picturesque, perhaps, is not such as I should wish to celebrate, either
in prose or poetry. It is of such breadth and extent, that its frame of
mountains and ridgy hills hardly serve to shut it in sufficiently, and
the spectator thinks of a boundless plain, rather than of a secluded
vale. After passing Le Vene, we came to the little temple which Byron
describes, and which has been supposed to be the one immortalized by
Pliny. It is very small, and stands on a declivity that falls
immediately from the road, right upon which rises the pediment of the
temple, while the columns of the other front find sufficient height to
develop themselves in the lower ground. A little farther down than the
base of the edifice we saw the Clitumnus, so recently from its source in
the marble rock, that it was still as pure as a child's heart, and as
transparent as truth itself. It looked airier than nothing, because it
had not substance enough to brighten, and it was clearer than the
atmosphere. I remember nothing else of the valley of Clitumnus, except
that the beggars in this region of proverbial fertility are wellnigh
profane in the urgency of their petitions; they absolutely fall down on
their knees as you approach, in the same attitude as if they were praying
to their Maker, and beseech you for alms with a fervency which I am
afraid they seldom use before an altar or shrine. Being denied, they ran
hastily beside the carriage, but got nothing, and finally gave over.

I am so very tired and sleepy that I mean to mention nothing else
to-night, except the city of Trevi, which, on the approach from Spoleto,
seems completely to cover a high, peaked hill, from its pyramidal tip to
its base. It was the strangest situation in which to build a town,
where, I should suppose, no horse can climb, and whence no inhabitant
would think of descending into the world, after the approach of age
should begin to stiffen his joints. On looking back on this most
picturesque of towns (which the road, of course, did not enter, as