Various as the Campagna is in outline it is quite as various in
colour, reflecting every aspect of the sky and answering every touch
of the seasons. Day after day it shifts the slide of its wondrous
panorama of changeM pictures — ^now tender in the fresh green and
ower-flush of spring — now golden in the matured richness* of
summer — and now subdued and softened into purple browns in the
autumn and winter. Silent and grand, with shifting opal hues of
blue, violet, and rose, the mountains look upon the plain. Light
cl6uds hide and cling to their airy crags, or drag along them their
trailing shadows. Looking down from the Alban Hill one sees in
the summer noons wild thunder-storms, with sloping spears of rain
and plashing blades of lightning, charge over the plain and burst
here and there among the ruins, while all around the full sunshine
basks upon the Campagna and trembles over the mountains. To-
wards twilight the landscape is transfigured in a blaze of colour —
the earth seems fused in a fire of sunset — the ruins are of beaten
gold — the meadows and hollows are as crucibles where delicate
rainbows melt into every tone and gradation of colour — a hazy and
misty splendour floats over the shadows, and earth drinks in the
glory of the heavens. Then softly a grey veil is drawn over the
plain, the shadow creeps up the mountain side, the purples deepen,
the fires of sunset Me away into cold ashes — ^aud. simset is gone



THE CAMPAGNA— FOREIGN VIEWS. 13

almost while we speak. The air grows cliill, and in the hollows
and along the river steal long white snakes of mist — ^fires fix)m the
stubble begin to show here and there — the sky's deep orange softens
slowly into a glowing citron, with tinges of green, then refines into
paler yellows, and the great stars begin to look out from the soft
deep blue above. Then the Campagna is swallowed up in dark, and
chilled with damp and creeping winds.
