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Passages from the French and Italian Notebooks, Volume 1.

by Nathaniel Hawthorne · English · Gutenberg #7879 · 500,204 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Passages from the French and Italian Notebooks, Volume 1.

Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne


        
Release date: April 1, 2005 [eBook #7879]
                Most recently updated: December 17, 2011

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7879

Credits: Produced by Tapio Riikonen and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PASSAGES FROM THE FRENCH AND ITALIAN NOTEBOOKS, VOLUME 1. ***




Produced by Tapio Riikonen and David Widger







PASSAGES FROM THE FRENCH AND ITALIAN NOTE-BOOKS

OF

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE



VOL. I.





PASSAGES FROM HAWTHORNE'S NOTE-BOOKS IN FRANCE AND ITALY.




FRANCE.


Hotel de Louvre, January 6th, 1858.--On Tuesday morning, our dozen trunks
and half-dozen carpet-bags being already packed and labelled, we began to
prepare for our journey two or three hours before light. Two cabs were at
the door by half past six, and at seven we set out for the London Bridge
station, while it was still dark and bitterly cold.  There were already
many people in the streets, growing more numerous as we drove city-ward;
and, in Newgate Street, there was such a number of market-carts, that we
almost came to a dead lock with some of them.  At the station we found
several persons who were apparently going in the same train with us,
sitting round the fire of the waiting-room.  Since I came to England
there has hardly been a morning when I should have less willingly
bestirred myself before daylight; so sharp and inclement was the
atmosphere.  We started at half past eight, having taken through tickets
to Paris by way of Folkestone and Boulogne.  A foot-warmer (a long, flat
tin utensil, full of hot water) was put into the carriage just before we
started; but it did not make us more than half comfortable, and the frost
soon began to cloud the windows, and shut out the prospect, so that we
could only glance at the green fields--immortally green, whatever winter
can do against them--and at, here and there, a stream or pool with the
ice forming on its borders.  It was the first cold weather of a very mild
season.  The snow began to fall in scattered and almost invisible flakes;
and it seemed as if we had stayed our English welcome out, and were to
find nothing genial and hospitable there any more.

At Folkestone, we were deposited at a railway station close upon a
shingly beach, on which the sea broke in foam, and which J----- reported
as strewn with shells and star-fish; behind was the town, with an old
church in the midst; and, close, at hand, the pier, where lay the steamer
in which we were to embark.  But the air was so wintry, that I had no
heart to explore the town, or pick up shells with J----- on the beach; so
we kept within doors during the two hours of our stay, now and then
looking out of the windows at a fishing-boat or two, as they pitched and
rolled with an ugly and irregular motion, such as the British Channel
generally communicates to the craft that navigate it.

At about one o'clock we went on board, and were soon under steam, at a
rate that quickly showed a long line of the white cliffs of Albion behind
us.  It is a very dusky white, by the by, and the cliffs themselves do
not seem, at a distance, to be of imposing height, and have too even an
outline to be picturesque.

As we increased our distance from England, the French coast came more and
more distinctly in sight, with a low, wavy outline, not very well worth
looking at, except because it was the coast of France.  Indeed, I looked
at it but little; for the wind was bleak and boisterous, and I went down
into the cabin, where I found the fire very comfortable, and several
people were stretched on sofas in a state of placid wretchedness. . . .
I have never suffered from sea-sickness, but had been somewhat
apprehensive of this rough strait between England and France, which seems
to have more potency over people's stomachs than ten times the extent of
sea in other quarters.  Our passage was of two hours, at the end of which
we landed on French soil, and found ourselves immediately in the clutches
of the custom-house officers, who, however, merely made a momentary
examination of my passport, and allowed us to pass without opening even
one of our carpet-bags.  The great bulk of our luggage had been
registered through to Paris, for examination after our arrival there.

We left Boulogne in about an hour after our arrival, when it was already
a darkening twilight.  The weather had grown colder than ever, since our
arrival in sunny France, and the night was now setting in, wickedly black
and dreary.  The frost hardened upon the carriage windows in such
thickness that I could scarcely scratch a peep-hole through it; but, from
such glimpses as I could catch, the aspect of the country seemed pretty
much to resemble the December aspect of my dear native land,--broad,
bare, brown fields, with streaks of snow at the foot of ridges, and along
fences, or in the furrows of ploughed soil.  There was ice wherever there
happened to be water to form it.

We had feet-warmers in the carriage, but the cold crept in nevertheless;
and I do not remember hardly in my life a more disagreeable short journey
than this, my first advance into French territory.  My impression of
France will always be that it is an Arctic region.  At any season of the
year, the tract over which we passed yesterday must be an uninteresting
one as regards its natural features; and the only adornment, as far as I
could observe, which art has given it, consists in straight rows of very
stiff-looking and slender-stemmed trees.  In the dusk they resembled
poplar-trees.

Weary and frost-bitten,--morally, if not physically,--we reached Amiens
in three or four hours, and here I underwent much annoyance from the
French railway officials and attendants, who, I believe, did not mean to
incommode me, but rather to forward my purposes as far as they well
could.  If they would speak slowly and distinctly I might understand them
well enough, being perfectly familiar with the written language, and
knowing the principles of its pronunciation; but, in their customary
rapid utterance, it sounds like a string of mere gabble.  When left to
myself, therefore, I got into great difficulties. . . . It gives a
taciturn personage like myself a new conception as to the value of
speech, even to him, when he finds himself unable either to speak or
understand.

Finally, being advised on all hands to go to the Hotel du Rhin, we were
carried thither in an omnibus, rattling over a rough pavement, through an
invisible and frozen town; and, on our arrival, were ushered into a
handsome salon, as chill as a tomb.  They made a little bit of a
wood-fire for us in a low and deep chimney-hole, which let a hundred
times more heat escape up the flue than it sent into the room.

In the morning we sallied forth to see the cathedral.

The aspect of the old French town was very different from anything
English; whiter, infinitely cleaner; higher and narrower houses, the
entrance to most of which seeming to be through a great gateway,
affording admission into a central court-yard; a public square, with a
statue in the middle, and another statue in a neighboring street.  We met
priests in three-cornered hats, long frock-coats, and knee-breeches; also
soldiers and gendarmes, and peasants and children, clattering over the
pavements in wooden shoes.

It makes a great impression of outlandishness to see the signs over the
shop doors in a foreign tongue.  If the cold had not been such as to dull
my sense of novelty, and make all my perceptions torpid, I should have
taken in a set of new impressions, and enjoyed them very much.  As it
was, I cared little for what I saw, but yet had life enough left to enjoy
the cathedral of Amiens, which has many features unlike those of English
cathedrals.

It stands in the midst of the cold, white town, and has a high-shouldered
look to a spectator accustomed to the minsters of England, which cover a
great space of ground in proportion to their height.  The impression the
latter gives is of magnitude and mass; this French cathedral strikes one
as lofty.  The exterior is venerable, though but little time-worn by the
action of the atmosphere; and statues still keep their places in numerous
niches, almost as perfect as when first placed there in the thirteenth
century.  The principal doors are deep, elaborately wrought, pointed
arches; and the interior seemed to us, at the moment, as grand as any
that we had seen, and to afford as vast an idea of included space; it
being of such an airy height, and with no screen between the chancel and
nave, as in all the English cathedrals.  We saw the differences, too,
betwixt a church in which the same form of worship for which it was
originally built is still kept up, and those of England, where it has
been superseded for centuries; for here, in the recess of every arch of
the side aisles, beneath each lofty window, there was a chapel dedicated
to some Saint, and adorned with great marble sculptures of the
crucifixion, and with pictures, execrably bad, in all cases, and various
kinds of gilding and ornamentation.  Immensely tall wax candles stand
upon the altars of these chapels, and before one sat a woman, with a
great supply of tapers, one of which was burning.  I suppose these were
to be lighted as offerings to the saints, by the true believers.
Artificial flowers were hung at some of the shrines, or placed under
glass.  In every chapel, moreover, there was a confessional,--a little
oaken structure, about as big as a sentry-box, with a closed part for the
priest to sit in, and an open one for the penitent to kneel at, and
speak, through the open-work of the priest's closet.  Monuments, mural
and others, to long-departed worthies, and images of the Saviour, the
Virgin, and saints, were numerous everywhere about the church; and in the
chancel there was a great deal of quaint and curious sculpture, fencing
in the Holy of Holies, where the High Altar stands.  There is not much
painted glass; one or two very rich and beautiful rose-windows, however,
that looked antique; and the great eastern window which, I think, is
modern.  The pavement has, probably, never been renewed, as one piece of
work, since the structure was erected, and is foot-worn by the successive
generations, though still in excellent repair.  I saw one of the small,
square stones in it, bearing the date of 1597, and no doubt there are a
thousand older ones.  It was gratifying to find the cathedral in such
good condition, without any traces of recent repair; and it is perhaps a
mark of difference between French and English character, that the
Revolution in the former country, though all religious worship disappears
before it, does not seem to have caused such violence to ecclesiastical
monuments, as the Reformation and the reign of Puritanism in the latter.
I did not see a mutilated shrine, or even a broken-nosed image, in the
whole cathedral.  But, probably, the very rage of the English fanatics
against idolatrous tokens, and their smashing blows at them, were
symptoms of sincerer religious faith than the French were capable of.
These last did not care enough about their Saviour to beat down his
crucified image; and they preserved the works of sacred art, for the sake
only of what beauty there was in them.

While we were in the cathedral, we saw several persons kneeling at their
devotions on the steps of the chancel and elsewhere.  One dipped his
fingers in the holy water at the entrance: by the by, I looked into the
stone basin that held it, and saw it full of ice.  Could not all that
sanctity at least keep it thawed?  Priests--jolly, fat, mean-looking
fellows, in white robes--went hither and thither, but did not interrupt
or accost us.

There were other peculiarities, which I suppose I shall see more of in my
visits to other churches, but now we were all glad to make our stay as
brief as possible, the atmosphere of the cathedral being so bleak, and
its stone pavement so icy cold beneath our feet.  We returned to the
hotel, and the chambermaid brought me a book, in which she asked me to
inscribe my name, age, profession, country, destination, and the
authorization under which I travelled.  After the freedom of an English
hotel, so much greater than even that of an American one, where they make
you disclose your name, this is not so pleasant.

We left Amiens at half past one; and I can tell as little of the country
between that place and Paris, as between Boulogne and Amiens.  The
windows of our railway carriage were already frosted with French breath
when we got into it, and the ice grew thicker and thicker continually.  I
tried, at various times, to rub a peep-hole through, as before; but the
ice immediately shot its crystallized tracery over it again; and, indeed,
there was little or nothing to make it worth while to look out, so bleak
was the scene.  Now and then a chateau, too far off for its
characteristics to be discerned; now and then a church, with a tall gray
tower, and a little peak atop; here and there a village or a town, which
we could not well see.  At sunset there was just that clear, cold, wintry
sky which I remember so well in America, but have never seen in England.

At five we reached Paris, and were suffered to take a carriage to the
hotel de Louvre, without any examination of the little luggage we had
with us.  Arriving, we took a suite of apartments, and the waiter
immediately lighted a wax candle in each separate room.

We might have dined at the table d'hote, but preferred the restaurant
connected with and within the hotel.  All the dishes were very delicate,
and a vast change from the simple English system, with its joints,
shoulders, beefsteaks, and chops; but I doubt whether English cookery,
for the very reason that it is so simple, is not better for men's moral
and spiritual nature than French.  In the former case, you know that you
are gratifying your animal needs and propensities, and are duly ashamed
of it; but, in dealing with these French delicacies, you delude yourself
into the idea that you are cultivating your taste while satisfying your
appetite.  This last, however, it requires a good deal of perseverance to
accomplish.

In the cathedral at Amiens there were printed lists of acts of devotion
posted on the columns, such as prayers at the shrines of certain saints,
whereby plenary indulgences might be gained.  It is to be observed,
however, that all these external forms were necessarily accompanied with
true penitence and religious devotion.


Hotel de Louvre, January 8th.--It was so fearfully cold this morning that
I really felt little or no curiosity to see the city. . . . Until after
one o'clock, therefore, I knew nothing of Paris except the lights which I
had seen beneath our window the evening before, far, far downward, in the
narrow Rue St. Honore, and the rumble of the wheels, which continued
later than I was awake to hear it, and began again before dawn.  I could
see, too, tall houses, that seemed to be occupied in every story, and
that had windows on the steep roofs.  One of these houses is six stories
high.  This Rue St. Honore is one of the old streets in Paris, and is
that in which Henry IV. was assassinated; but it has not, in this part of
it, the aspect of antiquity.

After one o'clock we all went out and walked along the Rue de
Rivoli. . . . We are here, right in the midst of Paris, and close to
whatever is best known to those who hear or read about it,--the Louvre
being across the street, the Palais Royal but a little way off, the
Tuileries joining to the Louvre, the Place de la Concorde just beyond,
verging on which is the Champs Elysees.  We looked about us for a
suitable place to dine, and soon found the Restaurant des Echelles, where
we entered at a venture, and were courteously received.  It has a
handsomely furnished saloon, much set off with gilding and mirrors; and
appears to be frequented by English and Americans; its carte, a bound
volume, being printed in English as well as French. . . .

It was now nearly four o'clock, and too late to visit the galleries of
the Louvre, or to do anything else but walk a little way along the
street.  The splendor of Paris, so far as I have seen, takes me
altogether by surprise: such stately edifices, prolonging themselves in
unwearying magnificence and beauty, and, ever and anon, a long vista of a
street, with a column rising at the end of it, or a triumphal arch,
wrought in memory of some grand event.  The light stone or stucco, wholly
untarnished by smoke and soot, puts London to the blush, if a blush could
be seen on its dingy face; but, indeed, London is not to be mentioned,
nor compared even, with Paris.  I never knew what a palace was till I had
a glimpse of the Louvre and the Tuileries; never had my idea of a city
been gratified till I trod these stately streets.  The life of the scene,
too, is infinitely more picturesque than that of London, with its
monstrous throng of grave faces and black coats; whereas, here, you see
soldiers and priests, policemen in cocked hats, Zonaves with turbans,
long mantles, and bronzed, half-Moorish faces; and a great many people
whom you perceive to be outside of your experience, and know them ugly to
look at, and fancy them villanous.  Truly, I have no sympathies towards
the French people; their eyes do not win me, nor do their glances melt
and mingle with mine.  But they do grand and beautiful things in the
architectural way; and I am grateful for it.  The Place de la Concorde is
a most splendid square, large enough for a nation to erect trophies in of
all its triumphs; and on one side of it is the Tuileries, on the opposite
side the Champs Elysees, and, on a third, the Seine, adown which we saw
large cakes of ice floating, beneath the arches of a bridge.  The Champs
Elysees, so far as I saw it, had not a grassy soil beneath its trees, but
the bare earth, white and dusty.  The very dust, if I saw nothing else,
would assure me that I was out of England.

We had time only to take this little walk, when it began to grow dusk;
and, being so pitilessly cold, we hurried back to our hotel.  Thus far, I
think, what I have seen of Paris is wholly unlike what I expected; but
very like an imaginary picture which I had conceived of St. Petersburg,--
new, bright, magnificent, and desperately cold.

A great part of this architectural splendor is due to the present
Emperor, who has wrought a great change in the aspect of the city within
a very few years.  A traveller, if he looks at the thing selfishly, ought
to wish him a long reign and arbitrary power, since he makes it his
policy to illustrate his capital with palatial edifices, which are,
however, better for a stranger to look at, than for his own people to pay
for.

We have spent to-day chiefly in seeing some of the galleries of the
Louvre.  I must confess that the vast and beautiful edifice struck me far
more than the pictures, sculpture, and curiosities which it contains,--
the shell more than the kernel inside; such noble suites of rooms and
halls were those through which we first passed, containing Egyptian, and,
farther onward, Greek and Roman antiquities; the walls cased in
variegated marbles; the ceilings glowing with beautiful frescos; the
whole extended into infinite vistas by mirrors that seemed like vacancy,
and multiplied everything forever.  The picture-rooms are not so
brilliant, and the pictures themselves did not greatly win upon me in
this one day.  Many artists were employed in copying them, especially in
the rooms hung with the productions of French painters.  Not a few of
these copyists were females; most of them were young men, picturesquely
mustached and bearded; but some were elderly, who, it was pitiful to
think, had passed through life without so much success as now to paint
pictures of their own.

From the pictures we went into a suite of rooms where are preserved many
relics of the ancient and later kings of France; more relics of the elder
ones, indeed, than I supposed had remained extant through the Revolution.
The French seem to like to keep memorials of whatever they do, and of
whatever their forefathers have done, even if it be ever so little to
their credit; and perhaps they do not take matters sufficiently to heart
to detest anything that has ever happened.  What surprised me most were
the golden sceptre and the magnificent sword and other gorgeous relics of
Charlemagne,--a person whom I had always associated with a sheepskin
cloak.  There were suits of armor and weapons that had been worn and
handled by a great many of the French kings; and a religious book that
had belonged to St. Louis; a dressing-glass, most richly set with
precious stones, which formerly stood on the toilet-table of Catherine
de' Medici, and in which I saw my own face where hers had been.  And
there were a thousand other treasures, just as well worth mentioning as
these.  If each monarch could have been summoned from Hades to claim his
own relics, we should have had the halls full of the old Childerics,
Charleses, Bourbons and Capets, Henrys and Louises, snatching with
ghostly hands at sceptres, swords, armor, and mantles; and Napoleon would
have seen, apparently, almost everything that personally belonged to
him,--his coat, his cocked hats, his camp-desk, his field-bed, his
knives, forks, and plates, and even a lock of his hair.  I must let it
all go.  These things cannot be reproduced by pen and ink.


Hotel de Louvre, January 9th.--. . . . Last evening Mr. Fezaudie called.
He spoke very freely respecting the Emperor and the hatred entertained
against him in France; but said that he is more powerful, that is, more
firmly fixed as a ruler, than ever the first Napoleon was.  We, who look
back upon the first Napoleon as one of the eternal facts of the past, a
great bowlder in history, cannot well estimate how momentary and
insubstantial the great Captain may have appeared to those who beheld his
rise out of obscurity.  They never, perhaps, took the reality of his
career fairly into their minds, before it was over.  The present Emperor,
I believe, has already been as long in possession of the supreme power as
his uncle was.  I should like to see him, and may, perhaps, do--so, as he
is our neighbor, across the way.

This morning Miss ------, the celebrated astronomical lady, called.  She
had brought a letter of introduction to me, while consul; and her purpose
now was to see if we could take her as one of our party to Rome, whither
she likewise is bound.  We readily consented, for she seems to be a
simple, strong, healthy-humored woman, who will not fling herself as a
burden on our shoulders; and my only wonder is that a person evidently so
able to take care of herself should wish to have an escort.

We issued forth at about eleven, and went down the Rue St. Honore, which
is narrow, and has houses of five or six stories on either side, between
which run the streets like a gully in a rock.  One face of our hotel
borders and looks on this street.  After going a good way, we came to an
intersection with another street, the name of which I forget; but, at
this point, Ravaillac sprang at the carriage of Henry IV. and plunged his
dagger into him.  As we went down the Rue St. Honore, it grew more and
more thronged, and with a meaner class of people.  The houses still were
high, and without the shabbiness of exterior that distinguishes the old
part of London, being of light-colored stone; but I never saw anything
that so much came up to my idea of a swarming city as this narrow,
crowded, and rambling street.

Thence we turned into the Rue St. Denis, which is one of the oldest
streets in Paris, and is said to have been first marked out by the track
of the saint's footsteps, where, after his martyrdom, he walked along it,
with his head under his arm, in quest of a burial-place.  This legend may
account for any crookedness of the street; for it could not reasonably be
asked of a headless man that he should walk straight.

Through some other indirections we at last found the Rue Bergere, down
which I went with J----- in quest of Hottinguer et Co., the bankers,
while the rest of us went along the Boulevards, towards the Church of the
Madeleine. . . . This business accomplished, J----- and I threaded our
way back, and overtook the rest of the party, still a good distance from
the Madeleine.  I know not why the Boulevards are called so.  They are a
succession of broad walks through broad streets, and were much thronged
with people, most of whom appeared to be bent more on pleasure than
business.  The sun, long before this, had come out brightly, and gave us
the first genial and comfortable sensations which we have had in Paris.

