or place, for her own perturbed and rich personality. The "Lettres d'un Voyageur" is one of her best books; she is herself so much in it. But it abounds more in impassioned declamation than in pictures of travel. She does not so much load you with facts as interest and charm you with her expression of herself.

A young woman of great gifts, of a benevolent nature, cut loose from the checks and freed from the usual sense of dependence of her sex, footing the open ways of this pleasant land like an unknown youth, was most interesting. True, she could not have found a country where the people are more civil and more gentle, or sooner respond to the charm of a stranger's voice. And there was more peril in George Sand's own imagination than in all the leagues of land between the Brenta and the Piave traversed by her; and if in any place nature could lay a cooling hand on her child, it would have been here on these pre-Alpine heights, these Asolan hills, with their restful vision of earth and sky, and pure air winnowed and freshened by free winds from the mounItains and the sea. There was ministra tion in the very flowers and aromatic plants which abound in the Asolan country. But the amenities of all this rich Italian nature were foreign to her, and she turned away from it. She says she skinned her hands to reach a solitude suited to her mood. The mountain gorge was too savage-the park-like slopes of the lower hills too tame-to influence her agitated spirit. Her soul was sick, and she sought to deaden reflection by movement. Nature irritates, she says, when one is in disaccord with her. Therefore she, the lover of nature, lingered in the enchanting land she traversed but to fare her way to Asolo. She was less fortunate than the sane Englishman who came to it and found in it the inspiration of his early verse and the subject of one of his best poems. Robert Browning came to Asolo two years later than George Sand, led to it, perhaps, by her very account of her walk from Bassano and Possagno. He set the name of Asolo in "Pippa

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Passes,” which remains expressive in some ways of its life and nature, though silk-winding is no longer an industry of the town. It may be owing to his poem about the girl of Asolo singing her song that his son has established his charitable industry there; and Mr. R. Barrett Browning's lacemakers are the result of "Pippa." Such potentialities lie in the glance and the expression of a poet.

If you would approach Asolo in the footsteps of George Sand or of Robert Browning, you will start from picturesque Bassano. At Bassano one naturally thinks of old Jacopo da Ponti, called Bassano, a painter of rural realities long before Millet. He felt the poetry of country life; he liked the low hills about his native town; his imagination was stirred by the frequent effects of light seen in its sky—the gleam of it at the horizon, and the bursting ray of its splendor shot from a rifted cloud like a sudden revelation; these are the two notes of poetry which you will find in his best pictures. Who can look at the level light at the horizon, a break in low-lying clouds, a quiet space of metallic lustre, or silver or gold, or like fire, above the lifted hills, without some thought of another world? It is the note which gives imaginative reach to Bassano's homeliest subjects-the note wherein he is akin to Tintoretto in his one suggestion of the infinite. So that his pastoral prose becomes as far reaching in suggestion as Tintoretto's great dramatic poetry. The Bassano hills were the setting of the seasons he knew best; and he painted them with great richness of color and according to the Venetian method. It is sound painting. Time does not blanch nor blacken nor dull it; if it darkens, it remains transparent, not black. His best work to-day is jewel-like for richness of color. His shepherd boy, his sleeping peasant, his busy peasant woman, and his sheep, the very peasant hats worn in his time, may still be seen near Bassano. He never rose to the inspiration of the Asolan landscape close by. That was left for Giorgione, with his patrician taste, his larger sense of space, of light,

of air-his sense of romantic scenery. The Asolan Country is, properly speaking, a part of his own; it is but nine miles from his own towered Castelfranco, or from the hamlet of Vedelago, where he was born. The Asolan hills are of pyramidal form for the most part, bare at the top and belted with chestnut woods and vineyards, like the hills you see in Bellini's backgrounds. The painter of Queen Cornaio's portrait doubtless came to Asolo, or to her royal seat, Barco, three miles away, where the élite of her time came to see her in her new domain.

Approaching Asolo from the north by way of Possagno, walking south, one traverses the Asolan Country; thus, or (stepping westward) from the east from Cornuda, the nearest station on the railway line of Treviso and Belluno. At Possagno one cannot wonder that Canova came back to such a birth-place after the honors of a brilliant and unresting life in the capitals of Europe. He came back to it unmarried; to give it a good part of the fortune he had acquired elsewhere, and to erect a Greek temple, for Christian worship, overlooking the whole land. It would have been more happily placed on one of the Asolan hills, at St. Anna, where he first proposed to build it, than where it perches belittled — on the slope of a mountain flank above Possagno.

