essive, through the
neglect that leaves Nature so much to her own ways and methods. Since
man seldom interferes with her, she sets to work in her quiet way
and makes herself at home. There is enough of human care, it is true,
bestowed, long ago and still bestowed, to prevent wildness from growing
into deformity; and the result is an ideal landscape, a woodland scene
that seems to have been projected out of the poet's mind. If the ancient
Faun were other than a mere creation of old poetry, and could have
reappeared anywhere, it must have been in such a scene as this.

In the openings of the wood there are fountains plashing into marble
basins, the depths of which are shaggy with water-weeds; or they tumble
like natural cascades from rock to rock, sending their murmur afar, to
make the quiet and silence more appreciable. Scattered here and there
with careless artifice, stand old altars bearing Roman inscriptions.
Statues, gray with the long corrosion of even that soft atmosphere, half
hide and half reveal themselves, high on pedestals, or perhaps fallen
and broken on the turf. Terminal figures, columns of marble or granite
porticos, arches, are seen in the vistas of the wood-paths, either
veritable relics of antiquity, or with so exquisite a touch of artful
ruin on them that they are better than if really antique. At all events,
grass grows on the tops of the shattered pillars, and weeds and flowers
root themselves in the chinks of the massive arches and fronts of
temples, and clamber at large over their pediments, as if this were the
thousandth summer since their winged seeds alighted there.

What a strange idea--what a needless labor--to construct artificial
ruins in Rome, the native soil of ruin! But even these sportive
imitations, wrought by man in emulation of what time has done to temples
and palaces, are perhaps centuries old, and, beginning as illusions,
have grown to be venerable in sober earnest. The result of all is a
scene, pensive, lovely, dreamlike, enjoyable and sad, such as is to
be found nowhere save in these princely villa-residences in the
neighborhood of Rome; a scene that must have required generations and
ages, during which growth, decay, and man's intelligence wrought kindly
together, to render it so gently wild as we behold it now.

The final charm is bestowed by the malaria. There is a piercing,
thrilling, delicious kind of regret in the idea of so much beauty thrown
away, or only enjoyable at i