Approaching the Madeleine, we found it a most beautiful church, that
might have been adapted from Heathenism to Catholicism; for on each side
there is a range of magnificent pillars, unequalled, except by those of
the Parthenon.  A mourning-coach, arrayed in black and silver, was drawn
up at the steps, and the front of the church was hung with black cloth,
which covered the whole entrance.  However, seeing the people going in,
we entered along with them.  Glorious and gorgeous is the Madeleine.  The
entrance to the nave is beneath a most stately arch; and three arches of
equal height open from the nave to the side aisles; and at the end of the
nave is another great arch, rising, with a vaulted half-dome, over the
high altar.  The pillars supporting these arches are Corinthian, with
richly sculptured capitals; and wherever gilding might adorn the church,
it is lavished like sunshine; and within the sweeps of the arches there
are fresco paintings of sacred subjects, and a beautiful picture covers
the hollow of the vault over the altar; all this, besides much sculpture;
and especially a group above and around the high altar, representing the
Magdalen smiling down upon angels and archangels, some of whom are
kneeling, and shadowing themselves with their heavy marble wings.  There
is no such thing as making my page glow with the most distant idea of the
magnificence of this church, in its details and in its whole.  It was
founded a hundred or two hundred years ago; then Bonaparte contemplated
transforming it into a Temple of Victory, or building it anew as one.
The restored Bourbons remade it into a church; but it still has a
heathenish look, and will never lose it.

When we entered we saw a crowd of people, all pressing forward towards
the high altar, before which burned a hundred wax lights, some of which
were six or seven feet high; and, altogether, they shone like a galaxy of
stars.  In the middle of the nave, moreover, there was another galaxy of
wax candles burning around an immense pall of black velvet, embroidered
with silver, which seemed to cover, not only a coffin, but a sarcophagus,
or something still more huge.  The organ was rumbling forth a deep,
lugubrious bass, accompanied with heavy chanting of priests, out of which
sometimes rose the clear, young voices of choristers, like light flashing
out of the gloom.  The church, between the arches, along the nave, and
round the altar, was hung with broad expanses of black cloth; and all the
priests had their sacred vestments covered with black.  They looked
exceedingly well; I never saw anything half so well got up on the stage.
Some of these ecclesiastical figures were very stately and noble, and
knelt and bowed, and bore aloft the cross, and swung the censers in a way
that I liked to see.  The ceremonies of the Catholic Church were a superb
work of art, or perhaps a true growth of man's religious nature; and so
long as men felt their original meaning, they must have been full of awe
and glory.  Being of another parish, I looked on coldly, but not
irreverently, and was glad to see the funeral service so well performed,
and very glad when it was over.  What struck me as singular, the person
who performed the part usually performed by a verger, keeping order among
the audience, wore a gold-embroidered scarf, a cocked hat, and, I
believe, a sword, and had the air of a military man.

Before the close of the service a contribution-box--or, rather, a black
velvet bag--was handed about by this military verger; and I gave J----- a
franc to put in, though I did not in the least know for what.

Issuing from the church, we inquired of two or three persons who was the
distinguished defunct at whose obsequies we had been assisting, for we
had some hope that it might be Rachel, who died last week, and is still
above ground.  But it proved to be only a Madame Mentel, or some such
name, whom nobody had ever before heard of.  I forgot to say that her
coffin was taken from beneath the illuminated pall, and carried out of
the church before us.

When we left the Madeleine we took our way to the Place de la Concorde,
and thence through the Elysian Fields (which, I suppose, are the French
idea of heaven) to Bonaparte's triumphal arch.  The Champs Elysees may
look pretty in summer; though I suspect they must be somewhat dry and
artificial at whatever season,--the trees being slender and scraggy, and
requiring to be renewed every few years.  The soil is not genial to them.
The strangest peculiarity of this place, however, to eyes fresh from
moist and verdant England, is, that there is not one blade of grass in
all the Elysian Fields, nothing but hard clay, now covered with white
dust.  It gives the whole scene the air of being a contrivance of man, in
which Nature has either not been invited to take any part, or has
declined to do so.  There were merry-go-rounds, wooden horses, and other
provision for children's amusements among the trees; and booths, and
tables of cakes, and candy-women; and restaurants on the borders of the
wood; but very few people there; and doubtless we can form no idea of
what the scene might become when alive with French gayety and vivacity.

As we walked onward the Triumphal Arch began to loom up in the distance,
looking huge and massive, though still a long way off.  It was not,
however, till we stood almost beneath it that we really felt the grandeur
of this great arch, including so large a space of the blue sky in its
airy sweep.  At a distance it impresses the spectator with its solidity;
nearer, with the lofty vacancy beneath it.  There is a spiral staircase
within one of its immense limbs; and, climbing steadily upward, lighted
by a lantern which the doorkeeper's wife gave us, we had a bird's-eye
view of Paris, much obscured by smoke or mist.  Several interminable
avenues shoot with painful directness right towards it.

On our way homeward we visited the Place Vendome, in the centre of which
is a tall column, sculptured from top to bottom, all over the pedestal,
and all over the shaft, and with Napoleon himself on the summit.  The
shaft is wreathed round and roundabout with representations of what, as
far as I could distinguish, seemed to be the Emperor's victories.  It has
a very rich effect.  At the foot of the column we saw wreaths of
artificial flowers, suspended there, no doubt, by some admirer of
Napoleon, still ardent enough to expend a franc or two in this way.


Hotel de Louvre, January 10th.--We had purposed going to the Cathedral
of Notre Dame to-day, but the weather and walking were too unfavorable
for a distant expedition; so we merely went across the street to the
Louvre. . . . .

Our principal object this morning was to see the pencil drawings by
eminent artists.  Of these the Louvre has a very rich collection,
occupying many apartments, and comprising sketches by Annibale Caracci,
Claude, Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci, Michel Angelo, Rubens, Rembrandt, and
almost all the other great masters, whether French, Italian, Dutch, or
whatever else; the earliest drawings of their great pictures, when they
had the glory of their pristine idea directly before their minds' eye,--
that idea which inevitably became overlaid with their own handling of it
in the finished painting.  No doubt the painters themselves had often a
happiness in these rude, off-hand sketches, which they never felt again
in the same work, and which resulted in disappointment, after they had
done their best.  To an artist, the collection must be most deeply
interesting: to myself, it was merely curious, and soon grew wearisome.

In the same suite of apartments, there is a collection of miniatures,
some of them very exquisite, and absolutely lifelike, on their small
scale.  I observed two of Franklin, both good and picturesque, one of
them especially so, with its cloud-like white hair.  I do not think we
have produced a man so interesting to contemplate, in many points of
view, as he.  Most of our great men are of a character that I find it
impossible to warm into life by thought, or by lavishing any amount of
sympathy upon them.  Not so Franklin, who had a great deal of common and
uncommon human nature in him.

Much of the time, while my wife was looking at the drawings, I sat
observing the crowd of Sunday visitors.  They were generally of a lower
class than those of week-days; private soldiers in a variety of uniforms,
and, for the most part, ugly little men, but decorous and well behaved.
I saw medals on many of their breasts, denoting Crimean service; some
wore the English medal, with Queen Victoria's head upon it.  A blue
coat, with red baggy trousers, was the most usual uniform.  Some had
short-breasted coats, made in the same style as those of the first
Napoleon, which we had seen in the preceding rooms.  The policemen,
distributed pretty abundantly about the rooms, themselves looked
military, wearing cocked hats and swords.  There were many women of the
middling classes; some, evidently, of the lowest, but clean and decent,
in colored gowns and caps; and laboring men, citizens, Sunday gentlemen,
young artists, too, no doubt looking with educated eyes at these
art-treasures, and I think, as a general thing, each man was mated with a
woman.  The soldiers, however, came in pairs or little squads,
accompanied by women.  I did not much like any of the French faces, and
yet I am not sure that there is not more resemblance between them and the
American physiognomy, than between the latter and the English.  The women
are not pretty, but in all ranks above the lowest they have a trained
expression that supplies the place of beauty.

I was wearied to death with the drawings, and began to have that dreary
and desperate feeling which has often come upon me when the sights last
longer than my capacity for receiving them.  As our time in Paris,
however, is brief and precious, we next inquired our way to the galleries
of sculpture, and these alone are of astounding extent, reaching, I
should think, all round one quadrangle of the Louvre, on the basement
floor.  Hall after hall opened interminably before us, and on either side
of us, paved and incrusted with variegated and beautifully polished
marble, relieved against which stand the antique statues and groups,
interspersed with great urns and vases, sarcophagi, altars, tablets,
busts of historic personages, and all manner of shapes of marble which
consummate art has transmuted into precious stones.  Not that I really
did feel much impressed by any of this sculpture then, nor saw more than
two or three things which I thought very beautiful; but whether it be
good or no, I suppose the world has nothing better, unless it be a few
world-renowned statues in Italy.  I was even more struck by the skill and
ingenuity of the French in arranging these sculptural remains, than by
the value of the sculptures themselves.  The galleries, I should judge,
have been recently prepared, and on a magnificent system,--the adornments
being yet by no means completed,--for besides the floor and wall-casings
of rich, polished marble, the vaulted ceilings of some of the apartments
are painted in fresco, causing them to glow as if the sky were opened.
It must be owned, however, that the statuary, often time-worn and
darkened from its original brilliancy by weather-stains, does not suit
well as furniture for such splendid rooms.  When we see a perfection of
modern finish around them, we recognize that most of these statues have
been thrown down from their pedestals, hundreds of years ago, and have
been battered and externally degraded; and though whatever spiritual
beauty they ever had may still remain, yet this is not made more apparent
by the contrast betwixt the new gloss of modern upholstery, and their
tarnished, even if immortal grace.  I rather think the English have given
really the more hospitable reception to the maimed Theseus, and his
broken-nosed, broken-legged, headless companions, because flouting them
with no gorgeous fittings up.

By this time poor J----- (who, with his taste for art yet undeveloped, is
the companion of all our visits to sculpture and picture galleries) was
wofully hungry, and for bread we had given him a stone,--not one stone,
but a thousand.  We returned to the hotel, and it being too damp and raw
to go to our Restaurant des Echelles, we dined at the hotel.  In my
opinion it would require less time to cultivate our gastronomic taste
than taste of any other kind; and, on the whole, I am not sure that a man
would not be wise to afford himself a little discipline in this line.  It
is certainly throwing away the bounties of Providence, to treat them as
the English do, producing from better materials than the French have to
work upon nothing but sirloins, joints, joints, steaks, steaks, steaks,
chops, chops, chops, chops!  We had a soup to-day, in which twenty kinds
of vegetables were represented, and manifested each its own aroma; a
fillet of stewed beef, and a fowl, in some sort of delicate fricassee.
We had a bottle of Chablis, and renewed ourselves, at the close of the
banquet, with a plate of Chateaubriand ice.  It was all very good, and we
respected ourselves far more than if we had eaten a quantity of red roast
beef; but I am not quite sure that we were right. . . .

Among the relics of kings and princes, I do not know that there was
anything more interesting than a little brass cannon, two or three inches
long, which had been a toy of the unfortunate Dauphin, son of Louis XVI.
There was a map,--a hemisphere of the world,--which his father had drawn
for this poor boy; very neatly done, too.  The sword of Louis XVI., a
magnificent rapier, with a beautifully damasked blade, and a jewelled
scabbard, but without a hilt, is likewise preserved, as is the hilt of
Henry IV.'s sword.  But it is useless to begin a catalogue of these
things.  What a collection it is, including Charlemagne's sword and
sceptre, and the last Dauphin's little toy cannon, and so much between
the two!


Hotel de Louvre, January 11th.--This was another chill, raw day,
characterized by a spitefulness of atmosphere which I do not remember
ever to have experienced in my own dear country.  We meant to have
visited the Hotel des Invalides, but J----- and I walked to the Tivoli,
the Place de la Concorde, the Champs Elysees, and to the Place de
Beaujou, and to the residence of the American minister, where I wished to
arrange about my passport.  After speaking with the Secretary of
Legation, we were ushered into the minister's private room, where he
received me with great kindness.  Mr. ------ is an old gentleman with a
white head, and a large, florid face, which has an expression of
amiability, not unmingled with a certain dignity.  He did not rise from
his arm-chair to greet me,--a lack of ceremony which I imputed to the
gout, feeling it impossible that he should have willingly failed in
courtesy to one of his twenty-five million sovereigns.  In response to
some remark of mine about the shabby way in which our government treats
its officials pecuniarily, he gave a detailed account of his own troubles
on that score; then expressed a hope that I had made a good thing out of
my consulate, and inquired whether I had received a hint to resign; to
which I replied that, for various reasons, I had resigned of my own
accord, and before Mr. Buchanan's inauguration.  We agreed, however, in
disapproving the system of periodical change in our foreign officials;
and I remarked that a consul or an ambassador ought to be a citizen both
of his native country and of the one in which he resided; and that his
possibility of beneficent influence depended largely on his being so.
Apropos to which Mr. ------ said that he had once asked a diplomatic
friend of long experience, what was the first duty of a minister.  "To
love his own country, and to watch over its interests," answered the
diplomatist.  "And his second duty?" asked Mr. ------.  "To love and to
promote the interests of the country to which he is accredited," said his
friend.  This is a very Christian and sensible view of the matter; but it
can scarcely have happened once in our whole diplomatic history, that a
minister can have had time to overcome his first rude and ignorant
prejudice against the country of his mission; and if there were any
suspicion of his having done so, it would be held abundantly sufficient
ground for his recall.  I like Mr. ------, a good-hearted, sensible old
man.

J-----  and I returned along the Champs Elysees, and, crossing the Seine,
kept on our way by the river's brink, looking at the titles of books on
the long lines of stalls that extend between the bridges.  Novels,
fairy-tales, dream books, treatises of behavior and etiquette,
collections of bon-mots and of songs, were interspersed with volumes in
the old style of calf and gilt binding, the works of the classics of
French literature.  A good many persons, of the poor classes, and of
those apparently well to do, stopped transitorily to look at these books.
On the other side of the street was a range of tall edifices with shops
beneath, and the quick stir of French life hurrying, and babbling, and
swarming along the sidewalk.  We passed two or three bridges, occurring
at short intervals, and at last we recrossed the Seine by a bridge which
oversteps the river, from a point near the National Institute, and
reaches the other side, not far from the Louvre. . . .

Though the day was so disagreeable, we thought it best not to lose the
remainder of it, and therefore set out to visit the Cathedral of Notre
Dame.  We took a fiacre in the Place de Carousel, and drove to the door.
On entering, we found the interior miserably shut off from view by the
stagings erected for the purpose of repairs.  Penetrating from the nave
towards the chancel, an official personage signified to us that we must
first purchase a ticket for each grown person, at the price of half a
franc each.  This expenditure admitted us into the sacristy, where we
were taken in charge by a guide, who came down upon us with an avalanche
or cataract of French, descriptive of a great many treasures reposited in
this chapel.  I understood hardly more than one word in ten, but gathered
doubtfully that a bullet which was shown us was the one that killed the
late Archbishop of Paris, on the floor of the cathedral.  [But this was a
mistake.  It was the archbishop who was killed in the insurrection of
1848.  Two joints of his backbone were also shown.]  Also, that some
gorgeously embroidered vestments, which he drew forth, had been used at
the coronation of Napoleon I.  There were two large, full-length
portraits hanging aloft in the sacristy, and a gold or silver gilt, or,
at all events, gilt image of the Virgin, as large as life, standing on a
pedestal.  The guide had much to say about these, but, understanding him
so imperfectly, I have nothing to record.

The guide's supervision of us seemed not to extend beyond this sacristy,
on quitting which he gave us permission to go where we pleased, only
intimating a hope that we would not forget him; so I gave him half a
franc, though thereby violating an inhibition on the printed ticket of
entrance.

We had been much disappointed at first by the apparently narrow limits
of the interior of this famous church; but now, as we made our way round
the choir, gazing into chapel after chapel, each with its painted window,
its crucifix, its pictures, its confessional, and afterwards came back
into the nave, where arch rises above arch to the lofty roof, we came to
the conclusion that it was very sumptuous.  It is the greatest of pities
that its grandeur and solemnity should just now be so infinitely marred
by the workmen's boards, timber, and ladders occupying the whole centre
of the edifice, and screening all its best effects.  It seems to have
been already most richly ornamented, its roof being painted, and the
capitals of the pillars gilded, and their shafts illuminated in fresco;
and no doubt it will shine out gorgeously when all the repairs and
adornments shall be completed.  Even now it gave to my actual sight what
I have often tried to imagine in my visits to the English cathedrals,--
the pristine glory of those edifices, when they stood glowing with gold
and picture, fresh from the architects' and adorners' hands.

The interior loftiness of Notre Dame, moreover, gives it a sublimity
which would swallow up anything that might look gewgawy in its
ornamentation, were we to consider it window by window, or pillar by
pillar.  It is an advantage of these vast edifices, rising over us and
spreading about us in such a firmamental way, that we cannot spoil them
by any pettiness of our own, but that they receive (or absorb) our
pettiness into their own immensity.  Every little fantasy finds its place
and propriety in them, like a flower on the earth's broad bosom.

When we emerged from the cathedral, we found it beginning to rain or
snow, or both; and, as we had dismissed our fiacre at the door, and could
find no other, we were at a loss what to do.  We stood a few moments on
the steps of the Hotel Dieu, looking up at the front of Notre Dame, with
its twin towers, and its three deep-pointed arches, piercing through a
great thickness of stone, and throwing a cavern-like gloom around these
entrances.  The front is very rich.  Though so huge, and all of gray
stone, it is carved and fretted with statues and innumerable devices, as
cunningly as any ivory casket in which relics are kept; but its size did
not so much impress me. . . .


Hotel de Louvre, January 12th.--This has been a bright day as regards
weather; but I have done little or nothing worth recording.  After
breakfast, I set out in quest of the consul, and found him up a court, at
51 Rue Caumartin, in an office rather smaller, I think, than mine at
Liverpool; but, to say the truth, a little better furnished.  I was
received in the outer apartment by an elderly, brisk-looking man, in
whose air, respectful and subservient, and yet with a kind of authority
in it, I recognized the vice-consul.  He introduced me to Mr. ------, who
sat writing in an inner room; a very gentlemanly, courteous, cool man of
the world, whom I should take to be an excellent person for consul at
Paris.  He tells me that he has resided here some years, although his
occupancy of the consulate dates only from November last.  Consulting him
respecting my passport, he gave me what appear good reasons why I should
get all the necessary vises here; for example, that the vise of a
minister carries more weight than that of a consul; and especially that
an Austrian consul will never vise a passport unless he sees his
minister's name upon it.  Mr. ------ has travelled much in Italy, and
ought to be able to give me sound advice.  His opinion was, that at this
season of the year I had better go by steamer to Civita Veechia, instead
of landing at Leghorn, and thence journeying to Rome.  On this point I
shall decide when the time comes.  As I left the office the vice-consul
informed me that there was a charge of five francs and some sous for the
consul's vise, a tax which surprised me,--the whole business of passports
having been taken from consuls before I quitted office, and the consular
fee having been annulled even earlier.  However, no doubt Mr. ------ had
a fair claim to my five francs; but, really, it is not half so pleasant
to pay a consular fee as it used to be to receive it.

Afterwards I walked to Notre Dame, the rich front of which I viewed with
more attention than yesterday.  There are whole histories, carved in
stone figures, within the vaulted arches of the three entrances in this
west front, and twelve apostles in a row above, and as much other
sculpture as would take a month to see.  We then walked quite round it,
but I had no sense of immensity from it, not even that of great height,
as from many of the cathedrals in England.  It stands very near the
Seine; indeed, if I mistake not, it is on an island formed by two
branches of the river.  Behind it, is what seems to be a small public
ground (or garden, if a space entirely denuded of grass or other green
thing, except a few trees, can be called so), with benches, and a
monument in the midst.  This quarter of the city looks old, and appears
to be inhabited by poor people, and to be busied about small and petty
affairs; the most picturesque business that I saw being that of the old
woman who sells crucifixes of pearl and of wood at the cathedral door.
We bought two of these yesterday.

I must again speak of the horrible muddiness, not only of this part of
the city, but of all Paris, so far as I have traversed it to-day.  My
ways, since I came to Europe, have often lain through nastiness, but I
never before saw a pavement so universally overspread with mud-padding as
that of Paris.  It is difficult to imagine where so much filth can come
from.

