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31.—­We spent nearly the whole day in the gallery of the Vatican, and in the Pauline and Sistine chapels.

February 1st, at Valletri.—­I left Rome this morning exceedingly depressed:  Madame de Stael may well call travelling un triste plaisir.  My depression did not arise from the feeling that I left behind me any thing or any person to regret, but from mixed and melancholy emotions, and partly perhaps from that weakness which makes my hand tremble while I write—­which has bound down my mind, and all its best powers, and all its faculties of enjoyment, to a languid passiveness, making me feel at every moment, I am not what I was, or ought to be, or might have been.

We arrived, after a short and most delightful journey by Albano, the Lake Nemi, Gensao, etc. at Velletri, the birth-place of that wretch Octavius, and famous for its wine.  The day has been as soft and as sunny as a May-day in England, and the country, through which we travelled but too rapidly, beyond description lovely.  The blue Mediterranean spread far to the west, and on the right we had the snowy mountains, with their wild fantastic peaks “rushing on the sky.”  I felt it all in my heart with a mixture of sadness and delight which I cannot express.

This land was made by nature a paradise:  it seems to want no charm, “unborrowed from the eye,”—­but how has memory sanctified, history illustrated, and poetry illumined the scenes around us; where every rivulet had its attendant nymph, where every wood was protected by its sylvan divinity; where every tower has its tale of heroism, and “not a mountain lifts its head unsung;” and though the faith, the glory, and the power of the antique time be passed away—­still

                            A spirit hangs,
    Beautiful region! o’er thy towns and farms,
    Statues and temples, and memorial tombs.

I can allow that one-half, at least, of the beauty and interest we see, lies in our own souls; that it is our own enthusiasm which sheds this mantle of light over all we behold:  but, as colours do not exist in the objects themselves, but in the rays which paint them—­so beauty is not less real, is not less BEAUTY, because it exists in the medium through which we view certain objects, rather than in those objects themselves.  I have met persons who think they display a vast deal of common sense, and very uncommon strength of mind, in rising superior to all prejudices of education and illusions of romance—­to whom enthusiasm is only another name for affectation—­who, where the cultivated and the contemplative mind finds ample matter to excite feeling and reflection, give themselves airs of fashionable nonchalance, or flippant scorn—­to whom the crumbling ruin is so much brick and mortar, no more—­to whom the tomb of the Horatii and Curiatii is a stack of chimneys, the Pantheon an old oven, and the Fountain of Egeria a pig-sty.  Are such persons aware that in all this there is an affectation, a thousand times more gross and contemptible, than that affectation (too frequent perhaps) which they design to ridicule?