If it were not stormy, I might order out the farm-chariot, or curriculum, which is, after all, but a low, dumpy kind of horse-cart, and take a drive over the lava pavement of the Via Tusculana, to learn what news is astir, and what the citizens talk of in the forum.  Is all quiet upon the Rhine?  How is it possibly with Germanicus?  And what of that story of the arrest of Seneca?  It could hardly have happened, they say, in the good old days of the Republic.

And with this mention, as with the sound of a gun, the Roman pastoral dream is broken.  The Campagna, the olive-orchards, the columbarium, fall back to their old places in the blurred type of Columella.  The Campanian steers are unyoked, and stabled in the text of Varro.  The turrets of the villa of Maecenas, and of the palaces of Sylla and the Caesars, give place to the spires of a New-England town,—­southward of which I see through the mist a solitary flag flying over a soldiers’ hospital.  It reminds of nearer and deadlier perils than ever environed the Roman Republic,—­perils out of which if the wisdom and courage of the people do not find a way, some new Caesar will point it with the sword.

Looking northward, I see there is a bight of blue in the sky; and a lee set of dark-gray and purple clouds is folding down over the eastern horizon,—­against which the spires and the flag show clearer than ever.  It means that the rain has stopped; and the rain having stopped, my in-door work is done.

* * * * *

GOLDEN WEDDING.

The reader whose eye is arrested by my title will doubtless anticipate a romance on that ever-old, ever-new theme of a certain god with a torch leading two souls bound together by iron concealed in flower-wreaths, until, alas! life seems ordinary enough to be symbolized by tin,—­of the tin-wedding entering into the refiner’s fire, and, by sure transmutation, rising from the baser metal to the paler, but purer silver,—­of the subtile alchemy of years, which, in human life’s great crucible,

  “Transmute, so potent are the spells they know
  Into pure gold the silver of to-day.”

Perhaps, reader, you are not altogether to be disappointed; and yet, for the present, it is only a glass of sparkling wine I wish you to take with me.  You will please read on that delicate strip of paper around the bottle’s neck the name in gilt,—­“Golden Wedding.”  At once you grow transcendental, and suppose that some German vine-dresser in Catawba-land—­by the way, Gerritt Smith’s gardener is a nephew of Schiller!—­was dreaming of the marriage of the Sun with the Vine, his darling plant, in whose juice linger and sparkle the light and joy of many faded days.  But no, it was named from a real Golden Wedding.

Let me take you—­as the clairvoyants say—­to a large, sooty, toiling city in the West.  From street to street you shall go, and see but little to excite your admiration, unless you are a constant believer that work is worship.  But here, in the centre of the city, is a noble old mansion with its beautiful park around it, which a traveller who saw it once compared to a pearl on the breast of a blacksmith.  Here it was that the Golden Wedding took place.