ectore fluctus.

Or crossing a broken bridge at night in the lumbering diligence,
guarded by infantry with set bayonets, and wondering on which side
of the ravine the brigands are in ambush, he suddenly calls to mind
that this torrent was the ancient Halycus, the border between Greeks
and Carthaginians, established of old, and ratified by Timoleon
after the battle of the Crimisus. Among the bare grey hills of
Segeste his thoughts revert to that strange story told by Herodotus
of Philippus, the young soldier of Crotona, whose beauty was so
great, that when the Segesteans found him slain among their foes,
they raised the corpse and burned it on a pyre of honour, and built
a hero's temple over the urn that held his ashes. The first sight of
Etna makes us cry with Theocritus, [Greek: Aitna mater
ema ... polydendreos Aitna]. The solemn heights of Castro
Giovanni bring lines of Ovid to our lips:--

Haud procul Hennaeis lacus est a moenibu altae
Nomine Pergus aquae. Non illo plura Caystros
Carmina cygnorum labentibus audit in undis.
Silva coronat aquas, cingens latus omne; suisque
Frondibus ut velo Phoebeos summovet ignes.
Frigora dant rami, Tyrios humus humida flores.
Perpetnum ver est.

We look indeed in vain for the leafy covert and the purple flowers
that tempted Proserpine. The place is barren now: two solitary
cypress-trees mark the road which winds downwards from a desolate
sulphur mine, and the lake is clearly the crater of an extinct
volcano. Yet the voices of old poets are not mute. 'The rich
Virgilian rustic measure' recalls a long-since buried past. Even
among the wavelets of the Faro we remember Homer, scanning the shore
if haply somewhere yet may linger the wild fig-tree which saved
Ulysses from the whirlpool of Charybdis. At any rate we cannot but
exclaim with Goethe, 'Now all these coasts, gulfs, and creeks,
islands and peninsulas, rocks and sand-banks, wooded hills, soft
meadows, fertile fields, neat gardens, hanging grapes, cloudy
mountains, constant cheerfulness of plains, cliffs and ridges, and
the surrounding sea, with such manifold variety are present in my
mind; now is the "Odyssey" for the first time become to me a living
world.'

But rich as the whole of Sicily may be in classical associations,
two places, Syracuse and Girgenti, are pre-eminent for the power of
bringing the Greek past forcibly before us. Their interest is of two
very different kinds. Girgenti still displays the sp