ends.  Days, and weeks, and months, and seasons, came and “passed like visions to their viewless home,” and brought no change.  Through the compass of the whole year I have not enjoyed one single day—­I will not say of happiness—­but of health and peace; and what I have endured has left me little to learn in the way of suffering.  Would to heaven that as the latest minutes now ebb away while I write, memory might also pass away!  Would to heaven that I could efface the last year from the series of time, hide it from myself, bury it in oblivion, stamp it into annihilation, that none of its dreary moments might ever rise up again to haunt me, like spectres of pain and dismay!  But this is wrong—­I feel it is—­and I repent, I recall my wish.  That great Being, to whom the life of a human creature is a mere point, but who has bestowed on his creatures such capacities of feeling and suffering, as extend moments to hours and days to years, inflicts nothing in vain, and if I have suffered much, I have also learned much.  Now the last hour is past—­another year opens; may it bring to those I love all I wish them in my heart! to me it can bring nothing.  The only blessing I hope from time is forgetfulness—­my only prayer to heaven is—­rest, rest, rest.

Jan. 4.—­We dispatched, as L** would say, a good deal to-day:  we visited the Temple of Vesta, the Church of Santa Maria in Cosmadino, the Temple of Fortune, the Ponte Rotto, and the house of Nicolo Rienzi:  all these lie together in a dirty, low, and disagreeable part of Rome.  Thence we drove to the Pyramid of Caius Cestus.—­As we know nothing of this Caius Cestus, but that he lived, died, and was buried, it is not possible to attach any fanciful or classical interest to his tomb, but it is an object of so much beauty in itself, and from its situation so striking and picturesque, that it needs no additional interest.  It is close to the ancient walls of Rome, which stretch on either side as far as the eye can reach in huge and broken masses of brickwork, fragments of battlements and buttresses, overgrown in many parts with shrubs and even trees.  Around the base of the Pyramid lies the burying-ground of strangers and heretics.  Many of the monuments are elegant, and their frail materials and diminutive forms are in affecting contrast with the lofty and solid pile which towers above them.  The tombs lie around in a small space “amicably close,” like brothers in exile, and as I gazed I felt a kindred feeling with all; for I, too, am a wanderer, a stranger and a heretic; and it is probable that my place of rest may be among them.  Be it so! for methinks this earth could not afford a more lovely, a more tranquil, or more sacred spot.  I remarked one tomb, which is an exact model, and in the same material with the sarcophagus of Cornelius Scipio, in the Vatican.  One small slab of white marble bore the name of a young girl, an only child, who died at sixteen, and “left her parents disconsolate:”