After dinner I walked through the gardens of the Tuileries; but as dusk
was coming on, and as I was afraid of being shut up within the iron
railing, I did not have time to examine them particularly.  There are
wide, intersecting walks, fountains, broad basins, and many statues; but
almost the whole surface of the gardens is barren earth, instead of the
verdure that would beautify an English pleasure-ground of this sort.  In
the summer it has doubtless an agreeable shade; but at this season the
naked branches look meagre, and sprout from slender trunks.  Like the
trees in the Champs Elysees, those, I presume, in the gardens of the
Tuileries need renewing every few years.  The same is true of the human
race,--families becoming extinct after a generation or two of residence
in Paris.  Nothing really thrives here; man and vegetables have but an
artificial life, like flowers stuck in a little mould, but never taking
root.  I am quite tired of Paris, and long for a home more than ever.



MARSEILLES.


Hotel d'Angleterre, January 15th.--On Tuesday morning, (12th) we took our
departure from the Hotel de Louvre.  It is a most excellent and perfectly
ordered hotel, and I have not seen a more magnificent hall, in any
palace, than the dining-saloon, with its profuse gilding, and its
ceiling, painted in compartments; so that when the chandeliers are all
alight, it looks a fit place for princes to banquet in, and not very fit
for the few Americans whom I saw scattered at its long tables.

By the by, as we drove to the railway, we passed through the public
square, where the Bastille formerly stood; and in the centre of it now
stands a column, surmounted by a golden figure of Mercury (I think),
which seems to be just on the point of casting itself from a gilt ball
into the air.  This statue is so buoyant, that the spectator feels quite
willing to trust it to the viewless element, being as sure that it would
be borne up as that a bird would fly.

Our first day's journey was wholly without interest, through a country
entirely flat, and looking wretchedly brown and barren.  There were rows
of trees, very slender, very prim and formal; there was ice wherever
there happened to be any water to form it; there were occasional
villages, compact little streets, or masses of stone or plastered
cottages, very dirty and with gable ends and earthen roofs; and a
succession of this same landscape was all that we saw, whenever we rubbed
away the congelation of our breath from the carriage windows.  Thus we
rode on, all day long, from eleven o'clock, with hardly a five minutes'
stop, till long after dark, when we came to Dijon, where there was a halt
of twenty-five minutes for dinner.  Then we set forth again, and rumbled
forward, through cold and darkness without, until we reached Lyons at
about ten o'clock.  We left our luggage at the railway station, and took
an omnibus for the Hotel de Provence, which we chose at a venture, among
a score of other hotels.

As this hotel was a little off the direct route of the omnibus, the
driver set us down at the corner of a street, and pointed to some lights,
which he said designated the Hotel do Provence; and thither we proceeded,
all seven of us, taking along a few carpet-bags and shawls, our equipage
for the night.  The porter of the hotel met us near its doorway, and
ushered us through an arch, into the inner quadrangle, and then up some
old and worn steps,--very broad, and appearing to be the principal
staircase.  At the first landing-place, an old woman and a waiter or two
received us; and we went up two or three more flights of the same broad
and worn stone staircases.  What we could see of the house looked very
old, and had the musty odor with which I first became acquainted at
Chester.

After ascending to the proper level, we were conducted along a
corridor, paved with octagonal earthen tiles; on one side were
windows, looking into the courtyard, on the other doors opening into the
sleeping-chambers.  The corridor was of immense length, and seemed still
to lengthen itself before us, as the glimmer of our conductor's candle
went farther and farther into the obscurity.  Our own chamber was at a
vast distance along this passage; those of the rest of the party were on
the hither side; but all this immense suite of rooms appeared to
communicate by doors from one to another, like the chambers through which
the reader wanders at midnight, in Mrs. Radcliffe's romances.  And they
were really splendid rooms, though of an old fashion, lofty, spacious,
with floors of oak or other wood, inlaid in squares and crosses,
and waxed till they were slippery, but without carpets.  Our own
sleeping-room had a deep fireplace, in which we ordered a fire, and asked
if there were not some saloon already warmed, where we could get a cup of
tea.

Hereupon the waiter led us back along the endless corridor, and down the
old stone staircases, and out into the quadrangle, and journeyed with us
along an exterior arcade, and finally threw open the door of the salle a
manger, which proved to be a room of lofty height, with a vaulted roof, a
stone floor, and interior spaciousness sufficient for a baronial hall,
the whole bearing the same aspect of times gone by, that characterized
the rest of the house.  There were two or three tables covered with white
cloth, and we sat down at one of them and had our tea.  Finally we wended
back to our sleeping-rooms,--a considerable journey, so endless seemed
the ancient hotel.  I should like to know its history.

The fire made our great chamber look comfortable, and the fireplace threw
out the heat better than the little square hole over which we cowered in
our saloon at the Hotel de Louvre. . . .

In the morning we began our preparations for starting at ten.  Issuing
into the corridor, I found a soldier of the line, pacing to and fro there
as sentinel.  Another was posted in another corridor, into which I
wandered by mistake; another stood in the inner court-yard, and another
at the porte-cochere.  They were not there the night before, and I know
not whence nor why they came, unless that some officer of rank may have
taken up his quarters at the hotel.  Miss M------ says she heard at
Paris, that a considerable number of troops had recently been drawn
together at Lyons, in consequence of symptoms of disaffection that have
recently shown themselves here.

Before breakfast I went out to catch a momentary glimpse of the city.
The street in which our hotel stands is near a large public square; in
the centre is a bronze equestrian statue of Louis XIV.; and the square
itself is called the Place de Louis le Grand.  I wonder where this statue
hid itself while the Revolution was raging in Lyons, and when the
guillotine, perhaps, stood on that very spot.

The square was surrounded by stately buildings, but had what seemed to be
barracks for soldiers,--at any rate, mean little huts, deforming its
ample space; and a soldier was on guard before the statue of Louis le
Grand.  It was a cold, misty morning, and a fog lay throughout the area,
so that I could scarcely see from one side of it to the other.

Returning towards our hotel, I saw that it had an immense front, along
which ran, in gigantic letters, its title,--

     HOTEL DE PROVENCE ET DES AMBASSADEURS.

The excellence of the hotel lay rather in the faded pomp of its
sleeping-rooms, and the vastness of its salle a manger, than in anything
very good to eat or drink.

We left it, after a poor breakfast, and went to the railway station.
Looking at the mountainous heap of our luggage the night before, we had
missed a great carpet-bag; and we now found that Miss M------'s trunk had
been substituted for it, and, there being the proper number of packages
as registered, it was impossible to convince the officials that anything
was wrong.  We, of course, began to generalize forthwith, and pronounce
the incident to be characteristic of French morality.  They love a
certain system and external correctness, but do not trouble themselves to
be deeply in the right; and Miss M------ suggested that there used to be
parallel cases in the French Revolution, when, so long as the assigned
number were sent out of prison to be guillotined, the jailer did not much
care whether they were the persons designated by the tribunal or not.  At
all events, we could get no satisfaction about the carpet-bag, and shall
very probably be compelled to leave Marseilles without it.

This day's ride was through a far more picturesque country than that we
saw yesterday.  Heights began to rise imminent above our way, with
sometimes a ruined castle wall upon them; on our left, the rail-track
kept close to the hills; on the other side there was the level bottom of
a valley, with heights descending upon it a mile or a few miles away.
Farther off we could see blue hills, shouldering high above the
intermediate ones, and themselves worthy to be called mountains.  These
hills arranged themselves in beautiful groups, affording openings between
them, and vistas of what lay beyond, and gorges which I suppose held a
great deal of romantic scenery.  By and by a river made its appearance,
flowing swiftly in the same direction that we were travelling,--a
beautiful and cleanly river, with white pebbly shores, and itself of a
peculiar blue.  It rushed along very fast, sometimes whitening over
shallow descents, and even in its calmer intervals its surface was all
covered with whirls and eddies, indicating that it dashed onward in
haste.  I do not now know the name of this river, but have set it down as
the "arrowy Rhone."  It kept us company a long while, and I think we did
not part with it as long as daylight remained.  I have seldom seen
hill-scenery that struck me more than some that we saw to-day, and the
old feudal towers and old villages at their feet; and the old churches,
with spires shaped just like extinguishers, gave it an interest
accumulating from many centuries past.

Still going southward, the vineyards began to border our track, together
with what I at first took to be orchards, but soon found were plantations
of olive-trees, which grow to a much larger size than I supposed, and
look almost exactly like very crabbed and eccentric apple-trees.  Neither
they nor the vineyards add anything to the picturesqueness of the
landscape.

On the whole, I should have been delighted with all this scenery if it
had not looked so bleak, barren, brown, and bare; so like the wintry New
England before the snow has fallen.  It was very cold, too; ice along the
borders of streams, even among the vineyards and olives.  The houses are
of rather a different shape here than, farther northward, their roofs
being not nearly so sloping.  They are almost invariably covered with
white plaster; the farm-houses have their outbuildings in connection with
the dwelling,--the whole surrounding three sides of a quadrangle.

We travelled far into the night, swallowed a cold and hasty dinner at
Avignon, and reached Marseilles sorely wearied, at about eleven o'clock.
We took a cab to the Hotel d'Angleterre (two cabs, to be quite accurate),
and find it a very poor place.

To go back a little, as the sun went down, we looked out of the window of
our railway carriage, and saw a sky that reminded us of what we used to
see day after day in America, and what we have not seen since; and, after
sunset, the horizon burned and glowed with rich crimson and orange
lustre, looking at once warm and cold.  After it grew dark, the stars
brightened, and Miss M------ from her window pointed out some of the
planets to the children, she being as familiar with them as a gardener
with his flowers.  They were as bright as diamonds.

We had a wretched breakfast, and J----- and I then went to the railway
station to see about our luggage.  On our walk back we went astray,
passing by a triumphal arch, erected by the Marseillais, in honor of
Louis Napoleon; but we inquired our way of old women and soldiers, who
were very kind and courteous,--especially the latter,--and were directed
aright.  We came to a large, oblong, public place, set with trees, but
devoid of grass, like all public places in France.  In the middle of it
was a bronze statue of an ecclesiastical personage, stretching forth his
hands in the attitude of addressing the people or of throwing a
benediction over them.  It was some archbishop, who had distinguished
himself by his humanity and devotedness during the plague of 1720.  At
the moment of our arrival the piazza was quite thronged with people, who
seemed to be talking amongst themselves with considerable earnestness,
although without any actual excitement.  They were smoking cigars;
and we judged that they were only loitering here for the sake of the
sunshine, having no fires at home, and nothing to do.  Some looked like
gentlemen, others like peasants; most of them I should have taken for the
lazzaroni of this Southern city,--men with cloth caps, like the classic
liberty-cap, or with wide-awake hats.  There were one or two women of the
lower classes, without bonnets, the elder ones with white caps, the
younger bareheaded.  I have hardly seen a lady in Marseilles; and I
suspect, it being a commercial city, and dirty to the last degree,
ill-built, narrow-streeted, and sometimes pestilential, there are few or
no families of gentility resident here.

Returning to the hotel, we found the rest of the party ready to go
out; so we all issued forth in a body, and inquired our way to the
telegraph-office, in order to send my message about the carpet-bag.  In a
street through which we had to pass (and which seemed to be the Exchange,
or its precincts), there was a crowd even denser, yes, much denser, than
that which we saw in the square of the archbishop's statue; and each man
was talking to his neighbor in a vivid, animated way, as if business were
very brisk to-day.

At the telegraph-office, we discovered the cause that had brought out
these many people.  There had been attempts on the Emperor's life,--
unsuccessful, as they seem fated to be, though some mischief was done to
those near him.  I rather think the good people of Marseilles were glad
of the attempt, as an item of news and gossip, and did not very greatly
care whether it were successful or no.  It seemed to have roused their
vivacity rather than their interest.  The only account I have seen of it
was in the brief public despatch from the Syndic (or whatever he be) of
Paris to the chief authority of Marseilles, which was printed and posted
in various conspicuous places.  The only chance of knowing the truth with
any fulness of detail would be to come across an English paper.  We have
had a banner hoisted half-mast in front of our hotel to-day as a token,
the head-waiter tells me, of sympathy and sorrow for the General and
other persons who were slain by this treasonable attempt.

J----- and I now wandered by ourselves along a circular line of quays,
having, on one side of us, a thick forest of masts, while, on the
other, was a sweep of shops, bookstalls, sailors' restaurants and
drinking-houses, fruit-sellers, candy-women, and all manner of open-air
dealers and pedlers; little children playing, and jumping the rope, and
such a babble and bustle as I never saw or heard before; the sun lying
along the whole sweep, very hot, and evidently very grateful to those who
basked in it.  Whenever I passed into the shade, immediately from too
warm I became too cold.  The sunshine was like hot air; the shade, like
the touch of cold steel,--sharp, hard, yet exhilarating.  From the broad
street of the quays, narrow, thread-like lanes pierced up between the
edifices, calling themselves streets, yet so narrow, that a person in the
middle could almost touch the houses on either hand.  They ascended
steeply, bordered on each side by long, contiguous walls of high houses,
and from the time of their first being built, could never have had a
gleam of sunshine in them,--always in shadow, always unutterably nasty,
and often pestiferous.  The nastiness which I saw in Marseilles exceeds
my heretofore experience.  There is dirt in the hotel, and everywhere
else; and it evidently troubles nobody,--no more than if all the people
were pigs in a pigsty. . . .

Passing by all this sweep of quays, J----- and I ascended to an elevated
walk, overlooking the harbor, and far beyond it; for here we had our
first view of the Mediterranean, blue as heaven, and bright with
sunshine.  It was a bay, widening forth into the open deep, and bordered
with heights, and bold, picturesque headlands, some of which had either
fortresses or convents on them.  Several boats and one brig were under
sail, making their way towards the port.  I have never seen a finer
sea-view.  Behind the town, there seemed to be a mountainous landscape,
imperfectly visible, in consequence of the intervening edifices.



THE MEDITERRANEAN SEA.


Steamer Calabrese, January 17th.--If I had remained at Marseilles, I
might have found many peculiarities and characteristics of that Southern
city to notice; but I fear that these will not be recorded if I leave
them till I touch the soil of Italy.  Indeed, I doubt whether there be
anything really worth recording in the little distinctions between one
nation and another; at any rate, after the first novelty is over, new
things seem equally commonplace with the old.  There is but one little
interval when the mind is in such a state that it can catch the fleeting
aroma of a new scene.  And it is always so much pleasanter to enjoy this
delicious newness than to attempt arresting it, that it requires great
force of will to insist with one's self upon sitting down to write.  I
can do nothing with Marseilles, especially here on the Mediterranean,
long after nightfall, and when the steamer is pitching in a pretty lively
way.

(Later.)--I walked out with J----- yesterday morning, and reached the
outskirts of the city, whence we could see the bold and picturesque
heights that surround Marseilles as with a semicircular wall.  They rise
into peaks, and the town, being on their lower slope, descends from them
towards the sea with a gradual sweep.  Adown the streets that descend
these declivities come little rivulets, running along over the pavement,
close to the sidewalks, as over a pebbly bed; and though they look vastly
like kennels, I saw women washing linen in these streams, and others
dipping up the water for household purposes.  The women appear very much
in public at Marseilles.  In the squares and places you see half a dozen
of them together, sitting in a social circle on the bottoms of upturned
baskets, knitting, talking, and enjoying the public sunshine, as if it
were their own household fire.  Not one in a thousand of them, probably,
ever has a household fire for the purpose of keeping themselves warm, but
only to do their little cookery; and when there is sunshine they take
advantage of it, and in the short season of rain and frost they shrug
their shoulders, put on what warm garments they have, and get through the
winter somewhat as grasshoppers and butterflies do,--being summer insects
like then.  This certainly is a very keen and cutting air, sharp as a
razor, and I saw ice along the borders of the little rivulets almost at
noonday.  To be sure, it is midwinter, and yet in the sunshine I found
myself uncomfortably warm, but in the shade the air was like the touch of
death itself.  I do not like the climate.

There are a great number of public places in Marseilles, several of
which are adorned with statues or fountains, or triumphal arches or
columns, and set out with trees, and otherwise furnished as a kind of
drawing-rooms, where the populace may meet together and gossip.  I never
before heard from human lips anything like this bustle and babble, this
thousand-fold talk which you hear all round about you in the crowd of a
public square; so entirely different is it from the dulness of a crowd in
England, where, as a rule, everybody is silent, and hardly half a dozen
monosyllables will come from the lips of a thousand people.  In
Marseilles, on the contrary, a stream of unbroken talk seems to bubble
from the lips of every individual.  A great many interesting scenes take
place in these squares.  From the window of our hotel (which looked into
the Place Royale) I saw a juggler displaying his art to a crowd, who
stood in a regular square about him, none pretending to press nearer than
the prescribed limit.  While the juggler wrought his miracles his wife
supplied him with his magic materials out of a box; and when the
exhibition was over she packed up the white cloth with which his table
was covered, together with cups, cards, balls, and whatever else, and
they took their departure.

I have been struck with the idle curiosity, and, at the same time, the
courtesy and kindness of the populace of Marseilles, and I meant to
exemplify it by recording how Miss S------ and I attracted their notice,
and became the centre of a crowd of at least fifty of them while doing no
more remarkable thing than settling with a cab-driver.  But really this
pitch and swell is getting too bad, and I shall go to bed, as the best
chance of keeping myself in an equable state.



ROME.


37 Palazzo Larazani, Via Porta Pinciana, January 24th.--We left
Marseilles in the Neapolitan steamer Calabrese, as noticed above, a week
ago this morning.  There was no fault to be found with the steamer, which
was very clean and comfortable, contrary to what we had understood
beforehand; except for the coolness of the air (and I know not that this
was greater than that of the Atlantic in July), our voyage would have
been very pleasant; but for myself, I enjoyed nothing, having a cold upon
me, or a low fever, or something else that took the light and warmth out
of everything.

I went to bed immediately after my last record, and was rocked to sleep
pleasantly enough by the billows of the Mediterranean; and, coming on
deck about sunrise next morning, found the steamer approaching Genoa.  We
saw the city, lying at the foot of a range of hills, and stretching a
little way up their slopes, the hills sweeping round it in the segment of
a circle, and looking like an island rising abruptly out of the sea; for
no connection with the mainland was visible on either side.  There was
snow scattered on their summits and streaking their sides a good way
down.  They looked bold, and barren, and brown, except where the snow
whitened them.  The city did not impress me with much expectation of size
or splendor.  Shortly after coming into the port our whole party landed,
and we found ourselves at once in the midst of a crowd of cab-drivers,
hotel-runnets, and coin missionaires, who assaulted us with a volley of
French, Italian, and broken English, which beat pitilessly about our
ears; for really it seemed as if all the dictionaries in the world had
been torn to pieces, and blown around us by a hurricane.  Such a pother!
We took a commissionaire, a respectable-looking man, in a cloak, who said
his name was Salvator Rosa; and he engaged to show us whatever was
interesting in Genoa.

In the first place, he took us through narrow streets to an old church,
the name of which I have forgotten, and, indeed, its peculiar features;
but I know that I found it pre-eminently magnificent,--its whole interior
being incased in polished marble, of various kinds and colors, its
ceiling painted, and its chapels adorned with pictures.  However, this
church was dazzled out of sight by the Cathedral of San Lorenzo, to which
we were afterwards conducted, whose exterior front is covered with
alternate slabs of black and white marble, which were brought, either in
whole or in part, from Jerusalem.  Within, there was a prodigious
richness of precious marbles, and a pillar, if I mistake not, from
Solomon's Temple; and a picture of the Virgin by St. Luke; and others
(rather more intrinsically valuable, I imagine), by old masters, set in
superb marble frames, within the arches of the chapels.  I used to try to
imagine how the English cathedrals must have looked in their primeval
glory, before the Reformation, and before the whitewash of Cromwell's
time had overlaid their marble pillars; but I never imagined anything at
all approaching what my eyes now beheld: this sheen of polished and
variegated marble covering every inch of its walls; this glow of
brilliant frescos all over the roof, and up within the domes; these
beautiful pictures by great masters, painted for the places which they
now occupied, and making an actual portion of the edifice; this wealth of
silver, gold, and gems, that adorned the shrines of the saints, before
which wax candles burned, and were kept burning, I suppose, from year's
end to year's end; in short, there is no imagining nor remembering a
hundredth part of the rich details.  And even the cathedral (though I
give it up as indescribable) was nothing at all in comparison with a
church to which the commissionaire afterwards led us; a church that had
been built four or five hundred years ago, by a pirate, in expiation of
his sins, and out of the profit of his rapine.  This last edifice, in its
interior, absolutely shone with burnished gold, and glowed with pictures;
its walls were a quarry of precious stones, so valuable were the marbles
out of which they were wrought; its columns and pillars were of
inconceivable costliness; its pavement was a mosaic of wonderful beauty,
and there were four twisted pillars made out of stalactites.  Perhaps the
best way to form some dim conception of it is to fancy a little
casket, inlaid inside with precious stones, so that there shall not a
hair's-breadth be left unprecious-stoned, and then to conceive this
little bit of a casket iucreased to the magnitude of a great church,
without losing anything of the excessive glory that was compressed into
its original small compass, but all its pretty lustre made sublime by the
consequent immensity.  At any rate, nobody who has not seen a church
like this can imagine what a gorgeous religion it was that reared it.

