A SACRED RIVER-HEAD. BY PROFESSOR JAMES SULLY. It was the month of May, but a May smitten with a July heat"un caldo di Luglio," which drove even which drove even Americans from Rome and invaded the Umbrian height on which Spoleto stands; so that we needed much persuasion to draw us from the shade of its narrow streets into the glare of the dusty roads. Yet our friend the Canonico prevailed on us to join him in an early morning drive to the farfamed river which retains its ancient Umbrian name "Clitumno." He is a delightful companion, in whom a fund of good spirits and a merry vein play about the solid qualities of a cultivated intelligence and a modest faith. With a fine enthusiasm for classical antiquities he combines a lively interest in all the details of Church lore, its customs, its saints, and the rest. He lures us skilfully to his proposed excursion by emphasising the refreshing coolness of the wonder - working stream. We seek to evade the heat by starting early, before the white mists which sleep in the hollows of the mountains have been chased away by the sun. Yet even at this hour, as we drive along the old Roman highway to the north the Via Flaminia, - we seem to see harbingers of of the hot noon in the masses of glowing poppy in the fields and in the black sharply edged shadows of the overhanging tiles on the walls of the farmhouses. On the wide plain of the valley and on the mountain - sides tower after tower of castle or church shoots up and disappears as we pass; while behind us our hanging city of Spoleto remains visible, well guarded by her high-set and spacious rocca, and, set higher still on a green hill, her church of St Giuliano, which, though a ruin, still stands to symbolise a heavenly protection. A Our road inclines to the base of the fine mountains to the right, and soon brings us within sight of a group of tall poplars which marks the sacred head of our river, the celebrated sources or Vene. sparkle of the water as it flows out from under the rock discloses itself through the foliage. Farther on we trace the flow of the river which runs below us to the left. It looks a tiny thing to have made so great a stir. The poet Propertius, in an elegy in which he praises the beauties of Italy to a friend whose return to Rome he desires, names it with the Anio as one of the land's fairest streams; and other poets, ancient and modern, have repeated its praises. Later on it became one of the desire of our Canon to maintain local tradition has to give way on this point. We succeed in bringing back to his mobile face the look of broad contentment by stretching a point and conceding that though not the temple in which, as Pliny tells us, the god Clitumnus was once enshrined, it may well have been erected on its site, and perhaps have embodied a part of the primitive masonry. According to recent authorities it was probably erected and dedicated as a church to Our Saviour (Il Salvatore) as late as the middle of the fifth century, and to some extent restored in the twelfth century. We have no eye to-day for cross or other symbol of the later faith, but abandon ourselves to a vision of the ancient temple in which dwelt the river-god-not reclining in majestic ease, with serene, complacent visage as the allegorical figures which we see in Rome, but 8 very god of great sights of Italy, drawing other colonettes. The amiable even emperors like Caligula and Honorius to its banks. An English sportsman might call it a nice little trout stream, and think of his Hampshire or other clear waters. Nor does an imposing length compensate for its narrowness, since at Bevagna (the ancient Mevania), some nine miles below its source, near which St Francis preached to his "Brother birds," it loses its name; and not far below this loses, too, its separate existence-pouring its waters into the Tiber. An American, calling to mind his own rivers, might say that no other stream had ever received per square foot of its surface so ridiculous an amount of laudation. Yet though our first impression-like that of J. A. Symonds on seeing the harbour of Syracuse-is one of disappointing smallness, we soon begin to realise that it is the wondrous and sacred stream of which we read in Virgil, Pliny the younger, and other Latin authors. A mile or so below the Vene we reach a dainty building known as the Temple of Clitumnus. It stands above the river and so close to the road that the upper part of its hinder wall makes a parapet for it. In external form it is a small graceful temple or chapel (sacellum). But a closer ex ancient Umbrian cult, standing fully draped, as Pliny tells us, with a veil over his head, mysterious and awful. It is Pliny who tells us of the ancient temple as well as of much else pertaining to the river. The letter in which he does so is one of the most delightful of his epistles, amination shows that it is and indeed of all the short not one of the temples of the letters of which we know. Augustan Age which once It is written to a friend, stood on these banks. Its "Romanus," who, since the façade is almost too pretty writer addresses him in the for this, with its twisted and most intimate terms, and was He ends by a half-serious, half-facetious allusion to the inscriptions, which his friends will find on the pillars and walls, celebrating the virtues of the spring and its divinity. shows himself to be perfectly and known winter sports in familiar with his inclinations Switzerland, he might have and tastes, is pretty certainly compared the experience with Viconius Romanus, the friend that of dragging the "luge whom in another letter he up the steep snow bank folwarmly recommends for pro- lowed by the swift glissade. motion to Priscus, the com- He then speaks of the temples mander of the army in which and of the river deity, to Romanus serves, and whom whose immediate presence the he describes as the friend of prophetic oracles bear testihis youth, his fellow - student, mony, and of the villas and the sharer of his rooms in baths, adding what town and country, and bound likely to influence a youngster to him by common jokes as not overburdened with cashwell as by serious thoughts. that the good people to whom The letter to Romanus is Augustus had given the place clearly written with a run- entertained strangers at their ning pen. Pliny, we may own expense. "In short" (he conjecture, has been staying writes), "every surrounding on the banks of the Clitumnus object will afford you enterand enjoying its wonders; and tainment." just as the first impulse of an