o unite folk with the terrible unity Death, so much as with the
everlasting life of the centuries.

_March_ 4, 1893.

SPRING 1895.

I.

VILLA LIVIA.

Along the road to Civita Castellana, absolutely deserted. The Tiber
between low, interrupted slopes, some covered with longest most
compact green grass, others of brown, unreal tufo, like crumbled
masonry, or hollowed into Signorelli-looking grottoes, with deep
growths of Judas-tree, broom, and scant asphodels; all green and
brown, of such shapes that one wonders whether they also, like so many
seeming boulders scattered in their neighbourhood, are not in reality
masonry, long destroyed towns.

The Tiber, pale fawn colour, flush, among greenness, receiving
delicate little confluents which have come along under lush foliage;
smooth dark shallow streams, stoneless on sandy bottom; one imagines
each fought about in those first Roman days. The country is a great
pale circular greenness under tender melting sky, with pale distant
mountains all round.

How Rome seems to have been isolated from all life save the life
eternal and unchangeable of grass and water, and cattle and larks; to
have been suspended in a sort of void!

Further along, reed hovels (some propped in aqueduct arches), hovels
also in caves, and squalid osterias, into whose side are built
escutcheoned mediaeval capitals. A few mounted drovers trot slowly by.

At Prima Porta, in this wilderness, a hillock of grass, descending
into which you find a small chamber painted all round with a deep
hedge of orchard and woodland plants, pomegranates, apples, arbutus,
small pines and spruce firs, all most lovingly and knowingly given,
with birds nesting and pecking, in brilliant enamel like encaustic on
an enamel blue sky.

Coming home in rain, Rome appears with cupola of St. Peter's and
Vatican gardens so disposed as to seem only a colossal sanctuary in
the wilderness.

_May_ 8.

II.

COLONNA GALLERY.

Durer?? Portrait of a red-haired Colonna with the ruins of Rome behind
him; ruins which, with his violent, wild-man-of-the-woods face, he
looks as if he had made.

III.

SAN SABA.

The lovely floor, the minute pieces of marble forming a
far-more-lovely-than possible faded purple and lilac rug. Also, the
pathetically trodden-down-to-bits porphyry discs in the doorway. And
the little cippus of a Roman girl who lived sixteen years and
twenty-eight days. Against the apse, outside