uresque varieties. The lovely mingles with the 

 wild. In places its walls stand two thousand feet 

 above the river and the daisies. The walls are 

 many-formed, rugged, polished, perpendicular, 

 terraced, and statuesque, and are adorned with 

 panels of rusty veneer, with decorative lichen 

 tracery or with vertical meadows of velvet moss. 

 Blossoms fill many niches with poetry, while 

 shrubbery, concealing in its clinging the cracks 

 in the wall, forms many a charming festoon. 



In some stretches the parallel walls go straight 

 away, well separated ; then they curve, or crowd 

 so closely that there is barely room for the river 

 and the road. At intervals the walls sweep out- 

 ward in short, grand semicircles and inclose 

 ideal wild gardens of pines, grass, flowers, and 

 the winding river. The river is ever varying its 

 speed, its surface, and its song. Here it is a 

 boulder-framed mirror reflecting the aspens and 

 the sky, there a stretch of foam-flow; now it 

 rests in a wild pool pierced with sharp rocks, 

 now it hurries on to plunge and roar over a ter- 

 race of rocks, then on, always on, toward the 

 sea. 



34S 



