After wide wanderings through the valley, the two travellers directed
their course towards its boundary of hills. Here, the natural scenery
and men's modifications of it immediately took a different aspect from
that of the fertile and smiling plain. Not unfrequently there was a
convent on the hillside; or, on some insulated promontory, a mined
castle, once the den of a robber chieftain, who was accustomed to dash
down from his commanding height upon the road that wound below. For ages
back, the old fortress had been flinging down its crumbling ramparts,
stone by stone, towards the grimy village at its foot.
Their road wound onward among the hills, which rose steep and lofty from
the scanty level space that lay between them. They continually thrust
their great bulks before the wayfarers, as if grimly resolute to forbid
their passage, or closed abruptly behind them, when they still dared to
proceed. A gigantic hill would set its foot right down before them, and
only at the last moment would grudgingly withdraw it, just far enough to
let them creep towards another obstacle. Adown these rough heights were
visible the dry tracks of many a mountain torrent that had lived a life
too fierce and passionate to be a long one. Or, perhaps, a stream was
yet hurrying shyly along the edge of a far wider bed of pebbles and
shelving rock than it seemed to need, though not too wide for the
swollen rage of which this shy rivulet was capable. A stone bridge
bestrode it, the ponderous arches of which were upheld and rendered
indestructible by the weight of the very stones that threatened to crush
them down. Old Roman toil was perceptible in the foundations of that
massive bridge; the first weight that it ever bore was that of an army
of the Republic.
Threading these defiles, they would arrive at some immemorial city,
crowning the high summit of a hill with its cathedral, its many
churches, and public edifices, all of Gothic architecture. With no more
level ground than a single piazza in the midst, the ancient town tumbled
its crooked and narrow streets down the mountainside, through arched
passages and by steps of stone. The aspect of everything was awfully
old; older, indeed, in its effect on the imagination than Rome itself,
because history does not lay its finger on these forgotten edifices and
tell us all about their origin. Etruscan princes may have dwelt in them.
A thousand years, at all events, would seem but a middle age for these
structures. They are built of such huge, square stones, that their
appearance of ponderous durability distresses the beholder with the idea
that they can never fall,--never crumble away,--never be less fit than
now for human habitation. Many of them may once have been palaces, and
still retain a squalid grandeur. But, gazing at them, we recognize how
undesirable it is to build the tabernacle of our brief lifetime out of
permanent materials, and with a view to their being occupied by future
'generations.