It is fearfully hot in Civita Vecchia.  The streets are made very narrow and the houses built very solid and heavy and high, as a protection against the heat.  This is the first Italian town I have seen which does not appear to have a patron saint.  I suppose no saint but the one that went up in the chariot of fire could stand the climate.

There is nothing here to see.  They have not even a cathedral, with eleven tons of solid silver archbishops in the back room; and they do not show you any moldy buildings that are seven thousand years old; nor any smoke-dried old fire-screens which are chef d’oeuvres of Reubens or Simpson, or Titian or Ferguson, or any of those parties; and they haven’t any bottled fragments of saints, and not even a nail from the true cross.  We are going to Rome.  There is nothing to see here.

CHAPTER XXVI.

What is it that confers the noblest delight?  What is that which swells a man’s breast with pride above that which any other experience can bring to him?  Discovery!  To know that you are walking where none others have walked; that you are beholding what human eye has not seen before; that you are breathing a virgin atmosphere.  To give birth to an idea—­to discover a great thought—­an intellectual nugget, right under the dust of a field that many a brain—­plow had gone over before.  To find a new planet, to invent a new hinge, to find the way to make the lightnings carry your messages.  To be the first—­that is the idea.  To do something, say something, see something, before any body else—­these are the things that confer a pleasure compared with which other pleasures are tame and commonplace, other ecstasies cheap and trivial.  Morse, with his first message, brought by his servant, the lightning; Fulton, in that long-drawn century of suspense, when he placed his hand upon the throttle-valve and lo, the steamboat moved; Jenner, when his patient with the cow’s virus in his blood, walked through the smallpox hospitals unscathed; Howe, when the idea shot through his brain that for a hundred and twenty generations the eye had been bored through the wrong end of the needle; the nameless lord of art who laid down his chisel in some old age that is forgotten, now, and gloated upon the finished Laocoon; Daguerre, when he commanded the sun, riding in the zenith, to print the landscape upon his insignificant silvered plate, and he obeyed; Columbus, in the Pinta’s shrouds, when he swung his hat above a fabled sea and gazed abroad upon an unknown world!  These are the men who have really lived—­who have actually comprehended what pleasure is—­who have crowded long lifetimes of ecstasy into a single moment.