In the cathedral, and in all the churches, we saw priests and many
persons kneeling at their devotions; and our Salvator Rosa, whenever we
passed a chapel or shrine, failed not to touch the pavement with one
knee, crossing himself the while; and once, when a priest was going
through some form of devotion, he stopped a few moments to share in it.

He conducted us, too, to the Balbi Palace, the stateliest and most
sumptuous residence, but not more so than another which he afterwards
showed us, nor perhaps than many others which exist in Genoa, THE SUPERB.
The painted ceilings in these palaces are a glorious adornment; the walls
of the saloons, incrusted with various-colored marbles, give an idea of
splendor which I never gained from anything else.  The floors, laid in
mosaic, seem too precious to tread upon.  In the royal palace, many of
the floors were of various woods, inlaid by an English artist, and they
looked like a magnification of some exquisite piece of Tunbridge ware;
but, in all respects, this palace was inferior to others which we saw.  I
say nothing of the immense pictorial treasures which hung upon the walls
of all the rooms through which we passed; for I soon grew so weary of
admirable things, that I could neither enjoy nor understand them.  My
receptive faculty is very limited, and when the utmost of its small
capacity is full, I become perfectly miserable, and the more so the
better worth seeing are the things I am forced to reject.  I do not know
a greater misery; to see sights, after such repletion, is to the mind
what it would be to the body to have dainties forced down the throat long
after the appetite was satiated.

All this while, whenever we emerged into the vaultlike streets,
we were wretchedly cold.  The commissionaire took us to a sort of
pleasure-garden, occupying the ascent of a hill, and presenting seven
different views of the city, from as many stations.  One of the objects
pointed out to us was a large yellow house, on a hillside, in the
outskirts of Genoa, which was formerly inhabited for six months by
Charles Dickens.  Looking down from the elevated part of the
pleasure-gardens, we saw orange-trees beneath us, with the golden fruit
hanging upon them, though their trunks were muffled in straw; and, still
lower down, there was ice and snow.

Gladly (so far as I myself was concerned) we dismissed the
commissionaire, after he had brought us to the hotel of the Cross of
Malta, where we dined; needlessly, as it proved, for another dinner
awaited us, after our return on board the boat.

We set sail for Leghorn before dark, and I retired early, feeling still
more ill from my cold than the night before.  The next morning we were in
the crowded port of Leghorn.  We all went ashore, with some idea of
taking the rail for Pisa, which is within an hour's distance, and might
have been seen in time for our departure with the steamer.  But a
necessary visit to a banker's, and afterwards some unnecessary
formalities about our passports, kept us wandering through the streets
nearly all day; and we saw nothing in the slightest degree interesting,
except the tomb of Smollett, in the burial-place attached to the English
Chapel.  It is surrounded by an iron railing, and marked by a slender
obelisk of white marble, the pattern of which is many times repeated over
surrounding graves.

We went into a Jewish synagogue,--the interior cased in marbles, and
surrounded with galleries, resting upon arches above arches.  There were
lights burning at the altar, and it looked very like a Christian church;
but it was dirty, and had an odor not of sanctity.

In Leghorn, as everywhere else, we were chilled to the heart, except when
the sunshine fell directly upon us; and we returned to the steamer with a
feeling as if we were getting back to our home; for this life of
wandering makes a three days' residence in one place seem like home.

We found several new passengers on board, and among others a monk, in a
long brown frock of woollen cloth, with an immense cape, and a little
black covering over his tonsure.  He was a tall figure, with a gray
beard, and might have walked, just as he stood, out of a picture by one
of the old masters.  This holy person addressed me very affably in
Italian; but we found it impossible to hold much conversation.

The evening was beautiful, with a bright young moonlight, not yet
sufficiently powerful to overwhelm the stars, and as we walked the deck,
Miss M------ showed the children the constellations, and told their
names.  J----- made a slight mistake as to one of them, pointing it out
to me as "O'Brien's belt!"

Elba was presently in view, and we might have seen many other interesting
points, had it not been for our steamer's practice of resting by day, and
only pursuing its voyage by night.  The next morning we found ourselves
in the harbor of Civita Vecchia, and, going ashore with our luggage, went
through a blind turmoil with custom-house officers, inspectors of
passports, soldiers, and vetturino people.  My wife and I strayed a
little through Civita Vecchia, and found its streets narrow, like clefts
in a rock (which seems to be the fashion of Italian towns), and smelling
nastily.  I had made a bargain with a vetturino to send us to Rome in a
carriage, with four horses, in eight hours; and as soon as the
custom-house and passport people would let us, we started, lumbering
slowly along with our mountain of luggage.  We had heard rumors of
robberies lately committed on this route; especially of a Nova Scotia
bishop, who was detained on the road an hour and a half, and utterly
pillaged; and certainly there was not a single mile of the dreary and
desolate country over which we passed, where we might not have been
robbed and murdered with impunity.  Now and then, at long distances, we
came to a structure that was either a prison, a tavern, or a barn, but
did not look very much like either, being strongly built of stone, with
iron-grated windows, and of ancient and rusty aspect.  We kept along by
the seashore a great part of the way, and stopped to feed our horses at a
village, the wretched street of which stands close along the shore of the
Mediterranean, its loose, dark sand being made nasty by the vicinity.
The vetturino cheated us, one of the horses giving out, as he must have
known it would do, half-way on our journey; and we staggered on through
cold and darkness, and peril, too, if the banditti were not a myth,--
reaching Rome not much before midnight.  I perpetrated unheard-of
briberies on the custom-house officers at the gates, and was permitted to
pass through and establish myself at Spillman's Hotel, the only one where
we could gain admittance, and where we have been half frozen ever since.

And this is sunny Italy, and genial Rome!


Palazzo Larazani, Via Porta Pinciana, February 3d.--We have been in Rome
a fortnight to-day, or rather at eleven o'clock to-night; and I have
seldom or never spent so wretched a time anywhere.  Our impressions were
very unfortunate, arriving at midnight, half frozen in the wintry rain,
and being received into a cold and cheerless hotel, where we shivered
during two or three days; meanwhile seeking lodgings among the sunless,
dreary alleys which are called streets in Rome.  One cold, bright day
after another has pierced me to the heart, and cut me in twain as with a
sword, keen and sharp, and poisoned at point and edge.  I did not think
that cold weather could have made me so very miserable.  Having caught a
feverish influenza, I was really glad of being muffled up comfortably in
the fever heat.  The atmosphere certainly has a peculiar quality of
malignity.  After a day or two we settled ourselves in a suite of ten
rooms, comprehending one flat, or what is called the second piano of this
house.  The rooms, thus far, have been very uncomfortable, it being
impossible to warm them by means of the deep, old-fashioned, inartificial
fireplaces, unless we had the great logs of a New England forest to burn
in them; so I have sat in my corner by the fireside with more clothes on
than I ever wore before, and my thickest great-coat over all.  In the
middle of the day I generally venture out for an hour or two, but have
only once been warm enough even in the sunshine, and out of the sun never
at any time.  I understand now the force of that story of Diogenes when
he asked the Conqueror, as the only favor he could do him, to stand out
of his sunshine, there being such a difference in these Southern climes
of Europe between sun and shade.  If my wits had not been too much
congealed, and my fingers too numb, I should like to have kept a minute
journal of my feelings and impressions during the past fortnight.  It
would have shown modern Rome in an aspect in which it has never yet been
depicted.  But I have now grown somewhat acclimated, and the first
freshness of my discomfort has worn off, so that I shall never be able to
express how I dislike the place, and how wretched I have been in it; and
soon, I suppose, warmer weather will come, and perhaps reconcile
me to Rome against my will.  Cold, narrow lanes, between tall, ugly,
mean-looking whitewashed houses, sour bread, pavements most uncomfortable
to the feet, enormous prices for poor living; beggars, pickpockets,
ancient temples and broken monuments, and clothes hanging to dry about
them; French soldiers, monks, and priests of every degree; a shabby
population, smoking bad cigars,--these would have been some of the points
of my description.  Of course there are better and truer things to be
said. . . .

It would be idle for me to attempt any sketches of these famous sites and
edifices,--St. Peter's, for example,--which have been described by a
thousand people, though none of them have ever given me an idea of what
sort of place Rome is. . . .

The Coliseum was very much what I had preconceived it, though I was not
prepared to find it turned into a sort of Christian church, with a pulpit
on the verge of the open space. . . . The French soldiers, who keep
guard within it, as in other public places in Rome, have an excellent
opportunity to secure the welfare of their souls.


February 7th.--I cannot get fairly into the current of my journal since
we arrived, and already I perceive that the nice peculiarities of Roman
life are passing from my notice before I have recorded them.  It is a
very great pity.  During the past week I have plodded daily, for an hour
or two, through the narrow, stony streets, that look worse than the worst
backside lanes of any other city; indescribably ugly and disagreeable
they are, . . . . without sidewalks, but provided with a line of larger
square stones, set crosswise to each other, along which there is somewhat
less uneasy walking. . . . Ever and anon, even in the meanest streets,
--though, generally speaking, one can hardly be called meaner than
another,--we pass a palace, extending far along the narrow way on a line
with the other houses, but distinguished by its architectural windows,
iron-barred on the basement story, and by its portal arch, through which
we have glimpses, sometimes of a dirty court-yard, or perhaps of a clean,
ornamented one, with trees, a colonnade, a fountain, and a statue in the
vista; though, more likely, it resembles the entrance to a stable, and
may, perhaps, really be one.  The lower regions of palaces come to
strange uses in Rome. . . . In the basement story of the Barberini
Palace a regiment of French soldiers (or soldiers of some kind [we find
them to be retainers of the Barberini family, not French]) seems to be
quartered, while no doubt princes have magnificent domiciles above.  Be
it palace or whatever other dwelling, the inmates climb through rubbish
often to the comforts, such as they may be, that await them above.  I
vainly try to get down upon paper the dreariness, the ugliness,
shabbiness, un-home-likeness of a Roman street.  It is also to be said
that you cannot go far in any direction without coming to a piazza, which
is sometimes little more than a widening and enlarging of the dingy
street, with the lofty facade of a church or basilica on one side, and a
fountain in the centre, where the water squirts out of some fantastic
piece of sculpture into a great stone basin.  These fountains are often
of immense size and most elaborate design. . . .

There are a great many of these fountain-shapes, constructed under the
orders of one pope or another, in all parts of the city; and only the
very simplest, such as a jet springing from a broad marble or porphyry
vase, and falling back into it again, are really ornamental.  If an
antiquary were to accompany me through the streets, no doubt he would
point out ten thousand interesting objects that I now pass over
unnoticed, so general is the surface of plaster and whitewash; but often
I can see fragments of antiquity built into the walls, or perhaps a
church that was a Roman temple, or a basement of ponderous stones that
were laid above twenty centuries ago.  It is strange how our ideas of
what antiquity is become altered here in Rome; the sixteenth century, in
which many of the churches and fountains seem to have been built or
re-edified, seems close at hand, even like our own days; a thousand
years, or the days of the latter empire, is but a modern date, and
scarcely interests us; and nothing is really venerable of a more recent
epoch than the reign of Constantine.  And the Egyptian obelisks that
stand in several of the piazzas put even the Augustan or Republican
antiquities to shame.  I remember reading in a New York newspaper an
account of one of the public buildings of that city,--a relic of "the
olden time," the writer called it; for it was erected in 1825!  I am glad
I saw the castles and Gothic churches and cathedrals of England before
visiting Rome, or I never could have felt that delightful reverence for
their gray and ivy-hung antiquity after seeing these so much older
remains.  But, indeed, old things are not so beautiful in this dry
climate and clear atmosphere as in moist England. . . .

Whatever beauty there may be in a Roman ruin is the remnant of what was
beautiful originally; whereas an English ruin is more beautiful often in
its decay than even it was in its primal strength.  If we ever build such
noble structures as these Roman ones, we can have just as good ruins,
after two thousand years, in the United States; but we never can have a
Furness Abbey or a Kenilworth.  The Corso, and perhaps some other
streets, does not deserve all the vituperation which I have bestowed on
the generality of Roman vias, though the Corso is narrow, not averaging
more than nine paces, if so much, from sidewalk to sidewalk.  But palace
after palace stands along almost its whole extent,--not, however, that
they make such architectural show on the street as palaces should.  The
enclosed courts were perhaps the only parts of these edifices which the
founders cared to enrich architecturally.  I think Linlithgow Palace, of
which I saw the ruins during my last tour in Scotland, was built, by an
architect who had studied these Roman palaces.  There was never any idea
of domestic comfort, or of what we include in the name of home, at all
implicated in such structures, they being generally built by wifeless and
childless churchmen for the display of pictures and statuary in galleries
and long suites of rooms.

I have not yet fairly begun the sight-seeing of Rome.  I have been four
or five times to St. Peter's, and always with pleasure, because there is
such a delightful, summerlike warmth the moment we pass beneath the
heavy, padded leather curtains that protect the entrances.  It is almost
impossible not to believe that this genial temperature is the result of
furnace-heat, but, really, it is the warmth of last summer, which will be
included within those massive walls, and in that vast immensity of space,
till, six months hence, this winter's chill will just have made its way
thither.  It would be an excellent plan for a valetudinarian to lodge
during the winter in St. Peter's, perhaps establishing his household in
one of the papal tombs.  I become, I think, more sensible of the size of
St. Peter's, but am as yet far from being overwhelmed by it.  It is not,
as one expects, so big as all out of doors, nor is its dome so immense as
that of the firmament.  It looked queer, however, the other day, to see a
little ragged boy, the very least of human things, going round and
kneeling at shrine after shrine, and a group of children standing on
tiptoe to reach the vase of holy water. . . .

On coming out of St. Peter's at my last visit, I saw a great sheet of ice
around the fountain on the right hand, and some little Romans awkwardly
sliding on it.  I, too, took a slide, just for the sake of doing what I
never thought to do in Rome.  This inclement weather, I should suppose,
must make the whole city very miserable; for the native Romans, I am
told, never keep any fire, except for culinary purposes, even in the
severest winter.  They flee from their cheerless houses into the open
air, and bring their firesides along with them in the shape of small
earthen vases, or pipkins, with a handle by which they carry them up and
down the streets, and so warm at least their hands with the lighted
charcoal.  I have had glimpses through open doorways into interiors, and
saw them as dismal as tombs.  Wherever I pass my summers, let me spend my
winters in a cold country.

We went yesterday to the Pantheon. . . .

When I first came to Rome, I felt embarrassed and unwilling to pass, with
my heresy, between a devotee and his saint; for they often shoot their
prayers at a shrine almost quite across the church.  But there seems to
be no violation of etiquette in so doing.  A woman begged of us in
the Pantheon, and accused my wife of impiety for not giving her an
alms. . . . People of very decent appearance are often unexpectedly
converted into beggars as you approach them; but in general they take a
"No" at once.


February 9th.--For three or four days it has been cloudy and rainy, which
is the greater pity, as this should be the gayest and merriest part of
the Carnival.  I go out but little,--yesterday only as far as Pakenham's
and Hooker's bank in the Piazza de' Spagna, where I read Galignani and
the American papers.  At last, after seeing in England more of my
fellow-compatriots than ever before, I really am disjoined from my
country.

To-day I walked out along the Pincian Hill. . . . As the clouds still
threatened rain, I deemed it my safest course to go to St. Peter's for
refuge.  Heavy and dull as the day was, the effect of this great world of
a church was still brilliant in the interior, as if it had a sunshine of
its own, as well as its own temperature; and, by and by, the sunshine of
the outward world came through the windows, hundreds of feet aloft, and
fell upon the beautiful inlaid pavement. . . . Against a pillar, on one
side of the nave, is a mosaic copy of Raphael's Transfiguration, fitly
framed within a great arch of gorgeous marble; and, no doubt, the
indestructible mosaic has preserved it far more completely than the
fading and darkening tints in which the artist painted it.  At any rate,
it seemed to me the one glorious picture that I have ever seen.  The
pillar nearest the great entrance, on the left of the nave, supports the
monument to the Stuart family, where two winged figures, with inverted
torches, stand on either side of a marble door, which is closed forever.
It is an impressive monument, for you feel as if the last of the race had
passed through that door.

Emerging from the church, I saw a French sergeant drilling his men in the
piazza.  These French soldiers are prominent objects everywhere about the
city, and make up more of its sight and sound than anything else that
lives.  They stroll about individually; they pace as sentinels in all the
public places; and they march up and down in squads, companies, and
battalions, always with a very great din of drum, fife, and trumpet; ten
times the proportion of music that the same number of men would require
elsewhere; and it reverberates with ten times the noise, between the high
edifices of these lanes, that it could make in broader streets.
Nevertheless, I have no quarrel with the French soldiers; they are fresh,
healthy, smart, honest-looking young fellows enough, in blue coats and
red trousers; . . . . and, at all events, they serve as an efficient
police, making Rome as safe as London; whereas, without them, it would
very likely be a den of banditti.

On my way home I saw a few tokens of the Carnival, which is now in full
progress; though, as it was only about one o'clock, its frolics had not
commenced for the day. . . . I question whether the Romans themselves
take any great interest in the Carnival.  The balconies along the Corso
were almost entirely taken by English and Americans, or other foreigners.

As I approached the bridge of St. Angelo, I saw several persons engaged,
as I thought, in fishing in the Tiber, with very strong lines; but on
drawing nearer I found that they were trying to hook up the branches, and
twigs, and other drift-wood, which the recent rains might have swept into
the river.  There was a little heap of what looked chiefly like willow
twigs, the poor result of their labor.  The hook was a knot of wood, with
the lopped-off branches projecting in three or four prongs.  The Tiber
has always the hue of a mud-puddle; but now, after a heavy rain which has
washed the clay into it, it looks like pease-soup.  It is a broad and
rapid stream, eddying along as if it were in haste to disgorge its
impurities into the sea.  On the left side, where the city mostly is
situated, the buildings hang directly over the stream; on the other,
where stand the Castle of St. Angelo and the Church of St. Peter, the
town does not press so imminent upon the shore.  The banks are clayey,
and look as if the river had been digging them away for ages; but I
believe its bed is higher than of yore.


February 10th.--I went out to-day, and, going along the Via Felice and
the Via delle Quattro Fontane, came unawares to the Basilica of Santa
Maria Maggiore, on the summit of the Esquiline Hill.  I entered it,
without in the least knowing what church it was, and found myself in a
broad and noble nave, both very simple and very grand.  There was a long
row of Ionic columns of marble, twenty or thereabouts on each side,
supporting a flat roof.  There were vaulted side aisles, and, at the
farther end, a bronze canopy over the high altar; and all along the
length of the side aisles were shrines with pictures, sculpture, and
burning lamps; the whole church, too, was lined with marble: the roof was
gilded; and yet the general effect of severe and noble simplicity
triumphed over all the ornament.  I should have taken it for a Roman
temple, retaining nearly its pristine aspect; but Murray tells us that it
was founded A. D. 342 by Pope Liberius, on the spot precisely marked out
by a miraculous fall of snow, in the month of August, and it has
undergone many alterations since his time.  But it is very fine, and
gives the beholder the idea of vastness, which seems harder to attain
than anything else.  On the right hand, approaching the high altar, there
is a chapel, separated from the rest of the church by an iron paling;
and, being admitted into it with another party, I found it most
elaborately magnificent.  But one magnificence outshone another, and made
itself the brightest conceivable for the moment.  However, this chapel
was as rich as the most precious marble could make it, in pillars and
pilasters, and broad, polished slabs, covering the whole walls (except
where there were splendid and glowing frescos; or where some monumental
statuary or bas-relief, or mosaic picture filled up an arched niche).
Its architecture was a dome, resting on four great arches; and in size it
would alone have been a church.  In the centre of the mosaic pavement
there was a flight of steps, down which we went, and saw a group in
marble, representing the nativity of Christ, which, judging by the
unction with which our guide talked about it, must have been of peculiar
sanctity.  I hate to leave this chapel and church, without being able to
say any one thing that may reflect a portion of their beauty, or of the
feeling which they excite.  Kneeling against many of the pillars there
were persons in prayer, and I stepped softly, fearing lest my tread on
the marble pavement should disturb them,--a needless precaution, however,
for nobody seems to expect it, nor to be disturbed by the lack of it.

