above the violet hills, and the long water-swathes of our course followed the keel like intertwisting serpents of gold and malachite. Thence by cliffs and vines, cities and towers, another broad stream and banks heavy with forests, to a capital lying far within a quiet valley, where the red rock withdrew its ramparts four miles asunder, and between them lay a plain which seemed snatched from Lombardy, squared with vine-ranks and poplar, and fretted now into furrowed network by battalions of yoked and patient oxen. Without the walls I traversed a long walnut avenue; to the left, the towers and vast roofs of the Cathedral rose above mediaeval battlements; a lofty bank on the right, thick with trees, and vines, and villas, and intersected midway by a line like the Offa Dyke of Wales, -the wide limit of the Roman city. Vineyard and garden ran far within this line; and as in Rome itself, the crumbling arches and vaults of the Baths marked the extreme verge of modern inhabitation. Vestiges such as these, in which we trace an ebb of human life, suggest always thoughts of transitoriness and deathlike repose: but my road was alive with counter-signs- the walnut harvest in full activity. From ladders set halfway in the golden green branches children with long poles were beating the leaves, which filled the air with a myrtle fragrance as they fell, preceded by the drop of heavy fruits, dancing and bursting the green cover as they touched the roadway, or bedded themselves in silence within a litter of strewn leaves and broken bough-fragments. Boys and women in blue skirts, jackets, and pale braided hair, caught and harvested the crop with blackened fingers into rough baskets. Thus about each trunk a picturesque group was formed: they reminded me of the Fairies who in Germany or Ireland danced of old round the mythic almond-tree beneath

which the Sungod, slain in his childhood, lay buried, and legend added, to rise again. These peasants were neither gay nor sullen: just employed. As I looked and walked on, I did not feel as generally when one enters a distant city and sees the crowd at work, these are utter strangers. There was a bond of human sympathy they little thought of the heart-reviving knowledge, Désirée was there within, established already a silent friendship between us.

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XXXIV Yet this was an error; all but a younger sister had left the house for a long day's excursion; they would return from Igel fatigued, she said; I had best visit them next morning the one day left before my fixed and expected return to England. The sky lost its blue, the trees their greenness; there was no longer glory in the grass, or beauty in the vineyards. But I must waste the hours, a few moments before so precious, somewhere. It would be like defeat, I felt, to retraverse the road just passed in expectation of immediate triumph; I crossed the river by a ferry, and on the opposite bank examined the town from a natural belvedere, a ledge of the shaly rock. Then the spirit of Antiquity, the great voices of the Past, rebuking my petty discouragement, carried me out of self by the human interest of that landscape. Though hidden, as I have said, and seemingly world-sequestered far within the heart of a pastoral valley, yet lofty fragments, ruins full ' of Fate' in darkened stone and grey brickwork, scattered here and there over an area of which not one-fourth part was now occupied, showed that in Roman times this city had been the capital of some powerful province; metropolis, in fact, of Gaul in the Napoleonic sense, of Spain, and of Britain-Augusta Trevirorum. Here Germanicus during an hour of trial had sheltered his noble wife; this was the centre of the so-long successful revolt maintained by the

