From A Roman Note-Book

December 28, 1872.--In Rome again for the last three days--that
second visit which, when the first isn't followed by a fatal
illness in Florence, the story goes that one is doomed to pay. I
didn't drink of the Fountain of Trevi on the eve of departure the
other time; but I feel as if I had drunk of the Tiber itself.
Nevertheless as I drove from the station in the evening I
wondered what I should think of it at this first glimpse hadn't I
already known it. All manner of evil perhaps. Paris, as I passed
along the Boulevards three evenings before to take the train, was
swarming and glittering as befits a great capital. Here, in the
black, narrow, crooked, empty streets, I saw nothing I would fain
regard as eternal. But there were new gas-lamps round the
spouting Triton in Piazza Barberini and a newspaper stall on the
corner of the Condotti and the Corso--salient signs of the
emancipated state. An hour later I walked up to Via Gregoriana by
Piazza di Spagna. It was all silent and deserted, and the great
flight of steps looked surprisingly small. Everything seemed
meagre, dusky, provincial. Could Rome after all really be
a world-city? That queer old rococo garden gateway at the top of
the Gregoriana stirred a dormant memory; it awoke into a
consciousness of the delicious mildness of the air, and very
soon, in a little crimson drawing-room, I was reconciled and re-
initiated.... Everything is dear (in the way of lodgings), but it
hardly matters, as everything is taken and some one else paying
for it. I must make up my mind to a bare perch. But it seems
poorly perverse here to aspire to an "interior" or to be
conscious of the economic side of life. The æesthetic is so
intense that you feel you should live on the taste of it, should
extract the nutritive essence of the atmosphere. For positively
it's such an atmosphere! The weather is perfect, the sky
as blue as the most exploded tradition fames it, the whole air
glowing and throbbing with lovely colour.... The glitter of Paris
is now all gaslight. And oh the monotonous miles of rain-washed
asphalte!

December 30th.--I have had nothing to do with the
"ceremonies." In fact I believe there have hardly been any--no
midnight mass at the Sistine chapel, no silver trumpets at St.
Peter's. Everything is remorselessly clipped and curtailed--the
Vatican in deepest mourning. But I saw it in its superbest
scarlet in '69.... I went yesterday with L. to the Colonna
gardens--an adventure that would have reconverted me to Rome if
the thing weren't already done. It's a rare old place--rising in
mouldy bosky terraces and mossy stairways and winding walks from
the back of the palace to the top of the Quirinal. It's the grand
style of