We took the road to Frascati, and walked for miles among cane-swamps and over plains covered with sheep.  The people we saw, were most degraded and ferocious-looking, and there were many I would not willingly meet alone after nightfall.  Indeed it is still considered quite unsafe to venture without the walls of Rome, after dark.  The women, with their yellow complexions, and the bright red blankets they wear folded around the head and shoulders, resemble Indian Squaws.

I lately spent three hours in the Museum of the Capitol, on the summit of the sacred hill.  In the hall of the Gladiator I noticed an exquisite statue of Diana.  There is a pure, virgin grace in the classic outlines of the figure that keeps the eye long upon it.  The face is full of cold, majestic dignity, but it is the ideal of a being to be worshipped, rather than loved.  The Faun of Praxiteles, in the same room, is a glorious work; it is the perfect embodiment of that wild, merry race the Grecian poets dreamed of.  One looks on the Gladiator with a hushed breath and an awed spirit.  He is dying; the blood flows more slowly from the deep wound in his side; his head is sinking downwards, and the arm that supports his body becomes more and more nerveless.  You feel that a dull mist is coming over his vision, and almost wait to see his relaxing limbs sink suddenly on his shield.  That the rude, barbarian form has a soul, may be read in his touchingly expressive countenance.  It warms the sympathies like reality to look upon it.  Yet how many Romans may have gazed on this work, moved nearly to tears, who have seen hundreds perish in the arena without a pitying emotion!  Why is it that Art has a voice frequently more powerful than Nature?

How cold it is here!  I was forced to run home to-night, nearly at full speed, from the Cafe delle Belle Arti through the Corso and the Piazza Colonna, to keep warm.  The clear, frosty moon threw the shadow of the column of Antoninus over me as I passed, and it made me shiver to look at the thin, falling sheet of the fountain.  Winter is winter everywhere, and even the sun of Italy cannot always scorch his icy wings.

Two days ago we took a ramble outside the walls.  Passing the Coliseum and Caracalla’s Baths, we reached the tomb of Scipio, a small sepulchral vault, near the roadside.  The ashes of the warrior were scattered to the winds long ago, and his mausoleum is fast falling to decay.  The old arch over the Appian way is still standing, near the modern Porta San Sebastiano through which we entered on the far-famed road.  Here and there it is quite entire, and we walked over the stones once worn by the feet of Virgil and Horace and Cicero.  After passing the temple of Romulus—­a shapeless and ivy-grown ruin—­and walking a mile or more beyond the walls, we reached the Circus of Caracalla, whose long and shattered walls fill the hollow of one of the little dells of the Campagna.  The original structure must have been of great size and splendor, but those twin Vandals—­Time and Avarice—­have stripped away everything but the lofty brick masses, whose nakedness the pitying ivy strives to cover.