Italy, the Magic Land

But ah, that spring should vanish with the Rose!

That youth's sweet-scented manuscript should close?

The nightingale that in the branches sang,

Oh, where and whither flown again,-who knows?

Omar Khayyam.

Rome, as the picturesque city of the Popes in the middle years of the nineteenth century, was resplendent in local color. It was the Rome of sunny winters; the Rome of gay excursions over that haunted sea of the Campagna to pictorial points in the Alban and Sabine hills; the Rome of young artist life, which organized impromptu festas with Arcadian freedom, and utilized the shadow or the shelter of ruined temples or tombs in which to spread its picnic lunches and bring the glow of simple, friendly intercourse into the romantic lights of the poetic, historic, or tragic past. There were splendid Catholic processions and ceremonials that seemed organized as a part of the stage scenery that ensconced itself, also, with the nonchalance of easy possession, in the vast salons of historic palaces where tapestried walls and richly painted ceilings, arched high overhead, with statues dimly seen in niches here and there, and the bust of some crowned Antoninus, or radiant Juno, gleaming from a shadowy corner, all made up the mise-en-scène of familiar evenings. There were lingering hours in the gardens of the Villa Medici into whose shades one strolled by that beguiling path along the parapet on Monte Pincio, through the beautiful grove with its walks and fountains. The old ilex bosquet, with its tangled growth and air of complete seclusion, had its spell of fascination. Then, as now, the elevated temple, at the end of the main path, seemed the haunt of gods and muses. In all the incidental, as well as the ceremonial social meeting and mingling, art and religion were the general themes of discussion. This idyllic life-

"Comprehending, too, the soul's

And all the high necessities of art"-

has left its impress on the air as well as its record on many a page of the poet and the romancist. The names that made memorable those wonderful days touch chords of association that still vibrate in the life of the hour. For the most part the artists and their associates have gone their way-not into a Silent Land, a land of shadows and vague, wandering ghosts-but into that realm wherein is the "life more abundant," of more intense energy and of nobler achievement; the realm in which every aspiration of earth enlarges its conception and every inspiration is exalted and endowed with new purpose; the realm where, as Browning says,-

"Power comes in full play."

The poet's vision recognizes the truth:-

"I know there shall dawn a day,

-Is it here on homely earth?

Is it yonder, worlds away,

Where the strange and new have birth,

That Power comes in full play?"

The names of sculptor, painter, and poet throng back, imaged in that retrospective mirror which reflects a vista of the past, rich in ideal creation. Beautiful forms emerge from the marble; pictorial scenes glow from the canvas; song and story and happy, historic days are in the very air. To Italy, land of romance and song, all the artists came trooping, and

"Under many a yellow Star"

they dropped into the Magic Land. If the wraiths of the centuries long since dead walked the streets, they were quite welcome to revisit the glimpses of the moon and contribute their mystery to the general artistic effectiveness of the Seven-hilled City. All this group of American idealists, from Allston and Page to Crawford, Story, Randolph Rogers, Vedder, Simmons, and to the latest comer of all, Charles Walter Stetson, recognized something of the artist's native air in this Mecca of their pilgrimage.

It was, indeed, quite natural, on account of the stupendous work of Michael Angelo and the unrivalled museums of the Vatican, that Rome should have become pre-eminently the artistic centre of the nineteenth century and should have attracted students and lovers of art from all parts of the world. The immortal works of the two great periods, the Greek and the Renaissance,-the art that was forever great because it was the outgrowth of profound religious conviction,-were enshrined in the churches and the galleries of Rome. The leading countries of Europe sent here their aspiring students and established permanent academies for their residence. Germany, France, and England were thus represented. Thorwaldsen came as a pensioner from the Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen; and it was during his life, and that of the noble Canova, that Rome began to be recognized as the modern world-centre of art. Was it not a natural sequence that the early painters and sculptors who came to study under the stimulating influences of the great masterpieces of the past should linger on in the city whose very air became to them the breath of inspiring suggestion? Where but in Rome would have come to Crawford the vision of his "Orpheus" and of his noble Beethoven? or to Story his "Libyan Sibyl," and that exquisite group, "Into the Silent Land"? or to Vedder his marvellous creations of "The Fates Gathering in the Stars," the "Cum?an Sibyl," or the "Dance of the Pleiades"? to Simmons his triumphant "Angel of the Resurrection," and "The Genius of Progress Leading the Nations"? or to Stetson that ineffable vision of "The Child," and that wonderful group called "Music"? whose coloring Titian or Giorgione might well mistake for their own.

Under the Pontifical régime the general character of Rome was medi?val and religious. The perpetual festas of the church made the streets constantly picturesque with their processions of monks, and friars, and priests, and these wonderful blendings of color and scenic effect stimulated the artistic sense. The expenses of living in Rome were then only a fraction of what the cost is at the present time; and as the city was the resort of the wealthy and cultured few, the artists were surrounded by the stimulus of critical appreciation and of patronage. Their work, their dreams, were the theme of literary discussion, and focussed the attention of the polite world. Their studios were among the important interests to every visitor in the Eternal City. In those days the traveller did not land with his touring car at Naples, make "the run" to Rome in a record that distanced any possibilities of railroad trains, pass two or three days in motoring about the city and its environs, seeing the exterior of everything in a dissolving view and the interior of nothing,-as within this time, at least, he must flash on in his touring car to Florence. On the contrary, the traveller proceeded to Rome with serious deliberation, and with a more realizing sense of undertaking a journey than Walter Wellman experiences in attempting to fly in his aero-car to the North Pole and send his observations across the polar seas by wireless telegraphy. The visitor went to Rome for a winter, for a year, and gave himself up to leisurely impressions. Rome was an atmosphere, not a spectacle, and it was to be entered with the lofty and reverent appreciation of the poet's power and the artist's vision.

In Rome, Thomas Cole painted some of his best pictures; and in Rome or Florence wrought a long list of painters and sculptors. Whether in the Eternal City or in the Flower City, their environment was alike Italy-the environment of the Magic Land. Among the more prominent of all these devotees of Beauty several nationalities were represented. Each might have said of his purpose, in the words of William Watson:-

"I follow Beauty; of her train am I,

Beauty, whose voice is earth and sea and air;

Who serveth, and her hands for all things ply;

Who reigneth, and her throne is everywhere."

Among these artists there flash upon memory the names of Vanderlyn, Benjamin West, Allston, Rauch, Ange, Veit, Tenerani, Overbeck, Schadow, Horace Vernet, Thorwaldsen, John Gibson, Hiram Powers, Crawford, Page, Clark Mills, Randolph Rogers, William Rinehart, Launt Thompson, Horatio and Richard Greenough, Thomas Ball, Anne Whitney, Larkin G. Mead, Paul Akers, William Wetmore Story, Harriet Hosmer, J. Rollin Tilton, and, later, Elihu Vedder, Moses Ezekiel, Franklin Simmons, Augustus St. Gaudens, and Charles Walter Stetson, the name of Mr. Stetson linking the long and interesting procession with the immediate life of to-day. Of these later artists Story, Miss Hosmer, Ezekiel, Vedder, Simmons, and Stetson are identified with Rome as being either their permanent or their prolonged residence. Mr. St. Gaudens was a transient student, returning to his own country to pursue his work; and of two young sculptors, Hendrick Christian Anderson and C. Percival Dietsch, time has not yet developed their powers beyond an experimental stage of brilliant promise.

The Rome of the artists of clay and canvas was also the Rome of the poets and romancists, of authors in all lines of literary achievement. How the names of the procession of visitors and sojourners in the Eternal City, from Milton, Goethe, and Mme. de Sta?l to Henry James, Marion Crawford, Richard Bagot, and Grace Ellery Channing (Mrs. Charles Walter Stetson), gleam from that resplendent panorama of the modern past of Rome! Like the words in electric fire that flash out of the darkness in city streets at night, there shine the names of Shelley and of Keats; of Gladstone, on whom in one memorable summer day, while strolling in Italian sunshine, there fell a vision of the sacredness and the significance of life and its infinite responsibility in the fulfilment of lofty purposes. What charming associations these guests and sojourners have left behind! Hawthorne, embodying in immortal romance the spirit of the scenic greatness of the Eternal City; Margaret Fuller, Marchesa d'Ossoli, allying herself in marriage with the country she loved, and living in Rome those troubled, mysterious years that were to close the earthly chapter of her life; Robert and Elizabeth Browning, the wedded poets, who sang of love and Italy; Harriet Beecher Stowe, finding on the enchanted Italian shores the material which she wove with such irresistible attraction into the romance of "Agnes of Sorrento;" Longfellow, with his poet's vision, transmuting every vista and impression into some exquisite lyric; Lowell, bringing his philosophic as well as his poetic insight to penetrate the untold meaning of Rome; Thomas William Parsons, making the country of Dante fairly his own; Thackeray, with his brilliant interpretation of the comédie humaine; Emerson, who, oblivious of all the glories of art or the joys of nature, absorbed himself in writing transcendental letters to his eccentric, but high-souled aunt, Mary Moody Emerson; Ruskin, translating Italian art to Italy herself; Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe and his poet wife, Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, in the first flush of their bridal happiness, when Mrs. Howe's impassioned love for the Seven-hilled City inspired many a lyric that mirrors the Roman atmosphere of that day; Kate Field, with a young girl's glad enthusiasm over the marvellous loveliness of a Maytime in Rome, and her devotion to those great histrionic artists, Ristori and Salvini; George Stillman Hillard, leaving to literature the rich legacy of his "Six Months in Italy,"-a work that to this day holds precedence as a clear and comprehensive presentation of the scenic beauty, the notable monumental and architectural art, and the general life and resources of this land of painter and poet. Other names, too, throng upon memory-that of William Dean Howells, painting Italian life in his "Venetian Days," and charming all the literary world by his choice art; and among later work, the interesting interpretations of Rome and of social life in Rome, by Marion Crawford, Henry James, and Richard Bagot,-in chronicle, in romance, or in biographical record. During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, indeed, the visitors to Rome-authors, artists, travellers of easy leisure-defy any numerical record. Mrs. Louise Chandler Moulton, poet, romancist, and delightful raconteur as well, has recorded some charming impressions of her various sojourns in Rome both in her "Random Rambles" and in "Lazy Tours." Of the Palatine Hill we find her saying:-

"Sometimes we go to the Palace of the C?sars, and look off upon the heights where the snow lingers and the warm light rests, making them shine like the Delectable Mountains. Nearer at hand are the almond trees, in flower, or the orange trees, bright at once with their white, sweet blossoms and their golden fruit."

Mrs. Moulton writes of the "stately dwellers" in Rome whom time cannot change; and to whom, whenever she returns, she makes her first visit; some of whom are in the mighty palace of the Vatican and some of whom dwell in state in the Capitol.

"The beautiful Antoninus still wears his crown of lotus in Villa Albani and the Juno whom Goethe worshipped reigns forever at the Ludovisi," she writes; "I can never put in words the pleasure I find in these immortals." Mrs. Moulton loved to wander in the Villa Borghese "before the place is thronged with the beauty and fashion of Rome as it is in the late afternoon. I do not wonder that Miriam and Donatello could forget their fate in these enchanted glades," she wrote, "and dance as the sunbeams danced with the shadows. Sometimes I seem to see them where the sun sifts through the young green leaves, and her beauty-her human, deep-souled beauty-and his fantastic grace are the only things here that cannot change.

"The walls will crumble; the busts of kings and heroes and poets will lose their contours, the lovely Roman ladies also grow old and fade, and vanish from sight and from memory; but still these two, hopeless yet happy, will dance in these wild glades immortally beyond the reach of the effacing years."

The visit to Rome of the Rev. Dr. Phillips Brooks-later the Bishop of Massachusetts-is immortalized in the most lifelike portrait bust of the great preacher ever modelled; a bust in which the genius of the sculptor, Franklin Simmons, found one of its noblest expressions, and has perpetuated, with masterly power, the energy of thought, at once profound and intense, in the countenance of Bishop Brooks. These, and many another whom the gods have loved and dowered with gifts, rise before any retrospective glance over the comparatively recent past of Rome. Bishop Brooks passed there the Holy Week of one Lenten season, and of the Miserere in the Sistine Chapel he wrote that it was certainly the most wonderful music to which he had ever listened; and he added:-

"The Miserere in the Sistine, the Benediction from the balcony, the solemn moment of the elevation of the Host on Easter, and the illumination of St. Peter's, these all seem to reach very remarkably the great ideal of the central religious commemoration of Christendom."

It was in the winter of 1828 that Mr. Longfellow first visited Rome, which "is announced," he wrote, "by Nero's tomb," and he quotes Dupaty's lines:-

"Quoi! c'est là Rome? quoi!

C'est le tombeau de Neron qui l'annonce."

Mr. Longfellow expressed his love for the Eternal City, and in a personal letter[1] he said:-

"I have been so delighted with Rome that I have extended my residence much beyond my original intention. There is so much in the city to delay the stranger; the villages in the environs are so beautiful, and there is such a quiet and stillness about everything that, were it in my power, I should be induced to remain the whole year round. You can imagine nothing equal to the ruins of Rome. The Forum and the Coliseum are beyond all I had ever fancied them; and the ruined temples and the mouldering aqueducts which are scattered over the Campagna; I do not believe there is a finer view in the world than that from the eastern gate of the city, embracing the Campagna, with its ruined aqueducts diverging in long broken arcades, and terminated by the sweep of the Albanian hills, sprinkled with their white villages, and celebrated in song and story! But the great charm of the scene springs from association; and though everything in Italy is really picturesque, yet strip the country of its historic recollections,-think merely of what it is, and not of what it has been,-and you will find the dream to be fading away.

"You would be shocked at the misery of the people, especially in the Pope's dominions: but their element seems to be in rags and misery; and with the ceremonials of their religion and the holidays of the church, which average nearly three a week, they are poor-and lazy and happy. I mean, happy in their way."

In a later visit the poet was domiciled in an hotel on the Piazza Barberini, where the wonderful view included then the entire city "to where St. Peter's dome darkens against the sunset." Of this visit his brother, Rev. Samuel Longfellow, writes:-

"Here Mr. Longfellow became for the season the centre of the group of American visitors and resident artists, whose well-known names need not be recounted. Here he made, also, acquaintances among the Italians,-especially the Duke of Sermoneta, the Dantean scholar, and Monsignore Nardi, of the papal court. The Pope himself he did not visit. An interesting acquaintance was that made with the Abbé Liszt, who was spending the winter in Rome, having rooms in the abandoned Convent of Santa Francesca, in the Forum. Calling there one evening, in company with Mr. Healy the artist, the inner door of the apartment was opened to them by Liszt himself, holding high in his hand a candle which illuminated his fine face. The picture was so striking that Mr. Longfellow begged his companion to put it upon canvas,-which he did; and the painting now hangs in the library of Craigie House. At a morning visit, Liszt delighted the party with a performance upon his Chickering pianoforte.

"To see Rome, as all travellers know, is a work for many months; and it was pursued with tolerable diligence. But Mr. Longfellow was never a good sight-seer. He was impatient of lingering in picture galleries, churches, or ruins. He saw quickly the essential points, and soon tired of any minuter examination."

But long, indeed, before nineteenth-century artists and authors laid siege to the Eternal City, in the far-away years of 1638, Milton visited Rome, and there still remains the tablet, on the wall of the casa in the Via delle Quattro Fontane in which he stayed, a tablet bearing an inscription giving the date of his visit; as, also, in Via Machella, there is an inscription marking the place where Scott lived during his visit to Rome. Goethe made his memorable tour to Italy in 1786-fourteen years before the dawn of the nineteenth century-and wrote: "I feel the greatest longing to read Tacitus in Rome;" and again (an observation with which every visitor to the Eternal City will sympathize) he noted:-

"It grows more and more difficult for me to render an account of my residence in Rome, for as we always find the sea deeper the further we go, so it is with me in observation of this city. . . . Wherever we go and wherever we stand, we see about us a finished picture,-forms of every kind and style; palaces and ruins; gardens and wastes; the distant and the near houses; triumphal arches and columns,-often all so close together that they might be sketched on a single sheet. One should have a thousand points of steel with which to write, and what can a single pen do? and then in the evening one is weary and exhausted with the day of seeing and admiring. Here one reads history from within outward."

Chateaubriand, who in his earliest youth had visited America as the guest of Washington, passed the winter of 1803-4 in Rome, and his pictorial transcriptions of the city and its environs are among the most exquisite things in literary record. As, for instance, this description of a sunset from Monte Mario:-

"I was never weary of seeing, from the Villa Borghese, the sun go down behind the cypresses of Monte Mario, and the pines of the Villa Pamphili planted by Le Notre. I have stood upon the Ponte Molle to enjoy the sublime spectacle of the close of day. The summits of the Sabine hills appeared of lapis lazuli and pale gold, while their bases and sides were bathed in vapors of violet or purple. Sometimes lovely clouds, like fairy cars, borne along by the evening wind with inimitable grace, recall the mythological tales of the descent of the deities of Olympus. Sometimes old Rome seems to have spread all over the west the purple of her consuls and her C?sars, beneath the last steps of the god of day. This rich decoration does not vanish so quickly as in our climate. When we think the hues are about to disappear they revive on some other point of the horizon; one twilight follows another and the magic of sunset is prolonged."

It was in the same year that Mme. de Sta?l visited Rome and recorded, in her glowing romance, "Corinne," the impressions she received. In the spring of 1817 Lord Byron found in Rome the inspiration that he transmitted into that wonderful line in "Childe Harold":-

"The Niobe of Nations! There she stands."

It was two years later that Shelley passed the spring in the Seven-hilled City, retiring to Leghorn later, to write his tragedy of "The Cenci."

In Rome the visitor follows Michael Angelo and Raphael through the various churches and museums. The celebrated sibyls of Raphael are in the Santa Maria della Pace; his "Isaiah" is in San Agostino and his "Entombment" in the Casino of the Villa Borghese. While the sublime work of Michael Angelo in the Sistine Chapel is always one of the first things in Rome to which the traveller goes to study that incomparable work portraying the Creation-the Prophets and the Sibyls, the Angels and the Genii, that record the impassioned power of the master-yet all footsteps turn quickly, too, to the church called San Pietro in Vincoli, near the house in which Lucrezia Borgia lived, in which is the colossal Moses of Michael Angelo. As it stands, it fails to convey the first design of the great sculptor. Originally intended for the tomb of Pope Julius II, the plan included a massive block of marble (some forty by twenty feet) surmounted by a cornice and having its niches, its columns, and its statues, of which the Moses was to have been one. It would then have been judged relatively to the entire group, while now it is seen alone, and thus out of the proportions that were in the mind of the artist. The entire conception, indeed, was to unite sculpture and architecture into one splendid combination. "Thus the statue of Moses was meant to have been raised considerably above the eye of the spectator," writes Mr. Hillard, "and to have been a single object in a colossal structure of architecture and sculpture, which would have had a foreground and a background, and been crowned with a mass at once dome-like and pyramidal. Torn, as it is, from its proper place; divorced from its proportionate companionship; stuck against the wall of a church; and brought face to face with the observer,-what wonder that so many of those who see it turn away with no other impressions than those of caricature and exaggeration!"

Mr. Hillard adds:-

"But who that can appreciate the sublime in art will fail to bow down before it as embodied in this wonderful statue? The majestic character of the head, the prodigious muscles of the chest and arms, and the beard that flows like a torrent to the waist, represent a being of more than mortal port and power, speaking with the authority, and frowning with the sanctions of incarnate law. The drapery of the lower part of the figure is inferior to the anatomy of the upper part. Remarkable as the execution of the statue is, the expression is yet more so; for notwithstanding its colossal proportions, its prominent characteristic is the embodiment of intellectual power. It is the great leader and lawgiver of his people that we see, whose voice was command, and whose outstretched arm sustained a nation's infant steps. He looks as if he might control the energies of nature as well as shape the mould in which the character of his people should be formed. That any one should stand before this statue in a scoffing mood is to me perfectly inexplicable. My own emotions were more nearly akin to absolute bodily fear. At an irreverent word, I should have expected the brow to contract into a darker frown, and the marble lips to unclose in rebuke."

William Watson condenses his impressions of this majestic sculpture in the following quatrain.-

"The captain's might, and mystery of the seer-

Remoteness of Jehovah's colloquist,

Nearness of man's heaven-advocate-are here:

Alone Mount Nebo's harsh foreshadow is miss'd."

The impressive group of sculptures and buildings on the Campidoglio-where once the shrine of Jupiter Capitolinus stood-owes its present picturesque scheme largely to Michael Angelo. The fascination of the long flights of steps leading from the Piazza Arac?eli to the Capitoline, where the ancient bronze equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius forever keeps guard, is indescribable. The historic statues of Castor and Pollux mark the portals; on either hand there are seen the Muses of ancient sculpture, the Palazzo Senatoriale and the Palazzo dei Conservatori. There is in the entire world no more classic ground than is found in this impressive grouping of art and architecture.

The genius of Raphael has recorded itself in those brilliant and imperishable works that enthrall the student of art in the Raphael stanze in the Vatican. He was imbued with the spirit of Greek art, and while Titian is a greater colorist, while Correggio, Botticelli, Perugino, and other artists that could be named equal or exceed Raphael in certain lines, yet as the interpreter of the profoundest thought, and for his philosophic grasp and his power to endow his conceptions with the most brilliant animation, he stands alone. The religious exaltation of "The Transfiguration" reveals the supreme degree of the divine genius of Raphael. That this painting was the last work of his life, that it was placed above his body as it lay in state, and was carried in his funeral procession, invests it with peculiar interest.

As a draftsman Raphael was second only to Michael Angelo, with whom he must forever share the immortality of fame. The Academy in Venice holds some of his choicest drawings, and in the Venetian sketch-book in the National Gallery in London are many of his small pictures, including that of the "Knight's Dream."

It was in the autumn of 1508, when Raphael was in his twenty-fifth year, that he was called to Rome in the service of the Pope. The Pontiff at this time was Pope Julius II, whose successor was Leo X, and under their pontificates (from 1508 to 1520) Raphael produced these masterpieces which stand unrivalled in the world save by the creations of Michael Angelo in the Capella Sistina. The celebrated "Four Sibyls" of Raphael are not, however, in the stanze of the Vatican, but in the Church of San Maria della Pace. In the Palazzo Vaticano these four wonderful stanze entrance the visitor; the Stanza della Signatura, the Stanza d'Eliodoro, the Stanza dell'Incendio and the Sala di Constantino.

For the decoration of these stanze several painters from Umbria had been summoned,-Perugino, Sodoma, Signorelli, and others; but when Raphael had produced the "Disputa" in the Sala della Signatura, Pope Julius II recognized the work as so transcendent that he ordered the other artists to cease and even had some of their paintings obliterated that there might be more space for the exercise of Raphael's genius. In the "Disputa" are glorified the highest expressions of the human intellect-the domain portrayed being that of Theology, Philosophy, Poetry, and Justice. The splendor of this creation transcends all attempts of interpretation in language. Against a background of gold mosaic are portrayed these typical figures enthroned on clouds where genii flit to and fro bearing tablets with inscriptions. Theology holds in the left hand a book, while the other points to the vision of angels; Poetry, laurel-crowned, is seen seated on a throne with books and lyre; Philosophy wears a diadem, and Justice, with her balance and her sword, is also crowned. The title of this marvellous work is misleading. Its message is not that of disputation but of beatitude. At the altar are grouped the congregation; the mystic spell of heavenly enthusiasm enfolds the scene as an atmosphere, as above the heavens open and the glorified Christ, surrounded by the saints who have kept the faith, is disclosed to the devotees kneeling below, while a choir of listening angels bend over them from the distant clouds in the background.

Under Poetry are grouped Apollo and the Muses, and the figures of Homer, Dante and Virgil, of Petrarcha, Anacreon and Sappho, of Pindar and of Horace are recognized. The great scholars seen in the Philosophy include Plato and Aristotle, while in the groups under Justice, Moses and Solon are seen.

"Raphael seems to have never known despair," remarked Franklin Simmons of the work of this divine genius. "His paintings reveal no struggle, but seem to have been produced without effort, as if brought into existence by an enchanter's wand."

No observation could more vividly interpret the wonderful effect produced on the student by Raphael, and he cannot but recall the truth expressed in these lines of Festus:-

"All aspiration is a toil;

But inspiration cometh from above

And is no labor."

The inspiration of Raphael was of the noblest order. His genius, his kindling enthusiasm, his ecstasy of religious devotion, have left an imperishable heritage to art. By his transcendent gifts he represents the highest manifestation of the art of painting in the Renaissance. For the true note in art lies in spiritual perception. Not so brilliant a colorist as Titian, he was more the interpreter of the extension of human activity into that realm of the life more abundant, and with his extraordinary facility of execution he united exquisite refinement and unerring sense of beauty and the masterly power in composition that fairly created for the spectator the visions that his soul beheld. "I say to you," said Mr. Bryce recently in a press interview,-"I say to you, each oncoming tide of life requires and needs men of lofty thought who shall dream for it, sing for it, who shall gather up its tendencies, formulate its ideals and voice its spirit." One of those men of lofty thought who thus dream for the ages was Raphael, and his power and glory have left an ineffaceable impress upon human life. He was the divinely appointed messenger of beauty, and he was never disobedient to the heavenly vision.

