Poetical fancy can immortalise thee.
And I hastened home, and the same night noted down the history which I had dreamt among the ruins of the old Roman villa.
CHAPTER I.
It was a beautiful evening in June, The sun threw its golden beams from the west, from Vindelicia, on the Mercurius Hill, and the modest villa which crowned it.
Here and there on the great street a two-wheeled cart, drawn by a yoke of Noric oxen, was returning home at the close of the market-day through the west gate of Juvavum, the Porta Vindelica. The colonists and peasants had been selling vegetables, fowls, and pigeons in the Forum of Hercules; but the bustle of the street reached the hill only as a murmur. Here it was still and quiet; one only heard outside the low stone wall which surrounded the garden the lively rippling of a little spring, which at its source was prettily enclosed in marble, and after it had fed the fountain in the middle, and had wandered through the garden in artificially winding rivulets, escaped through a gap in the wall and hurried down the hill in a stone channel. Close by was the gate entrance, surmounted by a statue of Mercury, but open, without door or lattice. In the direction of the town, towards the south-east, there lay at the foot of the hill carefully tended vegetable and fruit gardens, meadows with the most succulent verdure, and corn-fields with luxuriant grain, which products the Romans had brought into the land of the barbarians.
Behind the villa, towards the north, fine beech-woods towered and rustled, ascending the mountain slopes; and out of their depths sounded from afar the metallic note of the golden oriole.
It was so beautiful, so peaceful; but from the west--and no less from the south-east!--threatening storm-clouds were rising.
From the entrance a straight path, strewn with white sand, led through the wide-spreading garden, between tall ilices and yews, which according to the long ruling fashion had been cut into all kinds of geometrical figures--a taste, or rather want of taste, which the Rococo did not invent, but only newly borrowed from the gardens of the Imperators.
Statues were placed at regular intervals in the space between the garden gate and the entrance to the dwelling-house: nymphs, a Flora, a satyr, a Mercury--bad work in plaster; the stout Crispus made them by the dozen in his workshop on the Vulcan market-place in Juvavum; and he sold them cheap: for the times were not good for men, and were bad for gods and demi-gods; but these were all gifts, for Crispus was the father's brother of the young householder.
From the entrance of the garden, echoing from the stone wall of the enclosure, there sounded several strokes of a hammer, only lightly, for they were given carefully by an artist-hand; they seemed to be the last improving, finishing efforts of a master.