modest hospitalities the grandest company of his time, and we may be sure that his invitations were not slighted.

It would be strange, indeed, if the antiquaries had overlooked so likely a subject for contention as the site of that modest villa, which could hardly, in the nature of things, have been built in a sufficiently massive and costly style for even its foundations to have withstood the wear and tear of many centuries. Divers localities have, in fact, been thought to answer most of the conditions which Horace affectionately names, and the claims of each have been warmly supported. The artless criticism of the fifteenth century, as represented by Flavio Biondo in his Italia Illustrata, pitched upon Vaccone, twenty miles distant from Tivoli toward the Abruzzi, owing, doubtless, to the likeness of this name to that of Vacuna, near whose temple, a ruin already in his day, Horace had dated his letter to Aristius Fuscus: “ Hæc tibi dictabam post fanum putre Vacunæ.” ⁴

But Vacuna was the name of the Sabine goddess corresponding to the Roman Victoria, — Juno Victrix, — and at Rocca Giovine, or the Arx Junonis, a tiny hamlet clinging to a sharp hill peak, three miles from Vicovaro, there is an inscription which tells how Vespasian, who was born in the Sabine country, and brought up, no doubt, on traditions of the cult of Vacuna, restored the temple of Victory upon this spot. Vicovaro was the ancient Varia, whither the fine stout peasants, who constituted, as Horace tells us, his Sabine tenantry, used to carry the produce of the farm.

Accordingly, it was at Vicovaro, seven miles from Tivoli, that we left our carriage, and began the steep ascent to Rocca Giovine. There is only a bridlepath at present, which is being transformed into a carriage-road after so leisurely a fashion of engineering that we are as likely to see the end of it in this generation as of any contemporary geological change. Arrived at the Rock of Juno, we stop to quench our thirst at the fountain, which gushes into a rude stone basin in the centre of the uninviting little piazza; and broadarmed women stop, with their conchas half poised, to regard our invasion, while black-eyed babies multiply mysteriously at our feet, crying, in shrill chorus, the one intelligible word their infant lips can frame, “ Sordo ! ” Nothing could be more foreign to an AngloSaxon— or, to use the stronger Teutonic word, outlandish — than the aspect of this piazza and its inhabitants; nothing more homely and familiar than the country lane which leads out of it. It is for all the world like a cart-path across some well-wooded hill farm in New England. The way, on either side, we found bordered by a riotous tangle of sweet-brier and blackberry vines, just coming into leaf. The young grass underneath was full of spring blossoms, mostly of a vivid blue. There were violets, of course, and anemones, and yards of the periwinkle or ground myrtle. There were hepaticas, also, larger and deeper in color than the adventurous little blossoms we know so well ; and we noted, what is very curious, that the fine, downy fur on stem and calyx, so needful to the home hepatica as a protection against frost and snow, is here safely discarded, and the plant is nearly smooth. Here, too, relieving the prevailing azure, were occasional tufts of “ primrose pale,” and the first cyclamen of the season was discovered shooting above its mottled leaves. After a mile of rather rugged walking by this pleasant but always ascending path, we came upon the first spot which preserves, in its name, a reminiscence of the poet. “ E qui,” says the rather taciturn guide we had engaged at Vicovaro, “ il colle del Poetello,” —or Povatello, as he seems to say in his soft, slipshod utterance. It is only a grassy hillock, commanding a pleasing outlook, backward, upon Rocca Giovine, with its mediæval tower and sombre chapel ; upward, at the higher hills, the “ arduos Sahinos,” wooded in part, and partly open and terraced for orchard anil vine, of which the highest should be Horace’s Lucretilis; down, into the valley of the Licenza, which is the lisping Italian name for the Digentia of the poet:—