The situation of the church, I should suppose, is the loftiest in Rome:
it has a fountain at one end, and a column at the other; but I did not
pay particular attention to either, nor to the exterior of the church
itself.

On my return, I turned aside from the Via delle Quattro Fontane into the
Via Quirinalis, and was led by it into the Piazza di Monte Cavallo.  The
street through which I passed was broader, cleanlier, and statelier than
most streets in Rome, and bordered by palaces; and the piazza had noble
edifices around it, and a fountain, an obelisk, and two nude statues in
the centre.  The obelisk was, as the inscription indicated, a relic of
Egypt; the basin of the fountain was an immense bowl of Oriental granite,
into which poured a copious flood of water, discolored by the rain; the
statues were colossal,--two beautiful young men, each holding a fiery
steed.  On the pedestal of one was the inscription, OPUS PHIDIAE; on the
other, OPUS PRAXITELIS.  What a city is this, when one may stumble, by
mere chance,--at a street corner, as it were,--on the works of two such
sculptors!  I do not know the authority on which these statues (Castor
and Pollux, I presume) are attributed to Phidias and Praxiteles; but they
impressed me as noble and godlike, and I feel inclined to take them for
what they purport to be.  On one side of the piazza is the Pontifical
Palace; but, not being aware of this at the time, I did not look
particularly at the edifice.

I came home by way of the Corso, which seemed a little enlivened by
Carnival time; though, as it was not yet two o'clock, the fun had not
begun for the day.  The rain throws a dreary damper on the festivities.


February 13th.--Day before yesterday we took J----- and R----- in a
carriage, and went to see the Carnival, by driving up and down the Corso.
It was as ugly a day, as respects weather, as has befallen us since we
came to Rome,--cloudy, with an indecisive wet, which finally settled into
a rain; and people say that such is generally the weather in Carnival
time.  There is very little to be said about the spectacle.  Sunshine
would have improved it, no doubt; but a person must have very broad
sunshine within himself to be joyous on such shallow provocation.  The
street, at all events, would have looked rather brilliant under a sunny
sky, the balconies being hung with bright-colored draperies, which were
also flung out of some of the windows. . . . Soon I had my first
experience of the Carnival in a handful of confetti, right slap in my
face. . . . Many of the ladies wore loose white dominos, and some of
the gentlemen had on defensive armor of blouses; and wire masks over the
face were a protection for both sexes,--not a needless one, for I
received a shot in my right eye which cost me many tears.  It seems to be
a point of courtesy (though often disregarded by Americans and English)
not to fling confetti at ladies, or at non-combatants, or quiet
bystanders; and the engagements with these missiles were generally
between open carriages, manned with youths, who were provided with
confetti for such encounters, and with bouquets for the ladies.  We had
one real enemy on the Corso; for our former friend Mrs. T------ was
there, and as often as we passed and repassed her, she favored us with a
handful of lime.  Two or three times somebody ran by the carriage and
puffed forth a shower of winged seeds through a tube into our faces and
over our clothes; and, in the course of the afternoon, we were hit with
perhaps half a dozen sugar-plums.  Possibly we may not have received our
fair share of these last salutes, for J----- had on a black mask, which
made him look like an imp of Satan, and drew many volleys of confetti
that we might otherwise have escaped.  A good many bouquets were flung at
our little R-----, and at us generally. . . . This was what is called
masking-day, when it is the rule to wear masks in the Corso, but the
great majority of people appeared without them. . . . Two fantastic
figures, with enormous heads, set round with frizzly hair, came and
grinned into our carriage, and J----- tore out a handful of hair
(which proved to be sea-weed) from one of their heads, rather to
the discomposure of the owner, who muttered his indignation in
Italian. . . . On comparing notes with J----- and R-----, indeed with
U---- too, I find that they all enjoyed the Carnival much more than I
did.  Only the young ought to write descriptions of such scenes.  My cold
criticism chills the life out of it.


February 14th.--Friday, 12th, was a sunny day, the first that we had had
for some time; and my wife and I went forth to see sights as well as to
make some calls that had long been due.  We went first to the church of
Santa Maria Maggiore, which I have already mentioned, and, on our return,
we went to the Piazza di Monte Cavallo, and saw those admirable ancient
statues of Castor and Pollux, which seem to me sons of the morning, and
full of life and strength.  The atmosphere, in such a length of time, has
covered the marble surface of these statues with a gray rust, that
envelops both the men and horses as with a garment; besides which, there
are strange discolorations, such as patches of white moss on the elbows,
and reddish streaks down the sides; but the glory of form overcomes all
these defects of color.  It is pleasant to observe how familiar some
little birds are with these colossal statues,--hopping about on their
heads and over their huge fists, and very likely they have nests in their
ears or among their hair.

We called at the Barberini Palace, where William Story has established
himself and family for the next seven years, or more, on the third piano,
in apartments that afford a very fine outlook over Rome, and have the sun
in them through most of the day.  Mrs. S---- invited us to her fancy
ball, but we declined.

On the staircase ascending to their piano we saw the ancient Greek
bas-relief of a lion, whence Canova is supposed to have taken the idea of
his lions on the monument in St. Peter's.  Afterwards we made two or
three calls in the neighborhood of the Piazza de' Spagna, finding only
Mr. Hamilton Fish and family, at the Hotel d'Europe, at home, and next
visited the studio of Mr. C. G. Thompson, whom I knew in Boston.  He has
very greatly improved since those days, and, being always a man of
delicate mind, and earnestly desiring excellence for its own sake, he has
won himself the power of doing beautiful and elevated works.  He is now
meditating a series of pictures from Shakespeare's "Tempest," the
sketches of one or two of which he showed us, likewise a copy of a small
Madonna, by Raphael, wrought with a minute faithfulness which it makes
one a better man to observe. . . . Mr. Thompson is a true artist, and
whatever his pictures have of beauty comes from very far beneath the
surface; and this, I suppose, is one weighty reason why he has but
moderate success.  I should like his pictures for the mere color, even if
they represented nothing.  His studio is in the Via Sistina; and at a
little distance on the other side of the same street is William Story's,
where we likewise went, and found him at work on a sitting statue of
Cleopatra.

William Story looks quite as vivid, in a graver way, as when I saw him
last, a very young man.  His perplexing variety of talents and
accomplishments--he being a poet, a prose writer, a lawyer, a painter, a
musician, and a sculptor--seems now to be concentrating itself into this
latter vocation, and I cannot see why he should not achieve something
very good.  He has a beautiful statue, already finished, of Goethe's
Margaret, pulling a flower to pieces to discover whether Faust loves her;
a very type of virginity and simplicity.  The statue of Cleopatra, now
only fourteen days advanced in the clay, is as wide a step from the
little maidenly Margaret as any artist could take; it is a grand subject,
and he is conceiving it with depth and power, and working it out with
adequate skill.  He certainly is sensible of something deeper in his art
than merely to make beautiful nudities and baptize them by classic names.
By the by, he told me several queer stories of American visitors to his
studio: one of them, after long inspecting Cleopatra, into which he has
put all possible characteristics of her time and nation and of her own
individuality, asked, "Have you baptized your statue yet?" as if the
sculptor were waiting till his statue were finished before he chose the
subject of it,--as, indeed, I should think many sculptors do.  Another
remarked of a statue of Hero, who is seeking Leander by torchlight, and
in momentary expectation of finding his drowned body, "Is not the face a
little sad?"  Another time a whole party of Americans filed into his
studio, and ranged themselves round his father's statue, and, after much
silent examination, the spokesman of the party inquired, "Well, sir, what
is this intended to represent?"  William Story, in telling these little
anecdotes, gave the Yankee twang to perfection. . . .

The statue of his father, his first work, is very noble, as noble and
fine a portrait-statue as I ever saw.  In the outer room of his studio a
stone-cutter, or whatever this kind of artisan is called, was at work,
transferring the statue of Hero from the plaster-cast into marble; and
already, though still in some respects a block of stone, there was a
wonderful degree of expression in the face.  It is not quite pleasant to
think that the sculptor does not really do the whole labor on his
statues, but that they are all but finished to his hand by merely
mechanical people.  It is generally only the finishing touches that are
given by his own chisel.

Yesterday, being another bright day, we went to the basilica of St. John
Lateran, which is the basilica next in rank to St. Peter's, and has the
precedence of it as regards certain sacred privileges.  It stands on a
most noble site, on the outskirts of the city, commanding a view of the
Sabine and Alban hills, blue in the distance, and some of them hoary with
sunny snow.  The ruins of the Claudian aqueduct are close at hand.  The
church is connected with the Lateran palace and museum, so that the whole
is one edifice; but the facade of the church distinguishes it, and is
very lofty and grand,--more so, it seems to me, than that of St. Peter's.
Under the portico is an old statue of Constantine, representing him as a
very stout and sturdy personage.  The inside of the church disappointed
me, though no doubt I should have been wonderstruck had I seen it a month
ago.  We went into one of the chapels, which was very rich in colored
marbles; and, going down a winding staircase, found ourselves among the
tombs and sarcophagi of the Corsini family, and in presence of a marble
Pieta very beautifully sculptured.  On the other side of the church we
looked into the Torlonia Chapel, very rich and rather profusely gilded,
but, as it seemed to me, not tawdry, though the white newness of the
marble is not perfectly agreeable after being accustomed to the milder
tint which time bestows on sculpture.  The tombs and statues appeared
like shapes and images of new-fallen snow.  The most interesting thing
which we saw in this church (and, admitting its authenticity, there can
scarcely be a more interesting one anywhere) was the table at which the
Last Supper was eaten.  It is preserved in a corridor, on one side of the
tribune or chancel, and is shown by torchlight suspended upon the wall
beneath a covering of glass.  Only the top of the table is shown,
presenting a broad, flat surface of wood, evidently very old, and showing
traces of dry-rot in one or two places.  There are nails in it, and the
attendant said that it had formerly been covered with bronze.  As well as
I can remember, it may be five or six feet square, and I suppose would
accommodate twelve persons, though not if they reclined in the Roman
fashion, nor if they sat as they do in Leonardo da Vinci's picture.  It
would be very delightful to believe in this table.

There are several other sacred relics preserved in the church; for
instance, the staircase of Pilate's house up which Jesus went, and the
porphyry slab on which the soldiers cast lots for his garments.  These,
however, we did not see.  There are very glowing frescos on portions of
the walls; but, there being much whitewash instead of incrusted marble,
it has not the pleasant aspect which one's eye learns to demand in Roman
churches.  There is a good deal of statuary along the columns of the
nave, and in the monuments of the side aisles.

In reference to the interior splendor of Roman churches, I must say that
I think it a pity that painted windows are exclusively a Gothic ornament;
for the elaborate ornamentation of these interiors puts the ordinary
daylight out of countenance, so that a window with only the white
sunshine coming through it, or even with a glimpse of the blue Italian
sky, looks like a portion left unfinished, and therefore a blotch in the
rich wall.  It is like the one spot in Aladdin's palace which he left for
the king, his father-in-law, to finish, after his fairy architects had
exhausted their magnificence on the rest; and the sun, like the king,
fails in the effort.  It has what is called a porta santa, which we saw
walled up, in front of the church, one side of the main entrance.  I know
not what gives it its sanctity, but it appears to be opened by the pope
on a year of jubilee, once every quarter of a century.

After our return . . . . I took R----- along the Pincian Hill, and
finally, after witnessing what of the Carnival could be seen in the
Piazza del Popolo from that safe height, we went down into the Corso, and
some little distance along it.  Except for the sunshine, the scene was
much the same as I have already described; perhaps fewer confetti and
more bouquets.  Some Americans and English are said to have been brought
before the police authorities, and fined for throwing lime.  It is
remarkable that the jollity, such as it is, of the Carnival, does not
extend an inch beyond the line of the Corso; there it flows along in a
narrow stream, while in the nearest street we see nothing but the
ordinary Roman gravity.


February 15th.--Yesterday was a bright day, but I did not go out till the
afternoon, when I took an hour's walk along the Pincian, stopping a good
while to look at the old beggar who, for many years past, has occupied
one of the platforms of the flight of steps leading from the Piazza de'
Spagna to the Triniti de' Monti.  Hillard commemorates him in his book.
He is an unlovely object, moving about on his hands and knees,
principally by aid of his hands, which are fortified with a sort of
wooden shoes; while his poor, wasted lower shanks stick up in the air
behind him, loosely vibrating as he progresses.  He is gray, old, ragged,
a pitiable sight, but seems very active in his own fashion, and bestirs
himself on the approach of his visitors with the alacrity of a spider
when a fly touches the remote circumference of his web.  While I looked
down at him he received alms from three persons, one of whom was a young
woman of the lower orders; the other two were gentlemen, probably either
English or American.  I could not quite make out the principle on which
he let some people pass without molestation, while he shuffled from one
end of the platform to the other to intercept an occasional individual.
He is not persistent in his demands, nor, indeed, is this a usual fault
among Italian beggars.  A shake of the head will stop him when wriggling
towards you from a distance.  I fancy he reaps a pretty fair harvest, and
no doubt leads as contented and as interesting a life as most people,
sitting there all day on those sunny steps, looking at the world, and
making his profit out of it.  It must be pretty much such an occupation
as fishing, in its effect upon the hopes and apprehensions; and probably
he suffers no more from the many refusals he meets with than the angler
does, when he sees a fish smell at his bait and swim away.  One success
pays for a hundred disappointments, and the game is all the better for
not being entirely in his own favor.

Walking onward, I found the Pincian thronged with promenaders, as also
with carriages, which drove round the verge of the gardens in an unbroken
ring.

To-day has been very rainy.  I went out in the forenoon, and took a
sitting for my bust in one of a suite of rooms formerly occupied by
Canova.  It was large, high, and dreary from the want of a carpet,
furniture, or anything but clay and plaster.  A sculptor's studio has not
the picturesque charm of that of a painter, where there is color, warmth,
and cheerfulness, and where the artist continually turns towards you the
glow of some picture, which is resting against the wall. . . . I was
asked not to look at the bust at the close of the sitting, and, of
course, I obeyed; though I have a vague idea of a heavy-browed
physiognomy, something like what I have seen in the glass, but looking
strangely in that guise of clay. . . .

It is a singular fascination that Rome exercises upon artists.  There is
clay elsewhere, and marble enough, and heads to model, and ideas may be
made sensible objects at home as well as here.  I think it is the
peculiar mode of life that attracts, and its freedom from the
inthralments of society, more than the artistic advantages which Rome
offers; and, no doubt, though the artists care little about one another's
works, yet they keep each other warm by the presence of so many of them.

The Carnival still continues, though I hardly see how it can have
withstood such a damper as this rainy day.  There were several people--
three, I think--killed in the Corso on Saturday; some accounts say that
they were run over by the horses in the race; others, that they were
ridden down by the dragoons in clearing the course.

After leaving Canova's studio, I stepped into the church of San Luigi de'
Francesi, in the Via di Ripetta.  It was built, I believe, by Catherine
de' Medici, and is under the protection of the French government, and a
most shamefully dirty place of worship, the beautiful marble columns
looking dingy, for the want of loving and pious care.  There are many
tombs and monuments of French people, both of the past and present,--
artists, soldiers, priests, and others, who have died in Rome.  It was so
dusky within the church that I could hardly distinguish the pictures in
the chapels and over the altar, nor did I know that there were any worth
looking for.  Nevertheless, there were frescos by Domenichino, and
oil-paintings by Guido and others.  I found it peculiarly touching to
read the records, in Latin or French, of persons who had died in this
foreign laud, though they were not my own country-people, and though I
was even less akin to them than they to Italy.  Still, there was a sort
of relationship in the fact that neither they nor I belonged here.


February 17th.--Yesterday morning was perfectly sunny, and we went out
betimes to see churches; going first to the Capuchins', close by the
Piazza Barberini.

["The Marble Faun" takes up this description of the church and of the
dead monk, which we really saw, just as recounted, even to the sudden
stream of blood which flowed from the nostrils, as we looked at him.--
ED.]

We next went to the Trinita de' Monti, which stands at the head of the
steps, leading, in several flights, from the Piazza de' Spagna.  It is
now connected with a convent of French nuns, and when we rang at a side
door, one of the sisterhood answered the summons, and admitted us into
the church.  This, like that of the Capuchins', had a vaulted roof over
the nave, and no side aisles, but rows of chapels instead.  Unlike the
Capuchins', which was filthy, and really disgraceful to behold, this
church was most exquisitely neat, as women alone would have thought it
worth while to keep it.  It is not a very splendid church, not rich in
gorgeous marbles, but pleasant to be in, if it were only for the sake of
its godly purity.  There was only one person in the nave; a young girl,
who sat perfectly still, with her face towards the altar, as long as we
stayed.  Between the nave and the rest of the church there is a high iron
railing, and on the other side of it were two kneeling figures in black,
so motionless that I at first thought them statues; but they proved to be
two nuns at their devotions; and others of the sisterhood came by and by
and joined them.  Nuns, at least these nuns, who are French, and probably
ladies of refinement, having the education of young girls in charge, are
far pleasanter objects to see and think about than monks; the odor of
sanctity, in the latter, not being an agreeable fragrance.  But these
holy sisters, with their black crape and white muslin, looked really pure
and unspotted from the world.

On the iron railing above mentioned was the representation of a golden
heart, pierced with arrows; for these are nuns of the Sacred Heart.  In
the various chapels there are several paintings in fresco, some by
Daniele da Volterra; and one of them, the "Descent from the Cross," has
been pronounced the third greatest picture in the world.  I never should
have had the slightest suspicion that it was a great picture at all, so
worn and faded it looks, and so hard, so difficult to be seen, and so
undelightful when one does see it.

From the Trinita we went to the Santa Maria del Popolo, a church built on
a spot where Nero is said to have been buried, and which was afterwards
made horrible by devilish phantoms.  It now being past twelve, and all
the churches closing from twelve till two, we had not time to pay much
attention to the frescos, oil-pictures, and statues, by Raphael and other
famous men, which are to be seen here.  I remember dimly the magnificent
chapel of the Chigi family, and little else, for we stayed but a short
time; and went next to the sculptor's studio, where I had another sitting
for my bust.  After I had been moulded for about an hour, we turned
homeward; but my wife concluded to hire a balcony for this last afternoon
and evening of the Carnival, and she took possession of it, while I went
home to send to her Miss S------ and the two elder children.  For my
part, I took R-----, and walked, by way of the Pincian, to the Piazza del
Popolo, and thence along the Corso, where, by this time, the warfare of
bouquets and confetti raged pretty fiercely.  The sky being blue and the
sun bright, the scene looked much gayer and brisker than I had before
found it; and I can conceive of its being rather agreeable than
otherwise, up to the age of twenty.  We got several volleys of confetti.
R----- received a bouquet and a sugar-plum, and I a resounding hit from
something that looked more like a cabbage than a flower.  Little as I
have enjoyed the Carnival, I think I could make quite a brilliant sketch
of it, without very widely departing from truth.


February 19th.--Day before yesterday, pretty early, we went to St.
Peter's, expecting to see the pope cast ashes on the heads of the
cardinals, it being Ash-Wednesday.  On arriving, however, we found no
more than the usual number of visitants and devotional people scattered
through the broad interior of St. Peter's; and thence concluded that the
ceremonies were to be performed in the Sistine Chapel.  Accordingly, we
went out of the cathedral, through the door in the left transept, and
passed round the exterior, and through the vast courts of the Vatican,
seeking for the chapel.  We had blundered into the carriage-entrance of
the palace; there is an entrance from some point near the front of the
church, but this we did not find.  The papal guards, in the strangest
antique and antic costume that was ever seen,--a party-colored dress,
striped with blue, red, and yellow, white and black, with a doublet and
ruff, and trunk-breeches, and armed with halberds,--were on duty at the
gateways, but suffered us to pass without question.  Finally, we reached
a large court, where some cardinals' red equipages and other carriages
were drawn up, but were still at a loss as to the whereabouts of the
chapel.  At last an attendant kindly showed us the proper door, and led
us up flights of stairs, along passages and galleries, and through halls,
till at last we came to a spacious and lofty apartment adorned with
frescos; this was the Sala Regia, and the antechamber to the Sistine
Chapel.

