For my part, I always thought, perhaps on the testimony of the picture, that the window of the house at Ostia opened above the garden in view of the sea. The sea, symbol of the infinite, ought to be present--so it seemed to me--at the final conversation between Monnica and Augustin. At Ostia itself I was obliged to give up this too literary notion; the sea is not visible there. No doubt at that time the channel was not so silted up as it is to-day. But the coast lies so low, that just hard by the actual mouth of the Tiber, the nearness of the sea can only be guessed by the reflection of the waves in the atmosphere, a sort of pearly halo, trembling on the edge of the sky. At present I am inclined to think that the window of the house at Ostia was very likely turned towards the vast melancholy horizon of the _Agro Romano_. "We passed through, one after another," says Augustin, "all the things of a material order, unto heaven itself." Is it not natural to suppose that these things of a material order--these shapes of the earth with its plantations, its rivers, towns, and mountains--were under their eyes? The bleak spectacle which unrolled before their gaze agreed, at all events, with the disposition of their souls. This great desolate plain has nothing oppressive, nothing which retains the eyes upon details too material. The colours about it are pale and slight, as if on the point of swooning away. Immense sterile stretches, fawn-coloured throughout, with here and there shining a little pink, a little green; gorse, furze-bushes by the deep banks of the river, or a few _boschetti_ with dusty leaves, which feebly stand out upon the blondness of the soil. To the right, a pine forest. To the left, the undulations of the Roman hills expire into an emptiness infinitely sad. Afar, the violet scheme of the Alban mountains, with veiled and dream-like distances, shape indefinitely against the pearl light, limpid and serene, of the sky.