Mandela is now Bardella in Cantalupo, another high-perched mountain village, hidden from the poet’s hillock, hut only a few miles away. A second landmark, important for the identification of the villa site, is the lonely little chapel, embowered in ancient olivetrees, on the right of the path as you proceed, and only a few rods distant from the foot of the hill. The guide will tell you that this is the Madonna delle Case, and Muratori will tell you, or rather Anastasius, in the life of Pope Sylvester, that among the possessions deeded by the Emperor Constantine to the Church of St. Peter at Rome was a piece of property in the Sabine country, lying under Mount Lucretius, and known by the name of ad duas casas. Pausing in the silvery shadow of the olives to win breath after our climb, we can hear the joyous murmur of the unwearied fountain, which gushes out of a rock by the wayside, immediately beyond the chapel. And how should this be other than Horace’s

and his

since even at the present day the Digentia or Licenza is known simply as Il Rivo up to the point at which it receives this fountain’s tributary stream. Is it also the

of that sparkling ode which evert the most perfunctory student of Horace is pretty certain to remember ? Probably not, unless the poet re-christened his home rivulet after another of that name in his native country of Venusium, which he loved, we may believe as well as Virgil loved Mantua. One fancies that the ode in question may have been thrown off in some happy moment of revisiting, under specially gay and triumphal circumstances, the simple scenes of childhood, and that a genuine touch of the natural religion which binds us to our early years may have been concealed under its exultant salute and playful promise of a sacrifice on the morrow.

A hundred years ago, when the investigations of the Abbé Chapuy were supposed to have fixed the site of the Sabine villa two miles farther down the valley toward the modern town of Licenza, another source and affluent of the river was identified with Horace’s fountain. At that time also, — 1780, — a series of twelve plates illustrating the region was executed at Naples. They give us the Sabine landscape, combed, Curled, and conventionalized, after the fashion of the engraving of that day ; but the prominent features are there, of course, and the map or plan of the hillcountry, by which the plates are accompanied, is a sufficiently good guide to its localities to-day, except that the point marked Villa Horatii must be moved back toward Rocca Giovine to the artificial oblong plateau at which we are now arrived. It is a terrace of precisely the proper shape and size for the foundation of a small villa, perfectly regular, and raised some five or six feet above the roadway. It is under culture at present, surrounded by a low wattled hedge ; and a single stout laborer, one of Virgil’s own fortes coloni, was dropping seed of some sort into its freshly turned furrows. This, then, was the place. The view is broader than from the poet’s hillock, and more interesting. The town of Licenza is in plain view on the left; blue peaks of very distant mountains are seen upon the right. The stream of the Digentia is shrunken, at present, by the drouth of the almost cloudless winter just past, but it winds charmingly, and if its bed were full the valley would be perfect. Lucretilis and the lesser hills draw their skirts protectingly around the little terrace, and seem, with their budding boskage and fair, open slopes, a perfect storehouse of sunshine. Involuntarily, in our praises of the spot, we use the word amenity, — “ such a wonderful amenity of aspect,” — and not until we come to review the text of the odes in our inn, at night, do we perceive that we have made use of Horace’s very expression : —

Whether the word has lain overlooked in our memories ever since the remote period when we went to school, or whether we may indeed flatter ourselves with having selected the expression which is intrinsically fittest to depict the thing (and so, of course, the poet’s) may not be absolutely certain ; but we linger long over the various odes of invitation, and the pictures which they suggest: a summer dew-fall, for example, in this cosy hill solitude, rose light upon the mountain tops, long shadows in the valley. The goats, for whose protection Faunus is supposed to have forsaken the Arcadian mount, come trooping in single file down the declivity of Lucretilis. Slaves bearing a litter are mounting, with the ease of long practice, the pathway by which we have come. They deposit their burden in the court-yard of the vanished villa, and we need no introduction to the emerging figure. It is of a true Italian type, rather short, but active, and not yet too rotund. We recognize the fine complexion, of which the owner appears to have been rather vain ; the thickly-curling black hair, which will be white in the later days at Tibur ; the low, antique forehead and bright, dark, short-sighted eyes ; the varying charm of expression and boyish habit of bright speech and laughter, wdiose inevitable decline with advancing years the poet whimsically pleads as unfitting him for city society: —