"Time hath no tide but must abide

The servant of Thy will;

Tide hath no time, for to Thy rhyme

The ranging stars stand still."

The decline of art after Michael Angelo and Raphael was marked. The very splendor and power of their creations, instead of inspiring those who immediately followed them, produced almost the inertia of despair. In the reverence and awe and admiration with which these transcendent masterpieces were approached any power to originate seemed futile by contrast. Imitation rather than creation became the method adopted, resulting in an increased poverty of design and feeble execution. The art of the sixteenth century deteriorated rapidly till the baroco style was in evidence. One reason, too, for the decline was in that art was no longer so exclusively dedicated to the high service of religion, but aimed, instead, to please and to procure patrons, and thus were all worthy standards lowered to pernicious levels.

ANGEL, CHURCH OF SAN ANDREA DELLE FRATTE, ROME

Giovanni Lorenzo Bernini

A sculptor who left his impress upon the sixteenth-century art was Lorenzo Bernini, a Neapolitan (born in 1598) who died in Rome in 1685. The work of Bernini has a certain fascination and airy touch that, while it sometimes degenerates into the merely fantastic and even into tawdry and puerile affectations, has at its best a refinement and grace that lend to his sculptures an enduring charm, as seen in his "Apollo and Daphne" (a work executed in his eighteenth year) which is now in the Casino of the Villa Borghese. Bernini's name is perpetuated in the colossal statues on the colonnade of St. Peter's, the great bronze angels with their draperies streaming to the winds on the Ponte San Angelo, and in the vast fountain in the Piazza Navona. In the court of the Palazzo Bernini is one of the most interesting of his works-a colossal figure, allegorical in significance, illustrating "Truth Brought to Light by Time." One of the most important works of Bernini-now placed in the Museo Nazionale-is the group of "Pluto and Proserpine."

The influence that was to reform and regenerate the art of sculpture in the sixteenth century came with the great and good Canova, with which was united that of Flaxman and of Thorwaldsen. The heavenly messengers are always sent and appear at the time they are most needed. Neither Truth nor Art is ever left without a witness.

"God sends his teachers unto every age,

To every clime, and every race of men,

With revelations fitted to their growth

And shape of mind; nor gives the realm of truth

Into the selfish rule of one sole race."

DETAIL FROM STUART MONUMENT, ST. PETER'S, ROME

Antonio Canova

Canova's genius and services were widely recognized. In 1719 he was made a Senator; he was ennobled with the title of Marchese of Ischia and granted a yearly allowance of three thousand scudi; and his noble and generous enthusiasms, not less than his genius, have left their record on life as well as on art. When he died (in Venice, Oct. 3, 1822) his work included fifty-nine statues, fourteen groups, twenty-two monuments, and fifty-four busts. The statue of Pius V and the tomb of Clement XIII are his greatest works, and the latter is perhaps even increasingly held as a masterpiece of the ages.

Canova, warned by the fatal influence of imitation in art in the sixteenth century, frequently counselled his pupils against copying his own style and constantly urged them to study from the Greeks. He advised them to visit frequently the studios of other artists, "and especially," he would add, "the studios of Thorwaldsen, who is a very great artist."

In the early part of the nineteenth century contemporary sculpture in Rome was led by the three great artists,-Canova, Thorwaldsen, and Gibson. In 1829 Gibson had the honor of being elected a member of the Accadémia di San Luca in place of the sculptor Massimiliano, who had then just died. Cammuccini, the historical painter, proposed Gibson, and with the ardent assistance of Thorwaldsen he was elected resident Academician of merit. "Like Canova, Thorwaldsen was most generous to young artists," says Gibson of the great Danish master, "and he freely visited all who required his advice. I profited greatly by the knowledge which this splendid sculptor had of his art. On every occasion when I was modelling a new work he came to me, and corrected whatever he thought amiss. I also often went to his studio and contemplated his glorious works, always in the noblest style, full of pure and severe simplicity. His studio was a safe school for the young, and was the resort of artists and lovers of art from all nations. The old man's person can never be forgotten by those who saw him. Tall and strong,-he never lost a tooth in his life,-he was most venerable looking. His kind countenance was marked with hard thinking, his eyes were gray, and his white locks lay upon his broad shoulders. At great assemblies his breast was covered with orders."

Thorwaldsen (born in Copenhagen, Nov. 19, 1770) went to Rome in 1797-sent by the government of Denmark as a pensioner. It is said that, in his enthusiasm for Rome, Thorwaldsen dated his birth from the hour he entered the Eternal City. "Before that day," he exclaimed, "I existed; I did not live." For nearly fifty years-until his death in 1844-he lived and worked in Rome, occupying at one time the studio in Via Babuino that had formerly been that of Flaxman.

John Gibson, who went to Rome in 1817,-twenty years after Thorwaldsen first arrived,-had the good fortune to be for five years a pupil of Canova, whose death in 1822 terminated this inestimable privilege. The elevation of purpose that characterized the young English student made his progress and development a matter of peculiar interest to the master. Gibson, also, bears his testimony to the stimulus of the Roman environment. "Rome above all other cities," he says, "has a peculiar influence upon and charm for the real student; he feels himself in the very university of art, where it is the one thing talked about and thought about. Constantly did I feel the presence of this influence. Every morning I rose with the sun, my soul gladdened by a new day of a happy and delightful pursuit; and as I walked to my breakfast at the Caffè Greco and watched with new pleasure the tops of the churches and palaces gilt by the morning sun, I was inspired with a sense of daily renovated youth, and fresh enthusiasm, and returned joyfully to the combat, to the invigorating strife with the difficulties of art. Nor did the worm of envy creep round my heart whenever I saw a beautiful idea skilfully executed by any of my young rivals, but constantly spurred on by the talent around me I returned to my studio with fresh resolution."

Again to a friend Gibson writes:-

"I renewed my visits to the Vatican, refreshing my spirits in that Pantheon of the gods, demigods, and heroes of Hellas. . . . In the art of sculpture the Greeks were gods. . . . In the Vatican we go from statue to statue, from fragment to fragment, like the bee from flower to flower."

These five years in which Canova, Thorwaldsen, and Gibson lived and wrought together-although the youngest of this trio was still in his student life-form a definite period in the history of modern art in Rome. The dreams, the enthusiasm, the devotion to ideal beauty which characterized their work left its impress and its vitality of influence-a mystic power ready to incarnate itself again through the facility of expression of the artists yet to come. To the young men whose steps were turned toward Rome in these early years of the century just passed, how great was the privilege of coming into close range of the influence of such artists as these; to study their methods; to hear the expression of their views on art in familiar meeting and conversation! These artists were closely in touch with that "lovely and faithful dream which came with Italian Renaissance in the works of Pisani, Mino di Fiesole, Donatello, Michael Angelo, and Giovanni da Bologna-all who caught the spirit of Greek art." Artistic truth was the keynote of the hour, and it is this truth which is the basis of the highest conception of life.

"Art's a service,-mark:

A silver key is given to thy clasp

And thou shalt stand unwearied night and day,

And fix it in the hard, slow-turning wards

To open, so that intermediate door

Betwixt the different planes of sensuous form

And form insensuous, that inferior men

May learn to feel on still through these to those,

And bless thy ministration. The world waits for help."

In their true relation art and ethics meet in their ministry to humanity, for only in their union can they best serve man. All the nobler culture has its responsibility in service. "Many a man has a blind notion of stewardship about his property, but very few have it about their knowledge," said Bishop Phillips Brooks, and he added: "One grows tired of seeing cultivated people with all their culture cursed by selfishness." To the true idealist-as distinct from the mere emotionalist with ?sthetic tastes-selfishness is an impossible prison. The only spiritual freedom lies in the perpetual sharing of the fuller life. The gift shared is the gift doubled. Art is the spiritual glory of life; the supreme manifestation, the very influence of spiritual achievement. Mr. Stillman, discussing the revival of art, has questioned: "Does the world want art any longer? Has it, in the present state of human progress, any place which will justify devotion to it?"

He questions as to whether man is still

"Apparelled in celestial light,"

or whether he has lost "the glory and the freshness" of his dreams.

"No one can admit," continues Mr. Stillman, "that the human intellect is weaker than it was five or twenty centuries ago; but it is certain that if we take the pains to study what was done five centuries ago in painting, or twenty centuries ago in sculpture, and compare it with the best work of to-day, we shall find the latter trivial and 'prentice work compared with the ordinary work of men whose names are lost in the lustre of a school.

"Then, little men inspired by the Zeitgeist, painted greatly; now, our great men fail to reach the technical achievement of the little men of them. There is only one living painter who can treat a portrait as a Venetian artist of 1550 A.D. would have done it, and how differently in the mastery of his material! If we go to the work of wider range, the Campo Santo of Pisa, the Stanze, the Sistine Chapel, the distance becomes an abyss; the simplest fragment of a Greek statue of 450 B.C. shows us that the best sculpture of this century, even the French, is only a happy child-work, not even to be put in sight of Donatello or Michael Angelo. The reason is simple, and already indicated. The early men grew up in a system in which the power of expression was taught from childhood; they acquired method as the musician does now, and the tendency of the opinion of their time was to keep them in the good method."

Is this not too narrow and sweeping a judgment? The art of portraiture certainly did not die with the Venetian painters of 1550, however great their work; and if there be but "one living painter" who can treat portrait art like the early Venetians, there are scores of artists who achieve signal success by other methods of treatment.

At all events, these three men, Canova, Thorwaldsen, and Gibson, worked with the conviction that art is service. With Victor Hugo, Canova could have said: "Genius is not made for genius; it is made for men. . . . Let him have wings for the infinite provided he has feet for the earth, and that, after having been seen flying, he is seen walking. After he has been seen an archangel, let him be still more a brother. . . . To be the servant of God in the march of progress-such is the law which regulates the growth of genius."

They worked and taught by this creed. Thorwaldsen, on first arriving in Rome, wandered for three years, it is said, among the statues of gods and heroes, like a man in a dream. The atmosphere of the earlier day when Titian was employed by the king of Portugal and Raphael by the Pope to create works of great public importance still lingered and exerted over Thorwaldsen, and over all artists susceptible to its subtle influence, a peculiar spell. Its power was revealed in his subsequent works-the "Christ;" the sculptured groups for tombs in St. Peter's and in other churches; the poetic reliefs symbolizing "Day" and "Night;" "Ganymede Watering the Eagle;" the "Three Graces," "Hebe," and many others.

TOMB OF CLEMENT XIII, ST. PETER'S, ROME

Antonio Canova

Among Canova's works his immortal masterpiece is the monumental memorial group for the tomb of Pope Clement XIII in St. Peter's. The Pope is represented as kneeling in prayer. The modelling of the entire figure is instinct with expression. The fine and beautiful hands express reverence and trust. The countenance is pervaded with that peace only known to the soul that is in complete harmony with the divine power. The Holy Father has taken the tiara from his head and it lies before him on the cushion on which he kneels. Although the entire portrayal of the figure reveals that devotion expressed in the solemn and searching words of the church service, "And here we offer and present unto thee, O Lord, ourselves, our souls and bodies to be a reasonable, holy, and living sacrifice unto thee,"-although it is the very utmost rendering of the soul to God, it is yet the deliberate, the joyful, the living acceptance of divine love and no mere trance of ecstasy. No more wonderful figure in all the range of sculpture has been created than the Clement XIII of Canova.

"THE GENIUS OF DEATH," DETAIL FROM TOMB OF CLEMENT XIII, ST. PETER'S, ROME

Antonio Canova

The group is completed by two symbolic figures representing Religion and Death. The former is personified as a female figure holding a cross; the latter sits with his torch reversed. Grief, but not hopeless and despairing sorrow, is portrayed; it is the grief companioned by faith which ever sees

"The stars shine through the cypress trees."

The base of the monument represents a chapel guarded by lions. Pistolesi, the great Italian authority on the sculpture of St. Peter's and the Vatican galleries, notes that the lions typify the firmness and the force and the courage, "la fortezza dell'anima," that so signally characterized Clement XIII. There is probably no sacred monument in the realm of all modern art which can equal this creation in its delicacy, its lofty beauty, and the noble message that it conveys.

The oldest art school, the Accadémia di San Luca, founded in 1507 by Sixtus, when he called to Rome all the leading artists of Europe to assist in the decoration of the Sistine Chapel, is an organization that magically links the present with the days of Canova, Thorwaldsen, and Gibson, as it linked them, also, with the remote and historic past. The father of the present custodian of the Academy knew Thorwaldsen well. The grandfather of the gifted Italian sculptor, Tadolini (who has recently completed the tomb for Pope Leo XIII, placed in the Basilica of San Giovanni Laterano), modelled the bust of Thorwaldsen, and in one gallery hangs the great Danish sculptor's portrait, painted by himself. The first director of San Luca was Federigo Zuccaro. In the early years of the nineteenth century this Academy was a vital centre of art life, and it is still a school that draws students, although the visitor who does not loiter and linger in his Rome may fail to know of this most alluring place. The San Luca is in the Via Bonella, one of the old, dark, narrow, and gloomy streets of the oldest part of Rome,-a short street of hardly more than two blocks, running between the Via Alessandra and the Forum. Hawthorne vividly pictures all this old Rome when he speaks of the "narrow, crooked, intricate streets, so uncomfortably paved with little squares of lava that to tread over them is a penitential pilgrimage; so indescribably ugly, moreover; so cold, so alley-like, into which the sun never falls and where a chill wind forces its deadly breath into our lungs; the immense seven-storied, yellow-washed hovels, or call them palaces, where all that is dreary in domestic life seems magnified and multiplied; those staircases which ascend from a ground floor of cook shops and cobblers' stalls, stables and regiments of cavalry, to a middle region of princes, cardinals, and ambassadors, and an upper tier of artists just beneath the unattainable sky: . . . in which the visitor becomes sick at heart of Italian trickery, which has uprooted whatever faith in man's integrity had till then endured;" the city "crushed down in spirit by the desolation of her ruin and the hopelessness of her future;" one recalls these words when passing through the unspeakable gloom and horror and desolation and squalor of ancient Rome. In these surroundings one's cab stops at "No. 44," and ringing the bell the door is open, whether by super-normal agency or by some invisible terrestrial manipulation one is unable to determine; but in the semi-darkness of the narrow hall he discerns before him a flight of steep stairs, and, as no other vista opens, he reasons that, by the law of exclusion, this must be the appointed way. Along the wall are seen, here and there, some antique casts from Trajan's Column, and reliefs from Canova and Thorwaldsen. The galleries above hold only a small and a comparatively unimportant collection of pictures. There are marines from Vernet and Claude Lorraine; a "Venus Crowned by the Graces" from Rubens; Giulio Romano's copy of Raphael's "Galatea,"-the original of which (in the Villa Farnesina) represents Galatea surrounded by Nymphs, Cupids, and Tritons, being carried in a shell across the sea. There is a Cupid, and also the "Fortuna" of Guido Reni,-the latter a figure of ineffable grace floating in the air. One of Raphael's early works representing "St. Luke Painting the Madonna" is here. There are several works by Titian, but these have less than would be expected of the glory usually associated with his name; and a Vandyke representing the Virgin and Child, with two angels playing, the one on a lute, the other on the violin.

"LA FORTUNA," ACCADéMIA DI SAN LUCA, ROME

Guido Reni

One salon filled with portraits of artists is especially interesting, and that of Thorwaldsen is so feminine in its costume and the parting of the hair, that it is almost inevitably mistaken for that of a woman. Guido's graceful "Fortuna" is represented as a female figure flying through the air, her long hair streaming in the wind, and the picture recalls to one the Greek legend of Opportunity, as told by Kainos. The legend runs:-

"'Of what town is thy sculptor?'

"'Of Lukzon.'

"'What is his name?'

"'Lysippos.'

"'And thine?'

"'Opportunity, controller of all things.'

"'But why standest thou on tiptoe?'

"'I am always running.'

"'Why, then, hast thou wings on both feet?'

"'I fly like the wind.'

"'But wherefore bearest thou a razor in thy right hand?'

"'As a sign to men that I am sharper than any steel.'

"'And why wearest thou thy hair long in front?'

"'That I may be seized by him who approaches me.'

"'By Zeus! And thou art bald behind?'

"'Because once I have passed with my winged feet no one may seize me then.'"

From one landing, on the steep narrow staircase of San Luca, opens the Biblioteca Sarti, an art library of some fifteen thousand volumes. The sculpture gallery is now closed and can only be entered by special permission. This is the more to be regretted as it contains the principal collections in Rome of the original casts of the works of Thorwaldsen and Canova.

The latter-day artists who have been setting up their Lares and Penates in Rome at various periods during the early and into the later years of the nineteenth century have found the Eternal City in strong contrast with its twentieth-century aspects, however it may have differed from the Rome of the Popes. The earlier American artists to seek the Seven-hilled City were painters; and Allston, Copley, and Stuart had already distinguished themselves in pictorial art before America had produced any sculptor who could read his title clear to fame. It is to Hiram Powers (born in Vermont in 1805) that America must look as her first sculptor, chronologically considered, closely followed by Thomas Crawford, who was but eight years his junior, and by Horatio Greenough, who was also born in the same year as Powers, and who preceded him in Italy, but whose work has less artistic value. Mr. Greenough has left a colossal (if not an artistic) monument to his gifts in stately shaft marking Bunker Hill which he designed. Problematic in their claim to artistic excellence as are his "Washington"-a seated figure in the grounds of the Capitol in Washington-and his group in relief called "The Rescue" in the portico of the Capitol, his name lives by his personality as a man of liberal culture and noble character, if not by his actual rank in art. First of the American group in Italy, he was followed by Powers, who sought the ineffable beauty and enchantment of Florence in 1837. Horatio Greenough died in comparatively early life, leaving perhaps the most interesting of his works in a relief (purchased by Professor George Ticknor, the distinguished historian of Spain) "representing in touching beauty and expression a sculptor in an attitude of dejection and discouragement before his work, while a hand from above pours oil into his dying lamp, an allegory illustrative of the struggles of genius and the relief which timely patronage may extend to it."

Mr. Powers passed his entire life in Florence. His work attracted great attention and inspired ardent appreciation. In portrait busts Powers was especially successful; and his "Greek Slave," his "Fisher Boy," "Il Penseroso," and "Proserpine" impressed the art-loving public of the time as marked by strong artistic power and as entitled to permanent rank in sculpture.

Mr. Crawford died young; but his name lives in the majestic bronze statue of "Beethoven" which is in the beautiful white and gold interior of Symphony Hall, in Boston; and his "Orpheus" and some other works claim high appreciation. Writing of Crawford, Mr. Hillard said:-

"Crawford's career was distinguished by energy, resolution, and self-reliance. While yet a youth, he formed the determination to make himself an artist; and with this view went to Rome-alone, unfriended, and unknown-and there began a life of toil and renunciation; resisting the approaches alike of indolence and despondency. His strength of character and force of will would have earned distinction for powers inferior to his. Nothing was given to self-indulgence; nothing to vague dreams; nothing to unmanly despair. He did not wait for the work that he would have, but labored cheerfully upon that which he could have. Success came gradually, but surely; and his powers as surely proved themselves to be more than equal to the demand made upon them."

On the death of Mr. Crawford, Thomas William Parsons wrote a memorial poem in which this stanza occurs:-

"O Rome! what memories awake,

When Crawford's name is said,

Of days and friends for whose dear sake

That path of Hades unto me

Will have no more of dread

Than his own Orpheus felt, seeking Eurydice!

O Crawford! husband, father, brother

Are in that name, that little word!

Let me no more my sorrow smother;

Grief stirs me, and I must be stirred."

Thomas Ball, who went in early manhood to Florence, where he remained until when nearly at the age of fourscore he returned to his native land, still continues, at the age of eighty-five, to pursue the art he loves. He has created works, as his equestrian statue of "Washington" in the Public Gardens and his "Lincoln Freeing the Slave" in Park Square, both in Boston; his great Washington Memorial group in Methuen, Massachusetts; his "Christ Blessing Little Children," and many other historic and ideal sculptures, that seem endowed with his beautiful and winning spirit as well as with his rare gifts. Larkin G. Mead chose Florence rather than Rome for his home and work. His noble "River God," placed at the head of the Mississippi near St. Paul, as well as other interesting creations, link his name with that of his native land. Randolph Rogers, a man of genius; Rinehart, Paul Akers, and Thompson all died before the full maturity of their powers; Akers at the early age of thirty-six, leaving, as his bride of a year, the poet, Elizabeth Akers Allen, who, under the nom de plume of "Florence Percy," has endeared herself to all lovers of lyric art. In a monograph on Paul Akers, written after his death, the writer says of his studio in Rome:-

"Linked with this studio is Hawthorne's tale of 'The Marble Faun,' as Kenyon's studio was none other than Paul Akers's. Though Hawthorne in his romance saw fit to lay the scene in the rooms once occupied by Canova, it was in the Via del Crecie that he wove the thread of his Italian romance.

"Paul Akers's growing reputation and increase of work ere long made it necessary for him to seek a more commodious studio, and he took rooms once occupied by the famous Canova. Here he had made under his supervision copies in marble of many of the famous works of the Vatican and the Capitol. The largest collection of these was a commission from Mr. Edward King of Newport, and among them were busts of Ariadne, Demosthenes, and Cicero, and a facsimile of the 'Dying Gladiator' which Mr. King presented to the Redwood Library of Newport.

*****

"During his first winter in Rome he was permitted by the authorities to make a cast of a mutilated bust of Cicero which had long lain in the Vatican. A critic writing from Rome in 1857 says of this bust of Cicero: 'Mr. Akers obtained permission to take a cast from it; he then restored the eye, brow, and ears, and modelled a neck and bust for it in accordance with the temperament shown by the nervous and rather thin face. He has succeeded admirably. It is the very head of the Vatican, yet without the scars of envious time, and sits gracefully on human shoulders, instead of being rolled awkwardly back upon a shelf.' This bust is unlike the portrait which so long passed for Cicero's, but has been identified by means of a medal which was struck by the Magnesians in honor of the great orator during his consulate, and is now the authorized portrait of Cicero. The finest of Paul Akers's creations executed during his stay in Rome are 'St. Elizabeth of Hungary,' which represents the princess at the moment the roses have fallen to the ground; 'Una and the Lion,' an illustration of the line in Spenser's 'Faerie Queene,'-

'Still while she slept he kept both watch and ward;'

the head of Milton and the 'Pearl Diver.' The 'Pearl Diver,' now owned by the city of Portland, represents a youth stretched upon a sea-worn rock and wrapped in eternal sleep. The arms are thrown above the head, and about the waist is a net containing pearl-bearing shells for which he has risked his life. There is no trace of suffering; all is subdued to beauty. It is death represented as the ancients conceived it, the act of the torch-reverting god. This youth, who has lost his life at the moment when all that for which he had dared was within his grasp, suggests Paul Akers's own untimely death on the eve of his triumph."

It was from his Roman studio that Mr. Akers wrote to a friend:-

"Yesterday Browning called. He looked a long time at my Milton, and said it was Milton, the man-angel. He praised the wealth of hair which I had given the head, and then said that Mrs. Browning had a lock of Milton's hair, the only one now in existence. This was given her by Leigh Hunt, just before his death, who had the records proving it to be genuine. The hair was, he said, like mine. He invited me to visit him in Florence, where he would show me the first edition of Milton's poems, marked to indicate the peculiar accent which the poet sometimes adopted, a knowledge of which makes clear somewhat that otherwise seems discordant. Milton was so great a musician that there could have been no fault in sound in his compositions. He looked over my books; said my edition of Shelley was one which he had corrected for the press, not from a knowledge of the original MS., but from his internal evidence that so it must have been; said Poe was a wonderful man; spoke of Tennyson in the warmest terms. Took up a copy of his own poems published in the United States, and remarked that it was better than the English edition, yet had some awful blunders, and wished me to allow him to correct a copy for me. My head of the 'Drowned Girl' caught his eye and interested him. I told him that I had thought of Hood's 'Bridge of Sighs.' He then said that Hood wrote that on his deathbed, and read it to him before any one else had seen it. Hood was doubtful whether it was worth publishing. To-morrow Mrs. Browning is to come; she has been quite ill since she came to Rome, and I have seen her but once. I derive much comfort from the friendship of Charlotte Cushman. She has just gone from here. She has frequent breakfast parties; I have attended but one. Mr. and Mrs. James T. Fields, Wild, the painter, and myself were the guests. Fields I like much."

The first works of Mr. Akers were two portrait busts, of Longfellow and of Samuel Appleton. Of his bust of Milton, Hawthorne in the "Marble Faun" has said:-

"In another style, there was the grand, calm head of Milton, not copied from any one bust or picture, yet more authentic than any of them, because all known representations of the poet had been profoundly studied and solved in the artist's mind. The bust over the tomb in Greyfriar's Church, the original miniatures and pictures wherever to be found, had mingled each its special truth in this one work-wherein likewise by long perusal and deep love of 'Paradise Lost,' the 'Comus,' the 'Lycidas,' and 'L'Allegro,' the sculptor had succeeded even better than he knew in spiritualizing his marble with the poet's mighty genius. And this was a great thing to have achieved, such a length of time after the dry bones and dust of Milton were like those of any other dead man."

