ked
with bay leaves; and the rose trees, escaped from what were once trim
garden alleys, have gone wandering a-riot into country hedges. There
is no demarcation between the great man's villa and the neighbouring
farms. From this point the path rises, and the barren hillside is
a-bloom with late-flowering myrtles. Why did the Greeks consecrate
these myrtle-rods to Death as well as Love? Electra complained that
her father's tomb had not received the honour of the myrtle branch;
and the Athenians wreathed their swords with myrtle in memory of
Harmodius. Thinking of these matters, I cannot but remember lines of
Greek, which have themselves the rectitude and elasticity of myrtle
wands:

(Greek:)

kai prospeson eklaus' eremias tuchon
spondas te lusas askon hon phero xenois
espeisa tumbo d'amphetheka mursinas.

As we approach Fosdinovo, the hills above us gain sublimity; the
prospect over plain and sea--the fields where Luna was, the widening
bay of Spezzia--grows ever grander. The castle is a ruin, still
capable of partial habitation, and now undergoing repair--the state in
which a ruin looks most sordid and forlorn. How strange it is, too,
that, to enforce this sense of desolation, sad dishevelled weeds cling
ever to such antique masonry! Here are the henbane, the sow-thistle,
the wild cucumber. At Avignon, at Orvieto, at Dolce Acqua, at Les
Baux, we never missed them. And they have the dusty courtyards, the
massive portals, where portcullises still threaten, of Fosdinovo to
themselves. Over the gate, and here and there on corbels, are carved
the arms of Malaspina--a barren thorn-tree, gnarled with the
geometrical precision of heraldic irony.

Leaning from the narrow windows of this castle, with the spacious view
to westward, I thought of Dante. For Dante in this castle was the
guest of Moroello Malaspina, what time he was yet finishing the
'Inferno.' There is a little old neglected garden, full to south,
enclosed upon a rampart which commands the Borgo, where we found frail
canker-roses and yellow amaryllis. Here, perhaps, he may have sat
with ladies--for this was the Marchesa's pleasaunce; or may have
watched through a short summer's night, until he saw that _tremolar
della marina_, portending dawn, which afterwards he painted in the
'Purgatory.'

From Fosdinovo one can trace the Magra work its way out seaward, not
into the plain where once the _candentia moenia Lunae_ flashed sunrise
from their battlements,