The rustic household hurry in to welcome their easy-going master, and he has a friendly word for each and all. He has flung out his frank greeting to the bonos patres already, upon the way. And now orders are to be issued for such a banquet as the hills may afford, for company from Rome is presently to follow the lord of the little manor into his retreat. Mæcenas is coming, of whom the familia stands not a little in awe, and Virgil, perhaps, who is rather a favorite among them, because, in spite of his reserve and shyness, they somehow divine his dreamy sympathy with their own obscure lot. The household understands the joke perfectly when the command is given for a moderate supply of vile Sabinum; and so do we, after we have dined at Subiaco, and tasted the pale red vin du pays, beside which hard cider is a smooth and mellow beverage. There was plenty of Formian and Falernian to follow, in the olden time, we may be sure ; but What followed the Formian and Falernian, when hearts were lightened and tongues loosed ? “O noctes, cenæque deum ! ” What would we not give to know ?

Suddenly, as the pall of a mounting tempest is drawn over a glowing summer landscape, there falls upon our conjured vision of the Horatian feast a shadow from the fast-coming doom of Rome. The world of which the men who here unbent from ceremony formed so illustrious a part was literally a dying world, although they knew it not. The sun of its last day had arisen when the Augustan age began. Between the informal junketings here among the hills, or the move lavish orgies away in Roman or suburban villas, — the wines and garlands, the Lydias and Chloes, — the customs and courtesies and scandals and vanities and vices, the themes and theories and standards and anticipations of 720 u. c., — and that monastic age of which we are to see a famous monument upon the morrow, a gulf is fixed as deep and mysterious as that which divides one planet from another. The change from the world in which we now live to the new heavens and new earth of the apocalyptic dream, wherein shall dwell righteousness, will not be more radical, when it comes, than that which was actually accomplished in this quarter of the world between the life-time of Horace and that of St. Benedict, — only about five hundred years. We even ask ourselves and one another, as we bid good-by to the Sabine farm, and retrace our thoughtful steps along the blossoming mountain path to Vicovaro, whether this tremendous revolution and that of the evangelist’s vision may not, after all, have been one and the same; in which case the visible reign of the saints on earth (as of St. Benedict up yonder at the Sacro Speco) would have ended with the first Christian millennium, and we should literally be living in “ the last of the latter days.” How can a world be born again when it is old ? we say ; yet all around us are the startling proofs that the Roman world did die and was born again; and if one regeneration be possible, why not two? Be that as it may, we are crowning, in our route, the watershed between paganism and Christianity.

Nothing, meantime, could be more serene and beautiful outwardly than the scenery of our afternoon drive to Subiaco. The sun descended through a sky still absolutely cloudless, and all of that warm, gold-penetrated blue, which is the birthright of Italy. The air freshened a little, but only a little, as we passed into the lengthening shadows of the loftier hills. At every turn in the road new summits were disclosed, surmounted in most cases, as by finials, with some ancient piece of human handiwork, — a church, a convent, a machicolated tower, a town, whose tall huddled houses appeared all of one dun piece with the native rock, while the fashion of the foundations of its boundary walls carried us back to ante-Roman days.

is remembered and quoted out of the second Georgic. The description applies as well now as it can have done nineteen hundred years ago, and it is evident that his beloved Italy looked quite as old to Virgil as she does to us. As a matter of fact, however, he can never have seen either San Cosimato upon our left, or Saracinesco upon our right, — the last a very eyrie of a town, which has alighted twenty-five hundred feet above the Anio, and whose name still tells the story of its foundation by a colony of Saracens, a remnant of the army defeated in the ninth century by Berengarius, after they had laid waste the entire valley. It is said that many of the inhabitants of this apparently inaccessible hamlet bear Arabic names to this day, and that the added touch of orientalism in their looks makes them favorite models with the artists in Rome.

