and immutable scene! It is like the
contrast between the dappled sky of cheerful morning, when eye and ear
are on the alert to catch any transitory gleam and to welcome each
distant echo, and the awful immovable stillness of noon, when Pan is
sleeping, and will be wroth if he is awakened, when the whole life of
nature is still, and we look down shuddering into its unfathomable
depth! Standing on the heights of Tusculum, or on the sacred pavement of
the Latian Jupiter, every glance we send forth into the objects around
us, returns laden with matter to cherish forebodings and despondencies.
The ruins speak of an immovable past, the teeming growths which mantle
them, the abundant source of future malaria, of a destructive future,
and _activity_, the only spell by which we can evoke the cheerful spirit
of the present--activity within us, or around us, there is _none_. What
wonder if we now feel as though the weight of all those grim ruins had
been heaved from off the mind, and left it buoyant and eager to greet
the present as though we were but the creatures of it! Whatever denizen
of the vegetable or the animal kingdom we were familiar with in Italy
and miss hereabouts, is replaced by some more cheerful race. What a
_variety_ of trees! and how various their _shades_ of green! Though not
equal to thy pines, Pamfili, and to thy fair cypresses, Borghese, whose
feet lie cushioned in crocuses and anemones, yet a fine tree is the
poplar; and yonder, extending for a couple of miles, is an avenue of
their stateliest masts. The leaves of those nearest to us are put into a
tremulous movement by a breeze too feeble for our skins to feel it; and
as the rustling foliage from above gently _purrs_ as instinct with life
from _within_, this peculiar sound comes back to us like a voice we have
heard and forgotten. No "marble wilderness" or olive-darkened upland, no
dilapidated "Osterie," famine within doors and fever without, here press
desolation into the service of the picturesque. Neither here have we
those huge masses of arched brickwork, consolidated with Roman cement,
pierced by wild fig-trees, crowned with pink valerians or acanthus, and
giving issue to companies of those gloomy funeral-paced insects of the
_Melasome_ family, (the Avis, the Pimelia, and the Blaps,) whose dress
is _deep mourning_, and whose favoured haunt is the tomb! But in their
place, a richly endowed, thickly inhabited plain, filled with cottages
and their gardens,