Richard Greenough and the painter, Mr. Haseltine, were prominent figures among the early American group of the nineteenth-century artists in Rome. There came Emma Stebbins, who modelled a fine portrait bust of Charlotte Cushman; and Anne Whitney, whose statues of Samuel Adams and of Leif Ericson adorn public grounds in Boston; whose life-size statue of Harriet Martineau is the possession of Wellesley College; and whose "Chaldean Astronomer," "Lotus-Eater," and "Roma"-a figure personifying the Rome of Pio Nono-reveal her power in ideal creation.

The name of Harriet Hosmer stands out in brilliant pre-eminence among those of all women who have followed the plastic art. Her infinite charm of personality seems to impart itself to her work, and she has the gift to make friends as well as to call forms out of clay-the success of friendship being one even more permanently satisfying. In her early life as a girl hardly more than twenty, she sought Rome, living with art as her chaperon. Her versatility, her picturesque individuality, and her imaginative power all combined to win sympathetic recognition. Gibson, whose guidance was particularly well adapted to develop her gifts, received her into his own studio and took a deep interest in her work. It was during the period of her early efforts that Hawthorne was in Rome, and she is graphically depicted in his notebooks in her boyish cap at work in the clay. Gibson was an artist, con amore, and Miss Hosmer's joyous abandon to her art captivated his sympathy. "In my art what do I find?" he questioned; "happiness; love which does not depress me; difficulties which I do not fear; resolution which never abates; flights which carry me above the ground; ambition which tramples no one down." Master and pupil were akin in their unwearied devotion to art. Of Gibson, whose absence of mind regarding all the details of life made him almost helpless in travel and affairs, Miss Hosmer used gleefully to say that he "was a god in his studio, but God help him out of it!" This glancing sprite of a girl, frightening her friends by her daring and venturous horseback riding; gravitating by instinct to offer some generous, tender aid to the sick, the destitute, or the helpless; the life and light of gay dinners and of social evenings; working from six in the morning till night in her studio, "with an absence of pretension," says Mrs. Browning, "and simplicity of manners which accord rather with the childish dimples in her rosy cheeks than with her broad forehead and high aims," had the magic gift that merged her visitors and patrons into enthusiastic friends; and Mrs. Browning has chronicled the pretty scene when Lady Marion Alford, the daughter of the Earl of Northumberland, knelt before the girl artist and slipped on her finger a ring-a precious ruby set with diamonds-as a token of her devotion. Reading Miss Hosmer's life still further backward, the reader is transported, as if on some magic carpet, to St. Louis, in the United States, where a noble and lofty man, Hon. Wayman Crow,-a generous friend, a liberal patron of the arts, a man of the most refined tastes and culture, whose great qualities were always used in high service,-first aided Miss Hosmer to the preliminary studies in her art, and whose accomplished and lovely daughters (now Mrs. Lucien Carr of Boston, Mrs. Edwin Cushman of Newport and Rome, and Mrs. Emmons of Leamington, England) were as a trio of sisters to the young artist. And "the flowing conditions of life" bear on this lifelong friendship until a fair young girl, élise (the daughter of Mrs. Emmons), catches up this sweet tie and as an accomplished and lovely young woman in Roman society, when these "flowing conditions" had come down even into the season of 1906-7, Miss Emmons cherished the fame of Harriet Hosmer and enjoyed the privilege of a constant correspondence with the distinguished artist. So the past links itself again with the present; and who can tell where any story in life begins or ends in the constant evolutionary progress?

Miss Hosmer's work attracted wide attention. Her majestic statue of "Zenobia;" the winsome "Puck;" the impressive statue of "Beatrice Cenci," representing her as she lay in her cell in Castel San Angelo the night before her execution,-these and other works of hers are of an interesting character and will hold their permanent rank in sculpture.

Were all the muses present at the christening of William Wetmore Story-sculptor, musician, poet and painter, jurist and man of letters, and the friend whose social relationships made life a thing of beauty-

"To winds and waterfalls,

And autumn's sunlit festivals,

To music and to music's thoughts

Inextricably bound"?

Mr. Story made his first visit to Italy in 1847; not at that time with any fixed purpose of exchanging his profession of the law for art. He loved literature, and his grace and ease in expression had already manifested his literary talent; he had an inclination toward modelling-it could hardly, at this time, have been called by a stronger name-and curiously enough with him the usual conditions were reversed and he received a commission for a statue of his father, Judge Story, before he had made any definite turning toward the art of sculpture. A young man of versatile gifts and accomplished scholarship, sculpture was to him one among the many attractive forms of art rather than the supreme attraction; and it was the stimulus of the given work that determined him as a sculptor, rather than his determination to be a sculptor that determined the work. Among the goddesses of life Destiny must, perhaps, be allowed a place. At all events, after Mr. Story's initial glance at Italy, he sought Rome again a year later, and this time it was his choice for life, however unrevealed to his eye were the resplendent years that lay before him. He had fallen under the spell of the Magic Land. In a letter to Lowell, Mr. Story had questioned how he should ever endure again "the restraint and bondage of Boston." It was the picturesque Rome of the Popes that he first knew. The years of 1848-49 were those of revolutionary activities in Italy. Pio Nono, one of the most saintly and beloved of the Popes,-whose mortal form now rests in that richly decorated chapel in old San Lorenzo, fuori le mura, on the site of the church that Constantine founded on the burial place of St. Lawrence,-made his flight to Gaeta and the Roman republic was established. It was a dramatic scene when Pio Nono returned (April 12, 1850), entering Rome by the Porta San Giovanni. The scene from this gate was then, as now, one of the most impressive in the Eternal City.

It was in this vast Basilica of San Giovanni Laterano that Pio Nono entered that April day, leaving his carriage and walking alone to the altar, where he knelt in devotion. A splendid procession awaited without to accompany the Holy Father to the Papal Palace. The superb state carriages conveyed princes and foreign ambassadors and great nobles. From the Piazza San Giovanni to St. Peter's every house was illuminated, and the populace cheered and waved until the very air vibrated with sound and color. These were the days when the methods of government were a visible spectacle, a drama, making the life in Rome a daily illuminated missal.

The Storys, on their return to Italy, located themselves for a time in Florence, where they met the Brownings, and that lifelong friendship between the poet and the sculptor was initiated. In these happy Florentine days Mr. Story worked in his studio while his wife read to him the life of Keats, then just issued, written by Monckton Milnes, later Lord Houghton. But the "flowing conditions" soon bore them onward to Rome, where they settled themselves in the Via Porta Pinciana, and met the Crawfords, who were domiciled in the Villa Negroni. In these Roman days, too, appeared Mr. Cropsey, of poetic landscape fame, and here, too, was Margaret Fuller. Mazzini was then a leading figure in the Chamber of Deputies,-"the prophet not only of modern Italy, but of the modern world." He found Italy "utilitarian and materialistic, permeated by French ideas, and weakened by her reliance on French initiative. He was filled with hope that Italy might not only achieve her own unity, but might once more accomplish, as she had in the Rome of the C?sars and the Rome of the Church, the unity of the Western world. 'On my side I believe,' he says, 'that the great problem of the day was a religious problem, to which all other questions were but secondary.'" He was asserting that "we cannot relate ourselves to the Divine, but through collective humanity. It is not by isolated duty (which indeed the conditions of modern life render more and more impossible), nor by contemplation of mere Power as displayed in the material world, that we can develop our nature. It is rather by mingling with the universal life, and by carrying on the evolution of the never-ending work."

The studios of Mr. Crawford in those days were in the Piazza delle Terme, near the Baths of Diocletian. William Page, the painter, was domiciled on the slope of the Quirinal where he painted a portrait of Charlotte Cushman which Mrs. Browning described as "a miracle"; one of Mrs. Crawford; the head of Mrs. Story, which he insisted upon presenting to her husband; and a magnificent portrait of Browning which the artist presented to Mrs. Browning. "Both of us," wrote Robert Browning of this gift, "would have fain escaped being the subjects of such princely generosity; but there was no withstanding his delicacy and noble-mindedness." Mrs. Jameson was much in Rome in the early years of the 1850-60 decade, living in the old port by the Tiber nearly opposite to the new and splendid building of the law courts. Near the Tarpeian Rock Frederika Bremer had perched, in a tiny room of which she took all the frugal care, even to washing the blue cups and plates when she invited the Hawthornes to a tea of a simplicity that suggested, indeed, the utmost degree of "light" housekeeping. Thomas Buchanan Read was one of the hosts and guests of this social group, and it was at a dinner he gave that Hawthorne met Gibson, whose conversational talents were evidently (upon that occasion) chiefly employed in contemning the pre-Raphaelite school of painters and emphasizing the need of sculptors to discover and to follow the principles of the Greeks,-"a fair doctrine, but one which Mr. Gibson fails to practise," observes Hawthorne. The Brownings were variously bestowed in Rome through succeeding winters,-in the Bocca di Leone, in the Via del Tritone and elsewhere. Mrs. Browning, as her "Casa Guida Windows" and many other poems attest, took always the deepest interest in Italian politics. American and English friends come and go, but the little group of residents and the more permanent sojourners, as the Hawthornes and the Brownings, continue their daily variations on life in the social dinners and teas, the excursions and the sight-seeing of the wonderful city.

Only the magician could "call up the vanished past again" and summon into an undeniable materialization those charming figures to come forth out of the shadowy air of the rich, historic past, and stand before us in the full light of contemporary attention. Not alone this group of choice persons, but the environment of their time, the very atmosphere, are demanded of this necromancy. The figure of Adelaide Kemble (Mrs. Sartoris) is one of these, and the tradition still survives of a concert given in the splendid, spacious hall of the Palazzo Colonna where she was the prima donna of the occasion. There were also musicals at the house of Mrs. Sartoris, where the guests met her famous sister, Fanny Kemble. Mrs. Browning was fond of both the sisters, and said of them that their social brilliancy was their least distinction. She found them both "noble and sympathetic," and her "dear Mr. Page" and "Hatty" (Miss Hosmer) "an immense favorite with us both," she said of her husband and herself; these and the Storys made up the special circle for the Brownings in Rome. "The Sartoris house has the best society in Rome," writes Mrs. Browning to Miss Mitford, "and exquisite music, of course. We met Lockhart there and my husband sees a good deal of him. . . . A little society," she says, "is good for soul and body, and on the Continent it is easy to get a handful of society without paying too dear for it. This is an advantage of Continental life."

Mrs. Browning greatly admired the work of Mr. Page, whose portraits she found "like Titian's." But the tinted statues of Gibson seemed to her inartistic. His famous painted Venus she called "pretty," but only as a wax doll might be, not as a work of genuine art. Then Thackeray and his two daughters came; Miss Anne (now known to the world of literature as Anne Thackeray Ritchie) was a special favorite with Mrs. Browning.

Coming to Rome at one time from Florence in midwinter, the Brownings found that the Storys had taken an apartment for them (in the Via Bocca di Leone), and they arrived to find lighted fires and lamps. Their journey had included a week's visit at Assisi, studying the rich art of Cimabue and Giotto in the church of the great Franciscan monastery. Mrs. Browning visited studios in Rome and found that of Mr. Crawford more interesting to her than Mr. Gibson's, but no artist is "as near" to her, as she herself says, as Mr. Page. The Storys left the Porta Pinciana to live at No. 93 in the Piazza di Spagna, and in the same house with the Brownings, in the Bocca di Leone, Mr. Page had his apartment. To Lowell, Mr. Story wrote of the Brownings:-

"The Brownings and we became great friends in Florence, and, of course, we could not become friends without liking each other. He, Emelyn says, is like you. He is of my size, but slighter, with straight black hair, small eyes, a smooth face, and manner nervous and rapid. He has great vivacity, but not the least humor; some sarcasm, considerable critical faculty, and very great frankness and friendliness of manner and mind. Mrs. Browning will sit buried up in a large easy-chair listening and talking very quietly and pleasantly. Very unaffected is she. . . . I have hundreds of statues in my head, but they are in the future tense. Powers I knew very well in Florence. He is a man of great mechanical talent and natural strength of perception, but with no poetry in his composition, and I think no creative power. . . . I have been to hear Allegri's 'Miserere' in the Sistine Chapel, with the awful and mighty figures of Michael Angelo looking down from the ceiling; to hear Guglielmi's 'Miserere' in St. Peter's, while the gloom of evening was gathering in the lofty aisles and shrouding the frescoed domes, was a deeply affecting and solemnly beautiful experience. Never can one forget the plaintive wailing of the voices that seemed to implore pity and pardon."

It was in 1856 that the Storys located themselves in Palazzo Barberini, which Bernini designed and which was built "out of the quarry of the Coliseum" by Urban VIII. It is one of the wonderful old palaces of Rome,-this mass of Barberini courts, gardens, terraces, and vast apartments, with the interminable winding stairs, where on one landing Thorwaldsen's lion lies before the great doors decorated with the arms of Popes and princes. Here the old Cardinal Barberini lived his stormy life; here are the gallery and the library,-the latter stored with infinite treasures of ancient documents, old maps whose portrayal of the earth bears little resemblance to the present, and famous manuscripts and volumes in old vellum, some fifty thousand in all. In the Barberini gallery are a few noted works,-Raphael's "Fornarina," Guido's "Beatrice Cenci," a "Holy Family" by Andrea del Sarto, and others.

SPANISH STEPS, PIAZZA TRINITà DEI MONTI, ROME

The Via delle Quattro Fontane, on which the Palazzo Barberini stands, might well be known as the street of the wonderful vista. One strolls down it to the Via Sistina and to Piazza Trinità de' Monti at the head of the Spanish steps (the Scala di Spagna), pausing for the loveliness of the view. Across the city rises the opposite height of Monte Mario, and to the left the Janiculum, now crowned with the magnificent equestrian statue of Garibaldi, which is in evidence from almost every part of Rome. As far as the eye can see the Campagna stretches away, infinite as the sea-a very Campagna Mystica. The luminous air, the faint, misty blue of the distance, the deep purple shadows on the hills, make up a landscape of color. At the foot of the Spanish steps the flower venders spread out their wares,-great bunches of the flame-colored roses peculiar to Italy, the fragrant white hyacinths, golden jonquils, baskets of violets, and masses of lilies of the valley.

On many a night of brilliant moonlit glory the artistic sojourners in Rome lingered on the parapet of the Pincian Hill watching the moonlight flood the Eternal City until churches and palaces seemed to swim in a sea of silver. Or in the morning, when the rose-red of dawn was aglow, there seemed to hover over the city that wraith of mist whose secret Claude Lorraine surprises in his landscapes. These dawn visions of mysterious, incredible beauty are a part of the very identity of Rome.

There were mornings when the Hawthornes with Mrs. Jameson or some other friend would drive out to the old San Lorenzo (fuori le mura), the church founded by Constantine in 330 on the site where the body of St. Lawrence was buried. At various periods the church was enlarged and finally, as recently as in 1864, Pio Nono had great improvements made under the architect Vespignani. In the piazza in front was placed an immense column of red granite, some sixty feet high, with the statue of St. Lawrence, a standing figure, at the top. It is most impressive. The colonnade at the entrance of the church is decorated with frescoes and contains two immense sarcophagi, whose sides are beautifully sculptured with reliefs. The roof is supported by six Ionic columns. Entering the church one finds an interior of three aisles divided by colossal columns of Oriental granite. In the middle aisle, on both sides the galleries, are fresco paintings illustrating the martyrdom of St. Lawrence and of St. Stephen, one series on the right and the other on the left. One of these paintings, especially, of the life of St. Lawrence, is strangely haunting to the imagination. It represents the youthful, slender figure, nude, save for slight drapery, laid on the gridiron while the fire is being kindled under it and the fagots shovelled in. The physical shrinking of the flesh-of every nerve-from the torture, the spiritual strength and invincible energy of the countenance, are wonderfully depicted. The great aisle was painted by order of Pius IX by Cesare Fracassini; in it are two pulpits of marble. A double staircase of marble conducts to that part of the Basilica of Constantine which by Honorius III was converted into the presbytery. It is decorated at the upper end by twelve columns of violet marble which rise from the level of the primitive basilica beneath. At the end is the ancient pontifical seat, adorned with mosaic and precious marbles. The papal altar is under a canopy in the Byzantine style. The pavement of this presbytery is worthy of particular attention. Descending to the confessional which is under the high altar the tomb of the martyred saints, Lawrence, Stephen, and Justin, is found.

TOMB OF PIO NONO, SAN LORENZO (FUORI LE MURA), ROME

It was the request of Pio Nono that his mortal body should rest here, where it is placed in a simple tomb, according to his own instructions; but the chapel is very rich in decoration which was paid for by money sent from all parts of the world.

The chapel walls are entirely encrusted in mother-of-pearl, gilt bronze, and beautiful marbles. The mosaic paintings are formed of gold and precious stones of fabulous value. This interior is perhaps the richest in the world in its decoration. San Lorenzo is a patriarchal church, and one of the seven pilgrimage churches of Rome. Near San Lorenzo is the Campo Verano, a cemetery containing many beautiful memorial sculptures.

In those days, half a century ago, the entrance most often used by visitors to Rome was through the Via Flaminia and the Porta del Popolo, opening on the Piazza del Popolo, rather the most picturesque and impressive place in all Rome. On the left is the Pincian Hill (Monte Pincio), with its rich terraces, balustrades, its beautiful porticos filled with statuary, its groves of cypress and ilex trees; a classic vision rising on the sight and enchanting the imagination. On the side opposite the Porta three roads diverge in fan shape-the Via Babuino, the Corso, and the Ripetta, with the "twin churches" side by side; one between the Babuino and the Corso, the other between the Corso and the Ripetta.

The Corso (which was the ancient Flaminian Way) runs straight to the Piazza Venezia at the foot of the Capitoline Hill. This Piazza del Popolo was widened and decorated by Pius VII. It is formed by two semicircles, adorned with fountains and statues, and terminated by four symmetrical edifices. In the semicircles are colossal groups in marble, and a road opposite the Pincio leads to the Ponte Margherita and the Prati di Castello.

The obelisk in the centre of the piazza was brought to Rome from Heliopolis by C?sar Augustus and originally stood in the Circus Maximus. It was erected here by Pope Sixtus V, and it is nearly a hundred feet in height. It is formed of red granite, and while it has been broken in three places, the hieroglyphics are still legible. This obelisk was first erected in Egypt as a part of the Temple of the Sun at Heliopolis, in a period preceding that of Rameses II. After the battle of Actium, Augustus transported it to Rome, and it was first placed in the Circus Maximus, but during the reign of Valentinian it fell from its pedestal and lay buried in the earth, until in the sixteenth century Pope Sixtus V had it placed in the centre of the Piazza del Popolo, and consecrated it to the cross. The two inscriptions are on opposite sides. One thus reads:-

"The Emperor C?sar, son of the divine C?sar Augustus, Sovereign Pontiff, twelve times Emperor, eleven times Consul, fourteen times Tribune, having conquered Egypt, consecrated this gift to the Sun."

The other inscription is as follows:-

"Sixtus V, Sovereign Pontiff, excavated, transported, and restored this obelisk, sacrilegiously consecrated to the Sun by the great Augustus, in the great Circus, where it lay in ruins, and dedicated it to the cross triumphant in the fourth year of his pontificate."

The Church of Santa Maria del Popolo is built into the very wall of Monte Pincio on the site of Nero's tomb. It dates back to 1099, and consists of three naves and several chapels. In the first chapel is a "Nativity" by Pinturicchio, who also painted the lunettes. Another chapel belongs to the Cibo family, and is rich in marbles and adorned with sixteen columns of Sicilian jasper. The "Conception" is by Maratta, the "Martyrdom of St. Lawrence" by Morandi, and the "St. Catherine" by Volterra. The "Visitation" was sculptured by Bernini in 1679. The third chapel is painted by Pinturicchio (1513), and the fourth has an interesting bas-relief of the fifteenth century. The picture of the Virgin, on the high altar, is one of those attributed to St. Luke; the paintings on the vault of the choir are by Pinturicchio. The two marble monuments are, from their perfection of design and execution, reckoned among the best modern works. They are by Cantucci da S. Savino. In the chapel following is an "Assumption" by Annibale Carracci; the side pictures are by Caravaggio. The last chapel but one in the small nave is the Chigi chapel, and is one of the most celebrated in Rome.

Raphael gave the designs for the dome, the paintings of the frieze, and the altar picture. This latter was begun by Del Piombo and finished by Salviati. The statue of Daniel is by Bernini. The front of the altar and the statues of Jonah and Elijah were done by Lorenzetto (1541), from designs by Raphael. Outside this chapel is the monument of Princess Odescalchi Chigi (1771), by Paolo Posi. The stained windows of the choir belong to the fourteenth century, and in the sacristy and the vestibule are monuments also of the fourteenth century and of the fifteenth. Luther resided in the convent attached to this church when he was in Rome.

There is a legend that a large walnut tree grew on the site of Nero's tomb in whose branches innumerable crows had their home, and that they devastated all that part of Rome. An appeal was made to the Virgin, who declared that the crows were demons who kept watch over the ashes of Nero, and ordered the tree to be cut down and burned, the ashes being scattered to the air, and that, on the spot, a church should be built to her honor. This was accomplished, and the crows no more troubled the Eternal City.

The gardens of Lucullus were on the Monte Pincio. The view of the terraced hillside from the Piazza del Popolo is one of the most impressive in Rome.

The Hawthornes left Rome in 1859; and the death of Mrs. Browning in June of 1861 left the little circle of the Roman winters irreparably broken. "Returning to Rome," wrote Story to Charles Eliot Norton, "I have not one single intimate . . . no one with whom I can walk any of the higher ranges of art and philosophy." Mr. Story had modelled the busts of both Mr. and Mrs. Browning during their sojourns in Rome; in 1853 Harriet Hosmer had made the cast of the "clasped hands" of the poets, the model having since been cast in bronze; Mr. Page had, as already noted, painted a portrait of Robert Browning; and Mr. Leighton (afterward Sir Frederick) had made a beautiful portrait sketch of Mrs. Browning. In later years all these memorials, with other paintings or plastic sketches of the wedded poets, were grouped in Mr. Barrett Browning's palace in Venice.

At this time Mr. Story had completed his "Cleopatra," which Hawthorne had embalmed in literary mention in "The Marble Faun;" and beside his "Judith," "Sappho," and other lesser works, he had achieved one of his finest successes in the "Libyan Sibyl." Both the "Cleopatra" and the "Sibyl" became famous. Whether they would produce so strong an effect at the present stage of twentieth-century life is a problem, but one that need not press for solution. Mr. Story was singularly fortunate in certain conditions that grouped themselves about his life and combined to establish his fame. These conditions, of course, were largely the outer reflection of inner qualities, as our conditions are apt to be; still, the "lack of favoring gales" not infrequently foredooms some gallant bark to a disastrous course.

"Man is his own star. . . .

*****

Our acts, our angels, are, for good or ill,

Our fatal shadows that walk by us still,"

it is true; yet has not Edith Thomas embodied something of that overruling destiny that every thoughtful observer must discern in life in these lines?-

"You may blame the wind or no,

But it ever hath been so-

Something bravest of its kind

Leads a frustrate life and blind,

For the lack of favoring gales

Blowing blithe on other sails."

Only occasionally have we

". . . the time, and the place,

And the loved one all together."

Mr. Story's nature was eminently sympathetic with the other arts; he was himself almost as much a literary man as he was a sculptor; he was the friend and companion of literary men, and to the fact that art in the middle years of the nineteenth century was far more a literary topic than a matter of critical scrutiny, Mr. Story owed an incalculable degree of his fame. He was an extremely interesting figure with his social grace, his liberal culture, and his versatile gifts. His life was centred in choice and refined associations. If not dowered with lofty and immortal original genius, he had a singular combination of talent, of fastidious taste, and of the intellectual appreciation that enabled him to select interesting ideal subjects to portray in the plastic art. These appealed to the special interest of his literary friends and were widely discussed in the press and periodicals of the day. It is a bonmot of contemporary studio life that Hawthorne rather than Story created the "Cleopatra," and one ingenious spirit suggests that as Mr. Story put nothing of expression or significance into his statues, the beholder could read into them anything he pleased; finding an empty mould, so to speak, into which to pour whatever image or embodiment he might conjure up from the infinite realm of imagination. One of the latest of these contemporary critics declares that "Story declined appreciably, year by year, falling away from his own standard; haunted to the point of obsession by visions of mournful female figures, generally seated, wrapped in gloom. It seems strange," this critic continues, "that so active a mind should dream of nothing but brooding, sinister souls, of bodies bowed in grief, or tense with rage. Never once, apparently, did there come to him a vision of buoyancy and grace; of a beauty that one could love; of good cheer and joy of very living; always these unwholesome creatures born of that belated Byronic romanticism."

