Something of the total impression made upon Lowell in this first visit to Rome may be seen in the fragment of a letter to Mr. John Holmes, written near the end of his stay:

"After all, this is a wonderful place. One feels disappointed at first, everything looks so modern. But as the mind, taking in ruin after ruin, gradually reconstructs for itself the grandeur and the glory, of which these city-like masses are but the splinters sprinkled here and there by the fall of the enormous fabric, and conceives the spiritual which has outlived that temporal domination, and even surpassed it, laying its foundations deeper than the reach of earthquake or Gaul, and conquering worlds beyond the ken of the Roman eagles in their proudest flight, a feeling of the sublime, vague and vast, takes the place of the first hurried curiosity and interest. Surely the American (and I feel myself more intensely American every day) is last of all at home among ruins but he is at home in Rome. I cannot help believing that in some respects we represent more truly the old Roman Power and sentiment than any other people. Our art, our literature, are, as theirs, in some sort exotics; but our genius for politics, for law, and, above all, for colonization, our instinct for aggrandizement and for trade, are all Roman. I believe we are laying the basis of a more enduring power and prosperity, and that we shall not pass away till we have stamped ourselves upon the whole western hemisphere so deeply, so nobly, that if, in the far-away future, some Gibbon

shall muse among our ruins, the history of our Decline and Fall shall be more mournful and more epic than that of the huge Empire amid the dust of whose once world-shaking heart these feelings so often come upon me."

The last week before leaving Rome was spent in an excursion with Story to Subiaco, as related at length in "Leaves from my Journal in Italy." On their way to Naples the Lowells made a halt at Terracina, from which place Lowell wrote to Robert Carter: "Here I am, with a magnificent cliff opposite my window crowned by twelve arches of what is called the Palace of Theodoric. I have just come in from seeing the Cathedral, the dirtiest church I have seen in Italy (with a very picturesque old Campanile, however), and the remains of the old Roman port, which astonished me by their size even after all I had seen of Roman hugeness. The port is now filled with soil, and there is a fine orange garden where vessels used to lie. Terracina is nothing like what I expected to see. The inn (or 'Grand' Albergo, as it is called) is one of the least cutthroat looking places I ever saw. It is quite out of the town, between the great cliff and the sea. Behind it, on the beach, the scene is quite Neapolitan forty or fifty bare-legged fishermen are drawing a great seine out of the water, and forty or fifty dirty, laughing, ragged, happilywretched children gather round you and beg for caccose or cecco, by which they mean qualche cosa. The women sit round the doors, nasty and contented, urging on their offspring in their profes

sional career. They are the most obstinate beggars I have seen yet. In Rome the waving of the two first fingers of the hand and a decided non c'è is generally sufficient, but here I tried every expedient in vain. The prickly pear grows bloatedly in all the ledges of the cliff, an olive orchard climbs half-way up the back of it where the hill is less steep, and farther to the left there are tall palms in a convent garden, but I cannot see them.

“The drive over the Pontine marshes is for more than twenty miles a perfectly straight, smooth avenue, between double rows of elms. I had been told it was very dull, but did not find it so; for there were mountains on one side of us, cultivated, or cattle and horse-covered fields or woods on the other, and the birds sang and the sun shone all the way. It seemed like the approach to some prince's pleasure-house. On the whole, the result of my experience thus far is that I am glad that I came abroad, though the knowledge one acquires must rust for want of use in a great measure at home. To be sure, one's political ideas are also somewhat modified I don't mean retrograded."

The progress of the travellers is but briefly recorded after this. They were in Naples early in May, and thence they appear to have made their way to Venice, and to have spent the summer in leisurely travel through the Italian lakes, Switzerland, Germany, Provence, and France, reaching England in the early autumn. Here they saw London, Oxford, and Cambridge. “We have

been also," Lowell wrote to his father, "at Ely, where the cathedral is one of the most interesting I have seen. I know nothing for which I am more thankful than the opportunity I have had of seeing fine buildings. I think they give me a more absolute pleasure than anything except fine natural scenery. Perhaps I should not except even this, for the sense that it is a triumph of the brain and hand of man certainly heightens the delight we feel in them. I think that Ely, more than anything else, turned the scale and induced us to stay a month longer." From London, Lowell made an excursion with Kenyon to Bath to see Landor, and thirty-six years later he jotted down some of the impressions he then received of the man, whose writings he had long admired.1

A trip followed through England and into Scotland and Wales, which took in Peterborough, Lincoln, York, Ripon, Fountains Abbey, Durham, Edinburgh, and the haunts of Scott, the Scottish and English lakes, and then the Lowells took steamer from Liverpool, 30 October, 1852.

1 See "Walter Savage Landor," in Latest Literary Essays and Addresses, p. 51.

CHAPTER VIII

AN END AND A BEGINNING

1852-1857

It

LOWELL had the good fortune to have for a companion at sea Thackeray, who was on his way to America to give his lectures on the English Humourists; he liked the man very much, and his occasional references to the author in his letters and critical papers intimate the high regard he had for his work. Another congenial companion on shipboard was Arthur Hugh Clough, with whom he formed a warm and enduring friendship. was a thirteen days' passage, and on the 12th of November the Lowells were again at home in Elmwood. The coming of the two Englishmen gave occasion for many little festivities in Boston and Cambridge. A glimpse is given of them in Mr. Longfellow's printed journal, when the poet summoned Clough, Lowell, Felton, and C. E. Norton to feast on some English grouse and pheasant sent him from Liverpool by Mr. Henry Bright, and in the evening at the Nortons' there were private theatricals with a "nice little epilogue written by Mr. Clough," who shortly established himself indefinitely in Cambridge.

Clough has left a little picture of the interior