Excerpt from Transatlantic Sketches

Border, may easily deepen to delicious complacency. The wall encloses the town in a continuous ring, which, passing through innumerable picturesque vicissitudes, often threatens to snap, but never fairly breaks the link; so that starting at any point, an hour's easy stroll will bring you back to your station. I have quite lost my heart to this charming wall, and there are so many things to be said about it that I hardly know where to begin. The great fact, I suppose, is that it contains a Roman substructure, and rests for much of its course on foundations laid by that race of master-builders. But in Spite of this sturdy origin, much of which is buried in the well-trodden soil of the ages, it is the gentlest and least offensive of ramparts, and completes its long irregular curve without a frown or menace in all its disembattled stretch. The earthy deposit of time has, indeed, in some places climbed so high about its base, that it amounts to no more than a terrace of modest proportions. It has everywhere, however, a rugged outer parapet and a broad hollow flagging, wide enough for two strollers abreast. Thus equipped, it wanders through its adventurous circuit; now mping, now bending, now broadening into a terrace, now nar rowing into an alley, now swelling into an arch, now dipping into steps, now passing some thorn-screened garden, and now reminding you that it was once a more serious matter than all this, by the occurrence of a rugged, ivy-smothered tower. Its present mild inno cence is increased, to your mind, by the facility with which you can approach it from any point in the town.

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