The sun set over the little town of Terni, while we stood silently looking down into the gulf, and the wet spray reminded us that the most romantic people may take cold. We descended to our carriage; and in an hour were sitting around the blazing fire at the post-house, with a motley group of Germans, Swiss, French, and Italians--a mixture of company universal in the public room of an Italian albergo, at night. The coming and going vetturini stop at the same houses throughout, and the concourse is always amusing. We sat till the fire burned low, and then wishing our chance friends a happy night, had the "priests"[4] taken from our beds, and were soon lost to everything but sleep.
Terni was the Italian Tempe, and its beautiful scenery was shown to Cicero, whose excursion hither is recorded. It is part of a long, deep valley, between abrupt ranges of mountains, and abounds in loveliness.
We went to Spoleto, the next morning, to breakfast. It is a very old town, oddly built, and one of its gates still remains, at which Hannibal was repulsed after his victory at Thrasimene. It bears his name in time-worn letters.
At the distance of one post from Spoleto we came to the _Clitumnus_, a small stream, still, deep, and glassy--the clearest water I ever saw. It looks almost like air. On its bank, facing away from the road, stands the temple, "of small and delicate proportions," mentioned so exquisitely by Childe Harold.
The temple of the Clitumnus might stand in a drawing-room. The stream is a mere brook, and this little marble gem, whose richly fretted columns were raised to its honor with a feeling of beauty that makes one thrill, seems exactly of relative proportions. It is a thing of pure poetry; and to find an antiquity of such perfect preservation, with the small clear stream running still at the base of its _façade_, just as it did when Cicero and his contemporaries passed it on their visits to a country called after the loveliest vale of Greece for its beauty, was a gratification of the highest demand of taste. Childe Harold's lesson,
"Pass not unblest the genius of the place"
We slept at _Foligno_. For many miles we had observed that the houses were propped in every direction, many of them in ruins apparently recent, and small wooden sheds erected in the midst of the squares, or beside the roads, and crowded with the poor. The next morning we arrived at St. Angelo, and found its gigantic cathedral a heap of ruins. Its painted chapels, to the number of fifteen or sixteen, were half standing in the shattered walls, the altars all exposed, and the interior of the dome one mass of stone and rubbish. It was the first time I had seen the effects of an _earthquake_. For eight or ten miles further, we found every house cracked and deserted, and the people living like the settlers in a new country, half in the open air. The beggars were innumerable.