to its wharves; but the deposits
of the Po and the tides have, in process of time, made it an inland
town, and the sea is four miles away.

In the time of Augustus, Ravenna was a favorite Roman port and harbor
for fleets of war and merchandise. There Theodoric, the great king of
the Goths, set up his palace, and there is his enormous mausoleum. As
early as A. D. 44 it became an episcopal see, with St. Apollinaris, a
disciple of St. Peter, for its bishop. There some of the later Roman
emperors fixed their residences, and there they repose. In and about it
revolved the adventurous life of Galla Placidia, a woman of considerable
talent and no principle, the daughter of Theodosius (the great
Theodosius, who subdued the Arian heresy, the first emperor baptized in
the true faith of the Trinity, the last who had a spark of genius), the
sister of one emperor, and the mother of another,--twice a slave, once
a queen, and once an empress; and she, too, rests there in the great
mausoleum builded for her. There, also, lies Dante, in his tomb "by the
upbraiding shore;" rejected once of ungrateful Florence, and forever
after passionately longed for. There, in one of the earliest Christian
churches in existence, are the fine mosaics of the Emperor Justinian
and Theodora, the handsome courtesan whom he raised to the dignity
and luxury of an empress on his throne in Constantinople. There is the
famous forest of pines, stretching--unbroken twenty miles down the coast
to Rimini, in whose cool and breezy glades Dante and Boccaccio walked
and meditated, which Dryden has commemorated, and Byron has invested
with the fascination of his genius; and under the whispering boughs
of which moved the glittering cavalcade which fetched the bride to
Rimini,--the fair Francesca, whose sinful confession Dante heard in
hell.

We went down to Ravenna from Bologna one afternoon, through a country
level and rich, riding along toward hazy evening, the land getting
flatter as we proceeded (you know, there is a difference between level
and flat), through interminable mulberry-trees and vines, and fields
with the tender green of spring, with church spires in the rosy horizon;
on till the meadows became marshes, in which millions of frogs sang the
overture of the opening year. Our arrival, I have reason to believe, was
an event in the old town. We had a crowd of moldy loafers to witness it
at the station, not one of whom had ambition enough to work to earn a
so