It is, perhaps, no longer the fashion to admire Canova. One should not forget that he is noble and grand in his bronze Napoleon, high placed in the court of the Breza at Milan-though not in the plaster at Possagno, where one is too close to it. It is a bronze of heroic and enduring beauty. The feminine ideal of the empire found no fairer expression than in his statues of women-all grace and elegance of form. He abhorred the coarse and the material. Unfortunately, he too often eliminated all individuality; hence, he was monotonous, generalizing form. But he sought "the line," and found it; he sought beauty, and created a type. You might imagine he never saw any but delicately bred and high-born women; but the very peasant girls of Possagno, and of Asolo,

have just the grace of movement and the refinement of line you see in his statues. They have small hands and feet; small, round ankles; medium sized, perfectly proportioned bodies; lovely faces; their glance is clear as water. The race is of Greek origin. The Greek type is constantly seen here as elsewhere in the Veneto. The Ger man wave never swept it from hill or plain. The Lombard from the West never dislodged it. The Hun from the East drove it to the islands of the Lagoons, but it came back to its old seat. The peasant is like the grass, universal-and in Italy-like it, though he is trodden on, he endures. And in the Asolan Country he has kept the type of his race in spite of the Invaders of Italy. Only the other day Charles Yriarte observed the proud and charming type; the pose of the head on its columnar neck, the short bust, the noble elastic carriage of the women on the road below Asolo. Strange that a man of Canova's genius should have failed to see that his insipid faces, setting the fashion of a day, might have been made more vital, and interesting, more Greek looking, by modelling strictly the living peasants of his native hills. To them at least we owe the refinement of his ideal; its form was imposed upon him by his sense of the beauty of the peasant girls of the Asolan Country. As we face forward in it, the roadsides are bright with villas and villages and farmhouses, each one set in orchard close, or vineyard slope, or on the edge of chestnut woods; and from time to time we get glimpses of the marvellous plain and the chain of the Asolan hills coming dark against a luminous sky. It is all so pleasant, so radiant, and it has its note of romance in dark tower and blind fortress. It seems now the ideal country, where every gentle and peaceful thing has triumphed over the rougher and wilder life of the past. There is nothing of the melancholy and the homelessness of the severer and the more classic parts of southern Italy; nothing of Tuscan meagreness, nothing of its formal or ascetic aspect; nothing of the immeasurable monotony and

silence of the grander Roman Cam. pagna. No. We are in a part of Giorgione's country-the Holy Land of Art: that land of a vast horizon on the south, of green undulating hills below the majestic range of the Venetian Alps on the north; a land cut by swift streams and fresh with moist meadows; a land of park-like scenery, with vineyards, and orchards, and woods. The oak, the chestnut, the laurel, the olive, the sycamore, the pine, the cypress the pomegranate, the magnolia, the lemonhere grows every tree of southern Italy but the palm, and makes a landscape of rich foliage, the landscape of a light, melting, hazy world. Over and out of all this infinite of refreshing life comes the sound of church bells from the hills, from the vales, and from the plain. Rising and dying sounds, before dawn, break and fall in the dim and yet unawakened world; now single note after note, then the swarming sound of the bells of many campanili; far bells answer bells, and near by the bells of Asolo ring out in louder sound which ebbs away till lost in thin air.

The rising and falling tide of life on market-day once a week, and on festa days, is most amusing; it is all that breaks the monotony of the quiet street of little Asolo. The piazza is one of the most charming in Italy, with its Renaissance fountain and beautiful town-hall, perfectly proportioned, built above an open loggia. Its painted façade is adorned by a fresco of Diana and her dogs-pagan and pleasantwhich one remembers rather than the battle-scene also painted there. Yet one goes to Asolo not for architecture but for nature. The hill-town offers to the seeing eye a page-yes, many pages!of nature therein excelling Perugia, with her outlook on the Valley of the Tiber, and Orvietto on her rock-farreaching and beautiful as the Umbrian landscape is from both. At Asolo you are midway between the Brenta and the Piave, within easy reach of valleys, hills, and streams, and towns of great name and rich with art. It is prose, as the priest said, walking on the plain to the hills; but when I rose to Asolo it

was poetry. And it is joyous. Something in the smiling landscape and something in the quality of the air make people sing. A kind of lyric joy, as of perpetual youth, stirs the peasant. The shepherdess sings as she goes with her sheep; the girl at the waterside sings as she beats the clothes; the cowboy sings on the road, and the birds sing by the river. I have heard the little caponero by the Musone as late as December, and the nightingale in August. Once by the Musone one is in an enchanting world.