This criticism, while it has as little appreciation of Mr. Story's exquisite culture and of the taste and refinement of his art as the general rush of the motor car and telephonic conversational life of the first decade of the twentieth century has of the thoughtful, the poetic, the leisurely atmosphere of Mr. Story's time, is yet not without a keen flashlight of truth. Painting had its reactionary crisis from the pre-Raphaelite ideals and the intransigeants have had their own conflicts in which they survived, or disappeared, according to the degree of artistic vitality within. Sculpture and literature must also meet the series of tests to which the onward progress of life persists in subjecting them, and those who are submerged and perish can only encourage the survivors as did the Greeks, as sung by Theocritus:-

"A shipwrecked sailor, buried on this coast,

Bids you set sail.

Full many a gallant ship, when we were lost,

Weathered the gale."

"As we refine, our checks grow finer," said Emerson. As life becomes more elaborate and ambitious, the critical tests increase. Contemporary fame can be created for the artist by favorable contemporary comment; but it rests with himself, after all; it rests in the abiding significance of his work-or the lack of it-as to whether this fame is perpetuated. That of Mr. Story does not hold within itself all the qualities that insure the appreciation of the present day. It is, as the critic of the hour expresses himself, "too literary,"-too largely a question of classic titles which appealed to the mid-nineteenth-century authors whose judgment of art the twentieth century finds particularly amusing. Henry James has somewhere held up to ridicule the early Beacon Hill Boston for its impassioned devotion to the "attenuated outlines" of Flaxman's art. But the work of Story will survive all transient variations of opinion, even of the present realistic age; for is not true realism, after all, to be found in the eternal ideals of truth, grace, dignity, refinement, significance, and beauty? These qualities have a message to convey; and no one can study with sympathetic appreciation any sculpture of William Wetmore Story without feeling that the work has something to say; that it is not a mere reproduction of some form, but is, rather, an idea impersonated, and therefore it has life, it has significance. The criticism of the immediate hour is not necessarily infallible because it is contemporary. What does William Watson say?

"A deft musician does the breeze become

Whenever an ?olian harp it finds;

Hornpipe and hurdy-gurdy both are dumb

Unto the most musicianly of winds."

It is an irretrievable loss if, in the passion for the vita nuova, a generation, or a century, shall substitute for the ?olian harp the mere hornpipe and hurdy-gurdy of the hour. In another of his keenly critical quatrains William Watson embodies this signal truth:-

"His rhymes the poet flings at all men's feet,

And whoso will may trample on his rhymes.

Should Time let die a song that's pure and sweet,

The singer's loss were more than matched by Time's."

Art is progressive, and the present is always the "heir of all the ages" preceding; but it cannot be affirmed that it invariably makes the best use of its rich inheritance.

There are latter-day sculptors who excel in certain excellences that Story lacked; still, it would not be his loss, but our own, if we fail in a due recognition of that in his art which may appeal to the imagination; for, whatever the enthusiasms of other cults may be, there are qualities of beauty, strength, and profound significance in the art of Story that must insure their permanent recognition. Still, it remains true that Mr. Story owes his fame in an incalculable degree to the friendly pens of Hawthorne and others of his immediate circle,-Lowell, Motley, Charles Eliot Norton, Thackeray, Browning,-friends who, according to the latest standards of art criticism, were not unqualified nor absolute judges of art, but who were in sympathy with ideal expression and recognized this as embodied in the statues of Story.

Browning wrote to the London Times an article on Mr. Story's work, in which he conjured up most of the superlative phrases of commendation that the limits of the English language allow to praise his work, none of whose marshalled force was too poor to do him reverence. The versatile gifts of Story's personality drew around him friends whose influence was potent and, indeed, authoritative in their time.

Still, any analysis of these conditions brings the searcher back to the primary truth that without the gifts and grace to attract about him an eminent circle of choice spirits he could not have enjoyed this potent aid and inspiration; and thus, that

"Man is his own star,"

is an assertion that life, as well as poetry, justifies. In the full blaze of this fundamental truth, it is, not unfrequently, the mysterious spiritual tragedy of life that many an one as fine of fibre and with lofty ideals

"Leads a frustrate life and blind,

For the lack of favoring gales

Blowing blithe on other sails."

Mr. Story was himself of too fine an order not to divine this truth. With what unrivalled power and pathos has he expressed it in his poem-one far too little known-the "Io Victis":-

"I sing the song of the Conquered, who fell in the Battle of Life,-

The hymn of the wounded, the beaten, who died overwhelmed in the strife;

Not the jubilant song of the victors, for whom the resounding acclaim

Of nations was lifted in chorus, whose brows wore the chaplet of fame,

But the hymn of the low and the humble, the weary, the broken in heart,

*****

Whose youth bore no flower on its branches, whose hopes burned in ashes away,

From whose hands slipped the prize they had grasped at, who stood at the dying of day

With the wreck of their life all around them. . . ."

In this poem Mr. Story touched the highest note of his life,-as poet, sculptor, painter, or writer of prose; in no other form of expression has he equalled the sublimity of sentiment in these lines:-

". . . I stand on the field of defeat,

In the shadow, with those who are fallen, and wounded, and dying, and there

*****

Hold the hand that is helpless, and whisper, 'They only the victory win

Who have fought the good fight, and have vanquished the demon that tempts us within;

Who have held to their faith unseduced by the prize that the world holds on high;

Who have dared for a high cause to suffer, resist, fight,-if need be, to die.'"

Such a poem must have its own immortality in lyric literature.

For a period of forty years the home of the Storys in Palazzo Barberini was a noted centre of the most charming social life. Mr. Story's literary work-in his contributions of essays and poems to the Atlantic Monthly; in his published works, the "Roba di Roma," "Conversations in a Studio," his collected "Poems," and others-gave him a not transitory rank in literature which rivals, if it does not exceed, his rank in art.

Meantime other artists were to take up their permanent abode in the Seven-hilled City,-Elihu Vedder in 1866; Franklin Simmons two years later; Waldo and Julian Story, the two sons of William Wetmore Story, though claiming Rome as their home, are American by parentage and ancestry; and Mr. Waldo Story succeeds his father in pursuing the art of sculpture in the beautiful studios in the Via San Martino built by the elder Story. In 1902 Charles Walter Stetson, with his gifted wife, known to the contemporary literary world by her maiden name, Grace Ellery Channing, set up their household gods and lighted their altar fires in the city by the Tiber, ready, it may be, to exclaim with Ovid:-

"Four times happy is he, and times without number is happy,

Who the city of Rome uninterdicted enjoys."

THE DANCE OF THE PLEIADES

Elihu Vedder

If art is a corner of the universe seen through a temperament, the temperament of Mr. Vedder must offer an enthralling study, for it seems to be a lens whose power of refraction defies prophecy because it deals with the incalculable forces. His art concerns itself little with the ?sthetic, but is chiefly the art of the intellect and the imagination. All manner of symbols and analogies; the laws of the universe that prevail beyond the stars; the celestial figures; the undreamed significance in prophecy or in destiny; omens, signs, and wonders; the world forces, advancing stealthily in the shadows of a dusky twilight; the Fates, under brilliant skies, gathering in the stars; oracles and supernatural coincidences that lurk in undreamed-of days; the Pleiades dancing in a light that never was on sea or land; unknown Shapes that meet outside space and time and question each other's identity; the dead that come forth from their graves and glide, silent and spectral, through a crowd, unseen by any one; the prayer of the celestial powers poured forth in the utter solitude of the vast desert,-it is these that are the realm of Vedder's art, and what has the normal world of portrait and landscape to do with such art as this? Can it only be relegated to a class, an order, of its own, and considered as being-Vedderesque? It seems to stand alone and unparalleled. In his work lies the transfiguration of all mystery. Vedder never paints nature, in the sense of landscapes, and yet one often feels that he has the key to the very creation of nature; that he has supped with gods and surprised the secrets of the stars. Do the winds whisper to him?-

"The Muse can knit

What is past, what is done,

With the web that's just begun."

How can he find the design to phrase his thought-this painter of ideas?

"Can blaze be done in cochineal,

Or noon in mazarin?"

Whatever the Roman environment may have done for Allston, Page, and Story, there is no question but that to Vedder it has been as his soul's native air. For him the sirens sing again on the coast; the sorceress works her spell; the Cum?an Sibyl again flies, wraithlike, over the plain, clasping her rejected leaves of destiny which Tarquin in his blindness has refused to buy. The Rome that lies buried under the ages rises for Vedder. His art cannot be catalogued under any known division of portrait, landscape, marine, or genre, but it is simply-the art of Vedder. It stands alone and absolutely unrivalled. The pictorial creations of Vedder are as wholly without precedent or comparison as if they were the sole pictorial treasures of the world. The visitor may care for them, or not care, according to his own ability to comprehend and to recognize the inscrutable genius there manifested; but in either case he will find nowhere else, in either ancient or contemporary art, any parallel to these works.

One could well fancy that to any interrogation of his conceptions the artist might reply:-

"I am seeker of the stone,

Living gem of Solomon.

But what is land, or what is wave,

To me, who only jewels crave?

*****

I'm all-knowing, yet unknowing;

Stand not, pause not in my going."

In the rich, weird realm of Omar Khayyam's Persian poem, the Rubaiyat, Mr. Vedder found the opportunity of his life for translating its thought into strange, mystic symbolism. Never were artist and poet so blended in one as in Vedder's wonderful illustrations for this poem. It has nothing in common with what we ordinarily call an illustrated work. It is a great treasure of art for all the ages. It is a very fount of inspiration for painter and poet. An exquisite sonnet suggested by "The Angel of the Darker Cup" is the following by Louise Chandler Moulton:-

"She bends her lovely head to taste thy draught,

O thou stern Angel of the Darker Cup!

With thee to-night in the dim shades to sup,

Where all they be who from that cup have quaffed.

She had been glad in her own loveliness, and laughed

At Life's strong enemies who lie in wait;

Had kept with golden youth her queenly state,

All unafraid of Sorrow's threat'ning shaft.

"Then human Grief found out her human heart,

And she was fain to go where pain is dumb;

So Thou wert welcome, Angel dread to see,

And she fares onward with thee, willingly,

To dwell where no man loves, no lovers part,-

Thus Grief that is, makes welcome Death to come."

The sonnet, the stanza, and the pictorial interpretation all form one beautiful trio in poetic and graphic art.

Writing of Mr. Vedder, Mr. W. C. Brownell speaks of the personal force in a picture and says that with Vedder this personal force is imagination,-"the imagination of a man whose natural expression is pictorial, but who is a man as well as a painter; who has lived as well as painted, who has speculated, pondered, and felt much. . . . It is this," he continues, "that places Vedder in the front rank of the imaginative painters of the day." Of Mr. Vedder's painting called "The Enemy Sowing Tares," Mr. Brownell writes:-

". . . Here you note a dozen phases of significance. The theme is unconventional; the man has become the archenemy; the night is weird and awe-inspiring; the tares represent the foe of the church-money; they are sown at the foot of the cross-the symbol of the church. . . . Mr. Vedder has not passed his life in Rome for nothing. His attitude is in harmony with the spirit of the Sistine and the Stanze."

One of the interesting and mystical works of Vedder is "The Soul between Doubt and Faith,"-three heads, that of the Soul hooded and draped, looking before her with eyes that seem to discern things not seen by mortals; the sinister face of Doubt at the left, the serene, inspiring countenance of Faith at the right. It is a magical picture to have before one with its profoundly significant message. The works of Mr. Vedder will grow more priceless as the years pass by. They are pictures for the ages.

In Mr. Ezekiel, another American artist whose almost lifelong home has been in Rome, is a sculptor whose touch and technique have won recognition. In a recumbent figure of Christ is seen one of the best examples of his art. It is pervaded by the classic influences in which he has lived. The studios of Mr. Ezekiel, in the ruins of the old Baths of Caracalla, are very picturesque and his salon, with its music, its wealth of books including many rare and beautiful copies, and its old pictures and bric-a-brac, is one of the fascinating interiors of the Eternal City.

The visitor who is privileged to see the Story studios in the Via San Martino finds Mr. Waldo Story occupying these spacious rooms where the flash of a fountain in the court, a view of the garden, green-walled by vines, with flowers and shrubs and broken statues, make the place alluring to dreamer and poet. In these rooms may be seen many of the elder Story's finest statues in cast or marble, the "Libyan Sibyl," "Nemesis," "Sappho," the "Christ," "Into the Silent Land," and others, with many portrait busts, among which are those of Browning, Shelley, Keats, Theodore Parker, Mrs. Browning, Marchesa Peruzzi de Medici (Edith Story), John Lothrop Motley, one of Story's nearer friends, and Lord Houghton.

In the work of Mr. Waldo Story one admirable portrait bust is of Cecil Rhodes. A decorative work, a fountain for the Rothschild country estate in England, is charmingly designed as a Galatea (in bronze), standing in a marble shell that is drawn by Nereids and attended by Cupids. The happy blending of marble and bronze gives to this work a pleasing variety of color. Another decorative design is that of "Nymphs Drinking at the Fountain of Love." These studios are among the most interesting in Rome.

It was in 1868 that Franklin Simmons, then a young artist from Maine, turned to Rome as his artistic Mecca. Since then the Eternal City has always been his home, but his frequent and prolonged sojourns in America have kept him closely in touch with its national life. Mr. Simmons is the idealist who translates his vision into the actuality of the hour and who also exalts this actuality of the hour to the universality of the vision. In the creation of portrait busts and of the statues and monumental memorials of great men he infuses into them the indefinable quality of extended relation which relegates his work to the realm of the universal and, therefore, to the immortality of art, rather than restricting it to the temporal locality. Louis Gorse observes that it is not the absence of faults that constitutes a masterpiece, but that it is flame, it is life, it is emotion, it is sincerity. Under the touch of Mr. Simmons the personal accent speaks; to his creative power flame and life respond, and to no sculptor is the truth so admirably stated by M. Gorse more applicable.

Mr. Simmons has been singularly fortunate in a wide American recognition, having received a liberal share of the more important commissions for great public works of sculpture. The splendid statue, al fresco, of the poet Longfellow for his native city, Portland, was appropriately the work of Mr. Simmons as a native of the same state; the portrait statues of General Grant, Gov. William King, Roger Williams, and Francis H. Pierrepont, all in Statuary Hall in the Capitol in Washington; the portrait busts of Grant, Sheridan, Porter, Hooker, Thomas, and other heroes of the Civil War; the colossal group of the Naval Monument at the head of Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington,-are all among the works of Mr. Simmons.

Like all artists who, like the poet, are born and not made, Mr. Simmons gave evidence of his artistic bent in his early childhood. After graduating from Bates College he modelled a bust of its president, and a little later, going to Washington (in the winter of 1865-66), many of the noted men of the time gave him sittings, and in a series of portrait busts his genius impressed itself by its dignity of conception and an unusual power of sympathetic interpretation. He modelled the bust of Grant while he was the General's guest in camp, taking advantage of whatever spare minutes General Grant could give for sittings in the midst of his pressing responsibilities; and it is perhaps due to this unusually intimate intercourse with the great hero, and the rapport, not difficult of establishment, between two men whose natures were akin in a certain noble sincerity and lofty devotion to the purest ideals, that Mr. Simmons owes the power with which he has absolutely interpreted the essential characteristics of General Grant in that immortal portrait statue in the Capitol.

Washington is, indeed, the place to especially study the earlier work of Franklin Simmons. An important one is the Logan memorial,-an equestrian statue which is considered the finest work in sculpture in the capital, and which is the only statue in the United States in which both the group and the pedestal are of bronze. The visitor in Washington who should be ignorant of the relative rank of the great men commemorated by the equestrian memorial monuments of the city might be justified in believing that General Logan was the most important man of his time, if he judged from the relative greatness of his statue. When Congress decided upon this group, Mr. Simmons was requested to prepare a model. This proving eminently acceptable, Mr. Simmons found himself, quite to his own surprise, fairly launched on this arduous work, involving years of intense concentration and labor. For this monumental work was to be not merely that of the brave and gallant military leader,-a single idea embodied, as in those of Generals Scott, Sheridan, Thomas, and others,-but it was to be a permanent interpretation of the soldier-statesman, mounted on his battle-horse; it was to be, in the comprehensive grasp of Mr. Simmons, the vital representation of the complex life and individuality of General Logan and, even more, it must reflect and suggest the complex spirit of his age. In this martial figure was thus embodied a manifold and mysterious relation, as one of the potent leaders and directive powers in an age of tumultuous activities; an age of strife and carnage, whose goal was peace; of adverse conditions and reactions, whose manifest outcome was yet prosperity and national greatness and splendid moral triumph. All these must be suggested in the atmosphere, so to speak, of the artist's work; and no sculptor who was not also an American-not merely by ancestry and activity, but one in mind and heart only; one who was an intense patriot and identified with national ideas-could ever have produced such a work as that of the Logan monument. So unrivalled does it stand, unique among all the equestrian art of this country, that it enchants the art student and lover with its indefinable spell. When this colossal work was cast in bronze, in Rome, the event was considered important. The king and the Royal family visited the studio of Mr. Simmons to see the great group, and so powerfully did its excellence appeal to King Umberto that he knighted Mr. Simmons, making him Cavaliere of the Crown of Italy. Nor was Mr. Simmons the prophet who was not without honor save in his own country, for his alma mater gave him the degree of M.A. in 1867; Colby College honored him with the Master's degree in 1885, and in 1888 Bowdoin bestowed upon this eminent Maine artist the same degree. In 1892 Mr. Simmons married the Baroness von Jeinsen, a brilliant and beautiful woman who, though a lady of foreign title, was an American by birth. An accomplished musician, a critical lover of art, and the most delightful of hostesses and friends, Mrs. Simmons drew around her a remarkable circle of charming people and made their home in the Palazzo Tamagno a notable centre of social life. No woman in the American colony of the Seven-hilled City was ever more beloved; and it was frequently noted by guests at her weekly receptions that Mrs. Simmons was as solicitous for the enjoyment of the most unknown stranger as for those of rank and title who frequented her house. Her grace and loveliness were fully equalled by her graciousness and that charm of personality peculiarly her own. Her death in Rome, on Christmas of 1905, left a vacant place, indeed, in many a home which had been gladdened by her radiant presence. One of the most beautiful works of Mr. Simmons is a portrait of his wife in bas-relief, representing her standing just at the opening of parted curtains, as if she were about to step behind and vanish. It is a very poetic conception. A bust of Mrs. Simmons, also, in his studio, is fairly a speaking likeness of this beautiful and distinguished woman. It is over her grave in the Protestant cemetery that Mr. Simmons has placed one of his noblest ideal statues, "The Angel of the Resurrection,"-a memorial monument that is one of the art features of Rome to the visitor in the Eternal City.

"GRIEF AND HISTORY,"

DETAIL FROM NAVAL MONUMENT, WASHINGTON

Franklin Simmons

The brilliant and impressive Naval Monument, or Monument of Peace, as it is known in Washington, placed at the foot of Capitol Hill on Pennsylvania Avenue, is eloquent with the power of heroic suggestion that Mr. Simmons has imparted to it. The work breathes that exaltation of final triumph that follows temporary defeat. Those who died that the nation might live, are seen in the perpetual illumination of immortality. Not only has Mr. Simmons here perpetuated the suffering, the sacrifices of the Civil War, but that sublime and eternal truth of victory after defeat, of peace and serene exaltation after conflict, and the triumph of life after death, are all immortally embodied in this group crowned with those impressive and haunting figures, "Grief" and "History," which are considered as among the most classically beautiful and significant in the range of modern sculpture.

In the early winter of 1907 Mr. Simmons was invited by the American Ambassador to the Court of St. James, Hon. Whitelaw Reid, to send for Dorchester House, London, three busts of distinguished Americans,-those of Alexander Hamilton, Chief Justice Chase, and Hon. James G. Blaine, which Mr. Reid, in visiting the Roman studios of Mr. Simmons, had seen and greatly admired. The Ambassador observed that he "would like a few Americans, as well as so many Roman Emperors," about him.

These portrait busts all reveal an amazing force and mastery of work. The fine sculptural effect of the Hamilton and the wonderful blending of subtle delicacy of touch and vigor of treatment with which the nobility of character is expressed, mark this bust as something exceptional in portrait art. It has a matchless dignity and serene poise. The bust of Chief Justice Chase is a faithful and speaking reproduction of the very presence of its subject, instinct with vitality; and the fire and force and brilliancy of the bust of Hon. James G. Blaine fairly sweeps the visitor off his feet. The modelling is done with an apparent instantaneousness of power that is the highest realization of creative art. It is the magnetic Blaine, the impassioned and eloquent statesman, that rises before the gazer.

Mr. Simmons has long been a commanding figure in plastic art. No American sculptor abroad has, perhaps, received so many important public commissions as have been given to him. He has created nearly a score of memorial groups; he has modelled over one hundred portrait busts and statues. His industry has kept step with his genius. The latest success of Mr. Simmons in the line of monumental art is the statue (in bronze) of Alexander Hamilton, which was unveiled at Paterson, N. J., in May of 1907. The splendidly poised figure, the dignity, the serene strength and yet the intense energy of the expression and of the entire pose are a revelation in the art of the portrait statue.

"THE GENIUS OF PROGRESS LEADING THE NATIONS"

Franklin Simmons

It is not, however, true that Mr. Simmons has ever resigned himself to the necessity of producing portrait and memorial sculpture exclusively. In the realm of the purely ideal Mr. Simmons finds his most felicitous field for creative work. A bas-relief entitled "The Genius of Progress Leading the Nations," with all its splendid fire and action, the motif being that of the spirits Life and Light beating down and driving out the spirits of darkness and evil; "The Angel of the Resurrection," with its glad, triumphant assertion of the power of the immortal life; the poetry and sacredness of maternity as typified in the "Mother of Moses;" the statues of the "Galatea" and the "Medusa," and other ideal creations, indicate "the vision and the faculty divine" of Mr. Simmons. To a very great degree his art is that which the French describe as the grand manner, and to this is added a spiritual quality, a power of radiating the intellectual purpose, the profounder thought and the aspiration of the subject represented.

"MOTHER OF MOSES"

Franklin Simmons

One of the most charming of these ideal works is a statue of "Penelope," represented seated in the chair, her rich robe falling in graceful folds, and the little Greek fillet binding her hair. The face bears a meditative expression, into which has entered a hint of pathos and wistfulness in the dawning wonder as to whether, after all, Ulysses will return. The classic beauty of the pose; the exquisite modelling of the bust and arms and hands, every curve and contour so ideally lovely; the distinction of the figure in its noble and refined patrician elegance, are combined to render this work one that well deserves immortality in art, and to rank as a masterpiece in modern sculpture.

Another of his ideal figures, "The Promised Land," is a work of great spiritual exaltation and beauty. An Israelite woman has just arrived at the point when before her vision gleams the "Promised Land"; the face tells its own story of all she has passed through,-the trials, the sadness, the obstacles to be overcome; but now she sees the fulfilment of her hopes and dreams. It is a most interesting creation, and one in which is portrayed the artist's spiritual insight and susceptibility to poetic exaltation. To one visitor to Mr. Simmons's studio this statue suggested the following lines:-

Fair on her sight it gleams,-the Promised Land!

The rose of dawn sifts through the azure air,

And all her weariness and toil and care

Vanish, as if from her some tender hand

Lifted the burden, and transformed the hour

To this undreamed-of sense of joy and power!

The rapture and the ecstasy divine

Are deep realities that only wait

Their hour to dawn, nor ever rise too late

To draw the soul to its immortal shrine.

O Sculptor! thy great gift has shaped this clay,

To image the profoundest truth, and stand

As witness of the spirit power that may

Achieve the vision of the Promised Land!

"VALLEY FORGE"

Franklin Simmons

In a statuette in bronze called "Valley Forge," Mr. Simmons has fairly incarnated the entire spirit of the Revolutionary period in that mysterious way recognized only in its result; all that unparalleled epoch of tragic intensity and sublime triumph lives again in this work. The fidelity to a lofty ideal which essentially characterizes Mr. Simmons is as unswerving as that of Merlin, who followed "The Gleam."

"Great the Master

And sweet the Magic

When over the valley

In early summers,

Over the mountain,

On human faces,

And all around me

Moving to melody,

Floated the Gleam."

This American sculptor who, in his early youth, sought the artistic atmosphere of Rome as the environment most stimulating to his dawning power, who accepted with unfailing courage the incidental privations of art life in a foreign land more renowned for beauty than for comfort, who

". . . never turned his back, but marched breast forward,

Never doubted clouds would break,"

has expressed his message in many purely ideal works,-the message that the true artist must always give to the world and that leads humanity to the crowning truth of life, that of the ceaseless progress of the soul in its immortality.

For the brief and significant assertion of the apostle condenses the most profound truth of life when he says:-

"To be carnally minded is death; but to be spiritually minded is life and peace."

In these words are imaged the supreme purpose of all the experiences of the life on earth; and to the artist whose works bear this lofty message of the triumph of spirituality, his reward shall appear, not in the praise of men, but in the effect on character that his efforts have aided to exalt; in the train of nobler influences that his work shall perpetually inspire and create.

