ass-grown court,
and silent pathway, and lightless canal, where the slow waves have
sapped their foundations for five hundred years, and must soon prevail
over them for ever. It must be our task to glean and gather them forth,
and restore out of them some faint image of the lost city, more gorgeous
a thousand-fold than that which now exists, yet not created in the
day-dream of the prince, nor by the ostentation of the noble, but built
by iron hands and patient hearts, contending against the adversity of
nature and the fury of man, so that its wonderfulness cannot be grasped
by the indolence of imagination, but only after frank inquiry into the
true nature of that wild and solitary scene, whose restless tides and
trembling sands did indeed shelter the birth of the city, but long
denied her dominion.

Sec. III. When the eye falls casually on a map of Europe, there is no
feature by which it is more likely to be arrested than the strange
sweeping loop formed by the junction of the Alps and Apennines, and
enclosing the great basin of Lombardy. This return of the mountain chain
upon itself causes a vast difference in the character of the
distribution of its debris on its opposite sides. The rock fragments and
sediment which the torrents on the north side of the Alps bear into the
plains are distributed over a vast extent of country, and, though here
and there lodged in beds of enormous thickness, soon permit the firm
substrata to appear from underneath them; but all the torrents which
descend from the southern side of the High Alps, and from the northern
slope of the Apennines, meet concentrically in the recess or mountain
bay which the two ridges enclose; every fragment which thunder breaks
out of their battlements, and every grain of dust which the summer rain
washes from their pastures, is at last laid at rest in the blue sweep of
the Lombardic plain; and that plain must have risen within its rocky
barriers as a cup fills with wine, but for two contrary influences which
continually depress, or disperse from its surface, the accumulation of
the ruins of ages.

Sec. IV. I will not tax the reader's faith in modern science by insisting
on the singular depression of the surface of Lombardy, which appears for
many centuries to have taken place steadily and continually; the main
fact with which we have to do is the gradual transport, by the Po and
its great collateral rivers, of vast masses of the finer sediment to the
sea. The