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And above the camellias again, the famous stone-pines of the villa climbed into the high air, overlooking the plain and the sea, peering at Rome and Soracte. So old it was! and yet so fresh with spring! In the mornings at least the spring was uppermost. It silenced the plaint of outraged beauty which the place seemed to be always making, under a flutter of growth and song.
I saw Soracte on the horizon, and I looked at everything as if for the last time; nor do I wish ever to see any of these objects again, though no place ever took so strong a hold of my being as Rome, nor ever seemed so close to me and so strangely familiar.
We supprest every harsher judgment; we enjoyed the enjoyable. Lastly we ascended the roof of the church, where one finds in little the plan, of a well-built city. We mounted the dome, and saw glistening before us the regions of the Apennines, Soracte, and toward Tivoli the volcanic hills. Frascati, Castelgandolfo, and the plains, and beyond all the sea.
Once a year a fete of Soranus and Feronia was held, in the precinct of the goddess at Soracte. Servius, the old commentator on Virgil, confuses the Hirpi, not unnaturally, with the Sabine 'clan, the Hirpini.
The Priestesses of Diana, at Castabala, in Cappadocia, commanded public veneration by walking over red-hot iron. The Herpi, a people of Etruria, walked among glowing embers at an annual festival held on Mount Soracte, and thus proved their sacred character, receiving certain privileges, among others, exemption from military service, from the Roman Senate.
Beyond that is the long, thin, graceful line of the Claudian aqueduct, with Soracte in the distance to the left, and Tivoli, Palestrina, and Frascati lying among the hills which bound the view. That Frangipani baron was in the right of it, and I hope he got the value of his money out of the residence which he built for himself.
They were soon comparing their journeys, and Helen and Fanny were cruelly overlooked in the conversation.. It was to be the same journey, they found; one day for the galleries at Florence "from what I hear," said the young man, "it is barely enough," and the rest at Rome. He talked of Rome very pleasantly; he was evidently quite well read, and he quoted Horace about Soracte.
"Here Caesar may have walked," they would say. "Raphael may have seen Soracte from this very point." They happened on the tomb of Bibulus. "Old Bibulus," said the young man. "The oldest monument of Republican Rome!" said Miss Winchelsea. "I'm dreadfully stupid," said Fanny, "but who WAS Bibulus?" There was a curious little pause. "Wasn't he the person who built the wall?" said Helen.
Then the Emperor and the Pope departed together, leaving Rome to its factions and its parties. Suddenly Arnold of Brescia is with them, a prisoner, but how taken no man can surely tell. And with them also, by Soracte, far out in the northern Campagna, is Di Vico, the Prefect, to judge the leader of the people.
As one turns his horse's head away from the river, off the high-road, to the high grassy flats, the whole Campagna seems to lie before one like a vast table-land, with nothing between one's self and Soracte as he lifts his heavy shoulder from the plain not half hidden by intervening mountains, as from some points of view, but majestic and isolated, thirty miles away to the north.
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