To set foot in this joyous and open region is to see something of a part of Italy that was thought, comparable to San Remo and to the Holy Land. It has its Mount Tabor, the name given, perhaps, by the Crusader who returned to this land after slaying the infidel at Ascalon; for it was celebrated in the Middle Ages, and furnished fighters for the Holy Sepulchre. From its castled hills one overlooked the most favored part of Italy, the famous, the prosperous Marca Trivigiana, still populous, cut by swift rivers and washed and fretted by the waters of the far-off Adriatic. It was called the land of joy and love-La Marca Gioiosa e Amorosa. From Asolo one sees the hill of Romano, and also that of San Zenon, of the Ecelini. Dante, who saw everything worth seeing in Italy, mentions the little hill where stood the castle of Romano-which lifts itself, but not very high, he says, between the Brenta and the Piave. There Ecelin was born, and there also Cunizza, "passion's votaress," as Browning calls her. Her Tuscan mother, Adelaide, probably often came to Asolo for greater security. She was a watcher of the stars, and the Asolan fortress is a point of vantage where to remark the constellated heavens. The planets and stars seem to burn brighter than when they are seen from the plain, though it was from a city of that plain that Galileo watched. Seen at night, the plain lies in opaque darkness, vast and impressive like the sea. Over it the moon seems to shine with more effulgence than elsewhere, so pure is the atmosphere. What is this but to say

that the shows of nature are seen as in few other places, and that the spectacle of day and night is a continuous entertainment to the eye in this open country? Storms from the Alps or from the sea, piled in portentous clouds, break and fall, or are driven to and fro over the plain; and one is witness of atmospheric effects that amaze and enchant the eye.

The thing of most perplexing interest at Asolo is its Rocca, or fortress, a strange looking structure of mysterious antiquity. It was there long before the time of Ecelin, and it is thought by some to be pre-Roman, but its known story begins only with the Middle Ages. As to the strange signs scratched on its stones, they excited the curiosity and engaged the imagination of the local antiquary, Signor Scomazzetti, who fancied they might prove to be Euganean. His supposition was not confirmed by comparing these halfeffaced marks with the lapidary remains of the Euganean alphabet. He might as well have imagined them to be Runic. Their presence there would hardly seem more strange than the Runic characters in Venice on a red marble lion, a trophy from Athens in the tenth century which record the visit of a northern sea-rover. But they as little imply the Norseman as the Euganean, and we must leave them as of unknown significance and accept the Rocca as the work of the Romans, who gave the name Acelum to the town, and perhaps, first, to the fortress that dominates it. Be this as it may, the Rocca is one of the most striking monuments in Italy. Its dismantled tower was erected before the main structure, and is without any entrance from below, and appears to have been accessible only from the top! The puzzle of it is there. Its interior wall was pierced at the beginning of this century, and now one can' creep through the thickest part of it; but the aperture dwindles to a hole only big enough to admit a man's head and shoulders. The main structure has nine sides and but one entrance, and it presents itself, curiously enough, seen

from the Chapel of San Martino below, to the east, as a slim castle, the very unusual epithet Browning selects to describe the castle of Goito, which, in what remains of it, is but a round and roofed piece of medieval wall in a meadow by the Mincius. I fancy he had the Rocca of Asolo in his mind's eye when he wrote "Sordello." He seems to mean the Rocca when he speaks of the castle's looking "like the chine of some extinct animal," to which the boy in "Sordello" climbs:

Singing all the while Some unintelligible words to beat The lark, God's poet, swooning at his feet. It looks like that from the north side

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valley by the Musone. It is reached every side by rough lanes, bordered with old hedges. Ecelin's own men-at-arms many a time hurried down the devious and stony watercourses, or toiled up through them to the hill-top; and many a time the young lord or page of the castle slipped down through them, unseen, for such adventure as the field and covert of the forest slopes below offered him. Often there at vesper time you may startle the duskwinged bats-those ominous things of darkness, the last (save ruin) to possess the place.

