[Illustration: ASSISI. _From a drawing by the Author._]
Everything on our way seems to tell the same story of departed grandeur; the city is almost as deserted as one of those we read of in the _Arabian Nights_. A beautiful arcade, each capital of whose pillars is carved to represent a different species of vegetation, incloses nothing; the house of the poet Metastasio is falling into ruins, and scarcely can one decipher his coat of arms sculptured above the door. No dogs bark, nor children scream, nor loungers stare as the unwonted stranger passes through the market-place; the very _café_ has been fain to part with its chairs and little tables, and now is only a gaunt, bare room, in a corner of which sits, in half obscurity, a melancholy woman sewing slowly. The market-place is certainly the most gloomy part of the town, were it only from its contrast to the market-places we are accustomed to see; and so let us hurry down the long, grass-grown street, till at last a sudden breadth of light opens before us, and straight in front, across a patch of green meadow, rises the Church of St. Francis, while a little to the left a steep incline leads down to the entrance of the Lower Church, called incorrectly, in some works, the crypt, as the real crypt is beneath this lower edifice. The Lower Church stands upon a shelf of rock, the side of which slopes abruptly upward, against which one end of the church is built. The position of the two churches may perhaps be understood by thinking of them as situated upon two successive steps of a staircase, the floor of the Upper Church being merely a continuation of the upper step, and being thus immediately above the roof of the Lower Church.
Let us pause before entering the church, and cast our eyes over the scene before us. We stand on a little terrace half-way up the town, looking down upon tiled roofs, grey walls, and greyer olive groves, interspersed with some brighter greens of acacia and poplar. Beneath us, winding away in long perspective, is the road to the station, with the tall dome of St. Mary of the Angels forming a prominent blot upon the landscape, and breaking the level monotony of the plain. On the right a broad river-bed, nearly dry at the present season, stretches a snake-like course towards Perugia, the towers of which are just visible in the distance. In front of us, the valley of the Tiber stretches away for miles and miles, broken only by long lines of poplars and tiny villages, which, from the height at which we stand, only show as gleaming spots in the sunshine. In the extreme distance, purple mountains enclose the valley on every side, and immediately behind us rises the mountain on which Assisi is built, crowned with a ruined citadel, and black against the sky, the sharp pinnacles of cypress-trees. Whichever way one turns, there is beauty--in the quaint architecture of the old town, in the wild growth of the ancient olive-trees, and their delicate tints of greyish-green and silver; in the brighter colours of the plain, with its broad stretches of sunshine and little shadows of cloud; in the ranges of mountains, the darkness of the cypresses, and the brightness of the sky. And so murmuring within ourselves that the old monk was no bad judge of scenery, after all, we turn in beneath the broad portico of the church.