As every grove that the traveller passes on that road was guarded once by
a nymph, so now it is hallowed by a memory. In vain the air, heavy with
death, creeps over the wood, the rivulet, and the shattered tower;--the
mind will not recur to the risk of its ignoble tenement; it flies back; it
is with the Past! A subtle and speechless rapture fills and exalts the
spirit. There--far to the West--spreads that purple sea, haunted by a
million reminiscences of glory; there the mountains, with their sharp and
snowy crests, rise into the bosom of the heavens; on that plain, the
pilgrim yet hails the traditional tomb of the Curiatii and those immortal
Twins who left to their brother the glory of conquest, and the shame by
which it was succeeded: around the Lake of Nemi yet bloom the sacred
groves by which Diana raised Hippolytus again into life. Poetry, Fable,
History, watch over the land: it is a sepulchre; Death is within and
around it; Decay writes defeature upon every stone; but the Past sits by
the tomb as a mourning angel; a soul breathes through the desolation; a
voice calls amidst the silence. Every age that bath passed away bath left
a ghost behind it; and the beautiful land seems like that imagined clime
beneath the earth in which man, glorious though it be, may not breathe and
live--but which is populous with holy phantoms and illustrious shades.

On, on sped Godolphin. Night broke over him as he traversed the Pontine
Marshes. There, the malaria broods over its rankest venom: solitude hath
lost the soul that belonged to it: all life, save the deadly fertility of
corruption, seems to have rotted away: the spirit falls stricken into
gloom; a nightmare weighs upon the breast of Nature; and over the wrecks
of Time, Silence sits motionless in the arms of Death.

He arrived at Terracina, and retired to rest. His sleep was filled with
fearful dreams; he woke, late at noon, languid and dejected. As his