Where the awe of worship mingles with the throbbing of delight. The austere grandeur of San Zenone turns the soul inward upon a range of meditations which a Puritan need not disclaim. The nave terminates in one double flight of steps leading up to the second, most modern church, which is raised above the first and terminates in a pointed tribune; and another double flight which leads down to the vast vaulted crypt, with its pillars and recesses, which is the oldest part of the structure. This place breathes of the earliest Christian antiquity, and somehow reminds one of the Catacombs. The altars are older than the foundations: on one of them are groups of pillars fastened together by a species of Runic knot, such as are to be found in the rudest carving of the Hebrides; ancient sarcophagi and bassirilievi line the walls; yet round one of the recesses of this primitive-seeming sanctuary I found a branch of the _Ampelopsis quinquefolia_, our Virginia creeper, which I had fondly believed a native of America, painted with the utmost fidelity five hundred years before America was heard of, its five dentated leaves and jointed sprays in colors as rich as the masses we had seen trailing over the marble banisters of the villas on Lake Como, dyeing the pellucid water with their scarlet shadows. Throughout the church everything speaks of early times: the few frescoes are of the twelfth or thirteenth century: the only noteworthy picture is by the serious Mantegna. In the upper church Saint Zeno sits in his episcopal chair with a long fishing-rod in his hand, whence the Veronese, ignorant of sacred symbolism, infer that he was fond of the sport, and have invented an appropriate legend. He was an African by birth, became bishop of Verona A. D. 362, and is said to have suffered martyrdom twenty years afterward under the emperor Julian: his swarthy wooden effigy, of archaic stiffness, reminds one of the idol of some barbarous tribe. One of the most curious bits of the past is a group among the rude sculptures of the porch called _The Chase of Theodoric_: the dogs have caught the stag, and a fiend is about to seize upon the rider. Orthodox tradition has given the name, because Theodoric, like all the Goths, was a heretic, an Arian, but probably it points to some very early version of the story of the Wild Huntsman, an old German legend. One sees the trace of German ideas--at any rate, of Northern thought--everywhere in the mediaeval monuments of Verona: it is the meeting of the genius of the North and South which Ruskin finds in the architecture and sculpture, and which imparts a peculiar and original physiognomy to the whole place. One of its most striking features is the Castel Vecchio ("old castle") and adjacent Ponte del Castello ("castle bridge"), for they seem but parts of one great fortification, turreted and battlemented, built by Can Grande II. in 1355. The bridge is an extraordinary structure, the arches being