rist in the cherub-spangled gold almond among them.

_Holy Saturday._

V.

VILLA CAESIA.

Several miles along the Via Nomentana, we came to a strange place,
situate in an oasis in the wilderness, or rather in what is already
the beginning of a new country--the mere mounds of tufo turning into
high slopes, and a few trees (it is odd how they immediately give a
soul to this soulless desert), leafless at present, serpentine along
the greener grass. And there, with the russet of an oakwood behind,
rises a square huddle of buildings, a tall brick watch-tower,
battlemented and corbelled in the midst, and a great bay-tree at each
corner. On the tower, immediately below the battlements, is the
inscription, in huge letters, made, I should think, of white majolica
tiles--VILLA CAESIA. The lettering, besides being broken, is certainly
not modern, and has a sharpness of outline telling of the Renaissance.

What solitary humanist may have put up that inscription, coming out
from Rome to commune in that wilderness, amid the rustle of the
oakwood and of the laurel-trees, and the screaming of magpies and
owls, with the togaed poets and philosophers of the Past?

VI.

THE PANTHEON.

The back of the Pantheon, and its side, as seen from the steps of the
Minerva, the splendid circle of masonry, and arched courses of
rose-coloured brickwork, lichened and silvered over, broken off,
turned into something almost like a natural cliff of rosy limestone;
and at its foot the capitols of magnificent columns, and fragments of
delicate dolphined frieze.

VII.

BY THE CEMETERY.

I am struck again this time by one of the things which on my first
return after so many years got to mean for my mind Rome. The Aventine,
where it slopes down to the Tiber white with fruit blossom, the trees
growing freely in masonry and weeds, against the moist sky; this
ephemeral exquisiteness seeming to mean more here among the centuries
than in any other place.

I was right, I think, when I wrote the other day that it would be
easier for us to face the thought of danger, death, change, here in
Rome than elsewhere. K. told me she felt it when we met at the
Cemetery at her poor old aunt's grave. To die here might seem, one
would think, more like re-entering into the world's outer existence,
returning, as Epictetus has it, _where one is wanted_. The cypresses
of the graveyard, there under the city walls, among the ruins, do not
seem t