object, that he mounted to the little town on the hillside, the foot-
ways of which were so many flights of easy-going steps gathered round
a single great house under shadow of the "haunted" ruins of Cicero's
villa on the wooded heights. He found a touch of weirdness in the
circumstance that in so romantic a place he had been bidden to meet
the writer who was come to seem almost like one of the personages in
his own fiction. As he turned now and then to gaze at the evening
scene through the tall narrow openings of the street, up which the
cattle were going home slowly from the [77] pastures below, the Alban
mountains, stretched between the great walls of the ancient houses,
seemed close at hand--a screen of vaporous dun purple against the
setting sun--with those waves of surpassing softness in the boundary
lines which indicate volcanic formation. The coolness of the little
brown market-place, for profit of which even the working-people, in
long file through the olive-gardens, were leaving the plain for the
night, was grateful, after the heats of Rome. Those wild country
figures, clad in every kind of fantastic patchwork, stained by wind
and weather fortunately enough for the eye, under that significant
light inclined him to poetry. And it was a very delicate poetry of
its kind that seemed to enfold him, as passing into the poet's house
he paused for a moment to glance back towards the heights above;
whereupon, the numerous cascades of the precipitous garden of the
villa, framed in the doorway of the hall, fell into a harmless
picture, in its place among the pictures within, and scarcely more
real than they--a landscape-piece, in which the power of water
(plunging into what unseen depths!) done to the life, was pleasant,
and without its natural terrors.

At the further end of this bland apartment, fragrant with the rare
woods of the old inlaid panelling, the falling of aromatic oil from