The temple of the Clitumnus might stand in a drawing-room. The stream is a mere brook, and this little marble gem, whose richly fretted columns were raised to its honor with a feeling of beauty that makes one thrill, seems exactly of relative proportions. It is a thing of pure poetry; and to find an antiquity of such perfect preservation, with the small clear stream running still at the base of its _façade_, just as it did when Cicero and his contemporaries passed it on their visits to a country called after the loveliest vale of Greece for its beauty, was a gratification of the highest demand of taste. Childe Harold's lesson, "Pass not unblest the genius of the place" was scarce necessary.[5] We slept at _Foligno_. For many miles we had observed that the houses were propped in every direction, many of them in ruins apparently recent, and small wooden sheds erected in the midst of the squares, or beside the roads, and crowded with the poor. The next morning we arrived at St. Angelo, and found its gigantic cathedral a heap of ruins. Its painted chapels, to the number of fifteen or sixteen, were half standing in the shattered walls, the altars all exposed, and the interior of the dome one mass of stone and rubbish. It was the first time I had seen the effects of an _earthquake_. For eight or ten miles further, we found every house cracked and deserted, and the people living like the settlers in a new country, half in the open air. The beggars were innumerable. We stopped the next night on the shores of lake Thrasimene. For once in my life, I felt that the time spent at school on the "dull drilled lesson," had not been wasted. I was on the battle ground of Hannibal--the "_locus aptus insidiis_" where the consul Flaminius was snared and beaten by the wily Carthaginian on his march to Rome. I longed for my old copy of Livy "much thumbed," that I might sit on the hill and compare the image in my mind, made by his pithy and sententious description, with the reality. The battle ground, the scene of the principal slaughter, was beyond the _albergo_, and the increasing darkness compelled us to defer a visit to it till the next morning. Meantime the lake was beautiful. We were on the eastern side, and the deep-red sky of a departed sunset over the other shore, was reflected glowingly on the water. All around was dark, but the light in the sky and lake seemed to have forgotten to follow. It is a phenomenon peculiar to Italy. The heavens seem "dyed" and steeped in the glory of the sunset. We drank our host's best bottle of wine, the grape plucked from the battle ground; and if it was not better for the Roman blood that had manured its ancestor, it was better for some other reason.