At the end of another month the villa must again be given up to Byron and Allegra restored to him. The cold and rainy weather gave Shelley the idea of pushing farther south. To feel happy he needed warmth and sympathy. New climates and new places might cheat his sorrow. The road to Rome wound along among already reddening vineyards. At every step the travellers passed teams of cream-coloured oxen of Virgilian beauty. They went through Ferrara and Bologna, where they saw such quantities of statues, pictures and churches that Shelley’s brain became like the portfolio of an architect or a print-shop or a commonplace book. Passing by the romantic cities of Rimini, Spoleto and Terni, they reached the Campagna di Roma, an absolute solitude, yet picturesque and charming. When they entered Rome an immense hawk was sailing in the air over their heads. The majestic ruins of Rome impressed Shelley tremendously. The English burying-place, under the pyramidal tomb of Cestius, appeared to him the most beautiful and solemn cemetery he had ever seen. The wind whispered in the leaves of the trees overhanging tombs which were mostly of women and young people. If one were to die, it is there one might desire to sleep. From Rome they went on to Naples, where they took rooms which looked across the Villa Nazionali to the blue waters of the bay, for ever changing and for ever the same. Vesuvius was in a state of eruption, and day and night they saw volumes of smoke rolling up and fountains of liquid fire. The black bituminous vapour and the fiery light were reflected in the sea. The climate was that of an English spring, though lacking a little that crescendo of sweetness which delights one in England when April’s there. They went to Pompeii, to Salerno, to Pæstum, getting exquisite but transitory glimpses, that leave in the memory dim white visions as of some half-remembered dream. But, in spite of all this beauty, they were not happy. They knew no one and their perpetual loneliness was hard to bear. Basking in the splendid Italian sunshine they thought with longing of Windsor, of Marlow, even of London. What was the use of all these mountains, of all this blue sky without any friends? Social enjoyment, in some form or other, is the Alpha and Omega of existence, and, no matter how real or how beautiful the actual landscape may be, it dwindles into smoke in the mind when one thinks of some familiar forms of scenery, commonplace perhaps in themselves, but over which old memories throw a delightful hue.