In noisy discord, all alike;--
Convents and churches, chapels, shrines,
In quick succession break the lines.
Till every gong in town, at last
Its tongue hath loos'd, and sleep is past.
So much for nights! New days begin,
Which land you in another Inn.
O! he that means to see _Girgenti_
Or _Syracuse!_--needs patience plenty!"

Crossing a rustic bridge, we pass through a garden (for it is no
less, though man has had no spade in it) of pinks, marigolds,
cyclamens, and heart's-ease, &c. &c.; the moist meadow land below is
a perfect jungle of lofty grasses, all fragrant and in flower, gemmed
with the unevaporated morning dew, and colonized with the _Aphides,
Alticæ_, and swarms of the most beautiful butterflies clinging to
their stalks. _Gramina læta_ after Virgil's own heart, were these.
Their elegance and unusual variety were sufficient to throw a
botanist into a perfect HAY fever, and our own first paroxysm only
went off, when, after an hour's hard collecting, we came to a place
which demanded _another_ sort of enthusiasm; for THERE stood without
a veil the _Temple of Segeste_, with one or two glimpses of which we
had been already astonished at a distance, in all its Dorian majesty!
This almost unmutilated and glorious memorial of past ages here
reigns alone--the only building far or near visible in the whole
horizon; and what a position has its architect secured! In the midst
of hills on a bit of table-land, apparently made such by smoothing
down the summit of one of them, with a greensward in front, and set
off behind by a mountain background, stands this eternal monument of
the noblest of arts amidst the finest dispositions of nature. There