ved and frequented only by the
apparitions of an obsolete race. Yet many minds will find it
infinitely more congenial thus, than amidst all the popular
splendours of its holy week.

"Her tranquillity, nay, her very desolation, is enchanting. The
summer's-day circuit of the Seven Hills seems all your own. You
wander whither you will, meeting few, and disturbed by none. In
short, the very antiquity of the place is one perpetual novelty,
and its grave monotony a serene recreation. I write this in the
Villa Borghese, beneath groves of acacias, redolent with odours,
and booming with myriads of bees, the yellow hay in aromatic
quiles, pitched like pavilions below the old red walls of Rome, and
nightingales and blackbirds contending in gushes of ecstatic song!

"Though not new to me, I had little conception of the intrinsic
loveliness of the Villa Borghese till to-day. Picture to yourself a
large village of the most variegated and romantic character;
Church, casino, albergo, and farm, scattered amidst the turfy
glades of a forest; and that forest composed of such trees as the
beech, the elm, the ilex, and, above all, the sovereign pinaster,
whose enormous trunks seem to have _condescended_ to arrange
themselves into avenues; the most charmingly artificial glades of
the glossiest verdure, and vistas haunted by legions of dim waning
statues; hero or demigod, nymph or faun, for ever intermingling but
never interfering with each other; their various places of
rendezvous emblazed with flowers of a thousand colours, and
flashing with fountains of the most graceful fancies possible;
while every vista discloses some antique portico, or rotunda, or
vestibule of those gems that men call temples! Picture these scenes
on some such May-day as this,

'When God hath shower'd the earth;'

the dark evergreens rejoicing in the rain-drops, and the new-born
leaves of silky green, transparent with the moisture, which had
reluctantly ceased to shine on their delicate tapestries. Crown all
this with a country palace, of lofty Italian magnificence, a
treasure-house of antiquity, painting, and sculpture, disclosing
the statues, frescoes, and gilding, of its noble facade and massive
campaniles, at the extremity of its darkest grove of evergreens,
glittering in thi