certain valuable specimens of the Dutch and Italian schools as to which
he had received private proposals, and then present his treasures out of
hand to an American city, not unknown to aesthetic fame, in which at
that time there prevailed a good deal of fruitless aspiration toward an
art-museum. He had seen himself in imagination, more than once, in
some mouldy old saloon of a Florentine palace, turning toward the deep
embrasure of the window some scarcely-faded Ghirlandaio or Botticelli,
while a host in reduced circumstances pointed out the lovely drawing
of a hand. But he imparted none of these visions to Cecilia, and he
suddenly swept them away with the declaration that he was of course an
idle, useless creature, and that he would probably be even more so in
Europe than at home. "The only thing is," he said, "that there I shall
seem to be doing something. I shall be better entertained, and shall be
therefore, I suppose, in a better humor with life. You may say that that
is just the humor a useless man should keep out of. He should cultivate
discontentment. I did a good many things when I was in Europe before,
but I did not spend a winter in Rome. Every one assures me that this is
a peculiar refinement of bliss; most people talk about Rome in the same
way. It is evidently only a sort of idealized form of loafing: a passive
life in Rome, thanks to the number and the quality of one's impressions,
takes on a very respectable likeness to activity. It is still
lotus-eating, only you sit down at table, and the lotuses are served up
on rococo china. It 's all very well, but I have a distinct prevision of
this--that if Roman life does n't do something substantial to make you
happier, it increases tenfold your liability to moral misery. It seems
to me a rash thing for a sensitive soul deliberately to cultivate its
sensibilities by rambling too often among the ruins of the Palatine, or
riding too often in the shadow of the aqueducts. In such recreations the
chords of feeling grow tense, and after-life, to spare your intellectual
nerves, must play upon them with a touch as dainty as the tread of