And so we skirt, in the clear twilight, the Costa sole, — for this is the name of the fine mountain range of which the peak of Saracinesco is an outpost; and when, at length, we cross the beautiful one-arched bridge, with its flanking tower, which forms the entrance to Subiaco, the stars are already pointing in the blue depths above the high-perched cathedral of Pius VI. and the palace, which, as abbot of the monastery in this place, he greatly enlarged and beautified.

In spite of the vile Sabinum already mentioned, we have only good words to say of the hospitalities of the Pernice inn, although perhaps the member of our party who affected donkeys would wish to insert a word of warning concerning the strange and penitential character of the saddles furnished there. We slept sweetly in clean linen, and early in the morning, in the always unshadowed weather, we set forth for the Benedictine mount, only regretting that we must anticipate by a week the saint’s real fête, which occurs on the 21st of March.

In all the world there are few more romantic prospects than that commanded by the noble modern bridge which springs across the Anio at a height of two hundred and fifty feet, just where the carefully graded path to the monastery diverges from the main road. Aquamarine where it runs quietly, but breaking, at every few paces, into laughter of dazzling foam, the river flashes through the deep gorge below, between the mountain of the Sacred Grot and Monte Carpineto, so called from the young hornbeam trees, whose light spring leafage swathes all its vast slopes as with a veil of golden gauze. Only a generation ago, they say, this hill was bleak and bare. It was one of the last victories won by the Benedictine monks, in the loving warfare which they waged for thirteen centuries with the wildness of nature hereabout, — the clothing of this barren tower with green. Their simple method, in this instance, was resolutely to exclude the goats from pasturage upon the hillside, and nature took care of the rest. High up in the gorges behind Carpineto were the sources which fed the three artificial lakes of Nero’s famous villa, from which the town derives its name. — Subiaco, Sublagueum. The dikes were carried away by a flood in the fifteenth century, and nothing is left of all the fabulous magnificence of the imperial seat but a row of mossy arches a little way above the bridge, — the remains, it is thought, of a nymphean which formerly overlooked one of the lakes. It was here, according to Tacitus, that the table of Nero was once struck by lightning and thrown down while he was at supper ; where, perhaps, for one lurid instant, even that besotted reveler saw and read clearly the handwriting upon the wall. So the last tatters of Roman imperialism flutter in the breeze beyond the chasm, while, on the hither side of the river, the beneficent work of the Benedictines is all intact as yet, although the brothers are banished from their peaceful home, and scattered far and wide. They have built along their special mountain-side a zigzag stair, two miles in length, of broad and easy degrees, with frequent seats for rest before quiet shrines, and widening occasionally into a sort of semicircular terrace, with an enchanting outlook, lifted like a tower upon some projecting spur, and firmly walled and buttressed. Beyond the first of the two monastic houses — which is dedicated to Santa Seholastica, the sister of St. Benedict, and which we leave to be visited on our return — we pass through a gateway, and into the dense and grateful shadow of a long avenue of ilex-trees, — “nemus nigrum,” “ umbra sacra.” We are still fain to fall back upon Virgil for the words which best describe the refreshment and protection which they offer. Emerging, we find ourselves close upon the two long stories of the original monastery, lifted upon a row of tall arches, and flattened, as it were, against the mountain-side, with tower-flanked portal, terraced garden, and Gothic windows (the oldest, it is claimed, in Italy), whose pictured casements, thrown wide to the bright vernal day, will presently afford us the finest of all our long views up and down the valley. The principal part of this curious building, as we see it now, dates from 1066, — the year of the Norman Conquest. It covers the grotto, or grottoes, of the blessed saint’s earliest retreat, and is fairly overhung by the projecting rock which the simply faithful still believe to have been miraculously held in place ever since he sought refuge here.

