itecture, said to be the work of
Antonio di San Gallo.

We climbed the tower of the Palazzo del Comune, and stood at the
altitude of 2000 feet above the sea. The view is finer in its kind than
I have elsewhere seen, even in Tuscany, that land of panoramic
prospects over memorable tracts of world-historic country. Such
landscape cannot be described in words. But the worst is that, even
while we gaze, we know that nothing but the faintest memory of our
enjoyment will be carried home with us. The atmospheric conditions were
perfect that morning. The sun was still young; the sky sparkled after
the night's thunderstorm; the whole immensity of earth around lay lucid,
smiling, newly washed in baths of moisture. Masses of storm-cloud kept
rolling from the west, where we seemed to feel the sea behind those
intervening hills. But they did not form in heavy blocks or hang upon
the mountain summits. They hurried and dispersed and changed and flung
their shadows on the world below.

II.

The charm of this view is composed of so many different elements, so
subtly blent, appealing to so many separate sensibilities; the sense of
grandeur, the sense of space, the sense of natural beauty, and the sense
of human pathos; that deep internal faculty we call historic sense; that
it cannot be defined. First comes the immense surrounding space--a space
measured in each arc of the circumference by sections of at least fifty
miles, limited by points of exquisitely picturesque beauty, including
distant cloud-like mountain ranges and crystals of sky-blue Apennines,
circumscribing landscapes of refined loveliness in detail, always
varied, always marked by objects of peculiar interest where the eye or
memory may linger. Next in importance to this immensity of space, so
powerfully affecting the imagination by its mere extent, and by the
breadth of atmosphere attuning all varieties of form and colour to one
harmony beneath illimitable heaven, may be reckoned the episodes of
rivers, lakes, hills, cities, with old historic names. For there spreads
the lordly length of Thrasymene, islanded and citadelled, in hazy
morning mist, still dreaming of the shock of Roman hosts with
Carthaginian legions. There is the lake of Chiusi, set like a jewel
underneath the copse-clad hills which hide the dust of a dead Tuscan
nation. The streams of Arno start far far away, where Arezzo lies
enfolded in bare uplands. And there at our feet rolls Tiber's largest
affluen