The attendant, meanwhile, had informed us that my wife could not be
admitted to the chapel in her bonnet, and that I myself could not enter
at all, for lack of a dress-coat; so my wife took off her bonnet, and,
covering her head with her black lace veil, was readily let in, while I
remained in the Sala Regia, with several other gentlemen, who found
themselves in the same predicament as I was.  There was a wonderful
variety of costume to be seen and studied among the persons around me,
comprising garbs that have been elsewhere laid aside for at least three
centuries,--the broad, plaited, double ruff, and black velvet cloak,
doublet, trunk-breeches, and sword of Queen Elizabeth's time,--the papal
guard, in their striped and party-colored dress as before described,
looking not a little like harlequins; other soldiers in helmets and
jackboots; French officers of various uniform; monks and priests;
attendants in old-fashioned and gorgeous livery; gentlemen, some in black
dress-coats and pantaloons, others in wide-awake hats and tweed
overcoats; and a few ladies in the prescribed costume of black; so that,
in any other country, the scene might have been taken for a fancy ball.
By and by, the cardinals began to arrive, and added their splendid purple
robes and red hats to make the picture still more brilliant.  They were
old men, one or two very aged and infirm, and generally men of bulk and
substance, with heavy faces, fleshy about the chin.  Their red hats,
trimmed with gold-lace, are a beautiful piece of finery, and are
identical in shape with the black, loosely cocked beavers worn by the
Catholic ecclesiastics generally.  Wolsey's hat, which I saw at the
Manchester Exhibition, might have been made on the same block, but
apparently was never cocked, as the fashion now is.  The attendants
changed the upper portions of their master's attire, and put a little cap
of scarlet cloth on each of their heads, after which the cardinals, one
by one, or two by two, as they happened to arrive, went into the chapel,
with a page behind each holding up his purple train.  In the mean while,
within the chapel, we heard singing and chanting; and whenever the
voluminous curtains that hung before the entrance were slightly drawn
apart, we outsiders glanced through, but could see only a mass of people,
and beyond them still another chapel, divided from the hither one by a
screen.  When almost everybody had gone in, there was a stir among the
guards and attendants, and a door opened, apparently communicating with
the inner apartments of the Vatican.  Through this door came, not the
pope, as I had partly expected, but a bulky old lady in black, with a red
face, who bowed towards the spectators with an aspect of dignified
complaisance as she passed towards the entrance of the chapel.  I took
off my hat, unlike certain English gentlemen who stood nearer, and found
that I had not done amiss, for it was the Queen of Spain.

There was nothing else to be seen; so I went back through the
antechambers (which are noble halls, richly frescoed on the walls and
ceilings), endeavoring to get out through the same passages that had let
me in.  I had already tried to descend what I now supposed to be the
Scala Santa, but had been turned back by a sentinel.  After wandering to
and fro a good while, I at last found myself in a long, long gallery, on
each side of which were innumerable inscriptions, in Greek and Latin, on
slabs of marble, built into the walls; and classic altars and tablets
were ranged along, from end to end.  At the extremity was a closed iron
grating, from which I was retreating; but a French gentleman accosted me,
with the information that the custode would admit me, if I chose, and
would accompany me through the sculpture department of the Vatican.  I
acceded, and thus took my first view of those innumerable art-treasures,
passing from one object to another, at an easy pace, pausing hardly a
moment anywhere, and dismissing even the Apollo, and the Laocoon, and the
Torso of Hercules, in the space of half a dozen breaths.  I was well
enough content to do so, in order to get a general idea of the contents
of the galleries, before settling down upon individual objects.

Most of the world-famous sculptures presented themselves to my eye with a
kind of familiarity, through the copies and casts which I had seen; but I
found the originals more different than I anticipated.  The Apollo, for
instance, has a face which I have never seen in any cast or copy.  I must
confess, however, taking such transient glimpses as I did, I was more
impressed with the extent of the Vatican, and the beautiful order in
which it is kept, and its great sunny, open courts, with fountains,
grass, and shrubs, and the views of Rome and the Campagna from its
windows,--more impressed with these, and with certain vastly capacious
vases, and two seat sarcophagi,--than with the statuary.  Thus I went
round the whole, and was dismissed through the grated barrier into the
gallery of inscriptions again; and after a little more wandering, I made
my way out of the palace. . . .

Yesterday I went out betimes, and strayed through some portion of ancient
Rome, to the Column of Trajan, to the Forum, thence along the Appian Way;
after which I lost myself among the intricacies of the streets, and
finally came out at the bridge of St. Angelo.  The first observation
which a stranger is led to make, in the neighborhood of Roman ruins, is
that the inhabitants seem to be strangely addicted to the washing of
clothes; for all the precincts of Trajan's Forum, and of the Roman Forum,
and wherever else an iron railing affords opportunity to hang them, were
whitened with sheets, and other linen and cotton, drying in the sun.  It
must be that washerwomen burrow among the old temples.  The second
observation is not quite so favorable to the cleanly character of the
modern Romans; indeed, it is so very unfavorable, that I hardly know how
to express it.  But the fact is, that, through the Forum, . . . . and
anywhere out of the commonest foot-track and roadway, you must look well
to your steps. . . . If you tread beneath the triumphal arch of Titus
or Constantine, you had better look downward than upward, whatever be the
merit of the sculptures aloft. . . .

After a while the visitant finds himself getting accustomed to this
horrible state of things; and the associations of moral sublimity and
beauty seem to throw a veil over the physical meannesses to which I
allude.  Perhaps there is something in the mind of the people of these
countries that enables them quite to dissever small ugliness from great
sublimity and beauty.  They spit upon the glorious pavement of St.
Peter's, and wherever else they like; they place paltry-looking wooden
confessionals beneath its sublime arches, and ornament them with cheap
little colored prints of the crucifixion; they hang tin hearts and other
tinsel and trumpery at the gorgeous shrines of the saints, in chapels
that are incrusted with gems, or marbles almost as precious; they put
pasteboard statues of saints beneath the dome of the Pantheon; in short,
they let the sublime and the ridiculous come close together, and are not
in the least troubled by the proximity.  It must be that their sense of
the beautiful is stronger than in the Anglo-Saxon mind, and that it
observes only what is fit to gratify it.

To-day, which was bright and cool, my wife and I set forth immediately
after breakfast, in search of the Baths of Diocletian, and the church of
Santa Maria degl' Angeli.  We went too far along the Via di Porta Pia,
and after passing by two or three convents, and their high garden walls,
and the villa Bonaparte on one side, and the villa Torlonia on the other,
at last issued through the city gate.  Before us, far away, were the
Alban hills, the loftiest of which was absolutely silvered with snow and
sunshine, and set in the bluest and brightest of skies.  We now retraced
our steps to the Fountain of the Termini, where is a ponderous heap of
stone, representing Moses striking the rock; a colossal figure, not
without a certain enormous might and dignity, though rather too evidently
looking his awfullest.  This statue was the death of its sculptor, whose
heart was broken on account of the ridicule it excited.  There are many
more absurd aquatic devices in Rome, however, and few better.

We turned into the Piazza de' Termini, the entrance of which is at this
fountain; and after some inquiry of the French soldiers, a numerous
detachment of whom appear to be quartered in the vicinity, we found our
way to the portal of Santa Maria degl' Angeli.  The exterior of this
church has no pretensions to beauty or majesty, or, indeed, to
architectural merit of any kind, or to any architecture whatever; for it
looks like a confused pile of ruined brickwork, with a facade resembling
half the inner curve of a large oven.  No one would imagine that there
was a church under that enormous heap of ancient rubbish.  But the door
admits you into a circular vestibule, once an apartment of Diocletian's
Baths, but now a portion of the nave of the church, and surrounded with
monumental busts; and thence you pass into what was the central hall;
now, with little change, except of detail and ornament, transformed into
the body of the church.  This space is so lofty, broad, and airy, that
the soul forthwith swells out and magnifies itself, for the sake of
filling it.  It was Michael Angelo who contrived this miracle; and I feel
even more grateful to him for rescuing such a noble interior from
destruction, than if he had originally built it himself.  In the ceiling
above, you see the metal fixtures whereon the old Romans hung their
lamps; and there are eight gigantic pillars of Egyptian granite, standing
as they stood of yore.  There is a grand simplicity about the church,
more satisfactory than elaborate ornament; but the present pope has paved
and adorned one of the large chapels of the transept in very beautiful
style, and the pavement of the central part is likewise laid in rich
marbles.  In the choir there are several pictures, one of which was
veiled, as celebrated pictures frequently are in churches.  A person, who
seemed to be at his devotions, withdrew the veil for us, and we saw a
Martyrdom of St. Sebastian, by Domenichino, originally, I believe,
painted in fresco in St. Peter's, but since transferred to canvas, and
removed hither.  Its place at St. Peter's is supplied by a mosaic copy.
I was a good deal impressed by this picture,--the dying saint, amid the
sorrow of those who loved him, and the fury of his enemies, looking
upward, where a company of angels, and Jesus with them, are waiting to
welcome him and crown him; and I felt what an influence pictures might
have upon the devotional part of our nature.  The nailmarks in the hands
and feet of Jesus, ineffaceable, even after he had passed into bliss and
glory, touched my heart with a sense of his love for us.  I think this
really a great picture.  We walked round the church, looking at other
paintings and frescos, but saw no others that greatly interested us.  In
the vestibule there are monuments to Carlo Maratti and Salvator Rosa, and
there is a statue of St. Bruno, by Houdon, which is pronounced to be very
fine.  I thought it good, but scarcely worthy of vast admiration.  Houdon
was the sculptor of the first statue of Washington, and of the bust,
whence, I suppose, all subsequent statues have been, and will be, mainly
modelled.

After emerging from the church, I looked back with wonder at the stack of
shapeless old brickwork that hid the splendid interior.  I must go there
again, and breathe freely in that noble space.


February 20th.--This morning, after breakfast, I walked across the city,
making a pretty straight course to the Pantheon, and thence to the bridge
of St. Angelo, and to St. Peter's.  It had been my purpose to go to the
Fontana Paolina; but, finding that the distance was too great, and being
weighed down with a Roman lassitude, I concluded to go into St. Peter's.
Here I looked at Michael Angelo's Pieta, a representation of the dead
Christ, in his mother's lap.  Then I strolled round the great church, and
find that it continues to grow upon me both in magnitude and beauty, by
comparison with the many interiors of sacred edifices which I have lately
seen.  At times, a single, casual, momentary glimpse of its magnificence
gleams upon my soul, as it were, when I happen to glance at arch opening
beyond arch, and I am surprised into admiration.  I have experienced that
a landscape and the sky unfold the deepest beauty in a similar way; not
when they are gazed at of set purpose, but when the spectator looks
suddenly through a vista, among a crowd of other thoughts.  Passing near
the confessional for foreigners to-day, I saw a Spaniard, who had just
come out of the one devoted to his native tongue, taking leave of his
confessor, with an affectionate reverence, which--as well as the benign
dignity of the good father--it was good to behold. . . .

I returned home early, in order to go with my wife to the Barberini
Palace at two o'clock.  We entered through the gateway, through the Via
delle Quattro Fontane, passing one or two sentinels; for there is
apparently a regiment of dragoons quartered on the ground-floor of the
palace; and I stumbled upon a room containing their saddles, the other
day, when seeking for Mr. Story's staircase.  The entrance to the
picture-gallery is by a door on the right hand, affording us a sight of a
beautiful spiral staircase, which goes circling upward from the very
basement to the very summit of the palace, with a perfectly easy ascent,
yet confining its sweep within a moderate compass.  We looked up through
the interior of the spiral, as through a tube, from the bottom to the
top.  The pictures are contained in three contiguous rooms of the lower
piano, and are few in number, comprising barely half a dozen which I
should care to see again, though doubtless all have value in their way.
One that attracted our attention was a picture of "Christ disputing with
the Doctors," by Albert Duerer, in which was represented the ugliest,
most evil-minded, stubborn, pragmatical, and contentious old Jew that
ever lived under the law of Moses; and he and the child Jesus were
arguing, not only with their tongues, but making hieroglyphics, as it
were, by the motion of their hands and fingers.  It is a very queer, as
well as a very remarkable picture.  But we passed hastily by this, and
almost all others, being eager to see the two which chiefly make the
collection famous,--Raphael's Fornarina, and Guido's portrait of Beatrice
Cenci.  These were found in the last of the three rooms, and as regards
Beatrice Cenci, I might as well not try to say anything; for its spell is
indefinable, and the painter has wrought it in a way more like magic than
anything else. . . .

It is the most profoundly wrought picture in the world; no artist did it,
nor could do it, again.  Guido may have held the brush, but he painted
"better than he knew."  I wish, however, it were possible for some
spectator, of deep sensibility, to see the picture without knowing
anything of its subject or history; for, no doubt, we bring all our
knowledge of the Cenci tragedy to the interpretation of it.

Close beside Beatrice Cenci hangs the Fornarina. . . .

While we were looking at these works Miss M------ unexpectedly joined us,
and we went, all three together, to the Rospigliosi Palace, in the Piazza
di Monte Cavallo.  A porter, in cocked hat, and with a staff of office,
admitted us into a spacious court before the palace, and directed us to a
garden on one side, raised as much as twenty feet above the level on
which we stood.  The gardener opened the gate for us, and we ascended a
beautiful stone staircase, with a carved balustrade, bearing many marks
of time and weather.  Reaching the garden-level, we found it laid out in
walks, bordered with box and ornamental shrubbery, amid which were
lemon-trees, and one large old exotic from some distant clime.  In the
centre of the garden, surrounded by a stone balustrade, like that of the
staircase, was a fish-pond, into which several jets of water were
continually spouting; and on pedestals, that made part of the balusters,
stood eight marble statues of Apollo, Cupid, nymphs, and other such sunny
and beautiful people of classic mythology.  There had been many more of
these statues, but the rest had disappeared, and those which remained had
suffered grievous damage, here to a nose, there to a hand or foot, and
often a fracture of the body, very imperfectly mended.  There was a
pleasant sunshine in the garden, and a springlike, or rather a genial,
autumnal atmosphere, though elsewhere it was a day of poisonous Roman
chill.

At the end of the garden, which was of no great extent, was an edifice,
bordering on the piazza, called the Casino, which, I presume, means a
garden-house.  The front is richly ornamented with bas-reliefs, and
statues in niches; as if it were a place for pleasure and enjoyment, and
therefore ought to be beautiful.  As we approached it, the door swung
open, and we went into a large room on the ground-floor, and, looking up
to the ceiling, beheld Guido's Aurora.  The picture is as fresh and
brilliant as if he had painted it with the morning sunshine which it
represents.  It could not be more lustrous in its lines, if he had given
it the last touch an hour ago.  Three or four artists were copying it at
that instant, and positively their colors did not look brighter, though a
great deal newer than his.  The alacrity and movement, briskness and
morning stir and glow, of the picture are wonderful.  It seems impossible
to catch its glory in a copy.  Several artists, as I said, were making
the attempt, and we saw two other attempted copies leaning against the
wall, but it was easy to detect failure in just essential points.  My
memory, I believe, will be somewhat enlivened by this picture hereafter:
not that I remember it very distinctly even now; but bright things leave
a sheen and glimmer in the mind, like Christian's tremulous glimpse of
the Celestial City.

In two other rooms of the Casino we saw pictures by Domenichino, Rubens,
and other famous painters, which I do not mean to speak of, because I
cared really little or nothing about them.  Returning into the garden,
the sunny warmth of which was most grateful after the chill air and cold
pavement of the Casino, we walked round the laguna, examining the
statues, and looking down at some little fishes that swarmed at the stone
margin of the pool.  There were two infants of the Rospigliosi family:
one, a young child playing with a maid and head-servant; another, the
very chubbiest and rosiest boy in the world, sleeping on its nurse's
bosom.  The nurse was a comely woman enough, dressed in bright colors,
which fitly set off the deep lines of her Italian face.  An old painter
very likely would have beautified and refined the pair into a Madonna,
with the child Jesus; for an artist need not go far in Italy to find a
picture ready composed and tinted, needing little more than to be
literally copied.

Miss M------ had gone away before us; but my wife and I, after leaving
the Palazzo Rospigliosi, and on our way hone, went into the Church of St.
Andrea, which belongs to a convent of Jesuits.  I have long ago exhausted
all my capacity of admiration for splendid interiors of churches, but
methinks this little, little temple (it is not more than fifty or sixty
feet across) has a more perfect and gem-like beauty than any other.  Its
shape is oval, with an oval dome, and, above that, another little dome,
both of which are magnificently frescoed.  Around the base of the larger
dome is wreathed a flight of angels, and the smaller and upper one is
encircled by a garland of cherubs,--cherub and angel all of pure white
marble.  The oval centre of the church is walled round with precious and
lustrous marble of a red-veined variety interspersed with columns and
pilasters of white; and there are arches opening through this rich wall,
forming chapels, which the architect seems to have striven hard to make
even more gorgeous than the main body of the church.  They contain
beautiful pictures, not dark and faded, but glowing, as if just from the
painter's hands; and the shrines are adorned with whatever is most rare,
and in one of them was the great carbuncle; at any rate, a bright, fiery
gem as big as a turkey's egg.  The pavement of the church was one star of
various-colored marble, and in the centre was a mosaic, covering, I
believe, the tomb of the founder.  I have not seen, nor expect to see,
anything else so entirely and satisfactorily finished as this small oval
church; and I only wish I could pack it in a large box, and send it home.

I must not forget that, on our way from the Barberini Palace, we stopped
an instant to look at the house, at the corner of the street of the four
fountains, where Milton was a guest while in Rome.  He seems quite a man
of our own day, seen so nearly at the hither extremity of the vista
through which we look back, from the epoch of railways to that of the
oldest Egyptian obelisk.  The house (it was then occupied by the Cardinal
Barberini) looks as if it might have been built within the present
century; for mediaeval houses in Rome do not assume the aspect of
antiquity; perhaps because the Italian style of architecture, or
something similar, is the one more generally in vogue in most cities.


February 21st.--This morning I took my way through the Porta del Popolo,
intending to spend the forenoon in the Campagna; but, getting weary of
the straight, uninteresting street that runs out of the gate, I turned
aside from it, and soon found myself on the shores of the Tiber.  It
looked, as usual, like a saturated solution of yellow mud, and eddied
hastily along between deep banks of clay, and over a clay bed, in which
doubtless are hidden many a richer treasure than we now possess.  The
French once proposed to draw off the river, for the purpose of recovering
all the sunken statues and relics; but the Romans made strenuous
objection, on account of the increased virulence of malaria which would
probably result.  I saw a man on the immediate shore of the river, fifty
feet or so beneath the bank on which I stood, sitting patiently, with an
angling rod; and I waited to see what he might catch.  Two other persons
likewise sat down to watch him; but he caught nothing so long as I
stayed, and at last seemed to give it up.  The banks and vicinity of the
river are very bare and uninviting, as I then saw them; no shade, no
verdure,--a rough, neglected aspect, and a peculiar shabbiness about the
few houses that were visible.  Farther down the stream the dome of St.
Peter's showed itself on the other side, seeming to stand on the
outskirts of the city.  I walked along the banks, with some expectation
of finding a ferry, by which I might cross the river; but my course was
soon interrupted by the wall, and I turned up a lane that led me straight
back again to the Porta del Popolo.  I stopped a moment, however, to see
some young men pitching quoits, which they appeared to do with a good
deal of skill.

I went along the Via di Ripetta, and through other streets, stepping into
two or three churches, one of which was the Pantheon. . . .

There are, I think, seven deep, pillared recesses around the
circumference of it, each of which becomes a sufficiently capacious
chapel; and alternately with these chapels there is a marble structure,
like the architecture of a doorway, beneath which is the shrine of a
saint; so that the whole circle of the Pantheon is filled up with the
seven chapels and seven shrines.  A number of persons were sitting or
kneeling around; others came in while I was there, dipping their fingers
in the holy water, and bending the knee, as they passed the shrines and
chapels, until they reached the one which, apparently, they had selected
as the particular altar for their devotions.  Everybody seemed so devout,
and in a frame of mind so suited to the day and place, that it really
made me feel a little awkward not to be able to kneel down along with
them.  Unlike the worshippers in our own churches, each individual here
seems to do his own individual acts of devotion, and I cannot but think
it better so than to make an effort for united prayer as we do.  It is my
opinion that a great deal of devout and reverential feeling is kept alive
in people's hearts by the Catholic mode of worship.