But what wonder that legend and rumor of miracle should hover and hum about the story of St. Benedict, like the bees around the rosemary and wallflowers in the sunny convent garden ? That story in its baldest form is more than marvelous. A young patrician of Spoleto, a mere boy, sent to Rome to study law near the end of the terrible fifth century ; winning without effort the prizes of the schools, and disregarding them ; sickened by the vices of the putrescent society about him, and ardently desiring a better country, flies to the secrecy of this cave in the wilderness, and actually passes here the stormy and egotistical years between fifteen and eighteen in solitude and meditation and strong crying to the unseen Father of the stricken world. An old family servant dogs the footsteps of the child, lingers about, begs for him, tries to ameliorate his hardships. An elder recluse sometimes lowers him food in a basket from the frowning edge above. His harsh novitiate accomplished, the youth comes forth, not twenty yet, not crazed, nor sickened either, but strengthened, enlightened, resolved, and armed with a lever which is to move the world. He comes forth to seize and transform the selfish monasticism of the indolent Fast into an institution fraught with health and wealth and blessing for the aftertime ; to bring the lives of thousands upon thousands of aimless men and helpless women under the wise restraints of that austere but not unkindly law, whose perfect operation has been said to fit it to be the study of kings ; to add to the stern, subjective vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience the broader obligation of labor, the inestimable privilege and delight of study. All that could be collected of the old-world lore was carefully transcribed and treasured in the Benedictine houses. The seeds of every art in which we now luxuriate — agriculture, architecture, music, painting, and sculpture —were fostered and propagated there; and we do actually owe to one Benedictine or another almost all that was earliest notable in the manifold creations of the modern mind. Surely the feet of the founder of their order were beautiful upon these barren mountains, and the voice of the torrent in the fruitful vale may well repeat the anthem, “ Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini! ”

The saint’s especial cave, the sagro speco par excellence, is but one of a series, the like of which abound in all the mountains hereabout. One of them is said to have been the seat of an oracle of Faunus in primeval times. All are now transformed into chapels, each with its altar and rude mural paintings, historical or devotional, some of which are executed upon the native rock. They are interesting chiefly for their extremely archaic character. Those in the chapel of St. Laurence bear the signature Conxolus pinxit and the date 1219. They are therefore older than Cimabue, who died in 1300, and tradition says that their author, Console, was, by birth, a Greek. We do not care much for the reclining, not to say sprawling, figure of St. Benedict, by Bernini, seen dimly among the shadows of the sacred cave behind the altar in his chapel, nor for the marble basket conveniently set upon a ledge hard by ; but we know well with what reverence these two palpable images will be regarded by the throngs who will come hither for the fête next week, and we revere their veneration. What does interest us extremely is the contemporary portrait of St. Francis of Assisi, who visited the monastery in 1223. Nothing could be stiffer, flatter, more childish, in the way of drawing ; and yet the thin face is winning, and wears even to the eye of sense something of that gentle, wistful, débonnaire, and yet rapt expression, inseparable from the ideal of the well-beloved saint. Another memento of St. Francis is to be found in the garden, where an inscription upon the wall, above a luxuriant rose-bed, records that here grew the thorns among which St. Benedict plunged in the agony of his conflict with sensual temptation ; which very thorntrees the pitying monk of Assisi, when he came, grafted with the roses that have never failed from the spot to this day.

We had been shown about the convent, and gallantly presented with bouquets of giroflées from the garden, by a highly good-humored, hut somewhat obtuse and irreverent young monk, — one of the half dozen suffered by the Italian government to remain as custodians of the place; and he now proceeded to expound for us, in fluent Italian-French, the series of pictures illustrating the life of St. Benedict, which also adorn the Subterranean church. So slightly was he penetrated by the spirit of the place that he even took a humorous view of the most touching scene in all monastic history, the parting of St. Benedict and Santa Scholastica. All the world knows the legend. The brother and the sister, who had imitated his self-devotion, had long been dwelling in their separate cloisters away at Monte Cassino, not very far apart, yet seldom indulging themselves in the joy of meeting. One night, at the close of one of his rare visits, when St. Benedict was about to bid his sister good-by, she, contrary to her patient custom, entreated him to remain ; and when he would not, she bowed her head upon her folded hands, and for the first time in many years of prayer she asked of Heaven a favor for herself, — that her brother, namely, might be hindered from leaving her. Even while she prayed, a furious tempest broke over the convent, accompanied by thunder, hail, and flood, and rendered his return impossible. So they supped together, and then passed the night in sweet, mystical communings and in prayer. With the dawn St. Benedict departed indeed; but two days later, when alone in his own cell, he saw as in a vision a white dove soaring upward into heaven, and knew that it was the soul of his sister, and that they would hold converse upon earth no more.

