ruins than any of the Roman remains to which we have become accustomed.
This is partly, I suppose, owing to the fact that they have been
neglected, and allowed to mantle their decay with ivy, instead of being
cleaned, propped up, and restored. The antiquarian is apt to spoil the
objects that interest him.

Sometimes we passed through wildernesses of various trees, each
contributing a different hue of verdure to the scene; the vine, also,
marrying itself to the fig-tree, so that a man might sit in the shadow of
both at once, and temper the luscious sweetness of the one fruit with the
fresh flavor of the other. The wayside incidents were such as meeting a
man and woman borne along as prisoners, handcuffed and in a cart; two men
reclining across one another, asleep, and lazily lifting their heads to
gaze at us as we passed by; a woman spinning with a distaff as she walked
along the road. An old tomb or tower stood in a lonely field, and
several caves were hollowed in the rocks, which might have been either
sepulchres or habitations. Soracte kept us company, sometimes a little
on one side, sometimes behind, looming up again and again, when we
thought that we had done with it, and so becoming rather tedious at last,
like a person who presents himself for another and another leave-taking
after the one which ought to have been final. Honeysuckles sweetened the
hedges along the road.

After leaving Borghetto, we crossed the broad valley of the Tiber, and
skirted along one of the ridges that border it, looking back upon the
road that we had passed, lying white behind us. We saw a field covered
with buttercups, or some other yellow flower, and poppies burned along
the roadside, as they did yesterday, and there were flowers of a
delicious blue, as if the blue Italian sky had been broken into little
bits, and scattered down upon the green earth. Otricoli by and by