----------------squilla di lontano
Che paja il giorno pianger che si muore. 
DANTE.

----------------the vesper bell from far,
That seems to mourn for the expiring day.
CAREY’S TR.

The evening prayer is used to fix the time.  In Italy they say:  I will see you an hour before, or an hour after the Ave Maria:  and the different periods of the day and of the night, are thus religiously designated.  Oswald enjoyed the admirable spectacle of the sun which towards the evening descends slowly in the midst of the ruins, and appears for a moment submitted to the same destiny as the works of man.  Oswald felt all his habitual thoughts revive within him.  Corinne herself was too charming, and promised too much happiness to occupy his mind at this moment.  He sought the spirit of his father in the clouds, where the force of imagination traced his celestial form, and made him hope to receive from heaven some pure and beneficent breath, as the benediction of his sainted parent.

Chapter ii.

The desire of studying and becoming acquainted with the Roman religion, determined Lord Nelville to seek an opportunity of hearing some of those preachers who make the churches of this city resound with their eloquence during Lent.  He reckoned the days that were to divide him from Corinne, and during her absence, he wished to see nothing that appertained to the fine arts; nothing that derived its charm from the imagination.  He could not support the emotion of pleasure produced by the masterpieces of art when he was not with Corinne; he was only reconciled to happiness when she was the cause of it.  Poetry, painting, music, all that embellishes life by vague hopes, was painful to him out of her presence.

It is in the evening, with lights half extinguished, that the Roman preachers deliver their sermons in Holy Week.  All the women are then clad in black, in remembrance of the death of Jesus Christ, and there is something very moving in this anniversary mourning, which has been so often renewed during a lapse of ages.  It is therefore impossible to enter without genuine emotion those beautiful churches, where the tombs so fitly dispose the soul for prayer; but this emotion is generally destroyed in a few moments by the preacher.

His pulpit is a fairly long gallery, which he traverses from one end to the other with as much agitation as regularity.  He never fails to set out at the beginning of a phrase and to return at the end, like the motion of a pendulum; nevertheless he uses so much action, and his manner is so vehement, that one would suppose him capable of forgetting everything.  But it is, to use the expression, a kind of systematic fury that animates the orator, such as is frequently to be met with in Italy, where the vivacity of external action often indicates no more than a superficial emotion.  A crucifix is suspended at the extremity