The two stiff, black-robed figures clasping hands over the meagre board, in the old mural painting, do not jar as harshly upon our imagination of this spotless and tender scene as the curious jocularity of the youthful monk: “ Adesso, lui dit-elle partez si vous pouvez! ” At Santa Scholastica’s own beautiful house below, which we visited upon our return, we found another young monk, quite as courteous and cheery as the first, but much more reverential and refined. He led us through the portico, adorned on either side with beautiful columns of porphyry and giallo antico from the ruins of Nero’s villa; through the new cloister, for the backwardness of whose flower-beds he rather anxiously apologized ; through the exquisite elder cloister; and into the stately library, whose treasures he displayed with genuine enthusiasm and a touching delight in the company of appreciative guests. Though the place, like all such places, is wofully despoiled, those treasures are still great. The first printing-press ever set up in Italy was established here in 1465, by two Germans named Schweinheim and Pannartz, who had not been encouraged to start their chimerical enterprise in the city of Rome. Our gentle young monk — himself a German, too, to judge by his fair face and frank, spectacled blue eyes — displayed specimens of the first two books produced by the new process, and of the beautifully transcribed and illuminated manuscripts which they closely imitated. One was a volume of Lactantius, the other a copy of St. Augustine’s City of God. He would willingly have introduced us to every individual book and manuscript in the collection, but the clay was advancing, and we wanted to be at Olenano before sundown, for its celebrated view ; so we bade him a regretful good-by, carrying away in our memories a pleasant picture of the young librarian as we saw him last, solitary and smiling, handling the ancient tomes with loving care, as he passed and repassed through the echoing Gothic hall.

“ But why is it,” asks the voice of the nineteenth century, as we come slowly down from the mount, “ notwithstanding that all we now have and hope for is so deeply involved with the life lived and the work done in these conventual shades, that the pagan existence which we were yesterday endeavoring to restore is, after all, so much the more real and natural and germane to us of the two ? Unquestionably it is so. Horace became a living man to us when we stood where his threshold used to be. St. Benedict, in his unshaken house, remains an aureoled vision.”

“ Possibly,” was the hesitating answer, “ because the natural is inevitably more natural than the supernatural, and the slenderest ray of the latter slightly dazzling to the sight. First the physical, afterward the psychical.”

And whereas yesterday we felt the human race to be so blasé that its experiences on this familiar planet must needs be well-nigh over, to-day we are chiefly impressed by the slightness of its advance in twenty centuries, and the elementary and preliminary character of its utmost attainments. Turning at the angle of the road, where the monastery finally disappears from view, to wave a farewell salute to the iron cross, outlined upon the sky above its highest tower, we realize profoundly how far we are as yet from comprehending “ with all saints the height and breadth ” of all that symbol signifies.

I fancy we are all glad, however, that no grand historic memories importune, nor spectral spiritual problems confront us at Olenano. A buxom landlady made us vociferously welcome to that quaintest of country inns, bewitching Casa Baldi, set high among the terraced vineyards and olive plantations of the sunniest of mountain-sides, whose trellised and vine-shaded porch, as many a traveler knows, commands an incomparable prospect. Far away, beneath and before, for immeasurable miles, extended the plain which divides the Sabine from the Volscian hills. The white road over which we were to pass upon the morrow traced a devious line across it, and straight in front of us, in the vagueness of the extreme distance, Velletri “ sparkled like a grain of salt.” The Volscians command the plain upon the left. They are distant enough to be richly empurpled, and their outlines, essentially beautiful, are softened yet farther by the soft spring atmosphere; but their very name is resonant of warlike memories of Roman and Etruscan days. Close at hand, upon the right, divided from us by a narrow valley full of flowering trees, the town of Olenano crowns another height like ours.

