the gigantic billows, on whose front, in joyous sport, they were swept shoreward and lighty swung upon the wet sands.
Ere I approached the gates in the magnificent western wall which towered above, I looked back- ward, and saw through the gloom a dulf, blood-red band issuing from the mass of involved cloud, broad and smooth at the upper end, but at its hither extremity jagged and serrated like the sword of an avenging angel. Even as such a weapon would show, broken and dinted after some fierce chastisement, so from the end of this blood-red cloud-sword great crimson streaks and clots of reddish purple dropped, and stained the underworld of cloud and twilight.
2. Behind Assisi.
Behind Assisi, in a wooded ravine on the other- wise barren slope of Monte Subasio, can be reached by a stony footpath the retreat where the saint used to retire to dream and pray. Lying here — not, indeed, solitary, though in such solitude — I can well understand how either the ecstasy of religious delirium, or a very passion of faith, must have dominated any soul who should long dwell between these echo-haunted declivities; and, still more, lien I look from the heights northward, where abides a very desolation of barrenness, I realise that penitence in such a place, in those strange, pathetic middle ages, miint have meant absolute renunciation of all things fair and beautiful in this world, or else have impelled the passionate spirit to the licence of despair — to the extremest tyranny of the lusts of the body. The silence of the Thebaid was not worse than this silence, its lifelessness not so appalling as this terrible deathfulness of nature, where never sound is heard save the winds of winter howling from the mountain gullies; the grinding of dislocated rocks down sandy and marly slopes to a roadless abyss ; oi- the croak of a raven as its shadow drifts above the herbless and treeless waste, scorched and seared by the suns of unnumbered summers. Here, surely, is discernible at least one great factor in the potent, deep-rooted, and momentous impulse that emanated from Assisi in the thirteenth century. It is impossible that such a mighty reactionary impulse could have arisen if, instead of the everlasting presence of death behind the city of St. Francis, there had been fulness of life and joy of colour and sound.
3. Pekisia August.
I find it so difficult to realise, as I walk through these steep, picturesque streets, alive with renovated national energy ; or as I stand on the ancient ramparts, and look out upon the memorable, beautiful, pathetic Umbrian landscape ; or even when among those neiglibouring tombs, wherein the dust of the olumnii mouldered away long ago in their caskets of stone, ornamented with the mystic symbols of Etruria — I find it so difficult to realise that this very place, this very Perugia, existed in all the fulness of life close upon three thousand years ago. The very name of this pre-historic city of the Umbrians has passed away from man's knowledge. Even as it faded before, or possibly became merged in Etrurian ' Perusia," so the latter, under Roman dominion, became 'Perusia Augusta'; till, at last, mediaeval 'Perugia,' freed from the embrace of ancient Rome, and released from the grasp of Totila the Goth, slowly grew, through centuries of bloodshed and prostrate apathy, to its present prosperity. But how significant that, through all this change and interchange — this fluctuation between strife and weariness, bloodshed and sufferings innumerable, supremacy and subjection — art slowly germinated and grew, till it effloresced under the influence of that Terra Benigna, as the old chroniclers call it, where St. Francis and his companions 'lived and had their being only in the worship of the Inmieasurable Love.' Even more significant is it that this blossoming of art had no affinity to the gross, blood-stained records of Perugia; that it had nothing of the determined realism of undismayed Florence, or of the splendour of power and glory of war distinctive of the art of Venice at one great period; that, on the contrary, it became the most gentle, almost the most effeminately refined, and the most spiritual school of art in the world.
How glorious the view from this ' empress of hill- set cities'! Here, just outside the Porta Nuova, I see before me the Umbrian Champaign stretching away to where the mountains beyond Gubbio break soutliward by many a peak and serrated ridge, till, on the lower spurs of this great chain of tlie Apennines, my gaze dwells upon Assisi and Spello and Foligno, white in the sunlight ; further away, the village of Bevagna, on the classic Clitumnus, and Montefalco, high-perched on commanding heights; and, still further, Trevi on its olive slopes. To-day, indeed — so magically transparent, even for Umbria, is the atmosphere — I can even make out Spoleto, brooding in her ancient memories beneath her castellated hill. As I look forth upon this prospect, stretching from Apennine to Apennine — from Gubbio to the yellow Tiber in its Romeward flow — I am thrilled by the thought of how still o-rander Perugia must have been in those mediaeval