These thickly screened ways are a feature of the Asolan rivas, which are cut by deep ravines, strangely solitary and cool under the thick leafage of summer, and for a good part of the year are watercourses, in which you step on "stubs of living rock." But they lead you, as they descend, beneath grand chestnut-trees of great girth, and with wide-spreading branches to the open vineyards and orchards, through which you can roam at will in autumn, after the vintage. It is, perhaps, in springtime that the rivas of Asolo are the most enchanting. The new-born vegetation, the fields blue and gold and white with wild flowers, and, over all, the blossomy profusion of the fruit trees, make a vision of tender and fleeting beauty. The air is dim with blooms; they fall in showers; a puff of warm air sends them down like snowflakes. The admirable

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guide to Asolo, by Signor Paladinl"Asolo e il suo Territorio"-does not fail to pay due tribute to spring and autumn there, treating the impressions of both as of equal importance with its antiquities and its story.

There is in Asolo a certain riva-as the hillsides and vineyards are calledwhich is like a cloister, so private and hidden is its leafy walk, once paced by a Monsignore for many a day of his declining years; whether for reverie, or digestion, to dream of the cardinal's purple or to watch his grapes,-who knows? On that riva one is in a wellchosen place. There are the vestiges of a Roman theatre-a site selected as the convent's for the monk-a place where the air is delicate, and the view the best. With its ranged seats overlooking the Veneto, it buzzed with life before the comic or the tragic stage. But yesterday a peasant there turned up a coin of the time, but yesterday a bit of mosaic; and the Museum of Asolo is made interesting with the spoils of the Riva of the Monsignore. Hard by is the Castle of the Cornaro that walking lady of history, who, despite her tragic losses and her distress in Cyprus, despite the fame of her great beauty in youth, is not a very interesting woman. She was deficient in force of character; a queen, but for fine clothes, and festivals, and a secure State; in no way comparable to the great Italian women of story and song, or to the saints of legend; much less an impassioned soul, Andrea Cornaro, her uncle, banker to the bastard son of an effeminate king, bought her a husband of illustrious name; for it was his ducats, rather than her beauty, which won her the crown of Cyprus. Lusignan, the usurper, was a needy, if not an indigent, king. Lacking money, Cornaro accommodated him, offering his niece with a dot of one hundred thousand zecchini. To render the marriage fit, the republic adopted her; and, in case she had no heir, could claim jurisdiction over Cyprus, and in any case hold it against all pretenders. The transaction would not bear examination, and it was dangerous to look into it and criticise it, at the time, in

Venice. The scheme of the astute and all-aspiring Cornaro was for a while. successful, but it brought him violent death, and no happiness to his niece.

She, the queen of Cyprus, was compelled to cede the island, and fly to Venice, where a dazzling reception awaited her. Transferred to Asologiven to compensate her in a way for the loss of her sovereignty over Cyprus, where she had been helpless against the policy of Venice, and insecure against the rightful mistress of the island, Carlotta Lusignan, the wife of Luigi of` Savoy-she kept up the show of royalty, with her court of eighty persons and an allowance of eight thousand ducats from Venice. She gave fêtes, she was visited by great personages, and for a few years led a pleasant, sumptuous, untroubled life. Forced to fly from Asolo at the rumor of war, she appears but as the hurried lady of a festival suddenly terminated, and without any personal life. Nothing touched her deep enough for that. The splendor of her fêtes at Asolo made people forget that she had passed through a bloody and heart-shaking tragedy in Cyprus, where the Count of Tripoli and his fellow-conspirators "burst into the young queen's chamber; slew her doctor and her servant, who clung to the fo'd s of her dress for safety; and, after searching the palace through, captured · and cut to pieces Andrea Cornaro, the queen's uncle, and Marco Bembo, her cousin." Was it that nothing made a lasting impression on her kind of mind the kind that forgets, and lives only in the vanities of a day?

At Asolo young Bembo found in her nothing but a pleasant hostess, more like a stage queen: she exists but to show herself; she hardly seems to live. And so she is depicted in a phrase or two in Bembo's “Asolani,” the fashionable book of its time, read "with enthusiasm" in every court of Italy, but now dead. He dedicated it. not to the Cornaro, but to Lucrezia Borgia, Duchess of Ferrara, more than interesting to him, after the horrors of her : Roman days. "Gli Asolani" gives a glimpse of the courtly and cultivated