expansive German tourist of to-day, on visiting Tivoli or other famous sight in Italy, is to despatch an illustrated post-card to his betrothed or some bosom friend, so Pliny dashes off this note to the friend with whom long habit prompts him to share his pleasures. He begins by asking whether Romanus has ever seen the source of the river, and urges him, if he has not, to see it soon. He extols the charms of the water and its coolness, which vies with that of the snow, while in respect of colour it does not fall behind. He enlarges on the delights of boating on the stream, which has so strong 8 current that one drifts down merrily enough, but has to use oar and pole to get up, thus securing the desirable alternation of exertion and ease. Had he lived to-day Other writers tell us of the miracles wrought by the river. The tract of rich pasturage through which it flows, both above and below Trevi (the ancient Trebia), was famous for a breed of oxen specially prized for their snowy whiteness. The traffic in these is still recorded by the name of the village,-" Bovara," the ancient "Forum Boarium,❞— which lies on the mountainslope about two miles below the temple. They were in great request as victims for sacrifices. Virgil tells us that these oxen, and especially the bulls, were selected for their beauty as victims to precede victors in their triumphal processions. Juvenal, when he wishes to express the depth of his gratitude for the safe landing of Catullus after a perilous voyage, says that he has vowed a lamb to Juno and a steer to Jove, but would, had he been rich enough, have offered a huge bull fattened by the rich pastures of the Clitumnus. A pious tradition ascribed the preternatural whiteness of these oxen to the action of the clear bright water. According to the poets-Virgil, Propertius, and Claudian-they were laved white by bathing in the stream. Another version-for which the authority of Pliny is questionably claimed -regards their whiteness as the result of drinking the water. Much of the ancient glory of the river has departed. The temples, baths, and villas have vanished; the joyous life, too, half pleasure half worship, comparable with that of a And yet, as we look at the river to-day, it is not the vanishing of old world things which strikes us. So much seems to be still just what it was then. What has disappeared is the adventitious-the architecture and the human life. But the river itself and its natural surroundings live on much as they were. The clear glittering stream flowing smoothly and swiftly between its rushy banks, as one may see it from the road, or lower down from the window of the train, is just what Pliny saw. Nor has the vegetation altered much, for though the sacred grove of which cypresses once stood above the source may have modern Italian gone, the poplars still lend to festa, has been silenced. No the bank its procession of longer will the visitor see august worshippers. Even stately figures moving with though the famous breed of slow step towards the temple snowy oxen is said to have or the sacred wood, nor the exhausted itself, we find that well-fed oxen driven to their to-day, as in the early days of purifying bath; no longer will the Roman Empire, cattle come he hear the cries of barge- down in the evening to drink men whose craft have got en- of the waters. To quote Cartangled in the rushes of the ducci again— banks or interlocked one with another. For a moment we are touched by the elegiac mood of Carducci, whose lines our learned guide recites, giv "Ancor dal monte. . Scendon nel vespero umido, o Clit umno A te le greggi." 1 All is now silent, oh widowed Clitumnus, all: And local tradition, oddly enough, preserves the old faith in the whitening virtue of the sacred waters. To us, at any rate, in our uncritical mood, the miraculous blanching is sufficiently suggested by the peasant women whom we see near one of the single-arched bridges plunging their linen into the stream. Then there are the remains of the ancient buildings, the amphitheatre at Bevagna, and better still, the solitary little temple, a charming fraud if you like, but old enough to help us in our recreative day - dream of the things of the past. It is however at the source of the river, its sacred fountainhead, that we get nearest to the vanished scene; for though there are here no stony memorials, nature and man seem to have covenanted for once to conserve an ancient and revered spot. The pure sparkling water still flows out from under the limestone rock below our road as Pliny describes, not in a boisterous torrent, as the Anio issues, but in a number of gentle rivulets, some larger some smaller. These unite a few paces down to form a broad pool or basin, as if their waters were not pure enough and they paused to deposit some invisible impurities. The unfailing spring still "forces its way through the pool which it has made," emerging as a pure and glassy stream." The pool is studded with green islands which are shaded by poplars and weeping willows. Pliny speaks of the poplar and the ash; and the latter, as Car 66 ducci tells us, still murmurs in the wind on the mountain slopes above. As to the brilliant clearness of the pool it sets us at once peering into its light-shot depths, where, if we do not find the shining pebbles and votive coins of which Pliny wrote, we perceive with perfect distinctness each blade of the algae, each separate star of the decorative weeds on its glittering floor. So little of change is here that when our clerical friend quotes Pliny's letter we feel as if he were reading from some modern guide-book. This susceptible gentleman is fairly bewitched by the shining depths whose internal light set against the background of umbrageous trees reminds us of the famous grotto of Capri. He hurries hither and thither like a gladsome child, calling our attention to some new marvel of the aquatic world, so that an onlooker might rather take him to be the one having his first spiritual immersion in the waters and his less demonstrative companions as dulled by familiarity with the scene. His bright, keen eye searches the transparent depths as if for treasure. And when it lights on treasure, in the shape of a royal trout lying in stately repose in one of the lustrous hollows, or hiding his head under a grassy bank, he grows quite excited. His eye glistens like the pool over which he bends watching the shining armour of the fine fellow. We suspect that a word from us would suffice to set him tickling the fish, half asleep from |