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They seemed moving pictures with their staffs, scrip, and scallop-shell capes, returning from Rome. Then came Terni and its famous waterfall a mile away, they knew, for they walked there. Man-made were those falls, by the turning of a pretty stream many hundred years ago.
Besides, we had seen falls quite as grand, which needed only a Byron to make them as renowned we had been told that those of Tivoli, which we shall see, were equally fine. The Velino, which we crossed near Terni, was not a large stream in short, we hunted as many reasons as we could find, why the falls need not be seen. Leaving Terni before day, we drove up the long vale towards Narni.
Before you have finished your inventory he breaks off work to show you a drawer or two of minerals, fairy-land in a cupboard; or some of his missals, King Hakon's Bible, or the original MS. of the Scott he was reading last night; or, opening a door in a sort of secrétaire, pulls out of their sliding cases frame after frame of Turners the Bridge of Narni, the Falls of Terni, Florence, or Rome, and many more to hold in your hand, and take to the light, and look into with a lens quite a different thing from seeing pictures in a gallery.
Vivian Grey's English verses and Vivian Grey's English themes were the subject of universal commendation. Some young lads made copies of these productions, to enrich, at the Christmas holidays, their sisters' albums; while the whole school were scribbling embryo prize-poems, epics of twenty lines on "the Ruins of Paestum" and "the Temple of Minerva;" "Agrigentum," and "the Cascade of Terni."
They obtained varieties nearer home, in different parts of Italy, such as the beautiful Alabastro di Tivoli, employed by Hadrian in his villa, and which appears to have been brought from Terni, where it still exists in abundance. From the quarry near Volterra the Etruscans obtained the alabaster for their cinerary urns.
A most exquisite journey of eight days we had from Florence to Rome, seeing the great monastery and triple church of Assisi and the wonderful Terni by the way that passion of the waters which makes the human heart seem so still.
He assured me that the road by Terni was forty miles shorter than the other, much more safe and easy, and accommodated with exceeding good auberges. Had I taken the trouble to cast my eyes upon the map, I must have seen, that the road by Terni, instead of being forty miles shorter, was much longer than the other: but this was not the only mistake of Signiore Barazzi.
The beauty of Terni is so hackneyed that enthusiasm over it becomes cockney, yet the beauty of hackneyed things is as eternal as the verity of truisms, and no more loses its charm than the other its point. But one must not talk about it.
He understood a little of what hydraulic science can compass; he knew what canalisation meant, and its assistance to traffic and trade; he had seen the waterworks on the Po, on the Adige, on the Mincio; he had heard how the Velino had been enslaved for the steel foundry of Terni, how the Nerino fed the ironworks of Narni; he had seen the Adda captive at Lodi, and the lakes held in bond at Mantua; he had read of the water drawn from Monte Amiata; and not very many miles off him, in the Abruzzo, was that hapless Fuscino, which had been emptied and dried up by rich meddlers of Rome.
We were aroused at four o'clock this morning; had some eggs and coffee, and were ready to start between five and six; being thus matutinary, in order to get to Terni in time to see the falls.
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