For one, I now really live in Rome, and I begin to see and feel the real Rome.  She reveals herself day by day; she tells me some of her life.  Now I never go out to see a sight, but I walk every day; and here I cannot miss of some object of consummate interest to end a walk.  In the evenings, which are long now, I am at leisure to follow up the inquiries suggested by the day.

As one becomes familiar, Ancient and Modern Rome, at first so painfully and discordantly jumbled together, are drawn apart to the mental vision.  One sees where objects and limits anciently wore; the superstructures vanish, and you recognize the local habitation of so many thoughts.  When this begins to happen, one feels first truly at ease in Rome.  Then the old kings, the consuls and tribunes, the emperors, drunk with blood and gold, the warriors of eagle sight and remorseless beak, return for us, and the togated procession finds room to sweep across the scene; the seven hills tower, the innumerable temples glitter, and the Via Sacra swarms with triumphal life once more.

Ah! how joyful to see once more this Rome, instead of the pitiful, peddling, Anglicized Rome, first viewed in unutterable dismay from the coupe of the vettura,—­a Rome all full of taverns, lodging-houses, cheating chambermaids, vilest valets de place, and fleas!  A Niobe of nations indeed!  Ah! why, secretly the heart blasphemed, did the sun omit to kill her too, when all the glorious race which wore her crown fell beneath his ray?  Thank Heaven, it is possible to wash away all this dirt, and come at the marble yet.

Their the later Papal Rome:  it requires much acquaintance, much thought, much reference to books, for the child of Protestant Republican America to see where belong the legends illustrated by rite and picture, the sense of all the rich tapestry, where it has a united and poetic meaning, where it is broken by some accident of history.  For all these things—­a senseless mass of juggleries to the uninformed eye—­are really growths of the human spirit struggling to develop its life, and full of instruction for those who learn to understand them.

Then Modern Rome,—­still ecclesiastical, still darkened and damp in the shadow of the Vatican, but where bright hopes gleam now amid the ashes!  Never was a people who have had more to corrupt them,—­bloody tyranny, and incubus of priestcraft, the invasions, first of Goths, then of trampling emperors and kings, then of sight-seeing foreigners,—­everything to turn them from a sincere, hopeful, fruitful life; and they are much corrupted, but still a fine race.  I cannot look merely with a pictorial eye on the lounge of the Roman dandy, the bold, Juno gait of the Roman Contadina.  I love them,—­dandies and all?  I believe the natural expression of these fine forms will animate them yet.  Certainly there never was a people that showed a better heart than they do in this day of love, of purely moral influence.  It makes me very happy to be for once in a place ruled by a father’s love, and where the pervasive glow of one good, generous heart is felt in every pulse of every day.