Soon leaving the Pantheon, a few minutes' walk towards the Corso brought
me to the Church of St. Ignazio, which belongs to the College of the
Jesuits.  It is spacious and of beautiful architecture, but not
strikingly distinguished, in the latter particular, from many others; a
wide and lofty nave, supported upon marble columns, between which arches
open into the side aisles, and at the junction of the nave and transept a
dome, resting on four great arches.  The church seemed to be purposely
somewhat darkened, so that I could not well see the details of the
ornamentation, except the frescos on the ceiling of the nave, which were
very brilliant, and done in so effectual a style, that I really could not
satisfy myself that some of the figures did not actually protrude from
the ceiling,--in short, that they were not colored bas-reliefs, instead
of frescos.  No words can express the beautiful effect, in an upholstery
point of view, of this kind of decoration.  Here, as at the Pantheon,
there were many persons sitting silent, kneeling, or passing from shrine
to shrine.

I reached home at about twelve, and, at one, set out again, with my wife,
towards St. Peter's, where we meant to stay till after vespers.  We
walked across the city, and through the Piazza de Navona, where we
stopped to look at one of Bernini's absurd fountains, of which the water
makes but the smallest part,--a little squirt or two amid a prodigious
fuss of gods and monsters.  Thence we passed by the poor, battered-down
torso of Pasquin, and came, by devious ways, to the bridge of St. Angelo;
the streets bearing pretty much their weekday aspect, many of the shops
open, the market-stalls doing their usual business, and the people brisk
and gay, though not indecorously so.  I suppose there was hardly a man or
woman who had not heard mass, confessed, and said their prayers; a thing
which--the prayers, I mean--it would be absurd to predicate of London,
New York, or any Protestant city.  In however adulterated a guise, the
Catholics do get a draught of devotion to slake the thirst of their
souls, and methinks it must needs do them good, even if not quite so pure
as if it came from better cisterns, or from the original fountain-head.

Arriving at St. Peter's shortly after two, we walked round the whole
church, looking at all the pictures and most of the monuments, . . . .
and paused longest before Guido's "Archangel Michael overcoming Lucifer."
This is surely one of the most beautiful things in the world, one of the
human conceptions that are imbued most deeply with the celestial. . . .

We then sat down in one of the aisles and awaited the beginning of
vespers, which we supposed would take place at half past three.  Four
o'clock came, however, and no vespers; and as our dinner-hour is
five, . . . . we at last cane away without hearing the vesper hymn.


February 23d.--Yesterday, at noon, we set out for the Capitol, and after
going up the acclivity (not from the Forum, but from the opposite
direction), stopped to look at the statues of Castor and Pollux, which,
with other sculptures, look down the ascent.  Castor and his brother seem
to me to have heads disproportionately large, and are not so striking, in
any respect, as such great images ought to be.  But we heartily admired
the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, . . . . and looked at
a fountain, principally composed, I think, of figures representing the
Nile and the Tiber, who loll upon their elbows and preside over the
gushing water; and between them, against the facade of the Senator's
Palace, there is a statue of Minerva, with a petticoat of red porphyry.
Having taken note of these objects, we went to the museum, in an edifice
on our left, entering the piazza, and here, in the vestibule, we found
various old statues and relics.  Ascending the stairs, we passed through
a long gallery, and, turning to our left, examined somewhat more
carefully a suite of rooms running parallel with it.  The first of these
contained busts of the Caesars and their kindred, from the epoch of the
mightiest Julius downward; eighty-three, I believe, in all.  I had seen a
bust of Julius Caesar in the British Museum, and was surprised at its
thin and withered aspect; but this head is of a very ugly old man
indeed,--wrinkled, puckered, shrunken, lacking breadth and substance;
careworn, grim, as if he had fought hard with life, and had suffered in
the conflict; a man of schemes, and of eager effort to bring his schemes
to pass.  His profile is by no means good, advancing from the top of his
forehead to the tip of his nose, and retreating, at about the same angle,
from the latter point to the bottom of his chin, which seems to be thrust
forcibly down into his meagre neck,--not that he pokes his head forward,
however, for it is particularly erect.

The head of Augustus is very beautiful, and appears to be that of a
meditative, philosophic man, saddened with the sense that it is not very
much worth while to be at the summit of human greatness after all.  It is
a sorrowful thing to trace the decay of civilization through this series
of busts, and to observe how the artistic skill, so requisite at first,
went on declining through the dreary dynasty of the Caesars, till at
length the master of the world could not get his head carved in better
style than the figure-head of a ship.

In the next room there were better statues than we had yet seen; but in
the last room of the range we found the "Dying Gladiator," of which I had
already caught a glimpse in passing by the open door.  It had made all
the other treasures of the gallery tedious in my eagerness to come to
that.  I do not believe that so much pathos is wrought into any other
block of stone.  Like all works of the highest excellence, however, it
makes great demands upon the spectator.  He must make a generous gift of
his sympathies to the sculptor, and help out his skill with all his
heart, or else he will see little more than a skilfully wrought surface.
It suggests far more than it shows.  I looked long at this statue, and
little at anything else, though, among other famous works, a statue of
Antinous was in the same room.

I was glad when we left the museum, which, by the by, was piercingly
chill, as if the multitude of statues radiated cold out of their marble
substance.  We might have gone to see the pictures in the Palace of the
Conservatori, and S-----, whose receptivity is unlimited and forever
fresh, would willingly have done so; but I objected, and we went towards
the Forum.  I had noticed, two or three times, an inscription over a
mean-looking door in this neighborhood, stating that here was the
entrance to the prison of the holy apostles Peter and Paul; and we soon
found the spot, not far from the Forum, with two wretched frescos of the
apostles above the inscription.  We knocked at the door without effect;
but a lame beggar, who sat at another door of the same house (which
looked exceedingly like a liquor-shop), desired us to follow him, and
began to ascend to the Capitol, by the causeway leading from the Forum.
A little way upward we met a woman, to whom the beggar delivered us over,
and she led us into a church or chapel door, and pointed to a long flight
of steps, which descended through twilight into utter darkness.  She
called to somebody in the lower regions, and then went away, leaving us
to get down this mysterious staircase by ourselves.  Down we went,
farther and farther from the daylight, and found ourselves, anon, in a
dark chamber or cell, the shape or boundaries of which we could not make
out, though it seemed to be of stone, and black and dungeon-like.
Indistinctly, and from a still farther depth in the earth, we heard
voices,--one voice, at least,--apparently not addressing ourselves, but
some other persons; and soon, directly beneath our feet, we saw a
glimmering of light through a round, iron-grated hole in the bottom of
the dungeon.  In a few moments the glimmer and the voice came up through
this hole, and the light disappeared, and it and the voice came
glimmering and babbling up a flight of stone stairs, of which we had not
hitherto been aware.  It was the custode, with a party of visitors, to
whom he had been showing St. Peter's dungeon.  Each visitor was provided
with a wax taper, and the custode gave one to each of us, bidding us wait
a moment while he conducted the other party to the upper air.  During his
absence we examined the cell, as well as our dim lights would permit, and
soon found an indentation in the wall, with an iron grate put over it for
protection, and an inscription above informing us that the Apostle Peter
had here left the imprint of his visage; and, in truth, there is a
profile there,--forehead, nose, mouth, and chin,--plainly to be seen, an
intaglio in the solid rock.  We touched it with the tips of our fingers,
as well as saw it with our eyes.

The custode soon returned, and led us down the darksome steps, chattering
in Italian all the time.  It is not a very long descent to the lower
cell, the roof of which is so low that I believe I could have reached it
with my hand.  We were now in the deepest and ugliest part of the old
Mamertine Prison, one of the few remains of the kingly period of Rome,
and which served the Romans as a state-prison for hundreds of years
before the Christian era.  A multitude of criminals or innocent persons,
no doubt, have languished here in misery, and perished in darkness.  Here
Jugurtha starved; here Catiline's adherents were strangled; and,
methinks, there cannot be in the world another such an evil den, so
haunted with black memories and indistinct surmises of guilt and
suffering.  In old Rome, I suppose, the citizens never spoke of this
dungeon above their breath.  It looks just as bad as it is; round, only
seven paces across, yet so obscure that our tapers could not illuminate
it from side to side,-- the stones of which it is constructed being as
black as midnight.  The custode showed us a stone post, at the side of
the cell, with the hole in the top of it, into which, he said, St.
Peter's chain had been fastened; and he uncovered a spring of water, in
the middle of the stone floor, which he told us had miraculously gushed
up to enable the saint to baptize his jailer.  The miracle was perhaps
the more easily wrought, inasmuch as Jugurtha had found the floor of the
dungeon oozy with wet.  However, it is best to be as simple and childlike
as we can in these matters; and whether St. Peter stamped his visage into
the stone, and wrought this other miracle or no, and whether or no he
ever was in the prison at all, still the belief of a thousand years and
more gives a sort of reality and substance to such traditions.  The
custode dipped an iron ladle into the miraculous water, and we each of us
drank a sip; and, what is very remarkable, to me it seemed hard water and
almost brackish, while many persons think it the sweetest in Rome.  I
suspect that St. Peter still dabbles in this water, and tempers its
qualities according to the faith of those who drink it.

The staircase descending into the lower dungeon is comparatively modern,
there having been no entrance of old, except through the small circular
opening in the roof.  In the upper cell the custode showed us an ancient
flight of stairs, now built into the wall, which used to lead from the
Capitol.  The whole precincts are now consecrated, and I believe the
upper portion, perhaps both upper and lower, are a shrine or a chapel.

I now left S------ in the Forum, and went to call on Mr. J. P. K------ at
the Hotel d'Europe.  I found him just returned from a drive,--a gentleman
of about sixty, or more, with gray hair, a pleasant, intellectual face,
and penetrating, but not unkindly eyes.  He moved infirmly, being on the
recovery from an illness.  We went up to his saloon together, and had a
talk,--or, rather, he had it nearly all to himself,--and particularly
sensible talk, too, and full of the results of learning and experience.
In the first place, he settled the whole Kansas difficulty; then he made
havoc of St. Peter, who came very shabbily out of his hands, as regarded
his early character in the Church, and his claims to the position he now
holds in it.  Mr. K------ also gave a curious illustration, from
something that happened to himself, of the little dependence that can be
placed on tradition purporting to be ancient, and I capped his story by
telling him how the site of my town-pump, so plainly indicated in the
sketch itself, has already been mistaken in the city council and in the
public prints.


February 24th.--Yesterday I crossed the Ponte Sisto, and took a short
ramble on the other side of the river; and it rather surprised me to
discover, pretty nearly opposite the Capitoline Hill, a quay, at which
several schooners and barks, of two or three hundred tons' burden, were
moored.  There was also a steamer, armed with a large gun and two brass
swivels on her forecastle, and I know not what artillery besides.
Probably she may have been a revenue-cutter.

Returning I crossed the river by way of the island of St. Bartholomew
over two bridges.  The island is densely covered with buildings, and is a
separate small fragment of the city.  It was a tradition of the ancient
Romans that it was formed by the aggregation of soil and rubbish brought
down by the river, and accumulating round the nucleus of some sunken
baskets.

On reaching the hither side of the river, I soon struck upon the ruins of
the theatre of Marcellus, which are very picturesque, and the more so
from being closely linked in, indeed, identified with the shops,
habitations, and swarming life of modern Rome.  The most striking portion
was a circular edifice, which seemed to have been composed of a row of
Ionic columns standing upon a lower row of Doric, many of the antique
pillars being yet perfect; but the intervening arches built up with
brickwork, and the whole once magnificent structure now tenanted by poor
and squalid people, as thick as mites within the round of an old cheese.
From this point I cannot very clearly trace out my course; but I passed,
I think, between the Circus Maximus and the Palace of the Caesars, and
near the Baths of Caracalla, and went into the cloisters of the Church of
San Gregorio.  All along I saw massive ruins, not particularly
picturesque or beautiful, but huge, mountainous piles, chiefly of
brickwork, somewhat tweed-grown here and there, but oftener bare and
dreary. . . . All the successive ages since Rome began to decay have
done their best to ruin the very ruins by taking away the marble and the
hewn stone for their own structures, and leaving only the inner filling
up of brickwork, which the ancient architects never designed to be seen.
The consequence of all this is, that, except for the lofty and poetical
associations connected with it, and except, too, for the immense
difference in magnitude, a Roman ruin may be in itself not more
picturesque than I have seen an old cellar, with a shattered brick
chimney half crumbling down into it, in New England.

By this time I knew not whither I was going, and turned aside from a
broad, paved road (it was the Appian Way) into the Via Latina, which I
supposed would lead to one of the city gates.  It was a lonely path: on
my right hand extensive piles of ruin, in strange shapes or
shapelessness, built of the broad and thin old Roman bricks, such as may
be traced everywhere, when the stucco has fallen away from a modern Roman
house; for I imagine there has not been a new brick made here for a
thousand years.  On my left, I think, was a high wall, and before me,
grazing in the road . . . . [the buffalo calf of the Marble Faun.--ED.].
The road went boldly on, with a well-worn track up to the very walls of
the city; but there it abruptly terminated at an ancient, closed-up
gateway.  From a notice posted against a door, which appeared to be the
entrance to the ruins on my left, I found that these were the remains of
Columbaria, where the dead used to be put away in pigeon-holes.  Reaching
the paved road again, I kept on my course, passing the tomb of the
Scipios, and soon came to the gate of San Sebastiano, through which I
entered the Campagna.  Indeed, the scene around was so rural, that I had
fancied myself already beyond the walls.  As the afternoon was getting
advanced, I did not proceed any farther towards the blue hills which I
saw in the distance, but turned to my left, following a road that runs
round the exterior of the city wall.  It was very dreary and solitary,--
not a house on the whole track, with the broad and shaggy Campagna on one
side, and the high, bare wall, looking down over my head, on the other.
It is not, any more than the other objects of the scene, a very
picturesque wall, but is little more than a brick garden-fence seen
through a magnifying-glass, with now and then a tower, however, and
frequent buttresses, to keep its height of fifty feet from toppling over.
The top was ragged, and fringed with a few weeds; there had been
embrasures for guns and eyelet-holes for musketry, but these were
plastered up with brick or stone.  I passed one or two walled-up gateways
(by the by, the Parts, Latina was the gate through which Belisarius first
entered Rome), and one of these had two high, round towers, and looked
more Gothic and venerable with antique strength than any other portion of
the wall.  Immediately after this I came to the gate of San Giovanni,
just within which is the Basilica of St. John Lateran, and there I was
glad to rest myself upon a bench before proceeding homeward.

There was a French sentinel at this gateway, as at all the others; for
the Gauls have always been a pest to Rome, and now gall her worse than
ever.  I observed, too, that an official, in citizen's dress, stood there
also, and appeared to exercise a supervision over some carts with country
produce, that were entering just then.


February 25th.--We went this forenoon to the Palazzo Borghese, which is
situated on a street that runs at right angles with the Corso, and very
near the latter.  Most of the palaces in Rome, and the Borghese among
them, were built somewhere about the sixteenth century; this in 1590, I
believe.  It is an immense edifice, standing round the four sides of a
quadrangle; and though the suite of rooms comprising the picture-gallery
forms an almost interminable vista, they occupy only a part of the
ground-floor of one side.  We enter from the street into a large court,
surrounded with a corridor, the arches of which support a second series
of arches above.  The picture-rooms open from one into another, and have
many points of magnificence, being large and lofty, with vaulted ceilings
and beautiful frescos, generally of mythological subjects, in the flat
central part of the vault.  The cornices are gilded; the deep embrasures
of the windows are panelled with wood-work; the doorways are of polished
and variegated marble, or covered with a composition as hard, and
seemingly as durable.  The whole has a kind of splendid shabbiness thrown
over it, like a slight coating of rust; the furniture, at least the
damask chairs, being a good deal worn, though there are marble and mosaic
tables, which may serve to adorn another palace when this one crumbles
away with age.  One beautiful hall, with a ceiling more richly gilded
than the rest, is panelled all round with large looking-glasses, on which
are painted pictures, both landscapes and human figures, in oils; so that
the effect is somewhat as if you saw these objects represented in the
mirrors.  These glasses must be of old date, perhaps coeval with the
first building of the palace; for they are so much dimmed, that one's own
figure appears indistinct in them, and more difficult to be traced than
the pictures which cover them half over.  It was very comfortless,--
indeed, I suppose nobody ever thought of being comfortable there, since
the house was built,--but especially uncomfortable on a chill, damp day
like this.  My fingers were quite numb before I got half-way through the
suite of apartments, in spite of a brazier of charcoal which was
smouldering into ashes in two or three of the rooms.  There was not, so
far as I remember, a single fireplace in the suite.  A considerable
number of visitors--not many, however--were there; and a good many
artists; and three or four ladies among them were making copies of the
more celebrated pictures, and in all or in most cases missing the
especial points that made their celebrity and value.  The Prince Borghese
certainly demeans himself like a kind and liberal gentleman, in throwing
open this invaluable collection to the public to see, and for artists to
carry away with them, and diffuse all over the world, so far as their own
power and skill will permit.  It is open every day of the week, except
Saturday and Sunday, without any irksome restriction or supervision; and
the fee, which custom requires the visitor to pay to the custode, has the
good effect of making us feel that we are not intruders, nor received in
an exactly eleemosynary way.  The thing could not be better managed.

The collection is one of the most celebrated in the world, and contains
between eight and nine hundred pictures, many of which are esteemed
masterpieces.  I think I was not in a frame for admiration to-day, nor
could achieve that free and generous surrender of myself which I have
already said is essential to the proper estimate of anything excellent.
Besides, how is it possible to give one's soul, or any considerable part
of it, to a single picture, seen for the first time, among a thousand
others, all of which set forth their own claims in an equally good light?
Furthermore, there is an external weariness, and sense of a thousand-fold
sameness to be overcome, before we can begin to enjoy a gallery of the
old Italian masters. . . . I remember but one painter, Francia, who
seems really to have approached this awful class of subjects (Christs and
Madonnas) in a fitting spirit; his pictures are very singular and
awkward, if you look at them with merely an external eye, but they are
full of the beauty of holiness, and evidently wrought out as acts of
devotion, with the deepest sincerity; and are veritable prayers upon
canvas. . . .

I was glad, in the very last of the twelve rooms, to come upon some Dutch
and Flemish pictures, very few, but very welcome; Rubens, Rembrandt,
Vandyke, Paul Potter, Teniers, and others,--men of flesh and blood, and
warm fists, and human hearts.  As compared with them, these mighty
Italian masters seem men of polished steel; not human, nor addressing
themselves so much to human sympathies, as to a formed, intellectual
taste.


March 1st.--To-day began very unfavorably; but we ventured out at about
eleven o'clock, intending to visit the gallery of the Colonna Palace.
Finding it closed, however, on account of the illness of the custode, we
determined to go to the picture-gallery of the Capitol; and, on our way
thither, we stepped into Il Gesu, the grand and rich church of the
Jesuits, where we found a priest in white, preaching a sermon, with vast
earnestness of action and variety of tones, insomuch that I fancied
sometimes that two priests were in the agony of sermonizing at once.  He
had a pretty large and seemingly attentive audience clustered round him
from the entrance of the church, half-way down the nave; while in the
chapels of the transepts and in the remoter distances were persons
occupied with their own individual devotion.  We sat down near the chapel
of St. Ignazio, which is adorned with a picture over the altar, and with
marble sculptures of the Trinity aloft, and of angels fluttering at the
sides.  What I particularly noted (for the angels were not very real
personages, being neither earthly nor celestial) was the great ball of
lapis lazuli, the biggest in the world, at the feet of the First Person
in the Trinity.  The church is a splendid one, lined with a great variety
of precious marbles, . . . . but partly, perhaps, owing to the dusky
light, as well as to the want of cleanliness, there was a dingy effect
upon the whole.  We made but a very short stay, our New England breeding
causing us to feel shy of moving about the church in sermon time.