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barbarian Civilis against Vespasian. Here Ambrose was born, he who shut the church-gates against an Emperor in his pride and here, too, Constantine, Julian, and Theodosius held the orientalized court of the gorgeous Second Empire. There is an emanation of majesty and of glory inseparable from relics of Roman workmanship, or from places associated even by name with the strange fascination of that history. Trèves unites both conditions. The vast arches of the Black Gate seemed built for eternity; they had sustained and survived a hermitage, a sanctuary, and a church, constructed and ruined within them. Like the Alban Mount, like the rock platform of Jerusalem, I thought they appeared almost contemptuously impassive to the cyclical growth, splendour, and decay of human religions. But elsewhere farther on, in the grey cathedral, I could see a living relic of the first temporal triumph of Christianity; the walls of a Caesar's palace, the columns raised by imperial Helena, enshrining the seamless coat which but yesterday rent asunder German Catholicismthat spurious but priceless banner (so myriads thought it) of a Faith-and the later history of this fair region, more than most, has testified to the fact-which may reckon her martyrs by thousands, and her victims by tens of thousands. Looking northward, past the Church of the Virgin, 'Go'thic lighter than a fire', I saw the vast ruin, half Roman, half romantic, where the rude orgies of a Prussian soldiery have supplanted the splendid harem of the Prince Bishops and Electors of the ill-named Holy Empire; farther yet, but beyond the contracted circuit of the present city, that amphitheatre where Constantine the new convert twice - gratified his faith or his paganism, letting loose lion, bear, and wolf to the carnage of many thousand heathen and barbarian captives. Enough I pass over the ma

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jority; but how rich the web of remembrances spread, to an imaginative spectator, over any one of the greater of our European cities! Not the legend-inwoven robe worn on high festivals by the Patriarch of Rome, not that earlier work of a poet's loom, variegated with all the histories of the heroic age for the marriage of Thetis and Peleus,Ariadna desolate by the seaside, and Prometheus chained to the Scythian precipice, images typical of man's and of woman's destiny-rival the soul-enthralling splendour, the majestic significance of that spectacle; it is, at least in my judgment, the one absolutely unalloyed compensation for existence in the fret and frequent littleness of these later centuries.

XXXV In some noble verses Lord Byron, looking on the ancient mistress of Trèves, expressed the conviction that before such sights the voice of personal sorrow should be silenced. From a man so sincere and so great a sufferer, the judgment is remarkable; it is however but half a truth; there are sorrows beyond the control of the reflective imagination, and that can permanently cloud the spectator's eye, eclipse glasses of the mind. Far, indeed, in fancy was I from the burden of such feelings; yet perhaps the disfavour of the moment, Désirée's unexpected absence, led me to look thus musingly on Trèves ; to say, 'such is the race of man'. But one hour that evening (I wisely neglected the child's suggestion) passed in the portion of England or of Heaven which accompanied Désirée and her family to the Moselle, restored the lighter, perhaps healthier heart; and plans were soon settled for what was quickly a bright today. The plain of Trèves, I have said, seems like a fragment translated from Lombardy; and a summer, an exotic, an Italian sky vaulted furrowed tilth and green vineyard and reflective

stream with crystalline blue into that late autumn. We, a numerous party, for two or three dear English friends had joined us for this little expedition (a walk to the Kreuz Kapelle), threading some narrow streets near the Heiden Thurm presently reached the river-side, where the town, retreating from the choicest site for pleasure or for commerce, had left a wide space between garden-wall and ruinous cottage, and the broad tranquillity of the Moselle below. So equable was the river's lapse that the smallest speck of pearly morning cloud was repeated there in unbroken outline, whilst the deeper waters on the farther side were pierced by the downward lines projected from the lofty cliff-a red rock rising high against the blue, fringed with innumerable poplars, or embattled with close-set vines. White houses dotted this cliff, here singly, there ranged in the transverse series which marked some road into unseen regions beyond the barrier. If alone, so alluring was the scene, I should have thought it needed only to follow that guidance, and find on the farther side some home in the very heart of peace; one of those nests we see at times half hidden in high trees, and the fancy rises, the soul might there hap on happiness. But I turned now from the delusion of the 'hidden land' dear companion beside me. From my recollections of former study, Désirée was delighted to learn that the bridge we soon were crossing, so lofty that it surpassed the highest winter risings of the stream, so solid that it could have had none but Roman origin, was in truth one of the few constructions remaining which acquire a strange, a vast, an almost holy interest from incidental commemoration by the more than Imperial-souled Historian of the Caesars. Tacitus has spoken of it in his narrative of Vespasian's government. Employed on such service, man's

to present joy, the