Mr. Simmons has always found Rome potent in fascination. One may not want to go to St. Peter's every day, but one knows it is there, and there is some inexplicable satisfaction in being where it is possible to easily enter this impressive interior. One may not go near the Forum for a month, or even a season, but the knowledge that one may find it and the wonderful Palatine Hill any hour of any day is a perpetual delight. The Vatican galleries, with their great masterpieces; the Sistine Chapel, the stately, splendid impressiveness of San Giovanni Laterano; the wanderings in Villa Borghese, and the picturesque climbing of the Spanish steps, even all the inconveniences and deprivations, become a part of the story of Rome which the artist absorbs and loves.

The studios of Mr. Simmons in the Via San Nicolo da Tolentino are a centre of artistic resort, and his personal life is one of distinction amid the picturesque beauty and enchantment of the Eternal City.

For many years (until the death of Mrs. Simmons in 1905) the sculptor and his wife had their home in the beautiful Palazzo Tamagno in the Via Agostino Depretis, where one of those spacious apartments of twenty to thirty rooms, only to be found in a Roman palace, was made by them a brilliant centre of social life. Mrs. Simmons was herself a musical artist, with impassioned devotion to music; and her rare personal charm and distinction of presence drew around her a most interesting circle. Her receptions were for many years a noted feature of Roman society. The social life in Rome is very brilliant, interesting, and fascinating. The sight-seeing is a kind of attendant atmosphere,-the perpetual environment offering, but not intruding itself. People come to Rome for reasons quite disconnected with the Golden House of Nero or the latest arch?ological discoveries in the Forum. The present, rather than the past, calls to them, and the present, too, is resplendent and alluring.

Of the foreign painters in Rome, Charles Walter Stetson, whose work recalls the glory of the old Italian masters, is especially distinguished for his genius as a colorist. No visitor in Rome can afford to miss the studio of one of the most imaginative of modern artists. A wonderful picture still in process is a genre work with several figures, called "Music." An idyllic scene of a festa amid the ilex trees-with the Italian sky and the golden sunshine pervading a luminous atmosphere, while the joyous abandon of the dancers appeals to all who love Italy-is one of the many beautiful pictorial scenes of Mr. Stetson which enchant the eye and haunt the imagination. Another picture is called "Beggars,"-a name that illy suggests its splendor. There is the fa?ade of a church to which a long flight of steps leads up, a procession of cardinals and friars in their rich robes, while at one side the groups of beggars shrink into the darkness. It is an impressive commentary upon life.

For a long period, through the early and middle years of the nineteenth century, Rome held her place as the world centre of modern artistic activity. Great works of poetic and ideal sculpture elevated the general public taste to a high degree of appreciation. The standards were not ingeniously adjusted to mere spectacular methods whose sole appeal was to the crude fancy of possible patrons. Art held her absolute and inviolate ideals, and the spirit of her votaries might well have been interpreted in Mrs. Browning's words:-

"I, who love my art,

Would never wish it lower to suit my stature."

The tone of public appreciation is raised to a high quality only when the artist refuses to sell his soul for a mess of pottage. He may, to be sure, need the pottage, but the price is too great. Rather will he find his attitude expressed in these wonderful lines:-

"I can live

At least my soul's life without alms from men.

And if it be in heaven instead of earth,

Let heaven look to it-I am not afraid."

All art that has within itself true vitality must ever be the leader and the creator of the popular taste; only when it falls into decadence does it become the servile follower.

It is a serious question as to the degree in which the art of to-day keeps faith with the eternal ideals. The great expositions of the past quarter of a century, while they have contributed immeasurably to the popularization of art and to the familiarization of the public with the work of individual painters and sculptors, have yet, in many ways, been a demoralizing influence in their insidious temptation to produce pictures or plastic art calculated to arrest immediate attention, thus putting a premium on the spectacular, the sensational, on that which makes the most immediate and direct appeal to the senses. The work becomes fairly a personal document wrought with perhaps an almost amazing finesse, but utterly failing in power to inspire joyous sensibility to beauty or to impart to the gazer that glow of radiant energy which lofty art invariably communicates to all who respond to its infinite exaltation.

All great art is inspired by religious ideals. Painting and sculpture give to these a presence. Under their creative power are these ideals manifested. To embody them in living form becomes the absolute responsibility of the artist. In Greece all the fortunate conditions to produce great art were curiously combined and pre-eminently supported by the conjunction of events and by the prevailing sentiment of the time. The artist drew his inspiration from the most exalted conception of life embodied in gods rather than in men. Art, too, was an affair of the state. It was the supreme interest and held national importance. The temple was erected to form an inclosure for the statue, rather than that the statue was created as an adornment for the temple. The greatest gifts were consecrated to the service of art, and under these stimulating influences it is little wonder that artistic creation achieved that vital potency which has thrilled all succeeding centuries and has communicated to them something of the divine air of that remote period. With the Renaissance in Italy art culminated in the immortal work of Raphael and Michael Angelo. In the Sistine Chapel, where that sublime grouping of prophets and sibyls speaks of the very miracle of art in their impassioned fire and glow; where the figures, the pose, the draperies are so grandly noble and infused with dignity and presence,-the very atmosphere is vocal with the language of the spirit and the expressions of religious reverence. These marvellous shapes of grandeur and sublime intimations carry the soul into a conscious communion with the divine. In these stupendous works Michael Angelo has given to all the ages the message of the highest exaltation of art. In the technique, in the marvellous dignity of the sentiment, in the depth of the feeling involved, in the grace and power of the composition, these works embody the artistic possibilities of painting.

"LA PIETA," ST. PETER'S, ROME

Michael Angelo

Are such works as those of Canova and Thorwaldsen no longer created?

Can it be that art is no longer of national importance? In our own country vast appropriations are made for internal improvements of all kinds, while art that kindles and re-enforces life is almost ignored. Our government-the government of the richest country in the world-appropriated $200,000 for a memorial monument to General Grant to be placed in Washington, while Italy-whose resources are so slender in comparison-appropriates seven million dollars-thirty-five times the amount-for her great monument to Victor Emmanuel which is now being erected in Rome to stand near the Capitol and the Palace of the Quirinale. Great art has always been closely associated with great devotion to religious ideals. The artist was the servant of the Lord, and it was his supreme purpose to embody the aspirations of the age and render his works a full and complete symbol of those true realities of life which have their being in the spiritual universe rather than in the changing temporal world of the outer universe. The so-called realism of the day is based on a false interpretation. "The things that are seen are temporal, while the things that are not seen are eternal." True realism is in spiritual qualities, not in physical attributes. True realism is found in such works as Canova's sublime group, where the figures of Religion and of Death forever impress all who stand before this magnificent monument; it is found in Thorwaldsen's "Christ;" in Franklin Simmons's "Angel of the Resurrection,"-in such works as those that have a language for the soul, rather than in a "Saturnalia."

Again, another fatal rock on which art must inevitably make shipwreck is the theory that it is good to perpetuate ugliness, in either painting or in sculpture. The permanent reality of life is beauty. So far as any person or object departs from this enduring reality, so far it is the result of distortion and deformity, and these, being the temporary, the accidental, the deficient, should not be perpetuated in ideal creation. It is an Apollo who embodies the permanent ideal of manhood-not a cripple or a hunchback. Still further: art should not only refuse to embody the defective, which is a mere negative; it should not only give form to the utmost perfection it beholds in nature or in humanity, but beyond this the responsibility is upon the artist to penetrate into loftier realms, to catch the vision not revealed to mortals. The artist is, by virtue of his high calling, a co-worker with God. An English wit has declared that life copies art rather than that art copies life. In this he expresses a truth rather than a merely clever epigram. It is the artist's business to lead, not to follow. Only as he leads does he fulfil his divinely appointed destiny. "I maintain that life is not a form of energy," writes Sir Oliver Lodge; "that it is not included in our present physical categories; that its explanation is still to be sought. And it appears to me to belong to a separate order of existence, which interacts with this material frame of things, and while here exerts guidance and control on the energy which already here exists; for although they alter the quantity of energy no whit, and though they merely utilize available energy like any other machine, live things are able to direct inorganic terrestrial energy along new and special paths, so as to achieve results without which such living agency could not have occurred." Does it for an instant seem that a great scientist's theoretical speculations of the laws of the universe and of organic life have no connection with the province of art? On the contrary. Truly does Balzac exclaim: "Is not God the whole of science, the all of love, the source of poetry?" The artist is he who enters into the divine realm; who discerns the divine creations as the true ideals of humanity, and who interprets to the world the sublime significance of the divine thought. Shall such an artist degrade his power by portraying ugliness-the mere defects of negations and distortions? Shall he degrade life by calling these the realities?

The painter or sculptor who holds that it is as truly art to represent distortion and repulsiveness as it is to represent beauty is as false to his high calling as would be the poet who should insist that doggerel and mere commonplace truisms expressed in rhyme are poetry. Compare, for example, two statues, Cecioni's "La Madre," in which a woman's utter lack of personal attraction is so complete as to make her fairly repulsive to the gazer, and the "Mother of Moses," by Franklin Simmons, in which the mystic beauty, the very ideal of maternity, is embodied. Which of these statues is calculated to uplift and to exalt all who come near? This marvellously beautiful creation of Mr. Simmons shows a woman of exquisite delicacy and loveliness sitting, slightly bending forward, holding her baby to her breast. The modelling of the draped figure with the bare arms and neck revealing the tender curves, the yielding delicacy of the flesh and that inscrutable light upon the beautiful countenance, whose expression suggests that she is looking far into the future of the infant whom she holds in her arms, are a wonderful portrayal of the mystery and the sacredness of motherhood. The one statue degrades maternity; the other ennobles and exalts. The one embodies a pernicious and a false ideal; the other embodies the ideal that must appeal to all that is noble and divine in human life, and it thus ministers to moral progress by its contribution to the elevation of the social tone. For indeed, life follows art. It is art that exerts this powerful influence upon life which it may lead to loftier heights or drag down to the moral abyss. The artist is not merely the portrayer of existing types; he is the inspirer of those ideal types which human life should recognize as its pattern, its model to be followed and ultimately achieved. The world needs ideal and poetic art to minister to the attainment of the true social life and to the full and complete expression of man himself.

Do not the visions of Fra Angelico and Botticelli still inspire the artist of to-day with the absolute realization of all the deep significance of the past?

"Is there never a retroscope mirror,

In the realms and corners of space,

That can give us a glimpse of the battle,

And the soldiers face to face?"

Religion and art are inseparably united. In its true significance religion takes precedence of all else in that its influence is felt in every department and in every direction and expression of man's activity. It is the inexhaustible fountain of that lofty energy which communicates itself to every channel that carries inspiration to life and to art. Religion is the influence that redeems the mere shallow, surface presentation,-the petty trick to capture popularity, and holds art true to its real purpose. The glory of the medi?val art of Italy owed its greatness to religion. Cimabue and Giotto were directly inspired by that spring of a diviner life given to Italy and later to the world of that "sweet saint," Francis of Assisi. In an age of cruelty and terror he brought the new message that man is dear to God; that the soul is ceaselessly joyful; that man, created in the divine image, is a part of the divine life, and that only when he lives in this response and recognition does he truly live at all. In this restatement of the truth that Jesus came to proclaim, St. Francis opened the way for a revival of art, and opened the gates of that infinite and divine energy which has immortally recorded itself for all ages in the "Divina Comedia" of Dante. The irresistible wave of power which resulted from that liberating of thought, feeling, and emotion by the work of St. Francis expressed itself in the sublimest poem of all the ages, and in that glorious triumph of art that is still the treasure and the source of artistic inspiration.

It is only when the world is lifted out of the limitations of the material by a period of great art that humanity is brought into close and inspiring relation with the living Christ.

Men and women make the world,

As head and heart make human life.

Mrs. Browning.

* * *

Alas, our memories may retrace

Each circumstance of time and place;

Season and scene come back again,

And outward things unchanged remain;

The rest we cannot reinstate,

Ourselves we cannot re-create,

Nor set our souls to the same key

Of the remembered harmony.

Longfellow.

And as, after the lapse of a thousand years, you stand upon that hallowed spot, the yellow Tiber flowing sluggishly beneath you, the ruins of the Eternal City all around you speaking of fallen greatness, the mighty Basilica of St. Peter rising before you like some modern tower of Babel that would monopolize the road to heaven, the eye rests upon the figure of the Archangel sheathing his glittering sword upon the summit of the Castle of St. Angelo, and the heart asks, Why should that be a legend? Why should that be a projection of a morbid and devout imagination? Why should it not have been the clairvoyance of supernatural ecstasy opening the world of spirits? It was no unreality when the angel of God, with his sword drawn in his hand, withstood the prophet Balaam. It was no morbid imagination when the angel of God smote with the edge of the sword the first-born of the land of Egypt. It was no imposture when the shining hosts of the army of the Almighty smote the Assyrians. It was no deception when Gabriel, the King's messenger from the court of heaven, was sent to comfort Daniel by the river Hiddekel; or when he announced to the maiden, whom all generations have called blessed, that she was to be the mother of the Divine Redeemer. . . . The written Word from first to last is full of the holy angels. It begins with angels, it ends with angels.

The Venerable Archdeacon Wilberforce,

Westminster Abbey.

And others came,-Desires and Adorations,

Winged Persuasions and Veiled Destinies!

Shelley.

In what ethereal dances!

By what eternal streams!

Poe.

Social life in Rome is no misnomer. From the most stately and beautiful ceremonials of balls at the court of the Quirinale, in ducal palaces, or at the embassies; of dinners whose every detail suggests stage pictures in their magnificence, to the simple afternoon tea, where conversation and music enchant the hours; the morning call en tête-à-tête, and the morning stroll, or the late afternoon drive,-a season in Rome prefigures itself, by the necromancy of retrospective vision, as a resplendent panorama of pictorial scenes. There rise before one those mornings, all gold and azure, of loitering over the stone parapet on Monte Pincio, gazing down on the city in her most alluring mood. The new bridge that is to connect the Pincio with the Villa Borghese is a picturesque feature in its unfinished state; but the vision traverses the deep ravine and revels in the scene of the Borghese grounds carpeted with flowers. Its picturesque slopes under the great trees, with a view of Michael Angelo's dome in the near distance, are the resort of morning strollers, who find that lovely picture of Charles Walter Stetson's-a stretch of landscape under the ilex trees, the scarlet gowns of the divinity students giving vivid accents of color here and there-fairly reproduced in nature before their vision. One should never be in haste as the bewildering beauty of the Roman spring weaves its emerald fantasies on grass and trees, and touches into magical bloom the scarlet poppies that flame over all the meadows, and caress roses and hyacinths and lilies of the valley into delicate bloom and floating fragrance until the Eternal City is no more Rome, but Arcady, instead-one should never be in haste to toss his penny into the Fontane de Trevi. Yet in another way it may work for him an immediate spell that defies all other necromancy. Judiciously thrown in, on the very eve of departure, it is the conjurer that insures his return; but at any time prior to this it may even weave the irresistible enchantment that falls upon him and may prevent his leaving at all. Nor can he summon up the moral courage to regret even the missing of all other engagements, and the failure to keep faith with his plans. For in the May days Rome falls upon him anew, like a revelation, and he is ready to confess that he has never seen her who sees her not in her springtime loveliness. The Italian winter by no means lives up to its reputation. It is not the chill of any one special day that discourages one from any further effort to continue in this vale of tears, but the cold that has, apparently, the chill and dampness and cold of all those two thousand and two hundred and sixty winters that have gone before which concentrate themselves in the atmosphere. One could presumably endure with some degree of courage, if not equanimity, the chill in the air of any one winter; but when all the chill and cold that has ever existed in more than the two thousand winters of the past concentrates itself in the winter, say, of 1906-7, why, patience ceases to be a virtue although one that the sojourner in Rome is particularly called upon to practise if he fares forth to visit churches and galleries in the winter.

Torrents of rain pour down, rivalling the cloud-bursts of Arizona. Virgil's cave of the winds apparently lets loose its sharpest blasts. Tramontana and sirocco alternate, and each is more unendurable than the other.

The encircling mountains are white with snow. The streets are a sea of mud, for they are paved with small stones, and except in the new Villa Ludovisi quarter and along the Via Nazionale and a few other of the newer thoroughfares there are no sidewalks, the foot passengers (in all old Rome) pressing close to the wall to avoid the dangerously near proximity of carts and cabs. This rough pavement makes all driving hard and walking difficult. The Roman lady, indeed, does not walk; and the visitors who cannot forego the joy of daily promenades enter into the feelings of that nation which is said to take its pleasures sadly. But spring works a transformation scene. The air is filled with the most transparent shining haze; the sky lacks little of that intense, melting blue that characterizes the ineffable beauty of the skies in Arizona; and ruins and fragments and strange relics-ghosts of the historic past-are all enshrined in trailing green and riotous blossoms. To drive on the terraced roads of Monte Mario with all Rome and the emerald-green Campagna before one; through the romantic "Lovers' Lane," walled in by roses and myrtle; to enjoy the local life, full of gayety and brilliancy, is to know Rome in her most gracious aspects. One goes for strolls in the old Colonna Gardens, where still remain the ruins of the Temple of the Sun and of the Baths of Constantine. The terraces offer lovely views over the city. The old palace is occupied by the present Prince Colonna, and it is not unfrequently the scene of most elaborate and gorgeous receptions where the traditional Roman splendor is to be found. A series of arched bridges over the narrow street of the Via della Pilotta connect the Gardens with the Colonna Palace in the Piazza San Apostoli. Very fine old sarcophagi are half buried in trailing vines on the slope of the hill, dark with magnificent cypress trees. The Colonna Gardens are a very dream of the past, in their ruins of old temples, their shattered statues, their strange old tablets and inscriptions, and their grand view of the Capitol.

In one's retrospective vision of a Roman season all the inconveniences and discomforts of the winter disappear, leaving only the beauty and the enjoyment to be "developed," as the photographer would say, on the sensitive plate of memory.

No one really knows Rome until he has watched the transcendent loveliness of spring investing every nook and corner of the Eternal City. The picturesque Spanish steps are a very garden of fragrance, the lower steps of the terraced flight being taken possession of by the flower venders who display their wares,-masses of white lilac, flame-colored roses, rose and purple hyacinths and baskets of violets and carnations. Did all this fragrance and beauty send up its incense to Keats as he lay in the house adjoining, with the musical plash of Bernini's fountain under his window? It is pleasant to know that by the appreciation of American and English authors, the movement effectively directed by Robert Underwood Johnson, this house consecrated to a poet's memory has been purchased to be a permanent memorial to Keats and to Shelley. A library of their works will be arranged in it; and portraits, busts, and all mementos that can be collected of these poets will render this memorial one of the beautiful features of Rome.

From the flower venders and the circulating libraries in the Piazza di Spagna that allure one in the morning, from the fascinating glitter of the little Via Condotti which is, in its way, the rue de la Paix of Rome, one leisurely climbs the steps to where the great obelisk looms up in front of the Convent Church of the Trinità di Monti and on, across the Piazza di Trinità, toward the Pincian, one wanders along the brow of the hill surmounted by the low stone parapet. The view is a dream of beauty. Over the valley lies Monte Mario, crowned with the Villa Madama, silhouetted against the blue Roman sky; and the commanding dome of St. Peter's, the splendid new white marble buildings of the Law Courts, the domes of other churches, all make up a picturesque panorama, while on the Janiculum the great equestrian statue of Garibaldi can be descried. Strolling on, one turns into the gardens of the Villa Medici, the French Academy of Art, in which the present director, the great Carolus Duran, is domiciled and in which twenty-four students-of painting, sculpture, music, and architecture-are maintained at the expense of the French government for several years, the twenty four being chosen from those who have given signal proof of their ability. The Villa Medici has, perhaps, a more beautiful site than any other building in Rome. Facing the west, with the Janiculum and Monte Mario forever before it, while below lies the Piazza di Spagna and the Piazza del Popolo, and all the changing splendors of the sunset sky as a perpetual picture gallery, the situation is, indeed, magnificent. It is still conceivable, however, that Monsieur Carolus Duran must have many quarters of an hour when he longs for the brilliancy and the movement and the stimulus of his Paris. The gardens of the Villa Medici are large, but they are laid out with narrow paths bordered with box, forming a wall as impervious as if of stone, and dark and damp by the shade of foliage. These walks are paved with gravel, and are always damp. These formal rectangles and alleys are utterly shut in, so that in any one part one can see only the two dense green walls of box that inclose him and the glimpse of sky overhead,-not precisely a cheering promenade. This is the Italian idea of a garden. Much broken sculpture, weather-stained and defective, is placed all along the way, and the perpetual Roman fountain is always gushing somewhere.

VILLA MEDICI, ROME

Another phase of the Roman season may rise before one in the stately beauty of any old historic palace, where the hostess, all grace and sweetness, receives her guests in the apartment in which Galileo had been confined when imprisoned in Rome. The approach to this piano nobile was up a flight of easily graded marble stairs, where in frequent niches stood old statues. The large windows in the corridor on the landing were curtained with pale yellow, thus creating a golden light to fall on the old sculptured marbles. One salon was decorated with Flaxman's drawings on the wall, in their classical outlines. From a steep, dark stone stairway, down which one descended (at the imminent risk of a broken neck in the darkness and from the irregular stairs rudely carved in the stone), one emerged on a landing, where a little door opened into the balcony of the chapel, a curious, gloomy place, with tombs and altar and shrine, and some very poor old paintings. One's progress to it recalled the lines from Poe's "Ulalume":-

"By a route, obscure and lonely,

Haunted by ill angels only."

Then, sitting in one of the richly decorated salons at afternoon tea in this same old palace one day, while an accomplished harpist was discoursing delicate music from its vibrating chords, flights of birds kept passing a window, making a scene like that of a Wagner opera. The groups present, largely of the Roman nobility, the titled aristocracy, resembling so closely some of the old portraits in the palazzo that it was easy to recognize that they were all one people, descendants of the same race.

Many of the guests looked, indeed, as if they had stepped from out the sumptuously carved frames on the wall. At these pretty festas one meets much of the resident Roman world. The guests assembled seem to be speaking in all the romance languages. There are Russian and Spanish as well as Italian, French, German, and English at these alluring teas. All the salons of the spacious apartments are thrown open, and the men in their picturesque court dress or military costume, and the women and girls in dainty gowns, make up an alluring scene. The salons are richly furnished and abound in works of art, old pictures, inlaid cabinets, carvings, rich vases, busts, and statuettes. The library, with its wealth of books; the music room; the salon for dancing; the supper room, and the quiet rooms where groups gather before the blazing open fires, grateful in these lofty rooms whose temperature suggests the frozen circles of Dante,-all make up a delightful picture. One meets the most varying individualities. A Russian lady of title may confide her conviction that her country is ruined, and that she never desires to return to it. Italy is the country that attracts not only political refugees from other European countries, but many who are out of sympathy with conditions elsewhere and who find the cosmopolitan society and the varied interests of this land of sunshine their most enjoyable environment.

One pleasant feature of a Roman winter is that of the usual course of lectures given by Professor Lanciani. The celebrated arch?ologist is a man of special personal charm, and his conversation, as well as his public lectures, is full of interest and value. The lectures are given under the auspices of the Società Archeologica, and a special subject recently discussed was the celebration to be held in 1911 in Rome. One project for this celebration includes the plan to lay out a carriage road around the Forum and the Palatine, and also around the Baths of Titus and of Caracalla, extending the drive to all those places included between the Appian and the Latin Way, the Villa Celimontana and the Circus Maximus.

Professor Lanciani discussed the artistic history of Rome and the different appearances the city took on in different periods; the regulation plan drawn up by Julius C?sar and accepted and carried out by Augustus, by which one-fifth of the total area of the city was reserved for public parks. In the third century of the empire the city was inclosed by parks and crossed from end to end by delightful portico gardens, where valuable works of art were collected. During the period of the Renaissance there were the famous villas and the Cesarini Park on the slopes of the Esquiline, and after regretting the many unnecessary acts of vandalism committed since 1870 in Rome, Professor Lanciani suggested that a complete reconstruction of the Baths of Caracalla should be made, to serve in 1911 as the Exhibition Building. He believed no artistic difficulties would present themselves, as in the fifteenth century different architects took plaster casts of the decorations of the statues and of every detail of the Baths. The arch?ological exhibition would be arranged in the two large halls, another hall would be for concerts, another for lectures, the others for different congresses to be held.

In this way Rome would inaugurate for 1911 the Medi?val Museum in Castel Sant'Angelo, the medi?val collections in the Torre degli Anguillara, and the grand arch?ological exhibition in the reconstructed Baths of Caracalla.

Italian women are by no means behind the age in their organizations to aid in social progress. The most important one in Italy is that of the leading women of the nobility and aristocracy, called "The Society for Women's Work," which holds annual meetings, over which Lady Aberdeen, the president of the International Council, and the Contessa Spalletti, the president of the National Council of Italy, preside. Many of the prominent women of the Italian nobility are taking active part in the larger outlook for women; and in this movement Margherita, la Regina Madre, leads the way, supported by a large following of the titled nobility.

"Margherita holds the hearts of the people," remarked Cora, Contessa di Brazzá Savorgnan, at a brilliant little dinner one night, and no expression could more admirably represent the feeling of the nation toward the Queen Mother.

