Son menton nourrissait une barbe touffue; Toute sa personne velue Représentait un ours, mais un ours mal léché[527]. But the sky of Italy is lacking here: the sun is low and pale; those close-sown market-towns are not the little cities of the Romagna, which brood upon the master-pieces of the arts hidden underneath them: you scratch the ground, and that tillage makes some marvel of the antique chisel shoot up like a blade of corn. At Donauwörth, I regretted to have arrived too late to enjoy a fine view of the Danube. On Monday the 20th, the same appearance of the landscape; yet the soil becomes less good and the peasants seem poorer. One begins again to see the pine-woods of the hills. The Hercynian forest used to project as far as this: the trees of which Pliny left us a singular description were felled by generations now buried with the secular oaks. When Trajan threw a bridge over the Danube, Italy heard, for the first time, that name so fatal to the world of antiquity, the name of the Goths. The road was opened up to myriads of savages who marched to the Sack of Rome. The Huns and their Attila built their wooden palaces opposite the Coliseum, on the bank of the stream which was the rival of the Rhine and, like the latter, the enemy of the Tiber. The hordes of Alaric crossed the Danube, in 376, to overthrow the civilized Greek Empire, at the same spot where the Russians traversed it, in 1828, with the design of overthrowing the Barbaric Empire seated on the ruins of Greece. Could Trajan have guessed that a civilization of a new kind would one day be established on the other side of the Alps, on the borders of the stream which he had almost discovered? Born in the Black Forest, the Danube goes to die in the Black Sea. Where does its chief source lie? In the court-yard of a German baron, who employs the naiad to wash his linen. A geographer having taken it into his head to deny the fact, the noble owner brought an action against him. It was decided by a judicial verdict that the source of the Danube was in the court-yard of the said baron and could not be elsewhere. How many centuries were needed to arrive from the errors of Ptolemy[528] at this important discovery! Tacitus makes the Danube descend from Mount Abnoba: _Montis Abnobæ._ But the Hermondurian, Cheruscan, Marcomannian, Quadian barons, who are the authorities upon whom the Roman historian relies, are not so cautious as my German baron. Eudorus did not know so much, when I made him travel to the mouths of the Ister, where the Euxine, according to Racine, was to carry Mithridates in "two days[529]:" "Having passed the Ister near its mouth.... I discovered a stone tomb on which grew a laurel. I pulled out the grasses which covered some Latin characters, and soon I succeeded in reading this first verse of the elegies of an unfortunate poet: "'My book, you will go to Rome, and you will go to Rome without me.'"[530]