It is picturesque, of course, with its dark walls, crowded dwellings, open loggie, and tall mediæval castle, as richly draped with ivy, in this instance, as any English abbey. Higher still ascends the last promontory of the Sabine range which we shall have to round before reaching Palestrina. We do not even care to explore the little town. We remember that it takes its name Olenano (Olibanum) from the fact that its revenues were long applied to the purchase of incense for the churches, and we sagely doubt whether, if we penetrate its streets, this fragrant association may not be overpowered by others of a less agreeable nature. So we simply sit entranced by the almost incredible loveliness of the great vista and the declining day, till the sun dips behind the mountains on our right, and the sound of the Ave Maria bells mingles with the shouts of the children at play in the streets of the town and the twitter of birds in the Casa Baldi orchards.

A portly cardinal, who tells us upon his picture-frame that he lodged here sixty years ago, and four comely, pouting ladies in buckram and pearls — all of the Borghese family, to whom the village and hostelry belong — looked down with not a little superciliousness upon our evening meal. The door panels, also, of the room where we dined were decorated with sketches from the hands of German artists, who much frequent the Casa Baldi in summer; and we observed with some amusement, and instantly referred to the romantic influence of the same Teutonic wanderers, the airs and graces, the pauses and poses, of the landlady’s two pretty daughters, who waited on us at table. Very pretty indeed they were : tall and rosy, and with long fair hair, which, disdaining the neat braids of the ordinary Italian peasant maiden, they had piled, waved, looped, and left to stray in an æsthetic and wonderful manner; while their drooping heads, diffident smiles, and quick upward glances of excessive ingénuité exactly reproduced the sketches in the Casa Baldi album, which the mother proudly showed us on the following morning. We praised the portraits and their originals, whereupon our hostess assumed an air of critical disparagement: “ Non c’ é male, MA,” — she waved her arms to indicate the transcendent comeliness of her girls, and added, by way of apology for the goodnatured artist, with the patronizing accent of the most exasperating of connoisseurs, “ é paesista, non figurista.” The little white casa, which is distinguishable for miles and miles from different points upon the plain, seemed always repeating, as over and over again it flashed us farewell, the knowing wink and superior smile of its comfortable mistress.

Descending from Olenano, one drives for an hour or two over low and level ground ; looking upward at the mountains from their feet, instead of gazing straight into their faces, as in the earlier and later portions of the Sabine route. But we found the variety charming, and the white hawthorn hedges also, and the emerald meadows, and the farmers busy with plow and rastrum, — “ hominumque boumque Inbores” Afterwards, when we began our final ascent for Palestrina, — our latest destination is on the further side of the Sabine promontory, facing . Rome, — show-peaks of the greater Apennines lifted themselves above the Volscian line at our back, and the way grew exceedingly difficult and wild. We lunched at Gennezano, with its grand mediæval gateway, its exquisite fragments of Gothic carving “gleaming amid sordid modern structures, its kindly shrine of the Madonna of Good Counsel, sought of all the country side. And so, amid the slant shadows and cool breezes of one more perfect afternoon, we came to old Præneste.

