t town, now so shrunken from
its ancient limits; and who, I ask myself, Timeo?

IV

I thought when I first saw the inaccessibility of this mountain-keep
that I should have no walks except upon the carriage road; but I find
there are paths innumerable. Leap the low walls where I will, I come on
unsuspected ways broad enough for man and beast. They ran down the
hillsides in all directions, and are ever dividing as they descend, like
the branching streams of a waterfall. Some are rudely paved, and hemmed
by low walls; others are mere footways on the natural rock and earth,
often edging precipices, and opening short cross-cuts in the most
unexpected places, not without a suggestion of peril, to make eye and
foot alert, and to infuse a certain wild pleasure into the exercise. The
multiplicity of these paths is a great boon to the lover of beauty, for
here one charm of Italian landscape exists in perfection. Every few
moments the scene rearranges itself in new combinations, as on the
Riviera or at Amalfi, and makes an endless succession of lovely
pictures. The infinite variety of these views is not to be imagined
unless it has been witnessed; and besides the magic wrought by mere
change of position, there is also a constant transformation of tone and
colour from hour to hour, as the lights and shadows vary, and from day
to day, with the unsettled weather.

Yet who could convey to black-and-white speech the sense of beauty which
is the better part of my rambles? It is only to say that here I went up
and down on the open hillsides, and there I followed the ridges or kept
the cliff-line above the fair coves; that now I dropped down into the
vales, under the shade of olive and lemon branches, and wound by the
gushing streams through the orchards. In every excursion I make some
discovery, and bring home some golden store for memory. Yesterday I
found the olive slopes over Letojanni--beautiful old gnarled trees, such
as I have never seen except where the nightingales sing by the eastern
shore of Spezzia. I did not doubt when I was told that those orchards
yield the sweetest oil in the world. It was the lemon harvest, and
everywhere were piles of the pale yellow fruit heaped like apples under
the slender trees, with a gatherer here and there; for this is always a
landscape of solitary figures. To-day I found the little beach of San
Nicolo, not far from the same place. I kept inland, going down the
hollow by the Campo Santo, where