It rained when we reached the Capitol, and, as the museum was not yet
open, we went into the Palace of the Conservators, on the opposite side
of the piazza.  Around the inner court of the ground-floor, partly under
two opposite arcades, and partly under the sky, are several statues and
other ancient sculptures; among them a statue of Julius Caesar, said to
be the only authentic one, and certainly giving an impression of him more
in accordance with his character than the withered old face in the
museum; also, a statue of Augustus in middle age, still retaining a
resemblance to the bust of him in youth; some gigantic heads and hands
and feet in marble and bronze; a stone lion and horse, which lay long at
the bottom of a river, broken and corroded, and were repaired by
Michel Angelo; and other things which it were wearisome to set down.
We inquired of two or three French soldiers the way into the
picture-gallery; but it is our experience that French soldiers in
Rome never know anything of what is around them, not even the name of
the palace or public place over which they stand guard; and though
invariably civil, you might as well put a question to a statue of an old
Roman as to one of them.  While we stood under the loggia, however,
looking at the rain plashing into the court, a soldier of the Papal Guard
kindly directed us up the staircase, and even took pains to go with us to
the very entrance of the picture-rooms.  Thank Heaven, there are but two
of them, and not many pictures which one cares to look at very long.

Italian galleries are at a disadvantage as compared with English ones,
inasmuch as the pictures are not nearly such splendid articles of
upholstery; though, very likely, having undergone less cleaning and
varnishing, they may retain more perfectly the finer touches of the
masters.  Nevertheless, I miss the mellow glow, the rich and mild
external lustre, and even the brilliant frames of the pictures I have
seen in England.  You feel that they have had loving care taken of them;
even if spoiled, it is because they have been valued so much.  But these
pictures in Italian galleries look rusty and lustreless, as far as the
exterior is concerned; and, really, the splendor of the painting, as a
production of intellect and feeling, has a good deal of difficulty in
shining through such clouds.

There is a picture at the Capitol, the "Rape of Europa," by Paul
Veronese, that would glow with wonderful brilliancy if it were set in a
magnificent frame, and covered with a sunshine of varnish; and it is a
kind of picture that would not be desecrated, as some deeper and holier
ones might be, by any splendor of external adornment that could be
bestowed on it.  It is deplorable and disheartening to see it in faded
and shabby plight,--this joyous, exuberant, warm, voluptuous work.  There
is the head of a cow, thrust into the picture, and staring with wild,
ludicrous wonder at the godlike bull, so as to introduce quite a new
sentiment.

Here, and at the Borghese Palace, there were some pictures by Garofalo,
an artist of whom I never heard before, but who seemed to have been a man
of power.  A picture by Marie Subleyras--a miniature copy from one by her
husband, of the woman anointing the feet of Christ--is most delicately
and beautifully finished, and would be an ornament to a drawing-room; a
thing that could not truly be said of one in a hundred of these grim
masterpieces.  When they were painted life was not what it is now, and
the artists had not the same ends in view. . . . It depresses the
spirits to go from picture to picture, leaving a portion of your vital
sympathy at every one, so that you come, with a kind of half-torpid
desperation, to the end.  On our way down the staircase we saw several
noteworthy bas-reliefs, and among them a very ancient one of Curtius
plunging on horseback into the chasm in the Forum.  It seems to me,
however, that old sculpture affects the spirits even more dolefully than
old painting; it strikes colder to the heart, and lies heavier upon it,
being marble, than if it were merely canvas.

My wife went to revisit the museum, which we had already seen, on the
other side of the piazza; but, being cold, I left her there, and went out
to ramble in the sun; for it was now brightly, though fitfully, shining
again.  I walked through the Forum (where a thorn thrust itself out and
tore the sleeve of my talma) and under the Arch of Titus, towards the
Coliseum.  About a score of French drummers were beating a long, loud
roll-call, at the base of the Coliseum, and under its arches; and a score
of trumpeters responded to these, from the rising ground opposite the
Arch of Constantine; and the echoes of the old Roman ruins, especially
those of the Palace of the Caesars, responded to this martial uproar of
the barbarians.  There seemed to be no cause for it; but the drummers
beat, and the trumpeters blew, as long as I was within hearing.

I walked along the Appian Way as far as the Baths of Caracalla.  The
Palace of the Caesars, which I have never yet explored, appears to be
crowned by the walls of a convent, built, no doubt, out of some of the
fragments that would suffice to build a city; and I think there is
another convent among the baths.  The Catholics have taken a peculiar
pleasure in planting themselves in the very citadels of paganism, whether
temples or palaces.  There has been a good deal of enjoyment in the
destruction of old Rome.  I often think so when I see the elaborate pains
that have been taken to smash and demolish some beautiful column, for no
purpose whatever, except the mere delight of annihilating a noble piece
of work.  There is something in the impulse with which one sympathizes;
though I am afraid the destroyers were not sufficiently aware of the
mischief they did to enjoy it fully.  Probably, too, the early Christians
were impelled by religious zeal to destroy the pagan temples, before the
happy thought occurred of converting them into churches.


March 3d.--This morning was U----'s birthday, and we celebrated it by
taking a barouche, and driving (the whole family) out on the Appian Way
as far as the tomb of Cecilia Metella.  For the first time since we came
to Rome, the weather was really warm,--a kind of heat producing languor
and disinclination to active movement, though still a little breeze which
was stirring threw an occasional coolness over us, and made us distrust
the almost sultry atmosphere.  I cannot think the Roman climate healthy
in any of its moods that I have experienced.

Close on the other side of the road are the ruins of a Gothic chapel,
little more than a few bare walls and painted windows, and some other
fragmentary structures which we did not particularly examine.  U---- and
I clambered through a gap in the wall, extending from the basement of the
tomb, and thus, getting into the field beyond, went quite round the
mausoleum and the remains of the castle connected with it.  The latter,
though still high and stalwart, showed few or no architectural features
of interest, being built, I think, principally of large bricks, and not
to be compared to English ruins as a beautiful or venerable object.

A little way beyond Cecilia Metella's tomb, the road still shows a
specimen of the ancient Roman pavement, composed of broad, flat
flagstones, a good deal cracked and worn, but sound enough, probably, to
outlast the little cubes which make the other portions of the road so
uncomfortable.  We turned back from this point and soon re-entered the
gate of St. Sebastian, which is flanked by two small towers, and just
within which is the old triumphal arch of Drusus,--a sturdy construction,
much dilapidated as regards its architectural beauty, but rendered far
more picturesque than it could have been in its best days by a crown of
verdure on its head.  Probably so much of the dust of the highway has
risen in clouds and settled there, that sufficient soil for shrubbery to
root itself has thus been collected, by small annual contributions, in
the course of two thousand years.  A little farther towards the city we
turned aside from the Appian Way, and came to the site of some ancient
Columbaria, close by what seemed to partake of the character of a villa
and a farm-house.  A man came out of the house and unlocked a door in a
low building, apparently quite modern; but on entering we found ourselves
looking into a large, square chamber, sunk entirely beneath the surface
of the ground.  A very narrow and steep staircase of stone, and evidently
ancient, descended into this chamber; and, going down, we found the walls
hollowed on all sides into little semicircular niches, of which, I
believe, there were nine rows, one above another, and nine niches in
each row.  Thus they looked somewhat like the little entrances to a
pigeon-house, and hence the name of Columbarium.  Each semicircular niche
was about a foot in its semidiameter.  In the centre of this subterranean
chamber was a solid square column, or pier, rising to the roof, and
containing other niches of the same pattern, besides one that was high
and deep, rising to the height of a man from the floor on each of the
four sides.  In every one of the semicircular niches were two round holes
covered with an earthen plate, and in each hole were ashes and little
fragments of bones,--the ashes and bones of the dead, whose names were
inscribed in Roman capitals on marble slabs inlaid into the wall over
each individual niche.  Very likely the great ones in the central pier
had contained statues, or busts, or large urns; indeed, I remember that
some such things were there, as well as bas-reliefs in the walls; but
hardly more than the general aspect of this strange place remains in my
mind.  It was the Columbarium of the connections or dependants of the
Caesars; and the impression left on me was, that this mode of disposing
of the dead was infinitely preferable to any which has been adopted since
that day.  The handful or two of dry dust and bits of dry bones in each
of the small round holes had nothing disgusting in them, and they are no
drier now than they were when first deposited there.  I would rather have
my ashes scattered over the soil to help the growth of the grass and
daisies; but still I should not murmur much at having them decently
pigeon-holed in a Roman tomb.

After ascending out of this chamber of the dead, we looked down into
another similar one, containing the ashes of Pompey's household, which
was discovered only a very few years ago.  Its arrangement was the same
as that first described, except that it had no central pier with a
passage round it, as the former had.

While we were down in the first chamber the proprietor of the spot--a
half-gentlemanly and very affable kind of person--came to us, and
explained the arrangements of the Columbarium, though, indeed, we
understood them better by their own aspect than by his explanation.  The
whole soil around his dwelling is elevated much above the level of the
road, and it is probable that, if he chose to excavate, he might bring to
light many more sepulchral chambers, and find his profit in them too, by
disposing of the urns and busts.  What struck me as much as anything was
the neatness of these subterranean apartments, which were quite as fit to
sleep in as most of those occupied by living Romans; and, having
undergone no wear and tear, they were in as good condition as on the day
they were built.

In this Columbarium, measuring about twenty feet square, I roughly
estimate that there have been deposited together the remains of at least
seven or eight hundred persons, reckoning two little heaps of bones and
ashes in each pigeon-hole, nine pigeon-holes in each row, and nine rows
on each side, besides those on the middle pier.  All difficulty in
finding space for the dead would be obviated by returning to the ancient
fashion of reducing them to ashes,--the only objection, though a very
serious one, being the quantity of fuel that it would require.  But
perhaps future chemists may discover some better means of consuming or
dissolving this troublesome mortality of ours.

We got into the carriage again, and, driving farther towards the city,
came to the tomb of the Scipios, of the exterior of which I retain no
very definite idea.  It was close upon the Appian Way, however, though
separated from it by a high fence, and accessible through a gateway,
leading into a court.  I think the tomb is wholly subterranean, and that
the ground above it is covered with the buildings of a farm-house; but of
this I cannot be certain, as we were led immediately into a dark,
underground passage, by an elderly peasant, of a cheerful and affable
demeanor.  As soon as he had brought us into the twilight of the tomb, he
lighted a long wax taper for each of us, and led us groping into blacker
and blacker darkness.  Even little R----- followed courageously in the
procession, which looked very picturesque as we glanced backward or
forward, and beheld a twinkling line of seven lights, glimmering faintly
on our faces, and showing nothing beyond.  The passages and niches of the
tomb seem to have been hewn and hollowed out of the rock, not built by
any art of masonry; but the walls were very dark, almost black, and our
tapers so dim that I could not gain a sufficient breadth of view to
ascertain what kind of place it was.  It was very dark, indeed; the
Mammoth Cave of Kentucky could not be darker.  The rough-hewn roof was
within touch, and sometimes we had to stoop to avoid hitting our heads;
it was covered with damps, which collected and fell upon us in occasional
drops.  The passages, besides being narrow, were so irregular and
crooked, that, after going a little way, it would have been impossible to
return upon our steps without the help of the guide; and we appeared to
be taking quite an extensive ramble underground, though in reality I
suppose the tomb includes no great space.  At several turns of our dismal
way, the guide pointed to inscriptions in Roman capitals, commemorating
various members of the Scipio family who were buried here; among them, a
son of Scipio Africanus, who himself had his death and burial in a
foreign land.  All these inscriptions, however, are copies,--the
originals, which were really found here, having been removed to the
Vatican.  Whether any bones and ashes have been left, or whether any were
found, I do not know.  It is not, at all events, a particularly
interesting spot, being such shapeless blackness, and a mere dark hole,
requiring a stronger illumination than that of our tapers to distinguish
it from any other cellar.  I did, at one place, see a sort of frieze,
rather roughly sculptured; and, as we returned towards the twilight of
the entrance-passage, I discerned a large spider, who fled hastily away
from our tapers,--the solitary living inhabitant of the tomb of the
Scipios.

One visit that we made, and I think it was before entering the city
gates, I forgot to mention.  It was to an old edifice, formerly called
the Temple of Bacchus, but now supposed to have been the Temple of Virtue
and Honor.  The interior consists of a vaulted hall, which was converted
from its pagan consecration into a church or chapel, by the early
Christians; and the ancient marble pillars of the temple may still be
seen built in with the brick and stucco of the later occupants.  There is
an altar, and other tokens of a Catholic church, and high towards the
ceiling, there are some frescos of saints or angels, very curious
specimens of mediaeval, and earlier than mediaeval art.  Nevertheless,
the place impressed me as still rather pagan than Christian.  What is
most remarkable about this spot or this vicinity lies in the fact that
the Fountain of Egeria was formerly supposed to be close at hand; indeed,
the custode of the chapel still claims the spot as the identical one
consecrated by the legend.  There is a dark grove of trees, not far from
the door of the temple; but Murray, a highly essential nuisance on such
excursions as this, throws such overwhelming doubt, or rather
incredulity, upon the site, that I seized upon it as a pretext for not
going thither.  In fact, my small capacity for sight-seeing was already
more than satisfied.

On account of ------ I am sorry that we did not see the grotto, for her
enthusiasm is as fresh as the waters of Egeria's well can be, and she has
poetical faith enough to light her cheerfully through all these mists of
incredulity.

Our visits to sepulchral places ended with Scipio's tomb, whence we
returned to our dwelling, and Miss M------ came to dine with us.


March 10th.--On Saturday last, a very rainy day, we went to the Sciarra
Palace, and took U---- with us.  It is on the Corso, nearly opposite to
the Piazza Colonna.  It has (Heaven be praised!) but four rooms of
pictures, among which, however, are several very celebrated ones.  Only a
few of these remain in my memory,--Raphael's "Violin Player," which I am
willing to accept as a good picture; and Leonardo da Vinci's "Vanity and
Modesty," which also I can bring up before my mind's eye, and find it
very beautiful, although one of the faces has an affected smile, which I
have since seen on another picture by the same artist, Joanna of Aragon.
The most striking picture in the collection, I think, is Titian's "Bella
Donna,"--the only one of Titian's works that I have yet seen which makes
an impression on me corresponding with his fame.  It is a very splendid
and very scornful lady, as beautiful and as scornful as Gainsborough's
Lady Lyndoch, though of an entirely different type.  There were two
Madonnas by Guido, of which I liked the least celebrated one best; and
several pictures by Garofalo, who always produces something noteworthy.
All the pictures lacked the charm (no doubt I am a barbarian to think it
one) of being in brilliant frames, and looked as if it were a long, long
while since they were cleaned or varnished.  The light was so scanty,
too, on that heavily clouded day, and in those gloomy old rooms of the
palace, that scarcely anything could be fairly made out.

[I cannot refrain from observing here, that Mr. Hawthorne's inexorable
demand for perfection in all things leads him to complain of grimy
pictures and tarnished frames and faded frescos, distressing beyond
measure to eyes that never failed to see everything before him with the
keenest apprehension.  The usual careless observation of people both of
the good and the imperfect is much more comfortable in this imperfect
world.  But the insight which Mr. Hawthorne possessed was only equalled
by his outsight, and he suffered in a way not to be readily conceived,
from any failure in beauty, physical, moral, or intellectual.  It is not,
therefore, mere love of upholstery that impels him to ask for perfect
settings to priceless gems of art; but a native idiosyncrasy, which
always made me feel that "the New Jerusalem," "even like a jasper stone,
clear as crystal," "where shall in no wise enter anything that defileth,
neither what worketh abomination nor maketh a lie," would alone satisfy
him, or rather alone not give him actual pain.  It may give an idea of
this exquisite nicety of feeling to mention, that one day he took in his
fingers a half-bloomed rose, without blemish, and, smiling with an
infinite joy, remarked, "This is perfect.  On earth a flower only can be
perfect."--ED.]

The palace is about two hundred and fifty years old, and looks as if it
had never been a very cheerful place; most shabbily and scantily
furnished, moreover, and as chill as any cellar.  There is a small
balcony, looking down on the Corso, which probably has often been filled
with a merry little family party, in the carnivals of days long past.  It
has faded frescos, and tarnished gilding, and green blinds, and a few
damask chairs still remain in it.

On Monday we all went to the sculpture-gallery of the Vatican, and saw as
much of the sculpture as we could in the three hours during which the
public are admissible.  There were a few things which I really enjoyed,
and a few moments during which I really seemed to see them; but it is in
vain to attempt giving the impression produced by masterpieces of art,
and most in vain when we see them best.  They are a language in
themselves, and if they could be expressed as well any way except by
themselves, there would have been no need of expressing those particular
ideas and sentiments by sculpture.  I saw the Apollo Belvedere as
something ethereal and godlike; only for a flitting moment, however, and
as if he had alighted from heaven, or shone suddenly out of the sunlight,
and then had withdrawn himself again.  I felt the Laocoon very
powerfully, though very quietly; an immortal agony, with a strange
calmness diffused through it, so that it resembles the vast rage of the
sea, calm on account of its immensity; or the tumult of Niagara, which
does not seem to be tumult, because it keeps pouring on for ever and
ever.  I have not had so good a day as this (among works of art) since we
came to Rome; and I impute it partly to the magnificence of the
arrangements of the Vatican,--its long vistas and beautiful courts, and
the aspect of immortality which marble statues acquire by being kept free
from dust.  A very hungry boy, seeing in one of the cabinets a vast
porphyry vase, forty-four feet in circumference, wished that he had it
full of soup.

Yesterday, we went to the Pamfili Doria Palace, which, I believe, is the
most splendid in Rome.  The entrance is from the Corso into a court,
surrounded by a colonnade, and having a space of luxuriant verdure and
ornamental shrubbery in the centre.  The apartments containing pictures
and sculptures are fifteen in number, and run quite round the court in
the first piano,--all the rooms, halls, and galleries of beautiful
proportion, with vaulted roofs, some of which glow with frescos; and all
are colder and more comfortless than can possibly be imagined without
having been in them.  The pictures, most of them, interested me very
little.  I am of opinion that good pictures are quite as rare as good
poets; and I do not see why we should pique ourselves on admiring any but
the very best.  One in a thousand, perhaps, ought to live in the applause
of men, from generation to generation, till its colors fade or blacken
out of sight, and its canvas rots away; the rest should be put in
garrets, or painted over by newer artists, just as tolerable poets are
shelved when their little day is over.  Nevertheless, there was one long
gallery containing many pictures that I should be glad to see again under
more favorable circumstances, that is, separately, and where I might
contemplate them quite undisturbed, reclining in an easy-chair.  At one
end of the long vista of this gallery is a bust of the present Prince
Doria, a smooth, sharp-nosed, rather handsome young man, and at the other
end his princess, an English lady of the Talbot family, apparently a
blonde, with a simple and sweet expression.  There is a noble and
striking portrait of the old Venetian admiral, Andrea Doria, by Sebastian
del Piombo, and some other portraits and busts of the family.

In the whole immense range of rooms I saw but a single fireplace, and
that so deep in the wall that no amount of blaze would raise the
atmosphere of the room ten degrees.  If the builder of the palace, or any
of his successors, have committed crimes worthy of Tophet, it would be a
still worse punishment for him to wander perpetually through this suite
of rooms on the cold floors of polished brick tiles or marble or mosaic,
growing a little chiller and chiller through every moment of eternity,--
or, at least, till the palace crumbles down upon him.

Neither would it assuage his torment in the least to be compelled to gaze
up at the dark old pictures,--the ugly ghosts of what may once have been
beautiful.  I am not going to try any more to receive pleasure from a
faded, tarnished, lustreless picture, especially if it be a landscape.
There were two or three landscapes of Claude in this palace, which I
doubt not would have been exquisite if they had been in the condition of
those in the British National Gallery; but here they looked most forlorn,
and even their sunshine was sunless.  The merits of historical painting
may be quite independent of the attributes that give pleasure, and a
superficial ugliness may even heighten the effect; but not so of
landscapes.


Via Porta, Palazzo Larazani, March 11th.--To-day we called at Mr.
Thompson's studio, and . . . . he had on the easel a little picture of
St. Peter released from prison by the angel, which I saw once before.  It
is very beautiful indeed, and deeply and spiritually conceived, and I
wish I could afford to have it finished for myself.  I looked again, too,
at his Georgian slave, and admired it as much as at first view; so very
warm and rich it is, so sensuously beautiful, and with an expression of
higher life and feeling within.  I do not think there is a better painter
than Mr. Thompson living,--among Americans at least; not one so earnest,
faithful, and religious in his worship of art.  I had rather look at his
pictures than at any except the very finest of the old masters, and,
taking into consideration only the comparative pleasure to be derived, I
would not except more than one or two of those.  In painting, as in
literature, I suspect there is something in the p

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