This 17th day of December I rise to see the floods of sunlight blessing us, as they have almost every day since I returned to Rome,—­two months and more,—­with scarce three or four days of rainy weather.  I still see the fresh roses and grapes each morning on my table, though both these I expect to give up at Christmas.

This autumn is something like, as my countrymen say at home.  Like what, they do not say; so I always supposed they meant like their ideal standard.  Certainly this weather corresponds with mine; and I begin to believe the climate of Italy is really what it has been represented.  Shivering here last spring in an air no better than the cruel cast wind of Puritan Boston, I thought all the praises lavished on

  “Italia, O Italia!”

would turn out to be figments of the brain; and that even Byron, usually accurate beyond the conception of plodding pedants, had deceived us when he says, you have the happiness in Italy to

  “See the sun set, sure he’ll rise to-morrow,”

and not, according to a view which exercises a withering influence on the enthusiasm of youth in my native land, be forced to regard each pleasant day as a weather-breeder.

How delightful, too, is the contrast between this time and the spring in another respect!  Then I was here, like travellers in general, expecting to be driven away in a short time.  Like others, I went through the painful process of sight-seeing, so unnatural everywhere, so counter to the healthful methods and true life of the mind.  You rise in the morning knowing there are a great number of objects worth knowing, which you may never have the chance to see again.  You go every day, in all moods, under all circumstances; feeling, probably, in seeing them, the inadequacy of your preparation for understanding or duly receiving them.  This consciousness would be most valuable if one had time to think and study, being the natural way in which the mind is lured to cure its defects; but you have no time; you are always wearied, body and mind, confused, dissipated, sad.  The objects are of commanding beauty or full of suggestion, but there is no quiet to let that beauty breathe its life into the soul; no time to follow up these suggestions, and plant for the proper harvest.  Many persons run about Rome for nine days, and then go away; they might as well expect to appreciate the Venus by throwing a stone at it, as hope really to see Rome in this time.  I stayed in Rome nine weeks, and came away unhappy as he who, having been taken in the visions of the night through some wondrous realm, wakes unable to recall anything but the hues and outlines of the pageant; the real knowledge, the recreative power induced by familiar love, the assimilation of its soul and substance,—­all the true value of such a revelation,—­is wanting; and he remains a poor Tantalus, hungrier than before he had tasted this spiritual food.

No; Rome is not a nine-days wonder; and those who try to make it such lose the ideal Rome (if they ever had it), without gaining any notion of the real.  To those who travel, as they do everything else, only because others do, I do not speak; they are nothing.  Nobody counts in the estimate of the human race who has not a character.