Queen Elena as the reigning sovereign has, of course, her exclusive royal prerogatives, and she has youth and initiative and precedence; but Margherita is a most attractive woman, with learning and accomplishments galore, and she has an art of conversation that allures and fascinates visiting foreigners of learning and wit, as well as of rank. Roman society is not large numerically, and the same people are constantly meeting and consolidating their many points of contact and interest. Social life in these Italian cities is the supreme occupation of the residents, and one must concede that in proportion as one meets the same people constantly does society gain in dramatic interest. With each person who is in any sense an individual the play of life begins. It gains in dramatic sequence as it proceeds. The Eternal City is a wonderful scenic setting for the human drama.

Local gossip suggests perceptible rivalry between the stately palace of the King and the pink palace on the hill, in which Margherita holds her state with not less ceremony than that observed at the Court of the Quirinale. It is a beautiful thing for a country to have in it a woman of high position, of leisure and of culture, who is so admirably fitted to be the friend of the people as is Margherita. She is a connoisseur in art; she has a most intelligent interest in science; she is a critical lover of literature; she is a wise and judicious and deeply sympathetic leader in all philanthropic work and purposes. One can hardly visit painter or poet or artist in any line, or school, institute, or association, but that he hears of the personal sympathy and encouragement bestowed by this noble and beautiful Italian Queen,-the Regina Madre.

Practically there are, indeed, two courts in Rome; that of the Palazzo Margherita seeming to quite rival that held at the Palazzo Quirinale. The palace of the Queen Mother is an imposing three-story structure of pink-hued marble, with beautiful gardens and terraces, and adjoining it, in the palace grounds, is a marble villa, used for the entertainment of royal guests. This palace has been the residence of Margherita when in Rome since the tragic death of King Umberto, in 1900. It is in the Ludovisi quarter, and stands on the very site of the Gardens of Sallust. The Queen Mother receives noted visitors constantly, and entertains visiting royalties and members of the aristocracy. No great man of science, literature, and art visits Rome without seeking a presentation to the liberal-minded and accomplished Regina Madre, who is one of the most winning and attractive of all the royal women of Europe.

It has become quite a feature in introducing young girls to present them first in private audience to Margherita, and then later to Queen Elena at the Court of the Quirinale. Surely no girl could be given a lovelier idea of womanhood than that embodied in the Dowager Queen. When the poet Carducci died in the early months of 1907, Margherita sent beautiful messages of consolation to his family, and, later, to his home city of Bologna she sent the following letter:-

"I announce that I make a free gift to the city of Bologna of the house where Giosuè Carducci passed the last years of his life, and the library he collected there.

"Bologna, that showed such affectionate hospitality for Giosuè Carducci for so many years, and surrounded him with so much devotion, will know, I feel sure, how to carefully preserve this remembrance of the greatest poet of modern Italy.

Margherita."

The Syndic replied in a letter hardly less fine in its expression of Bologna's appreciation, and with assurances that the name of the first Queen of Italy will in future be forever associated with Italy's greatest modern poet.

The Regio Palazzo del Quirinale is near the Capitol, in the older part of the city, and only a small part of this is shown to visitors when the King and Queen are in residence. The Sala Regia may be seen, the chapel in which are preserved a large number of the wreaths and the addresses sent from all parts of the civilized world on the occasion of the death of Victor Emmanuel II, and a suite of reception rooms, the throne room with many historic portraits, the Sala des Ambassadeurs, and the audience chamber, containing Thorwaldsen's "Triumphal Procession of Alexander the Great," a gift from Napoleon I. In the small chapel of the Annunciation is an altar piece by Guido Reni.

To artists the Queen Mother is most generously kind. One of the younger Italian sculptors, Turillo Sindoni, Cavaliere of the Crown of Italy, whose latest creation is a very beautiful statue of St. Agnes, has his studios in the Via del Babuino, and to especially favored visitors he sometimes exhibits a beautiful letter that he received from Margherita, who purchased two of his statues. With the letter expressing her warm appreciation of his art was an exquisite gift of jewelled sleeve-links.

Notwithstanding the fascinating lectures of Professor Lanciani and the valuable and interesting work in the Forum that is being accomplished under the efficient directorship of Commendatore Boni, yet all the roads that traditionally lead to Rome do not converge to the palace on the Palatine. Modern Rome is only mildly arch?ological, and while it takes occasional recognition of the ancient monuments, and drives to the crypt of old St. Agnes, to the tomb of Cecilia Metella, and may manage a descent into the catacomb of St. Calixtus, it is far more actively interested in its dancing and dining and driving. As a scenic background for festivities Rome is a success, and as one comes into social touch with the titled nobility, and the resident life, by birth or adoption, one finds a city of infinite human interest and picturesque possibilities.

Between the "Whites" (the loyal followers of the Palazzo Quirinale and the King) and the "Blacks" (the devoted followers of the Palazzo Vaticano and the Pope) a great gulf is fixed over which no one may cross.

Pope Pius X is wonderfully accessible, considering the great responsibilities and duties he has on him, and his generous goodness, his gracious tact and the beauty of his spirit endear him to all, Catholic or Protestant alike, for every one recognizes in him the Christian gentleman, whose ideals of gentleness and inspiring helpfulness impress themselves on all who are so fortunate as to meet him.

The most impressive ceremonial receptions of the "Blacks" are those given at the Spanish Embassy in the Piazza di Spagna. At the Embassy or in the private palace of any Roman noble which a Cardinal honors by accepting an invitation, he is received according to a most picturesque old Roman custom. At the foot of the stairs two servants bearing lighted torches meet his Eminence, and, making a profound obeisance, escort him to the portals of the grand reception salon and await, in the corridor, his return. On his departure they escort him in the same way down the staircase.

In the College of Cardinals and among the many interesting individualities of the Vatican, the most marked figure is that of the Cardinal Secretary of State, Merry del Val. He occupies the Borgia apartments, which are hung with tapestry and ornamented with the most unique and valuable articles de vertu,-wonderful vases, inlaid cabinets, old tapestries, paintings, statues, busts, and ivories. These Borgia apartments are one of the most interesting features of the Palazzo Vaticano, and may be seen now and then by special permission when the Cardinal secretary is out, or when he may be pleased to retire into his more private salons in the apartment while the others are shown. Cardinal Rafael Merry del Val is an impressive personality, whose life seems strangely determined by destiny. His father was an attaché of the Spanish embassy to the Court of St. James when the future Cardinal was born in 1865. In 1904, at the early age of thirty-nine, he was advanced from the soutane violet of the bishop to the mantelletta scarlet of the cardinal, and after the accession of the present Pope, Pius X, he was appointed to the highest office in the Vatican, that of Secretary of State, the Pope paying him the high tribute because of his "devotion to work, his capability and absolute self-negation."

Cardinal Merry del Val has had a wonderful training of experience and circumstances. At the early age of twenty-two he was a member of the papal embassy commissioned to the jubilee of Queen Victoria in 1887. He was also appointed a member of the embassy from the Vatican to attend the funeral of Emperor William I; and at the jubilee of Francis Joseph, Emperor of Austria, Cardinal (then Bishop) Merry del Val was the sole and accredited representative of the Holy See, as he was also at the coronation of King Edward. The Spanish Cardinal is the special trusted counsellor of the royal family of Spain.

In Rome, Cardinal Merry del Val is an impressive figure. He is always attended by his gentiluomo, who is gorgeously arrayed in knee breeches, military hat and sword. This gentleman in waiting walks behind him on a promenade, sits in his carriage and stands near him in all religious ceremonies. His equipage is well known in the Eternal City,-a stately black carriage drawn by two massive black horses with luxurious flowing manes.

It is freely prophesied in Rome that the Cardinal secretary is destined to yet exchange the mantelletta scarlet for the zucchetta white, when Pius X shall have gone the way of all his predecessors in the papal chair. He is the Cardinal especially favored by Austria and Spain. Although the conflict with France was at first ascribed to Cardinal Merry del Val, he has of late been completely exonerated from blame, even by the French prelates and clergy.

Cardinal Merry del Val represents the most advanced and progressive thought of the day. He is an enthusiastic admirer of Marconi and the marvels of wireless telegraphy; he is an advocate of telephonic service, electric motors, electric lights, and of phonographs and typewriters for the Vatican service. He is a great linguist, speaking English, French, and German as well as Spanish, which is his native tongue, and Italian, which has become second nature. He is a good Greek scholar and a profound Latin scholar, and he speaks the ancient Latin with the fluency and the force of the modern languages. He is, indeed, a remarkable twentieth-century personality and one who has apparently a very interesting life yet to come in his future.

At the Villa Pamphilia Doria, built by a former Prince Doria, the largest villa in the Roman environs and the finest now remaining, the Cardinal enjoys his game of golf, of which he is very fond. The Doria family rendered the villa magnificent in every respect. Besides the spacious avenues, woods, fountains, a lake, and cascades, are various edifices, among which is one in the form of a triumphal arch, decorated with ancient statues; the casino of the villa in which are preserved some ancient marbles and several pictures; the beautiful circular chapel, adorned with eight columns of marble and other stately ornaments. There is a monument erected by the present Prince Doria to the memory of the French soldiers who were killed there during the siege of 1849. From the terrace of the palace there is a magnificent view of the environs of Rome, as far as the sea. In consequence of excavations, some columbaria, sepulchres, inscriptions, and other relics have been found, which have attracted much attention from arch?ologists.

It is near these grounds that the "Arcadians" still hold their al fresco meetings. The society dates back to 1690, and the first custos (whose duty was to open and close the meetings) was Crescimbeni. The "Arcadians" organized themselves to protest against the degeneracy of Italian poetry that marked the seventeenth century. To keep their meetings a secret from the populace the "Arcadians" held their meetings in an open garden on the slope below San Pietro in Montorio,-a terrace still known as "Bosco Parrasio degli Arcadi."

One of the enchanting views in Rome is from the Piazza San Giovanni. One looks far away past the Coliseum in its ruined grandeur and the casa where Lucrezia Borgia lived, and in the near distance is the colossal pile of San Giovanni di Laterano, its beautiful and impressive fa?ade crowned with the statues of the apostles silhouetted against the western sky. In the piazza formed by the church, the museums, and the Baptistery of San Giovanni and the Scala Santa is one of the most remarkable obelisks in Rome, ninety-nine feet in height, formed of red granite and carved with hieroglyphics. This shaft is placed on a pedestal which makes it in all some 115 feet in height. It was placed in 1568 by Sixtus V. The museums of the San Giovanni are the "Museo Sacro" and the "Museo Profano,"-the latter founded by Pope Gregory XVI, and very rich in sculptures and mosaics. The "Museo Sacro" was founded by Pio Nono, and is rich in the antiquities of the Christian era. Within San Giovanni the visitor finds himself in a vast interior divided by columns of verd-antique into three aisles, each of which is as wide as, and far longer than, the interior of an ordinary church. Statues fill the niches, and the chapels and confessionals are all beautifully decorated. The Corsini Chapel is the richest and was executed by order of Clement XII, in honor of St. Andrew Corsini, who is represented in a rich mosaic painting copied from Guido. Two sculptured figures, "Innocence" and "Penitence," stand before the altar, and above is a relief depicting St. Andrew protecting the Florentine army at the battle of Anghiari.

The tomb of Pope Clement XII (who himself belonged to the Corsini family and who was an uncle of Cardinal Corsini) is in a niche between two columns of porphyry, and there is a bronze statue of the Pope. On the opposite side is a statue of Cardinal Corsini, and in the crypt below are tombs of the Corsini family. On the altar-always lighted-is a "Pieta" by Bernini, of which the face of the Christ is very beautiful.

Near the centre of the Basilica is a rich tabernacle of precious stones, defined by four columns of verde antico, and it is said that the heads of St. Peter and St. Paul are preserved here. The table upon which Christ celebrated the Last Supper is placed here, above the altar of the Holy Sacrament, a sacred relic that thrills the visitors. In one chapel is a curious and grotesque group of sculpture,-a skeleton holding up a medallion portrait, while an angel with outstretched wings hovers over it.

San Giovanni has the reputation of being absolutely the coldest church in all Rome, which-it is needless to remark-means a great deal, for they all in winter have the temperature of the arctic regions. In all these great churches there is never any heat; no apparatus for heating has ever been introduced, and the twentieth century finds them just as cold as they were in the centuries of a thousand years ago. This colossal Basilica is considered the most important church in the world, as it is the cathedral of the Pontiff. It was founded in the third century by Constantine, destroyed by fire in 1308, and rebuilt by Pope Clement V, and every succeeding Pope has added to it. The fa?ade is of travertine, with four gigantic columns and six pilasters, and the cornice is decorated with colossal figures of Jesus and a number of the saints. There are five balconies, the middle one being always used for papal benedictions. In the portico is the colossal statue of Constantine the Great. Within the columns are of verde antico; the ceiling was designed by Michael Angelo; the interior is very rich in sculpture, and there are some fine paintings and the chapels are most beautiful, one of them containing a tabernacle comprised wholly of precious stones. Above the altar of the Holy Sacrament the table upon which Christ celebrated the Last Supper with the disciples is preserved. It is wonderful to look upon this most sacred and significant relic.

It is in this church that the tomb of Leo XIII has been constructed by the eminent Italian sculptor, Tadolini, opposite the tomb of Innocent III. The work was completed in the spring of 1907, the design being a life-size portrait statue of the Pope with two figures, one on either side, representing the church and the workman-pilgrim, forming part of the group. This is one of the most memorable monuments of all Rome, and the tomb of the great Leo XIII will form a new shrine for Christian pilgrimage.

Included in the group of structures that form the great Basilica of San Giovanni is the Scala Santa, which offers a strange picture whenever one approaches it. These twenty-eight marble steps that belonged to Pilate's house in Jerusalem are said to have been once trodden by Jesus and may be ascended only on one's knees. At no hour of the day can one visit the Scala Santa without finding the most motley and incongruous throng thus ascending, pausing on each step for meditation and prayer. These stairs were transported from Jerusalem to Rome under the auspices of St. Helena, the Empress, about 326 A.D., and in 1589 they were placed by Pope Sixtus V in this portico built for them with a chapel at the top of the stairs called the "Sancta Sanctorum," formerly the private chapel of the Popes. In this sanctuary is preserved a wonderful portrait of the Saviour, painted on wood, which is said to have been partly the work of St. Luke but finished by unseen hands. The legend runs that St. Luke prepared to undertake the work by three days' fasting and prayer, and that, having drawn it in outline, the painting was done by angelic ministry, the colors being filled in by invisible hands. In ancient times-the custom being abolished by Pius V in 1566-this picture was borne through Rome on the Feast of the Assumption and the bearer halted with it in the Forum, when the "Kyrie Eleison" would be chanted by hundreds of voices.

Myth and legend invest every turn and footfall of the Eternal City, and there are few that are not founded on what the church has always called supernatural manifestations, but which the new age is learning to recognize as occurrences under natural law.

The story of Luther's ascent of the Scala Santa is thus told:-

"Brother Martin Luther went to accomplish the ascent of the Scala Santa-the Holy Staircase-which once, they say, formed part of Pilate's house. He slowly mounted step after step of the hard stone, worn into hollows by the knees of penitents and pilgrims. Patiently he crept halfway up the staircase, when he suddenly stood erect, lifted his face heavenward, and in another moment turned and walked slowly down again.

"He said that as he was toiling up a voice as if from heaven spoke to him and said, 'The just shall live by faith.' He awoke as if from a nightmare, restored to himself. He dared not creep up another step; but rising from his knees he stood upright like a man suddenly loosed from bonds and fetters, and with the firm step of a free man he descended the staircase and walked from the place."

The entire legendary as well as sacred history is almost made up of instances of the interpenetration of the two worlds; the response of those in the spiritual world to the needs of those in the natural world. Pope Paschal recorded that he fell asleep in his chair at St. Peter's (somewhere about 8.20 A.M.) with a prayer on his lips that he might find the burial place of St. Cecilia, and in his dream she appeared to him and showed him the spot where her body lay, in the catacombs of Calixtus. The next day he went to the spot and found all as had been revealed to him. The miraculous preservation of St. Agnes is familiar to all students of legendary art. Throughout all Rome, shrine and niche and sculpture, picture, monument, arch and column, speak perpetually of some interposition of unseen forces with events and circumstances in this part of life. The Eternal City in its rich and poetic symbolism is one great object lesson of the interblending of the two worlds, the natural and the spiritual. The first stage regarding all this marvellous panorama was entire and unquestioning acceptance; the succeeding stage was doubt, disbelief; the third, into which we are now entering, is that of an enlightened understanding and a growing knowledge and grasp of the laws under which these special interpositions and interventions occur.

For that "according to thy faith be it unto thee," is as true now in the twentieth century as it was in the first. The one central truth that is the very foundation of all religious philosophy is the continuity of life and the persistence of intercourse and communion, spirit to spirit, across the gulf we call death. The evidences of this truth have been always in the world. The earliest records of the Bible are replete with them. The gospels of the New Testament record an unbroken succession of occurrences and of testimony to this interpenetration of life in the Unseen with that in the Seen. Secular history is full of its narrations of instances of clairvoyance, clairaudience, and of communications in a variety of ways; and the sacred and legendary art of Rome, largely founded on story and myth and legend, when seen in the light of latter-day science is judged anew, and the literal truth of much that has before been considered purely legendary is revealed and realized. One reads new meanings into Rome when testing it by this consciousness. It is a city of spiritual symbolism. It is a great object lesson extending over all the centuries. Making due allowance for the distortion and exaggeration of ages of testimony, there yet remains a residuum indisputable. The Past and the Present both teem with record and incident and experience proving that life is twofold, even now and here; that all the motives and acts of the life which we see are variously incited, modified, strengthened, or annulled by those in the realm of the Unseen.

ENTRANCE TO VILLA PAMPHILIA-DORIA, ROME

The intelligent recognition of this truth changes the entire conduct of life. It entirely alters the point of view. It extends the horizon line infinitely. Instead of conceiving of life as a whole, as comprised between the cradle and the grave, it will be regarded in its larger and truer scope as a series of experiences and achievements, infinite in length and in their possibilities and unbroken by the change we call death. This will impart to humanity a new motor spring in that greater hope which puts man in a working mood, which makes him believe in the value of that which he undertakes, which encourages him to press on amid all difficulties and against all obstacles. Increasing hope, all activity is proportionately increased. It was an event of incalculable importance to the progress of humanity when the swift communication by cable was established between America and Europe. It is one of infinitely greater importance to establish the truth and enlarge the possibility of direct communication with the world of higher forces and larger attainment and scope than our own. This communication exists and has always existed, but it has been regarded as myth and legend and phenomenon rather than as a fact of nature whose laws were to be ascertained and understood. It must be made clear as an absolute scientific demonstration that the change of form by the process we call death does not put an end to intelligent and rational intercourse, but that, indeed, instead of setting up a barrier, it removes barriers and renders mutual comprehension far clearer and more direct than before. This realization alters the entire perspective of life, and is the new Glad Tidings of great joy.

It is something of all this that the Eternal City suggests to one as he makes his pilgrimages to shrine and cloister and chapel and Basilica. The mighty Past is eloquent with a thousand voices, and they blend into a choral harmony of promise and prophecy for the nobler future of humanity.

At the foot of the Scala Santa, on either side, are statues of Christ and Judas, and of Christ and Pilate, very interesting groups by Jacometti, and there is also a kneeling statue of Pio Nono.

The statue of Judas is considered one of the most notable of the late modern Italian sculpture.

The Rome of to-day is in strange contrast even to the city that Page and Hawthorne knew, in the comparatively recent past; and the Rome of the ancients is traced only in the churches and the ruins. It is a mot that one hears every language spoken in Rome, except the Italian! So largely has the Seven-hilled City become the pleasure ground of foreign residents. The contrast between the ordinary breakfast-table talk in Rome and in-Boston, for instance, or Washington, is amusing. In the Puritan capital it usually includes the topic of weather predictions and the news in the morning paper, with whatever other of local or personal matters of interest. In Washington, where the very actors and the events that make the nation's history are fairly before one's eyes, the breakfast-table conversation is apt to turn on matters that have not yet got into the papers,-the evening session of the previous night, perhaps, when too long prolonged under the vast dome to admit of its having been noted in the morning press. But in Rome the breakfast-table talk is apt to be of the new excavations just taken from the bed of the Tiber; the question as to whether the head of St. Paul could have touched (at the tragic scene of his execution) at three places so far apart as the tri-fontanes; or a discussion of the marvellous freshness of the mosaics in the interior of the Palace of the C?sars; or, again, of the last night's balls or dinners, and matters most frankly mondaine, and of contemporary life.

The American Embassy, whose location depends on the individual choice of the Ambassador of the time, is now in the old Palazzo del Drago on the corner of the Via Venti Settembre and the Via delle Quattro Fontane. The street floor, like all the old palaces, is not used for living purposes. The portiere, the guards, the corridors, and approaches to the staircases monopolize this space. The piano nobile is the residence of the beautiful and lovely Principessa d'Antuni, the youthful widow of the Principe who was himself a grandson of Marie Christine, the Queen of Spain. The young Princess who was married to him at the age of seventeen, ten years ago, is left with three little children, of whom the only daughter bears the name of her great-grandmother, the Spanish Queen. Perfectly at home in all the romance languages, an accomplished musician, a thinker, a scholar, a student, a lovely figure in life, a beautiful and sympathetic friend is the Princess d'Antuni. She is "of a simplicity," as they say in Italy, investing the dignity of her rank with indescribable grace and sweetness. The two long flights of stairs that lead up to the secundo piano in the Palazzo del Drago-the floor occupied by the American Embassy-have at least a hundred steps to each staircase, yet so broad and easy of ascent as hardly to fatigue one. These flights are carpeted in glowing red, while along the wall are niches in each of which stands an old statue, making the ascent of the guest seem a classic progress.

The Palazzo del Drago has an elevator, but elevator service in Rome is a thing apart, something considered quite too good for human nature's daily food, and the slight power is far too little to permit any number of people to be accommodated, so on any ceremonial occasion the elevator is closed and the guests walk up the two long flights. The total lack of any mastery of mechanical conditions in Italy is very curious.

The grand ball given at the American Embassy just before Ash Wednesday in the winter of 1907 was a very pretty affair. Up the rose-red carpeted stairs the guests walked, the statues looking silently on, but apparently there was no Galatea to step down from her niche and join the happy throng. In the antechamber each guest was asked to write his name in the large autograph books kept for that purpose, and then, passing on, was received by the Ambassador and Ambassadress in the first of the splendid series of salons thrown open for the occasion. At this time it was Mr. and Mrs. Henry White who represented the United States, and won the hearts of all Rome as well, and assisted by their charming daughter, Miss Muriel White, they made this ball an affair to leave its lovely pictures in memory. The scenic setting of an old Roman palace captivates the stranger. It may not impress him as especially comfortable, but it is certainly picturesque, and who would not prefer-at least for the "one night only" of the traditional prima donna announcements-the pictorially picturesque and magnificent to the merely comfortable? The lofty ceilings, painted by artists who have long since vanished from mortal sight, make it impossible to attain the temperature that the American regards as essential to his terrestrial well-being, and as the only sources of heat were the open fireplaces the guests hovered around these and their radii of comfortable warmth were limited. In one salon there was one especially beautiful effect of a great jar of white lilacs placed before a vast mirror at sufficient distance to give the mirror reflection an individuality as a thing apart, and the effect was that of a very garden of paradise. The music was fascinating, the decorations all in good taste, and the occasion was most brilliant,-très charmante indeed. The American ambassadress was ablaze with her famous diamonds, her corsage being literally covered with them, and her coiffure adorned with a coronet, but the temperature soon forced the ambassadress to partially eclipse her splendor with the little ermine shoulder cape that is an indispensable article for evening dress in Rome. The temperature does not admit the possibility of décolleté gowns without some protection, when these resplendent glittering robes that seem woven of the stars are worn. Among the more distinguished guests, aside from the corps diplomatique and the titled nobility of Rome and visiting foreigners, were M. Carolus Duran, the celebrated portrait artist of Paris, and among other interesting people were Miss Elise Emmons of Leamington, England, a grand-niece of Charlotte Cushman. M. Carolus Duran was very magnificent, his breast covered with jewelled orders and decorations from the various societies, academies, and governments that have honored him. He is a short man and has grown quite stout, but he carries himself with inimitable grace and dignity, and in his luminous eyes one still surprises that far-away look which Sargent so wonderfully caught in his portrait of the great French artist, painted in his earlier life.

