You say truly, I shall come home humbler.  God grant it may be entirely humble!  In future, while more than ever deeply penetrated with principles, and the need of the martyr spirit to sustain them, I will ever own that there are few worthy, and that I am one of the least.

A silken glove might be as good a gauntlet as one of steel, but I, infirm of mood, turn sick even now as I think of the past.

* * * * *

July, 1849.—­I cannot tell you what I endured in leaving Rome; abandoning the wounded soldiers; knowing that there is no provision made for them, when they rise from the beds where they have been thrown by a noble courage, where they have suffered with a noble patience.  Some of the poorer men, who rise bereft even of the right arm,—­one having lost both the right arm and the right leg,—­I could have provided for with a small sum.  Could I have sold my hair, or blood from my arm, I would have done it.  Had any of the rich Americans remained in Rome, they would have given it to me; they helped nobly at first, in the service of the hospitals, when there was far less need; but they had all gone.  What would I have given that I could have spoken to one of the Lawrences, or the Phillipses; they could and would have saved the misery.  These poor men are left helpless in the power of a mean and vindictive foe.  You felt so oppressed in the slave-states; imagine what I felt at seeing all the noblest youth, all the genius of this dear land, again enslaved.

TO W.H.C.

Rieti, Aug. 28, 1849.—­You say, you are glad I have had this great opportunity for carrying out my principles.  Would it were so!  I found myself inferior in courage and fortitude to the occasion.  I knew not how to bear the havoc and anguish incident to the struggle for these principles.  I rejoiced that it lay not with me to cut down the trees, to destroy the Elysian gardens, for the defence of Rome; I do not know that I could have done it.  And the sight of these far nobler growths, the beautiful young men, mown down in their stately prime, became too much for me.  I forget the great ideas, to sympathize with the poor mothers, who had nursed their precious forms, only to see them all lopped and gashed.  You say, I sustained them; often have they sustained my courage:  one, kissing the pieces of bone that were so painfully extracted from his arm, hanging them round his neck to be worn as the true relics of to-day; mementoes that he also had done and borne something for his country and the hopes of humanity.  One fair young man, who is made a cripple for life, clasped my hand as he saw me crying over the spasms I could not relieve, and faintly cried, “Viva l’Italia.”  “Think only, cara bona donna” said a poor wounded soldier, “that I can always wear my uniform on festas, just as it is now, with the holes where the balls went through, for a memory.”  “God is good; God knows,” they often said to me, when I had not a word to cheer them.