excitement of this tremendous place. I have been here a
week, and have seen the Vatican and the Capitoline Museums,
and the Sistine Chapel, and St. Peter's, besides the ruins
on the streets and on the hills, and the graves of Shelley
and Keats.

"It is all heart-breaking. I don't only mean those beautiful
graves, overgrown with acanthus and violets, but the mutilated
arches and columns and dumb appealing fragments looming up in
the glowing sunshine under the Roman blue sky."


True to her old attractions, it is pagan Rome that appeals to her
most strongly,--


"and the far-away past, that seems so sad and strange and
near. I am even out of humor with pictures; a bit of broken
stone or a fragment of a bas-relief, or a Corinthian column
standing out against this lapis-lazuli sky, or a tremendous
arch, are the only things I can look at for the moment,--
except the Sistine Chapel, which is as gigantic as the rest,
and forces itself upon you with equal might."


Already, in February, spring is in the air; "the almond-trees are in
bloom, violets cover the grass, and oh! the divine, the celestial,
the unheard-of beauty of it all!" It is almost a pang for her, "with
its strange mixture of longing and regret and delight," and in the
midst of it she says, "I have to exert all my strength not to lose