Most of the leading literary lights of Rome, including Virgil, Ovid, Horace, and Tibullus, were the successors of Catullus in the art of poetry, and honored him with the title of "Doctus" in alluding to him, thus testifying to his talent and his erudition. Some of them also made pilgrimages here, as many famous personages of the modern world have done, to render homage to the poet's memory. Thus, Bonaparte, in 1797, when on his way to sign the treaty of Campio Formio, - though proud and eager to conclude the terms which were to cover him with glory, insure to France the coveted frontier of the Rhine, and leave her virtually supreme in Italy, - yet halted long enough to turn aside from the direct route east of Desenzano, that he might offer here his tribute to a bard whose lyrics had outlived the wars of eighteen centuries. Tennyson's visit to the place we can more easily understand, not only from the natural affinity uniting two poetic souls, but also from the fact that in Catullus' lament for his dead brother the author of "In Memoriam" found a bond of sympathy transcending all the intervening years. Amid these ruins, therefore, one recalls with double pleasure the verses of the English poet:

" Row us out from Desenzano, to your Sirmione row! So they rowed, and there we landed - ' O venusta Sirmio'! There to me through all the groves of olive in the summer glow, There beneath the Roman ruin where the purple flowers grow, Came that ' Ave atque Vale' of the Poet's hopeless woe, -Tenderest of Roman poets nineteen hundred years ago".

Tennyson.

The outer world has made what men call progress since Catullus was inspired by this view; but on the peninsula itself there has been retrogression. Nature in lake and mountain is as lovely now as then; but ruin sits upon the olive-mantled cliffs, and in their rear the little town is principally dependent upon foreign visitors, and on a health establishment of sulphur baths, whose water bubbles up within the lake, close by the shore, and is conveyed in pipes to the sanatorium. Nevertheless, in presence of a scene of such transcendent beauty and poetic charm, one is transported not alone from local poverty and squalor, but also from all recollection of to-day's mad money-getting and commercialism, to the repose, nobility, and poetry of the past - that peaceful, art-creating past - of what was best in Greece and Rome.

Absorbed in such reflections, Sirmio's promontory seemed to me the prow of a mysterious vessel, cleaving the water noiselessly and imperceptibly, and bearing me to an ideal world. Some sixty feet below the wall on which I sat, the sandstone reefs lay glistening like scales of gold, lapped by the beryl - colored waves, whose soft, caressing murmur mingled with the whisper of the olives in the light June breeze. The afternoon was waning. Far out toward San Vigilio, Lake Garda looked like a vast shield of opals, its wondrous colors changing like the hues of a chameleon, as the fleecy squadrons of the sky sailed far above its surface. A tender bloom of violet rested on the Tyrolese mountains, as if they had been touched and tinted by a sunset cloud. Through one of the ivied arches of the poet's home I saw beneath me, floating like a seagull in the shadow of the cliff, the little boat that was to bear me hence to take the steamer at another point. Yet still I lingered on and on, dreading to close this volume of poetic paganism, of which an exquisitely illustrated page lay open here before me. Even when finally I had departed, and in the sunset light was sailing toward the eastern shore, the charm of Sirmio seemed as potent as before. For as I looked back from the shelter of the slanting sail, and watched that happy day's last footstep on the purpling clouds, an iridescent veil of pearly mist rose slowly from the lake and wrapped the classic ruins in its radiant folds, as if the spirit of Euterpe hovered o'er the spot where one of her most gifted votaries had lived and died.

The " Prow " Of The Promontory.

Farewell To Sirmione.

The Waiting Boat.