But let us ascend out of the close and enervating air of low-lying Baiae to the breezy heights of Misenum, which has immortalised the name of the Trojan trumpeter whose end was mourned by the tears of pious Aeneas himself. In gaining its summit and in gazing upon the landscape spread around us, we have penetrated, so it seems, into the very heart of Italy: not the Italy of Roman history, but the land of Ausonia itself, the fabled shore that the Trojan hero sailed at his goddess-mother’s bidding to discover, when all the world was young and the high dwellers of Olympus still condescended to take a personal interest in the affairs of favourite mortals. Surely the vine-clad terraces of Lake Avernus, the pools of the Lucrine and the Mare Morto, the verdure-clad hillocks lying beneath us must conceal the true secret of the antique Tyrrhenian country, in whose history the rise and fall of Roman power afford but one amongst many epochs. Looking to northward, beyond the little landing-stage of Torregaveta, we behold the heights of Cumae, that was a flourishing city with harbour and citadel hundreds of years before a certain Romulus built a wall of mud near the banks of Tiber and slew his brother Remus for leaping over his handiwork. The founding of Rome is enveloped in impenetrable clouds of legend; the building of Cumae is a fact:—here then we obtain a key to Italian history. Rome, whose origin is lost in mists of obscurity, is a flourishing modern capital; Cumae is but a shapeless mass of crumbling ruins, overgrown with ivy and cytizus, and inhabited by lizards and serpents. But both cities, dead Cumae and living Rome, present but passing events in the long slow progress of the centuries, which have witnessed successive phases of civilisation and destruction in this “Woman-country, wooed, not won, Loved all the more by Earth’s male lands, Laid to their hearts instead.” Is the Genius of Italy, the Sibyl of Cumae, still living, we wonder, in some dim recess, some secret cavern of Cimmerian gloom, beneath those decaying heaps of the ancient Greek city? She was old, very old, we know, when pious Aeneas found her shrieking her strange prophecies, and that was long ages before Hellenic wanderers raised a fortress upon the wooded heights above the dread lake of Avernus.—Venerable Mother of Italy! dost thou still survive muttering thy strange warnings in some sunless labyrinth, that the rapacious guides of Baiae have yet failed to penetrate? Art thou, like King Arthur of romantic Wales, still keeping watch over the destiny of thy country, ever ready to assist in the hour of need?