The number of spacious salons with their easy-chairs and sofas enabled all guests who desired to ensconce themselves luxuriously to do so, and watch the glittering scene. The supper room and the salon for dancing were not more alluring than the salons wherein one could study this brilliant throng of diplomates, titled nobility, distinguished artists, social celebrities, and those who were, in various ways, each persona grata in Rome. Among those at this particular festivity were the American novelist, Frank Hamilton Spearman, with Mrs. Spearman. In late American fiction Mr. Spearman has made for himself a distinctive place as the novelist whose artistic eye has discerned the romance in the new phases of life created by the extensive systems of mountain railroading, and the great irrigation schemes of the far West, which have not only opened up new territory, but have called into evidence new combinations of the qualities most potent in human life,-love, sacrifice, heroism, devotion to duty, and tragedy and comedy as well. In his novels, "The Daughter of a Magnate" and "Whispering Smith," in such vivid and delightful short stories as "The Ghost at Point of Rocks," which appeared in Scribner's Magazine for August of 1907, Mr. Spearman has dramatized the pathos, the wit, the vast and marvellous spirit of enterprise, the desolation of isolated regions, the all-pervading potency and one may almost say intimacy of modern life made possible by the Arabian Nights' dream of wireless telegraphy, "soaring" cars, long-distance telephoning, and lightning express train service in cars that climb the mountains beyond the clouds, or dash through tunnels with ten thousand feet of mountains above them. Mr. Spearman is the novelist par excellence of this intense vie modernité.

On Washington's Birthday, again, the stately salons of the American Embassy in the old Palazzo del Drago were well filled from four to six with an assemblage which expressed its patriotism and devotion to Washington by appearing in its most faultless raiment and in an apparent appreciation of the refreshment tables, from which cake and ices, tea and various other delicacies, were served.

The informal weekly receptions at the Embassy are always delightful, and the dinners and ceremonial entertainments are given with that faultless grace which characterizes the American ambassadress.

The American consulate is always a charming centre in Rome, and in the present residence of Consul-General and Mrs. De Castro, who have domiciled themselves on a lofty floor of a palace in the Via Venti Settembre, commanding beautiful views that make a picture of every window, the consulate is one of the favorite social centres for Americans and other nationalities as well, who enjoy the charming welcome of Mrs. De Castro.

Professor and Mrs. Jesse Benedict Carter, in their lovely home in the Via Gregoriana, add another to the pleasant American centres in the Eternal City, Professor Carter having succeeded Professor Norton as the principal of the American Classical School.

Mrs. Elihu Vedder, assisted by her accomplished daughter, Miss Anita Vedder, has a pretty fashion of receiving weekly in Mr. Vedder's studio in the Via Flaminia, and these Saturday receptions at the Vedders' are a feature of social life in Rome which are greatly sought. The distinguished artist reserves these afternoons for leisurely conversation, and pictures and sketches are enjoyed the more that they may be enjoyed in the presence of their creator. Miss Vedder has called to life again the almost lost art of tapestry, and her productions of wonderful beauty are considered as among the most desirable in modern decorative art. Among these tapestries are "The Lover's Song," "Salome Dancing before Herod," "The Annunciation," "The Legend of the Unicorn," "The Lovers' Picnic," and "The Lovers." The tapestries were painted in Rome and in the Vedder villa, Torre Quattro Venti on Capri, where the artist and his wife and daughter pass their summers. The established English Church has two chapels in Rome, one the Holy Trinity, of which Rev. Dr. Baldwin is the rector, and the other English chapel in Via del Babuino has for its chaplain Rev. Dr. Nutcombe Oxenham, whose ministry is one of the most helpful factors in Rome. Dr. and Mrs. Oxenham occupy a charming apartment in the Piazza del Popolo, the most picturesque piazza in Rome, with the terraced Pincion hillside crowned by the Villa di Medici on one side, and the "twin churches" on another; and the beautiful salon of Mrs. Oxenham, with its wealth of books and classic engravings and gems of pictures, is one of the homelike interiors in Rome. Mr. and Mrs. Oxenham receive on Wednesdays, and an hour with them and their guests is always a privileged one.

The work of this church, largely through the active co-operation of Mrs. Oxenham, extends into wide charities which are without discrimination as to sect or race,-the only consideration being the human need to be met in the name of Him whose care and love are for each and all.

Among the delightful hostesses of Rome is the American wife of Cavaliere Cortesi, an Italian man of letters, and in their apartment, in one of the notable palaces in the Corso, some of the most brilliant musicals and receptions are given, the "All'Illustrissima Signora" being assisted in the informal serving of tea by the two little fairy daughters, Annunziata and Elizabetta, whose childish loveliness lingers with the habitués of this pleasant home.

In the Palazzo Senni, in the old part of Rome, looking out on Castel San Angelo and the Ponte d'Angelo, across to the dome of St. Peter's, the Listers had their home; and though Mrs. Lister, one of the most distinguished English ladies of Rome, has gone on into the fairer world beyond, her daughter, Miss Roma Lister, sustains the charming hospitalities for which her mother was famous. Her salons on the piano nobile of the palace are rich in souvenirs and rare objects of art. Mrs. Lister, who was of a noted English house, was evidently a favorite with Queen Victoria and the royal family; and her marriage gifts included two drawings by the Queen, both autographed, and a crayon portrait of the Empress Frederick with autographic inscription to Mrs. Lister. Another personal gift was a portrait of Cardinal Newman, with his autograph. A bust of Lady Paget of Florence, the widow of Sir Augustus Paget, formerly the English Ambassador to Italy, is another of the interesting treasures which include, indeed, gifts and offerings from a large number of those eminent in state, in art, in literature, or in the church. The gracious hospitality of Miss Lister is dispensed to groups of cosmopolitan guests, and her dinners and other entertainments are among the most brilliant in Rome.

The Eternal City is not as hospitable to various phases of modern thought as is Florence, in which Theosophy, Christian Science, and psychic investigation flourish with rapidly increasing ardor; but Rome has a Theosophical Society, among whose leaders is the Baroness Rosenkrans, the mother of the distinguished young Danish novelist, and the aunt of Miss Roma Lister. The society has its rooms in the very heart of old Rome, and holds weekly meetings, often with an English lecturer as the speaker of the hour. A Theosophical library, in both English and Italian, is easily accessible, and the meetings are conducted in either language as it chances at the time. The accession of Annie Besant to the presidency of the Theosophical Society, succeeding Colonel Olcott, whose death occurred early in 1907, was most satisfactory to the Roman members. Mrs. Besant is one of the most remarkable women of the day. She is in no sense allied with any fads or freaks; she is essentially a woman of scholarship and poise, of genuine grasp of significant thought and of brilliant eloquence. Theosophy, rightly interpreted, is in no sense antagonistic, but, rather, supplemental to Christianity. It offers the intellectual explanation-the details, so to speak-of the great spiritual truths of the Bible.

Rome seems fairly on its way to become an English-speaking city, so numerous are the Americans and English who throng to Rome in the winter.

There are now at least a dozen large new hotels on the scale of the best modern hotels in New York and Paris, beside the multitude of the older ones which are comfortable and retain all their popularity; yet this increase in accommodation does not equal the increase in demand. In February the tide of travel sets in toward Rome, and from that date until after Easter every nook and niche are filled to overflowing. The demand for apartments in Rome is greater than the supply, although the city is being constantly extended and new buildings are rapidly being erected. It would seem as if, with the present increasingly large number of Americans and English, it might be an admirable financial enterprise for capitalists to come and build comfortable modern apartment hotels. There seems to be no adequate reason why, in this age, people should be compelled to live in these gloomy, dreary, cold, old stone palaces, without elevator service and with no adequate heating, lighting, and running-water facilities. There would seem to be no conceivable reason why these conveniences should not be at hand in Rome as well as in New York. As for the climate, with warm houses to live in, it would be charmingly comfortable, for the deadly cold is not in the temperature out of doors, but only in the interiors. One is warm in the sunshine in the streets, when he is fairly frozen in the house. Mentioning this, however, with wonder that some enterprising American did not begin such building operations, a friend who has lived for sixteen years in Rome replied that the Italians would never permit it; that no foreigner is allowed to come in here and initiate business operations. And the Italians continue building after the old and clumsy fashion of five hundred years ago.

Italy has a curiously pervasive and general suspicion of any latter-day comfort. The new apartment houses of from four to seven stories are largely without any elevator; if there is one it usually only ascends about halfway, and it is so clumsy and slow in its methods, so poorly supported by power, that half the time it does not run at all. The streets of Rome are paved with rough stones; the sidewalks are very narrow; the lighting is inadequate. Bathrooms are rare and insufficient in number, and all interior lighting and heating arrangements lack much that is desirable according to American ideas of comfort.

Still the Eternal City is so impressive in and of itself that sunshine or storm, comfort or the reverse, can hardly affect one's intensity of joy and wonder and mysterious, unanalyzable rapture in it. The twentieth-century Rome is a very different affair from the Rome on which Hawthorne entered one dark, cold, stormy winter night more than half a century ago. In the best modern hotels one may be as comfortable as he likes, with all the fascinations of life added besides. No wonder that Rome is one of the great winter centres, with some of the most interesting people in the world always to be found under the spell of its enchantment.

The Rome of to-day is a curious mixture of ruins and of modern buildings which are neither modern nor medi?val in their structure, but many of which combine the most picturesque features of the latter with the latest beauty of French and American architectural art. The classic buildings are now largely in unpleasant surroundings; as, for instance, the Pantheon, which is surrounded by a fish market, with unspeakable odors and other repulsive features. "But the portico, with its sixteen Corinthian columns, is forever majestic; the interior, a vast circular cell surmounted by a dome through which alone it is lighted, there being no windows in the walls, is massive and grim, but the magical illumination, the eye constantly revealing the sky above, gives it wonderful beauty. Over the outer portals is the inscription of its erection by Agrippa twenty-seven years before Christ, so it has stood for nearly two thousand years. Colossal statues of Augustus and Agrippa fill niches. In diameter the interior of the Pantheon is one hundred and thirty-two feet, and it is the same in height, which insures the singularly harmonious proportions. The tribune of the High-Altar is cut in the thickness of the wall in the form of a semicircle, and is ornamented, like the door, with four pilasters and two columns of violet marble. The six chapels are also cut in the wall and ornamented by two columns and two pilasters. The columns and the pilasters support the beautiful cornice of white marble; the frieze is of porphyry, and goes round the whole temple. Above this order there is a species of attic with fourteen niches, and the great cornice from which rises the majestic dome. Eight other niches are between the chapels, and these are also with a pediment supported by two Corinthian columns. They are now converted into altars. In this temple are buried several artists, among whom are Raphael, Giovanni da Udine, Baldassare Peruzzi, and Annibale Carracci. Raphael is buried beneath the base of the statue called la Madonna del Sasso, sculptured by Lorenzetti. This church is, however, without paintings or sculptures of much interest. Victor Emmanuel was entombed here on the 20th of January, 1878, and King Umberto on the 9th of August, 1900." One of the imposing ceremonies of Rome is that always celebrated in the Pantheon on March 14, in memory of King Umberto Primo.

A grand catafalque, surmounted by the royal crown, and surrounded by tall candelabra with wax candles, is erected in the centre of the temple, draped with black velvet and gold lace, and lighted with electric lamps. The mass is for a chorus of voices only. All the civil and military authorities, the state dignitaries, and the corps diplomatique to the court of Italy are present. The troops, in full dress uniform, file in the Piazza of the Collegio Romano, Via Piè di Marmo, and the Piazza della Minerva, enclosing thus a large square in the Piazza del Pantheon. The spectacle is one of the most imposing of all Roman ceremonies.

The King, and Queen Elena, and the Dowager Queen Margherita, accompanied by their respective civil and military households, assist at the requiem mass celebrated in the Pantheon, and at a commemoration service, on the same day, in the Royal Chapel of the Sudario, where also assemble the ladies and gentlemen of the Order of the Annunziata.

On the same morning the feast of St. Gregory, Pope and Doctor of the church, is celebrated at his church on the C?lian Hill. He was born of a noble family, and was Prefect of Rome in 573. Pope Pelagius II made him regionary deacon of Rome, and sent him as legate to Constantinople in 578, where he remained till the death of Pelagius, when he was elected Pope (590). He introduced the Gregorian chant. His first great act was to send St. Augustine to convert the Saxons of England to the Christian faith. An inscription in the Church of San Gregorio Magno states that St. Augustine was educated in the abbey which was erected on the site of the present church by Gregory, and that many early archbishops of York and Canterbury were also educated there. It was on the steps of this church that Augustine and his forty monks took leave of Gregory, when setting out for England. He died in 604, after a pontificate of thirteen years and six months. He was buried in the portico of the Vatican Basilica, and his body lies under the altar dedicated to him in this same church. His church, on the C?lian Hill, was built on the site of the monastery founded by him. In the chapel of the triclinium, near the church, the table on which he served the poor is shown. Near the church also is seen his cell, where his marble chair and one of his arms are exhibited.

During the Lenten season of 1907 one of the privileges of Rome was to hear the sermons of Monsignor Vaughn, in the English Catholic Church of San Silvestre. Monsignor Vaughn is the private chaplain of the Pope. His discourses attracted increasing throngs of both Catholic and Protestant hearers. This celebrated prelate is a brother of the late English Cardinal. He is a man of great distinction of presence, of beautiful voice and fascination of manner. One discourse had for its theme the joys of the life that is to come. The spiritual body, he said, has many qualities not pertaining to the physical body. It is immured from all disease and accidents; it is subtle and can pass through any substance which is (apparently) solid to us, as, for instance, when Jesus appeared in the midst of his disciples, "the doors being shut." It is not a clog on the soul, continued Monsignor Vaughn; the spiritual body is the vehicle of the soul and can waft its way through the air; it can walk the air as the physical body walks the earth. It is not-as is the physical body-the prison of the soul, but the companion of the soul. This is all a very enlightened presentation of spiritual truth, and it is little wonder that such preaching attracts large congregations. Holy Week in Rome bears little resemblance now to that of the past. The Pope is not visible in any of the ceremonials in any of the churches; and the impressiveness of former Catholic ceremonials is greatly lessened. Indeed, with the passing of the temporal power of the Pope, the picturesqueness of Rome largely vanished.

Not, assuredly, from any lack of reverence for the colossal cathedral of St. Peter's is that Basilica a resort for Sunday afternoons; it suggests a social reunion, where every one goes, listens as he will to the music of the Papal choir in the Chapel of the Sacrament, and strolls about the vast interior where the promenade of the multitude does not yet disturb in the least the vesper service in the chapel. Here one meets everybody; the general news of the day is exchanged; greeting and salutation and pleasant little conversational interludes mark the afternoon, while the sun sinks behind the splendid pile of the Palazzo Vaticano, and the golden light through the window of the tribune fades into dusk. Can one ever lose out of memory the indescribable charm of this leisurely sauntering, in social enjoyment, in the wonderful interior of St. Peter's?

In the way of the regulation sight-seeing the visitor to Rome compasses most of his duty in this respect on his initial sojourn and goes the rounds that no one ever need dream of repeating. Once for all the visitor to Rome goes down into the Catacombs; makes his appallingly hard journey over Castel San Angelo, into its cells and dungeons, and to the colossal salon in which is Hadrian's tomb; once for a lifetime he climbs St. Peter's dome; drives out to old St. Agnes and descends into the crypt; visits the Church of the Capucines and beholds the ghastly spectacle of the monks' skulls; drives in the Appian Way; visits the Palace of the C?sars, the Baths of Caracalla-a mass of ruins; the Forum; the Temples of Vesta and Isis; the Coliseum, and the classic old Pantheon. These form a kind of skeleton for the regulation sight-seeing of the Eternal City; things which, once done, are checked off with the feeling that the entire duty of the tourist has been fulfilled, and that, henceforth in Rome, there is laid up for him the crown of enjoyment, if not rejoicing; that he may go again and again to study the marvellous treasures of the Vatican galleries, the masterpieces of art in the Raphael stanze in the Vatican, the interesting pictures and sculpture in the many rich churches and galleries. The deadly chill of most of these galleries and churches in the winter is beyond words to describe. It is as if the gloom and chill and darkness of a thousand centuries were there concentrated.

One of the regulation places for the devout sight-seer, who feels responsible to his conscience for improving his privileges, is the Museo Nazionale, or the Tiberine Museum, a large proportion of whose treasures have been excavated in making the new embankments of the Tiber. It is located on the site of the Baths of Diocletian, the great ruins of which surround it in the most uncanny way. Built around a large court, the salons of the museum are entered from the inner cloisters. In the centre of the court is a fountain, and around it are antique fragments of statues, columns, and statuettes found in many places. The famous Ludovisi collection of antique statuary is now permanently placed in this museum,-a collection that includes the "Ludovisi Mars;" "Hercules," with a cornucopia; the "Hermes of Theseus," the "Discobolus Hermes;" the "Venus of Gnidus" as copied by Praxiteles; the "Dying Medusa;" the "Ludovisi Juno," which Winckelmann declares to be the finest head of Juno extant, a Greek work of the fourth century; a "Cupid and Psyche;" the two "Muses of Astronomy" and of "Epic Poetry," "Urania and Calliope;" "an Antoninus;" the largest sarcophagus known; a "Tragic Mask" (colossal) in rosso antico; a bust of "Marcus Aurelius" in bronze, and many other priceless works.

The splendor of scenic setting for art in the magnificent salons of the Casino Borghese has never been surpassed. They are, perhaps, the most impressive of any Roman interior, with lofty, splendidly decorated ceilings and walls, where recess and niche hold priceless sculptures. The splendor of these salons, indeed, quite exceeds description. In the principal one is a group on one wall-a colossal relief-representing Marcus Curtius plunging into the gulf in the Forum. There are busts of the twelve C?sars; there are busts of all the Roman Emperors, with alabaster draperies, placed on pedestals of red granite. There are Bernini's "Apollo and Daphne;" Canova's celebrated statue of Princess Pauline Borghese (the sister of Napoleon I); Bernini's "David" and "?neas and Anchises;" Thorwaldsen's "Faun;" "Diana," "Isis," "Juno," and many other celebrated classic statues. All the great paintings which were formerly in the Palazzo Borghese-over six hundred in all-are now in this casino. The great work in this collection is Raphael's "Entombment of Christ," painted in his twenty-fourth year. Titian's "Divine and Human Love;" Raphael's portrait of "C?sar Borgia;" Correggio's "Dana?;" Domenichino's "Cum?an Sibyl" and "Diana;" Peruzzi's "Venus Leaving the Bath;" Van Dyck's "Crucifixion;" Titian's "Venus and Cupid;" and "Annunciation," by Paul Veronese; Vasari's "Lucrezia Borgia;" Botticelli's "Holy Family and Angels;" Van Dyck's "Entombment;" Carlo Dolce's "Mater Dolorosa," and Sassoferrato's "Three Ages of Man" are among the great masterpieces in this museum.

The Villa Borghese (by which is meant the park) is some three miles in extent, and was laid out some two hundred years ago by Cardinal Borghese. As recently as 1902 it was purchased by the government for three million francs, and its official name is now "Villa Comunale Umberto Primo." These grounds contain fountains, antique statues, tablets, small temples and many inscriptions, with statues of ?sculapius and Apollo, and an Egyptian gateway. They are open all day to every one freely and are one of the great attractions of Rome.

The great palaces of Rome are of later date than those of Florence. There are some eighty principal ones, of which the Palazzos Veneziano, Farnese, Doria, Barberini, Colonna, and the Rospigliosi (containing Guido's famous "Aurora") are the most important. The Farnesina Palace contains some of the most interesting pictures in Rome, and the traditions of the residence of Agostino Chigi, during the pontificate of Leo X, are still found in Rome,-traditions of the lavish magnificence of the entertainments given here to the Pope and the Cardinals.

The Monte Pincio is the famous drive of Roman society, and the promenade around the brow of the hill offers one of the most enchanting views of the world. Near the Trinità di Monti stands the historic Villa Medici, the French Academy of which the great Carolus Duran is now the director. The view across the valley in which lies the Piazza di Spagna, the river to St. Peter's, from the Villa Medici, is one of the finest in Rome.

The architecture of the garden fa?ade is attributed to Michael Angelo. These gardens have a circuit of more than a mile, laid out in the formal rectangles and densely bordered walks of the Italian custom. All manner of old fragments of sculpture are scattered through them,-a torso, a broken bust, a ruined statue, an old and partly broken fountain,-and entablatures and reliefs are seen in the walls on every hand. No sound of the city ever penetrates into this dense foliage which secludes the gardens of the famous Villa Medici.

One of the features of Roman life is the fashionable drive on Monte Pincio in the late afternoons. An hour or two before sunset the terrace of the Piazza Trinità di Monti begins to be thronged with pedestrians, who lean over the marble balustrade, gazing at the incomparable pictured panorama where the vast dome of St. Peter's, the dense pines of the Villa Pamphilia-Doria on the Janiculum, and the dark cypress groves on Monte Mario loom up against the golden western sky.

Compared with the extensive parks of modern cities the Monte Pincio would prefigure itself as a drive for fairies alone. It comprises a few acres only, thickly decorated with trees and shrubbery, with a casino for the orchestra that plays every afternoon, and a circular carriage drive so limited in extent that the same carriage comes in view every few minutes.

The Eternal City has had so many birthdays that one would fancy them to have become negligible; but it was announced on April 21 of 1907 that the date was a special anniversary, and she took on aspects of festivity. The municipal palaces and museums were hung with tapestries, flags were flying from the Capitol, the municipal guards were all in full dress uniform and the municipal orchestra played in the Piazza Colonna. The historic bell began ringing at eight in the morning in peals that were well calculated to call the C?sars from their tombs and which might, indeed, have been mistaken for the final trumpet calls of Gabriel. But the Romans take their pleasures rather sadly and sternly,-not like the light-hearted Florentines in song and laughter, or with the joyous abandon of the Neapolitans,-so there was no special manifestation on the part of the populace, and the day, cold, gloomy, and cheerless, did not inspire gayety.

When the Republic of Rome was established (on Feb. 9, 1849) a provisional government was appointed. In March of that year Mazzini proposed that the assembly should appoint a Committee of War, and it was decided to send troops to Piedmont. Later a triumvirate, consisting of Mazzini, Saffi, and Armellini, was formed, but disaster was near. In April the French troops landed at Cività Vecchia, and the Italians prepared to defend their country from the control of Louis Napoleon. Mazzini is said to have been "the life and the soul" of this defence. But the Republic was doomed, and when it had fallen the Pope returned, only under the protection of the French. But the French Empire, too, was doomed to fall; and when Garibaldi transferred his successes to Victor Emmanuel, the monarchy was consolidated by the union of Rome with Italy, and the present "Via Venti Settembre" in Rome-the street named to commemorate that 20th of September, 1870, on which the Italian troops entered the city and the Papal reign ended-perpetuates the story of those eventful days. "Victor Emmanuel, Cavour, and Garibaldi have been designated, along with Mazzini, as the founders of the modern Italy," said Dr. William Clarke, "but a broad line divides Mazzini from the others." Dr. Clarke sees between Cavour and Mazzini "the everlasting conflict between the idealist and the man of the world. The former," he continues, "stands by the intellect and the conscience; the latter by the limitations of actual fact and the practical difficulties of the case," and Dr. Clarke notes further:-

"It was pre-eminently Mazzini who gave to Italy the breath of a new life, who taught her people constancy in devotion to an ideal good. Prophets are rarely successful in their own day, and so it has been with the prophet of modern Italy. The making of Italy has not proceeded in the way he hoped it would; for the Italians, who are an eminently subtle and diplomatic people, have apparently thought it best to bend to the hard facts by which they have been surrounded. But if, as Emerson teaches, facts are fluid to thought, we may believe that the ideas of Mazzini will yet prevail in the nation of his birth, and that he may yet be regarded as the spiritual father of the future Italian commonwealth. For of him, if of any modern man, we may say that he

'Saw distant gates of Eden gleam,

And did not dream it was a dream.'"

STATUE OF CHRIST, ANCIENT CHURCH OF SAN MARTINA, ROME

From the Artist's Original Cast

Albert Bertel Thorwaldsen

Between the period of the establishment of the Roman Republic in 1849 and the consummation of United Italy in 1870 the years were rich to the artist, whatever they may have been to philosopher and patriot. The way for the painter and the sculptor seems to have been a flowery and a pictorial one,-a very via buona fortuna, through a golden, artistic atmosphere. The perpetual excursions may lead the serious spectator to wonder where working hours come in, but, at all events, those days are rich in color. Friends grouped together by the unerring law of elective affinities loitered in galleries and churches. San Martina, near the Mamertine prisons, was a point of interest because of Thorwaldsen's bequest to it of the original cast of his beautiful statue of "Christ" which is in Copenhagen. This is, perhaps, the finest work ever conceived by the Danish sculptor, and is one that no visitor of to-day can behold unmoved. Both Canova and Bernini are also represented in this church,-the former by a statue of "Religion" and the latter by a bust of Pietro da Cortona. Beneath the present Church of San Martina is the ancient one containing the shrine of the martyr, under a superb bronze altar. Of this church, Mrs. Jameson says in her "Sacred and Legendary Art":-

"At the foot of the Capitoline Hill, on the left hand as we descend from the Ara C?li into the Forum, there stood in very ancient times a small chapel, dedicated to St. Martina, a Roman virgin. The veneration paid to her was of very early date, and the Roman people were accustomed to assemble there on the first day of the year. This observance was, however, confined to the people, and was not very general till 1634, an era which connects her in rather an interesting manner with the history of art. In this year, as they were about to repair her chapel, they discovered, walled into the foundations, a sarcophagus of terra cotta, in which was the body of a young female, whose severed head reposed in a separate casket. These remains were very naturally supposed to be those of the saint who had been so long venerated on that spot. The discovery was hailed with the utmost exultation, not by the people only, but by those who led the minds and consciences of the people. The Pope himself, Urban VIII, composed hymns in her praise; and Cardinal Francesco Barberini undertook to rebuild her church."

