and bathing distant
towers and tall aerial palms with floods of light. Such is a child's
vision, begotten by the music of the symphony; and when he wakes
from trance at its low silver close, the dark cathedral seems
glowing with a thousand angel faces, and all the air is tremulous
with angel wings. Then follow the solitary treble voice and the
swift chorus.

_SIENA_

After leaving the valley of the Arno at Empoli, the railway enters a
country which rises into earthy hills of no great height, and
spreads out at intervals into broad tracts of cultivated lowland.
Geologically speaking, this portion of Tuscany consists of loam and
sandy deposits, forming the basin between two mountain-ranges--the
Apennines and the chalk hills of the western coast of Central Italy.
Seen from the eminence of some old Tuscan turret, this champaign
country has a stern and arid aspect. The earth is grey and dusty,
the forms of hill and valley are austere and monotonous; even the
vegetation seems to sympathise with the uninteresting soil from
which it springs. A few spare olives cast their shadows on the lower
slopes; here and there a copse of oakwood and acacia marks the
course of some small rivulet; rye-fields, grey beneath the wind,
clothe the hillsides with scanty verdure. Every knoll is crowned
with a village--brown roofs and white house-fronts clustered
together on the edge of cliffs, and rising into the campanile or
antique tower, which tells so many stories of bygone wars and
decayed civilisations.

Beneath these villages stand groups of stone pines clearly visible
upon the naked country, cypresses like spires beside the square
white walls of convent or of villa, patches of dark foliage, showing
where the ilex and the laurel and the myrtle hide thick tangles of
rose-trees and jessamines in ancient gardens. Nothing can exceed the
barren aspect of this country in midwinter: it resembles an
exaggerated Sussex, without verdure to relieve the rolling lines of
down, and hill, and valley; beautiful yet, by reason of its frequent
villages and lucid air and infinitely subtle curves of
mountain-ridges. But when spring comes, a light and beauty break
upon this gloomy soil; the whole is covered with a delicate green
veil of rising crops and fresh foliage, and the immense distances
which may be seen from every height are blue with cloud-shadows, or
rosy in the light of sunset.

Of all the towns of Lower Tuscany, none is more celebrated