Rome disappoints me still; but I shrink and adapt myself to it. 
  Somehow a tyrannous sense of a superincumbent oppression
  Still, wherever I go, accompanies ever, and makes me
  Feel like a tree (shall I say?) buried under a ruin of brick-work. 
  Rome, believe me, my friend, is like its own Monte Testaceo,
  Merely a marvellous mass of broken and castaway wine-pots. 
  Ye gods! what do I want with this rubbish of ages departed,
  Things that Nature abhors, the experiments that she has failed in? 
  What do I think of the Forum?  An archway and two or three pillars. 
  Well, but St. Peter’s?  Alas, Bernini has filled it with sculpture! 
  No one can cavil, I grant, at the size of the great Coliseum. 
  Doubtless the notion of grand and capacious and massive amusement,
  This the old Romans had; but tell me, is this an idea? 
  Yet of solidity much, but of splendor little is extant: 
  “Brickwork I found thee, and marble I left thee!” their Emperor vaunted;
  “Marble I thought thee, and brickwork I find thee!” the Tourist may
      answer.

III.--GEORGINA TREVELLYN TO LOUISA -----.

  At last, dearest Louisa, I take up my pen to address you. 
  Here we are, you see, with the seven-and-seventy boxes,
  Courier, Papa and Mamma, the children, and Mary and Susan: 
  Here we all are at Rome, and delighted of course with St Peter’s,
  And very pleasantly lodged in the famous Piazza di Spagna. 
  Rome is a wonderful place, but Mary shall tell you about it;
  Not very gay, however; the English are mostly at Naples;
  There are the A.s, we hear, and most of the W. party. 
  George, however, is come; did I tell you about his mustachios? 
  Dear, I must really stop, for the carriage, they tell me, is waiting. 
  Mary will finish; and Susan is writing, they say, to Sophia. 
  Adieu, dearest Louise,—­evermore your faithful Georgina. 
  Who can a Mr. Claude be whom George has taken to be with? 
  Very stupid, I think, but George says so very clever.

  IV.—­CLAUDE TO EUSTACE.

  No, the Christian faith, as at any rate I understood it,
  With its humiliations and exaltations combining,
  Exaltations sublime, and yet diviner abasements,
  Aspirations from something most shameful here upon earth and
  In our poor selves to something most perfect above in the heavens,—­
  No, the Christian faith, as I, at least, understood it,
  Is not here, O Rome, in any of these thy churches;
  Is not here, but in Freiberg, or Rheims, or Westminster Abbey. 
  What in thy Dome I find, in all thy recenter efforts,
  Is a something, I think, more rational far, more earthly,
  Actual, less ideal, devout not in scorn and refusal,
  But in a positive, calm, Stoic-Epicurean acceptance. 
  This I begin to detect in St. Peter’s and some of the churches,
  Mostly in all that I see of the sixteenth-century