At length I reached the Golo. The river flows through a wide valley; the air is full of fever, and is shunned. It is the atmosphere of a battle-field--of the battle-field of Ponte Nuovo. I was warned in Morosaglia against passing through the night-mists of the Golo, or staying long in Ponte alla Leccia. Those who wander much there are apt to hear the ghosts beating the death-drum, or calling their names; they are sure at least to catch fever, and see visions. I believe I had a slight touch of the last affection, for I saw the whole battle of the Golo before me, the frightful monk, Clemens Paoli in the thickest of it, with his great fiery eyes and bushy eyebrows, his rosary in the one hand, and his firelock in the other, crying mercy on the soul of him he was about to shoot. Wild flight--wounded--dying! "The Corsicans," says Peter Cyrnæus, "are men who are ready to die." The following is a characteristic trait:--A Frenchman came upon a Corsican who had received his death-wound, and lay waiting for death without complaint. "What do you do," he asked, "when you are wounded, without physicians, without hospitals?" "We die!" said the Corsican, with the laconism of a Spartan. A people of such manly breadth and force of character as the Corsicans, is really scarcely honoured by comparison with the ancient heroic nations. Yet Lacedæmon is constantly present to me here. If it is allowable to say that the spirit of the Hellenes lives again in the wonderfully-gifted people of Italy, this is mainly true, in my opinion, as applied to the two countries--and they are neighbours of each other--of Tuscany and Corsica. The former exhibits all the ideal opulence of the Ionic genius; and while her poets, from Dante and Petrarch to the time of Ariosto, sang in her melodious language, and her artists, in painting, sculpture, and architecture, renewed the days of Pericles; while her great historians rivalled the fame of Thucydides, and the philosophers of her Academy filled the world with Platonic ideas, here in Corsica the rugged Doric spirit again revived, and battles of Spartan heroism were fought. The young Napoleon visited the battle-field of the Golo in the year 1790. He was then twenty-one years old; but he had probably seen it before when a boy. There is something fearfully suggestive in this: Napoleon on the first battle-field that his eyes ever lighted on--a stripling, without career, and without stain of guilt, he who was yet to crimson a hemisphere--from the ocean to the Volga, and from the Alps to the wastes of Lybia--with the blood of his battle-fields.