A certain languor seized us here. Whether it came of the very fatigue and satiety of delightful impressions, or of the inevitably pensive perception that our rare play-time was nearly over, we found ourselves quite unable to do more than cursorily survey the great remains of many epochs, and idly glance, in thought, at a little of the all that makes Palestrina memorable. We read the headings of its history upon its wonderful walls, where Pelasgic foundations — composed, that is, of immense polygons of stone, fitted one to another without cement — support massive quadrilateral blocks of the later republic, surmounted by brick-work of the empire. We remember that there were kings ruling here at Præneste before Roma Quadrata was outlined with a plowshare, and we trace for a little way the foundations of that stupendous temple of Fortune, which covered, inthe early imperial days of its greatest glory, almost all the space now occupied by the lower town. We mount the mouldering staircase of the desolate Barbarini palace, built upon the foundations of the great hemicycle which fronted the shrine of the capricious divinity, and we gaze at the famous mosaic, once the floor of one of the tribunes in the temple. It was unearthed in 1640, restored where imperfect by Pietro da Cortona, and removed, with the utmost care, to the spacious and solitary hall, where it is now seen to remarkable advantage. Yet no one knows precisely what it was intended to represent. The vicissitudes of fortune ; the voyage of Alexander to the oracle of Jupiter Ammon ; the history of Sylla; the course of the Nile ; the meeting of Helen and Menelaus in Egypt; the voyage of Hadrian to Elephantina ; the conquest of Egypt by Augustus, — such are a few of the guesses at its motif. For ourselves, we care only to note the common element in all these conjectures, — the sphinxes and lotus flowers, which prove the subject to be something Egyptian, and the remarkable representations of animals, with Greek names affixed, which perambulate the stony space; and then we stroll away to the dusty window of the hall, and look out once more over the old Campagna, illimitable under the roseate mist that hides the distant dome. Dimly and dreamily we recall and recount the many contests which Præneste waged with Rome : its conquest by Ciucinnatus ; that Pyrrhus and Hannibal both made reconnaissances from the citadel ; that the young Cains Marius put an end to his own life here after his defeat by Sylla; that Sylla, after he came back from the Mithridatic war, destroyed the town for its resistance to himself, and afterward rebuilt it ; that Augustus lived here sometimes, and Tiberius and Nero and Hadrian; and that our Horace himself re-read the Iliad within these walls, while Lollius was holding forth at Rome : —

But of all the heroes, conquerors, ravagers, and rebuilders of Palestrina, by far the most vivid to our imagination was that “ glorioso Colonna,” who arrived a thousand years later than the imperial Romans, and for whose sake chiefly, on the following morning, we achieved the breathless climb to the citadel. Here the two cardinals of that fierce and famous Gliibelline race defied the Popes ; here, in the mountain stronghold of the Colonnas, they were besieged, and finally vanquished, and driven forth into that harsh exile, where one, meeting Stephano, the nephew of the rebellious ecclesiastics, and asking him what fortress he now possessed, saw him strike his hand upon his gallant breast, as be returned the immortal answer, Eccola ! We should hardly have been Ghibellines if we had lived in the fourteenth century, but we inconsistently adopt the heroism of Stephen, and exult in the thought that he lived to return to his dismantled fastness, and that the castle which now crowns the peak is the very one of his rebuilding. For the sake of standing in the grassy space inclosed by those frowning walls, we surmount so many difficulties and dangers, wrestle with so many sturdy beggars, tread so steep and difficult a path, that we feel, in our proper persons, something of the elation of a conquering army ; and we note, as symbolical of Stephen’s dazzling fame, that his shield in white marble shines untarnished out of the dark stone above the moss-grown gateway, with slender column and flanking initials, as distinct as though cut but yesterday, sIc, and the triumphant legend, perfectly legible, “ Magnificus dominus Stephanus de Colonna reædificavit civitatem Præneste cum monte et arce, anno 1332.”

From every point at which we pause for rest, upon our lingering descent, amid beds of dwarf marigold, on broad stones painted with rose-hued lichen, we find our eyes drawn backward by that bright symbol of human pride and valor, until a turn of the path withdraws it finally from our view, and its spell is vanquished by another and yet mightier. For the mists of the morning have dispersed by this, and the great dome swells clear in the pulsing heat upon the far-off southern horizon, and we hear the grave mandate of the mistress of the world proclaiming the end of our vacances, the limit of our week of dreams, — the compulsion which all feel who have ever turned the back on her to return, and submit once more to her stately and sombre custody.

Harriet W. Preston.