I SHOOK her hand, and in an hour afterward was passing, with my friend, by the Trajan forum, toward the deep shadow of San Maggiore, which lay in our way to the mountains. At sunset we were wandering over the ruin of Adrian’s villa, which lies upon the first step of the Appenines. Behind us, the vesper bells of Tivoli were sounding, and their echoes floating sweetly under the broken arches; before us, stretching all the way to the horizon, lay the broad Campagna; while in the middle of its great waves, turned violet-colored by the hues of twilight, rose the grouped towers of the Eternal City; and lording it among them all, like a giant, stood the black dome of St. Peter’s. Day after day we stretched on over the mountains, leaving the Campagna far behind us. Rocks and stones, huge and ragged, lie strewn over the surface right and left; deep yawning valleys lie in the shadows of mountains, that loom up thousands of feet, bearing, perhaps, upon their tops old castellated towns, perched like birds’ nests. But mountain and valley are blasted and scarred; the forests even are not continuous, but struggle for a livelihood; as if the brimstone fire that consumed Nineveh, had withered their energies. Sometimes our eyes rest on a great white scar of the broken calcareous rock, on which the moss cannot grow, and the lizards dare not creep. Then we see a cliff beetling far aloft, with the shining walls of some monastery of holy men glistening at its base. The wayside brooks do not seem to be the gentle offspring of bountiful hills, but the remnants of something greater, whose greatness has expired—they are turbid rills, rolling in the bottom of yawning chasms. Even the shrubs have a look, as if the Volscian war-horse had trampled them down to death; and the primroses and the violets by the mountain path alone look modestly beautiful amid the ruin. Sometimes we loiter in a valley, above which the goats are browsing on the cliffs, and listen to the sweet pastoral pipes of the Appenines. We see the shepherds in their rough skin coats, high over our heads. Their herds are feeding, as it seems, on ledges of a hand’s breadth. The sweet sound floats and lingers in the soft atmosphere, without a breath of wind to bear it away, or a noise to disturb its melody. The shadows slant more and more as we linger; and the kids begin to group together. And as we wander on, through the stunted vineyard in the bottom of the valley, the sweet sound flows after us, like a river of song—nor leaves us, till the kids have vanished in the distance, and the cliffs themselves, become one dark wall of shadow.