The painter, Pietro da Cortona, entered into this feeling and at his own expense built the chapel and painted for its altar piece the picture representing the saint in triumph, while the temple in which she has gone to sacrifice falls in ruins from a raging tempest.

In any stray ramble in Rome the sojourner might chance, at any moment, upon obelisk, a pedestal or inscription linked with the great names of the historic past. Hawthorne has recorded how, by mere chance, he turned from the Via delle Quattro Fontane into the Via Quirinale and was thus lured on to an obelisk and a fountain on the pedestal of which on one side was the inscription, "Opus Phidias," and on the other, "Opus Praxiteles," and he exclaims:-

"What a city is this, when one may stumble, by mere chance-at a street corner as it were-on the works of two such sculptors! I do not know the authority," he continues, "on which these statues (Castor and Pollux I presume) are attributed to Phidias and Praxiteles; but they impressed me as noble and godlike, and I feel inclined to take them for what they purport to be."

While the Papal ceremonies are neither so frequent nor so magnificent as in former days, still any hotel guest in Rome is liable, any morning, on coming down to the salle-à-manger for coffee, to find every woman (who is taking her Rome seriously) arrayed in a black robe with a black lace veil on her head. One would fancy they were all a procession of nuns, about to retire from the world into the strict seclusion of the cloister. But it is nothing so momentous. It is only that every lady, with the devotion to spectacles which every visitor in Rome feels, as a matter of course, has secured the pink ticket entitling her to admission to the Vatican Palace to see the "passage" of the Pope, as he makes his way, attended by the Cardinals of the Sacred College, to the Sistine Chapel where his Holiness "creates" new Cardinals. Although rumored that the spectacle will be a gorgeous one, that the Pope will be carried aloft preceded by the silver trumpeters and attended by the Cardinals and the ambassadors and other dignitaries in the full dress of their ceremonial costumes and their orders, the reality is less impressive. Some feminine enthusiasts fare forth at the heroic hour of eight, although the procession is not announced to pass until a quarter after ten (which in Italy should be translated as a quarter after eleven, at the earliest, if not after twelve, which would be the more probable), in order to secure good standing room. For everybody is to stand-of course, comfort being a thing conspicuous only by its absence in Italy! Those of us too well aware by the experiences of previous visits to Italy that no Italian function was ever on time, from the starting of a railway train to the crowning of a king, only betake ourselves to the glories of the Palazzo Vaticano at the hour named, and we have then-as one's prophetic soul or his commonplace memory warned him-to wait more than an hour wedged into a dense crowd of all nationalities, none of whom seem at this particular juncture, at least, to be at all overburdened with good manners. And what went they out for to seek? Instead of an impressive spectacle-a thing to remember for a lifetime-one merely sees Pius X walking, surrounded by his Cardinals in a group,-not a procession,-he alone in the centre with his mitre on his head,-the whole scene hardly lasting over a minute, and as his Holiness is not as tall as most of his Cardinals, he is almost hidden from view. It had been rumored that the Pope was to be borne aloft in the Papal chair, preceded by the traditional white fan and the silver trumpets; but the present Pope is temperamentally inclined to minimize all the ceremonials investing his sacred office.

Yet there is always a thrill in entering the Vatican. To ascend that splendid Scala Regia designed by Bernini, with one of the most ingeniously treated perspective effects to be found, it may be, in the entire world; to cross this Scala with its interesting frescoes by Salviati and others; to see at near range the picturesque Swiss Guard,-surely any pretext to enjoy such a morning is easily accepted of whatever occurrence one may grasp in order to obtain the hour.

One curious feature of the past is to-day equally in evidence in Rome. Strolling at any time into the Church of San Agostino one beholds a curious spectacle. It is in this church that is placed the beautiful bronze statue of the Virgin and Child by Sansovino. It is approached by a platform on which is placed a stool that enables one to mount and thus reach the foot of the statue, which is kissed and the wish of the devotee is offered. This Madonna is believed to have the power to grant each wish and prayer; to heal the sick; restore the blind, the deaf, and the lame; to grant immunity from loss or illness; to grant success and prosperity. The poor Madonna must have her hands full with these avalanches of petitions, but she sits calmly in state and, if the striking testimony of votive offerings can be credited, she is most amiable in granting the prayers of her devotees. For she is hung with priceless jewels; necklaces, brooches, bracelets, diamond and ruby and sapphire rings on her fingers, she is a blaze of splendor. Around this statue there is a perpetual crowd, whatever hour of day one chances to wander in, and from prince to beggar the bronze foot is kissed, as each waits his turn to mount the stool and prefer his secret wish. The walls of the church are covered with the votive offerings to the Madonna for her aid,-rich jewels, orders, tablets,-offerings of all kinds. In this church is entombed the body of Santa Monica, the mother of St. Augustine, placed in an urn of verd-antique, in a special chapel beautifully decorated. After preferring one's secret wish to the Virgin one must wander on to the Fontane de Trevi and throw his penny into the water to insure his return to Rome, and then he may rest, mens conscia recti!

Although Holy Week in Rome has less ceremonial observance in these latter days than those of the impressive scenes so vividly portrayed by Mme. de Sta?l in "Corinne," it still attracts a multitude of visitors and offers much to touch and thrill the life of the spirit, quite irrespective as to whether the visitor be of the Catholic or Protestant faith. In the great essentials of Christianity, all followers of Christ unite. The Pope does not now take part in public services on Easter, and that scene of the Pontifical blessing from the balcony of St. Peter's given to the multitude below who throng the piazza remains only in memory and in record. But the stately and solemn services of Good Friday in the vast and grand interior of St. Peter's are an experience to linger forever in memory. The three hours' service-the chanting of the Miserere-was a scene to impress the imagination. This service is held in the late afternoon of Good Friday, in the tribune of St. Peter's, the extreme end of the church where the vast window of yellow glass gives a perpetually golden light. The chair believed to have been that of St. Peter's is here placed, enclosed in ivory and supported by statues of four Fathers of the church, St. Augustine, St. Ambrose, St. Chrysostom, and St. Athanasius, from a design of Bernini.

In the tribune is the tomb of Urban VIII (who was Matteo Barberini), of which the redundant decoration tells the story that it is also Bernini's work. Opposite this tomb is that of Paul III, by della Porta, under the supervision of Michael Angelo, it is said, and the beauty and dignity of the bronze figure of the aged Pope, in the act of giving the benediction, quite confirm this tradition. On a tablet in the wall of the tribune are engraved the names of all the bishops and prelates who, in 1854, accepted the belief of the Immaculate Conception,-this tablet being placed by the order of Pio Nono.

In this tribune on the late afternoon of the Good Friday of 1907 the seats were filled with worshippers to listen to the three hours' chant of the Miserere. Princes and peasants sat side by side, and an immense throng who could not find seats stood, often wandering away in the dim distances of the cathedral and ever and again returning. The high altar, where Canova's beautiful figure of the kneeling Pope always enchains the visitor, was, as usual, surrounded. The lights burned-these perpetual lamps-and the moving throng went and came. The scene grew mystic, dream-like, as the solemn music floated on the air.

The Chapel of the Holy Sacrament, on the left of the cathedral, was made into the sepulchre that day, and anything more beautiful than the myriad altar lights and the flowers could not be imagined. At the altar black-robed nuns were kneeling, and all over the chapel, kneeling on the floor, were people of all grades and ranks of life, from the duchess and princess to the beggar woman with a ragged shawl on her shoulders and her baby in her arms. St. Peter's was nearly filled all that day with people, not crowded, but apparently thronged in almost every part.

The altar in the Chapel of the Holy Sacrament was one mass of deep red roses. The chapel was completely darkened, but the blaze of myriads of tall candles illuminated the roses and the black-robed nuns and the black-robed devotees. It was a scene never to be forgotten.

Even in the latter-day Rome, historic names are not wanting. One of these, the Princess Christina Bonaparte, née Ruspoli, died in 1907 in her Roman villa in Via Venti Settembre. She was the widow of Prince Napoleon Charles Bonaparte and a cousin of the Empress Eugénie. With her husband in Paris until 1870, she fled (whilst her husband was fighting at Metz) as soon as the Commune was proclaimed. The princess was considered a beautiful woman and her portrait had been painted by Ernest Hébert, but it was lost when the Palace of the Tuileries was destroyed in 1870.

With this princess dies the name of the Bonaparte family. Her daughters, Donna Maria Gotti-Bonaparte and Princess Maria della Moskowa, were often with her in Rome.

The Palazzo Bonaparte is very near Porta Pia. Although called a palace, it is simply a plain house of some five stories, with narrow halls and stone staircases, no elevator, no electric lights. The princess occupied the first floor, while the apartments above were let to various families.

With the exception of the royal palaces there are few in which suites are not obtainable for residence by any one who desires them.

CASTEL SAN ANGELO AND ST. PETER'S, ROME

It was at a pleasant déje?ner one spring day in Rome that the project was launched, that we should go motoring that afternoon to Frascati, Albano, Castel Gandolfo, Lago di Nemi, and all that wonderful region. We were lunching with a friend who had a charming apartment in one of the sumptuous old palaces of Rome, where, in a niche on the marble staircase, the statue of C?sar Augustus stood,-a copy of the famous statue in the Capitoline,-where lofty, decorated ceilings, old paintings and sculptures adorned the rooms, and where from the windows we looked out on the tragedy-haunted Castel San Angelo, with the dome of San Pietro in the background. Our friend who invited us to fly in his motor had brought his touring car over from America. The one note of new luxury now is for travellers to journey with their touring cars. In a year or two more it will be airships or soaring machines. On this wonderful May afternoon, all azure and gold, we started off in the great, luxurious touring car which was arranged even to carry two trunks, with a safe in it for the deposit of valuables, a hamper for refreshments, and, indeed, almost every conceivable convenience. On we flew through Rome, past the great Basilica of San Maria Maggiore; past the wonderful pile of San Giovanni Laterano, with the colossal statues of the apostles surmounting the fa?ade; through the Porta San Giovanni into the narrow, walled lane leading out on the Campagna; on, on, to the Alban hills. We flew past olive orchards and vineyards, and the vast green pasture lands of the Campagna whose vivid green was ablaze with scarlet poppies. Far away to the west there was a white shining line-the line of the sea.

At Frascati we stopped at the Villa Torlonia, the country place of the ducal family, whose grand Roman palazzo is in the Bocca di Leone in the old part of Rome. The Torlonia have an only daughter, Donna Teresa, whose débutante ball a year ago is said to have been the most magnificent entertainment in Rome for fifty years. A writer, in a recent article on the nobility of Rome, said of this family:-

"The Torlonia figure repeatedly in the novels of Thackeray, who was never tired of portraying them. They have been most useful citizens, and since the days of the old army contractor, who founded the house, have augmented the family wealth by judicious investments, especially in connection with the draining and reclaiming of the marsh lands that abound in the former Papal States. They have contracted matrimonial alliances with the Colonna, with the Borghese, the Belmonte, the Doria, and the Sforza."

The Villa Torlonia at Frascati is a very large estate with extensive gardens, terraces, and a cascade of three falls on the hillside, which is turned on (the water) at pleasure. The house, however, is a shabby-looking affair, a two or three story, rambling, yellow structure, which, at Newport, would not be considered too good for the gardener.

After the usual fashion of the Italians who seldom travel, the Torlonia, wealthy as they are, simply remove from their palace in Rome to their villa at Frascati instead of travelling to Switzerland, Germany, or elsewhere in the summer.

The Duke and Duchess of Cumberland were the guests of the Torlonia that day, the entire party enjoying themselves al fresco, and the beautiful cascade pouring down within the near distance.

These outlying towns, Frascati, Albano, Castel Gandolfo, and Lago di Nemi, the picturesque group in the Alban Mountains, are some sixteen to eighteen miles from Rome. These Alban hills rise like an island from the vast plain of the Campagna, the highest point being some three thousand feet above sea level. They are covered with villages and castles and villas, and have in all a population of some fifty thousand. The region is volcanic, and the beautiful Lago di Nemi and Lago di Albano were the craters of extinct volcanoes. All this region was the haunt of Cicero, Virgil, and Livy. At Tusculum, near Frascati, are the remains of Cicero's villa, and also of an ancient theatre hewn out of solid rock. The view to the west toward Rome is most beautiful. The dome of St. Peter's crowns the Eternal City; and the Campagna-a sea of green-is as infinite in sight as is the Mediterranean. There are splendid villas and estates in these Alban hills that belong to the Roman nobility, and here the Pope has his summer palace. "The Alban Mount is also full of historical and legendary interest," says a writer on the country around Rome. "The Latin tribe, one of the constituent elements of the Roman people, had here its seat. Upon the highest peak of the range was the temple of Jupiter Latiaris, where all the tribes of Latin blood, the Romans included, met every year to worship; and where the victorious generals of the Republic repaired to offer praises and acknowledgments. In these mountain glens undoubtedly most of that ballad literature of Rome, the loss of which Macaulay so eloquently laments and so successfully restores, had its origin. Nor need the scholar be reminded that this is the scene of the most original and vigorous portions of the ?neid of Virgil; nor how the genius of the poet, which rather languidly recounts the traditions borrowed from Greece, wakes to new life, when he feels his feet upon his own soil and deals with Latin names and Latin legends."

The Villa Aldobrandini at Frascati is celebrated for its fantastic waterworks in elaborate fountains and cascades. In the gardens a statue of Pan with a pipe of reeds and one of a satyr with a trumpet are made to play (both the pipe and the trumpet) by water. The hydraulic engineer must have found in Frascati his earthly paradise, for he commanded the water to leap into foam and spray in the air, to rush down marble terraces, and to form itself into obelisks of liquid silver.

At Grotto Ferrata is a vast monastery of monks of the Order of Basilio (Greek), a monastery so colossal as to be mistaken for a fortress. The chapel has frescoes by Domenichino. At Castel Gandolfo is the summer Papal palace, that has not been occupied by a Pope since the overthrowing of the temporal power in 1870. It has a beautiful and commanding view toward Rome. It was built by Urban VIII.

All the magic of Italy is in this picturesque excursion. In the vast grounds of the Villa Barberini are the ruins of the ancient palace and gardens of Domitian. On one hillside is a broken wall; a long avenue of ilex trees reveals here and there fragments of mosaic pavement. Crumbling niches hold fragments of statues. The hill itself is still pierced with the long tunnels driven through it by Domitian that he might pass unseen,-presumably safe from his enemies,-from the palace to the gardens. From the parapet, Rome is seen across the shining Campagna and the dome of Michael Angelo gleams against the blue Italian sky.

"The wreck is beautiful," writes Mrs. Humphry Ward, in "Eleanor," of this romantic spot; "for it is masked in the gloom of the overhanging trees; or hidden behind dropping veils of ivy; or lit up by straggling patches of broom and cytisus that thrust themselves through the gaps in the Roman brickwork and shine golden in the dark. At the foot of the wall, along its whole length, runs a low marble conduit that held the sweetest, liveliest water. Lilies of the valley grow beside it, breathing scent into the shadowed air; while on the outer or garden side of the path the grass is purple with long-stalked violets, or pink with the sharp heads of the cyclamen. And a little farther, from the same grass, there shoots up, in happy neglect, tall camellia trees, ragged and laden, strewing the ground red and white beneath them. And above the camellias again the famous stone-pines of the villa climb into the high air, overlooking the plain and the sea, peering at Rome and Soracte."

One could wander all day in the strange ruins of the old Barberini grounds, and in the vast spaces of the gardens and through the Villa Doria.

The beauty of the avenue of ilex trees through which we flew from Castel Gandolfo to Lago di Nemi surpasses description. This lake, some four miles in circumference, lies in a crater hollow, with precipitous hills surrounding it, the water so clear that the ancients called it the "Mirror of Diana." In it was constructed an artificial island in the design of a Roman state barge.

Over the long viaduct at Ariccia we flew; everywhere in the little town people, donkeys-an almost indistinguishable mass-filled the narrow streets; and thus on to Genzano and the Lago di Nemi, with its fabled fleet at the bottom.

The Chigi woods, that fill the deep ravine under the great viaduct at Ariccia, were in the most brilliant emerald green. Past these forests lay the vast stretch of the Pontine Marshes; and turning toward Rome again, the splendor of the sunset flamed in the sky. One could but recall Mrs. Humphry Ward's vivid picture of a storm seen over this part of the Campagna:-

"The sunset was rushing to its height through every possible phase of violence and splendor. From the Mediterranean, storm clouds were rising fast to the assault and conquest of the upper sky, which still above the hills shone blue and tranquil. But the northwest wind and the sea were leagued against it. They sent out threatening fingers and long spinning veils of cloud across it-skirmishers that foretold the black and serried lines, the torn and monstrous masses behind. Below these wild tempest shapes again-in long spaces resting on the sea-the heaven was at peace, shining in delicate greens and yellows, infinitely translucent and serene, above the dazzling lines of water. Over Rome itself there was a strange massing and curving of the clouds. Between their blackness and the deep purple of the Campagna rose the city-pale phantom-upholding one great dome, and one only, to view of night and the world. Round and above and behind, beneath the long flat arch of the storm, glowed a furnace of scarlet light. The buildings of the city were faint specks within its fierce intensity, dimly visible through a sea of fire. St. Peter's alone, without visible foundation or support, had consistence, form, identity; and between the city and the hills, waves of blue and purple shade, forerunners of the night, stole over the Campagna towards the higher ground. But the hills themselves were still shining, still clad in rose and amethyst, caught in gentler repetition from the wildness of the west. Pale rose even the olive gardens; rose the rich brown fallows, the emerging farms; while drawn across the Campagna from north to south, as though some mighty brush had just laid it there for sheer lust of color, sheer joy in the mating it with the rose,-one long strip of sharpest, purest green."

The Villa Falconieri, in Frascati, which was built by Cardinal Ruffini, with the old ilex tree preserved in the portals, has recently been purchased by the Emperor of Germany, who proposes to transform it into an Academy for the accommodation of German students in Rome. These national academies draw their corresponding numbers of students from the nations thus represented, and contribute to the cosmopolitan aspects of Rome. The American Academy in Rome is now being transferred from the Ludovisi quarter to a large and convenient building outside Porta Pia.

Perhaps the eminently social quality of Roman life may be indirectly due to the lack of library privileges which is a conspicuous defect in Rome. The Biblioteca Vittorio Emanuele, under the courteous administration of Commendatore Conte Guili, has, it is true, a collection of over half a million volumes and thousands of very rare and valuable manuscripts. It has a large public reading room, and books are loaned on the signature of any embassy or consulate; yet this library, while offering peculiar advantages to theological and other special students and readers, does not afford any extended privileges to the general reader of modern English and American publications. It is located in a grim and forbidding old stone palace, approached by an obscure lane from the Corso, where, as there is no sidewalk, the pedestrian shares the narrow, dark, cold, stone-paved little street with carts, donkeys, peasants, and beggars.

The great monument to King Victor Emmanuel, of mingled architecture and sculpture, a colossal structure of white marble with arches and pillars forming beautiful colonnades, the capital of each column heavily carved, and the sculpture, which is being done by a number of artists, will be of the most artistic and beautiful order. This memorial will occupy an entire block, and it is located very near the Capitol. All the old buildings in the vicinity will be torn down to give a fine vista for this transcendently noble and sumptuous memorial.

The directors of this work aim to have it completed and ready to be unveiled in 1911, the jubilee year of Italy's resurrection as a united country.

Encircled by the old Aurelian wall and near the great pyramid that marks the tomb of Caius Cestius, who died 12 B.C., lies the Protestant cemetery of Rome, full of bloom and fragrance and beauty, under the dark, solemn cypress trees that stand like ever-watchful sentinels. When Keats was buried here (in 1820), Shelley wrote of "the romantic and lovely cemetery . . . under the pyramid of Caius Cestius, and the mossy walls and towers now mouldering and desolate which formed the circuit of ancient Rome. The cemetery is an open space among the ruins, covered even in winter with violets and daisies. It might make one in love with death," he added, "to think of being buried in so sweet a place."

PORTA SAN PAOLA, PYRAMID OF CAIUS CESTIUS, ROME

In the old cemetery (immediately adjoining the pyramid and separated from the new one by a wall) is the grave of Keats (who died in 1821) with its unique inscription, "Here lies one whose name was writ in water." Beside it is that of his friend, Joseph Severn, who died in 1829, and near these the grave of John Bell, the famous writer on surgery and anatomy. In the new or more modern cemetery the visitor lingers by the graves of Shelley and his friend, Trelawney; August Goethe (the son of the poet); of William and Mary Howitt, who died in 1879 and 1888. Not merely, however, do the names of Keats and Shelley allure the visitor to poetic meditations; but here lie the earthly forms of many a poet, painter, and sculptor of our own country, with their wives and children, who have sought in the Eternal City the atmosphere for art and who, enamoured by the loveliness of Rome, continued there for all their remaining years. These graves, these sculptured memorials, are eloquent with the joys, the sorrows, the achievements and the failures, the success and the defeat, of the artistic life in a foreign land. Many of these memorial sculptures are the work of the husband or the father, into which is inseparably joined the personal tenderness to the artist's skill. Especially noticeable are the graves of the wives of three American sculptors,-William Wetmore Story, Richard S. Greenough, and Franklin Simmons. Each of these is marked by a memorial sculpture created by the husband, and the three different conceptions of these sculptors are interesting to contrast. That of Mr. Story is of an angel with outspread wings, kneeling, her head bowed in the utter despair and desolation of hopeless sorrow. The figure has the greatest delicacy of beauty and refinement and tenderness; but it is the grief that has no support of faith, the grief that has no vision of divine consolation. On the memorial monument is simply the name, Emelyn Story, born in Boston, 1820, died in Rome in 1898, and the note that it is the last work of W. W. Story, in memory of his beloved wife. Here, also, is Mr. Story buried, his name and dates of birth and death (1819-1901) alone being inscribed.

At the tomb of Sarah B. Greenough, the wife of Richard S. Greenough, the monument is designed to represent Psyche escaping from the bondage of mortality. This Psyche is emerging from her garments and she holds in her hand a lamp. On this is the inscription: "Her loss was that as of a keystone to an arch."

Mrs. Greenough was a very accomplished musician, and she had the unique honor of having been made a member of the "Arcadians."

The memorial sculpture over the grave of Mrs. Franklin Simmons is, as elsewhere noted, the work of her husband, a figure called "The Angel of the Resurrection." The angel is represented as a male figure (Gabriel) holding in the left hand a golden trumpet while the right is outstretched. His wings are spread, his face partly turned to the right. The form is partially draped and in every detail is instinct with a complete harmony; every fold of the drapery, every curve of the body, and the lofty and triumphant expression of the face in its ineffable glory of achievement proclaim the triumph of immortality. It stands on a pedestal that gives it, from the base of the pedestal to the tip of the outstretched wings, a height of some twenty-one feet. This monument, seen against a background of dark cypress trees, speaks the word of positive and complete faith in the divine promise of eternal life.

"Then life is-to wake, not sleep,

Rise and not rest, but press

From earth's level where blindly creep

Things perfected, more or less,

In the heaven's height-far and steep."

The visitor lingers over the grave of that interesting painter, J. Rollin Tilton, whose landscapes from Egypt and Italian scenes were so vivid and picturesque.

Richard Henry Dana, the elder, born in Boston in 1815, came to Rome to die in 1882.

Very near the tomb of William Wetmore and Emelyn Story is that of Constance Fenimore Woolson. Over the graves of William and Mary Howitt is the inscription: "Let not your heart be troubled; believe in God, believe also in me."

On the wall just back of the new tomb erected over the ashes of Shelley by Onslow Ford in 1891 is a memorial tablet placed to Frederick W. H. Myers, bearing this inscription:-

"This tablet is placed to the memory of Frederick William Henry Myers, born at Keswick, Cumberland, Feb. 6, 1843; died in Rome, Jan. 17, 1901. 'He asked life of Thee, and Thou gavest him long life ever and forever.'"

Over the grave of John Addington Symonds, whose best monument is in his admirable History of the Renaissance in Italy, is a Latin inscription written by Professor Jowett of Oxford, and a stanza from the Greek of Cleanthes, translated by Mr. Symonds as follows:-

"Lead thou, our God, law, reason, motion, life;

All names for Thee alike are vain and hollow;

Lead me, for I will follow without strife,

Or, if I strive, still more I blindly follow."

John Addington Symonds, who certainly ranks as the most gifted interpreter of Italy, in her art, her legends and associations, and her landscape loveliness, died in the Rome he so loved in 1893. His wife was ill in Venice, but his daughter, Margaret,-his inseparable companion and his helper in his work,-was with him. It is Miss Symonds who prefaced a memorial volume to her father with the exquisite lines:-

"O Love; we two shall go no longer

To lands of summer beyond the sea."

Near the graves of Keats and of his friend, Joseph Severn, are those of Augustus William Hare and John Gibson, the sculptor, who died in 1868. Some ten years before Hawthorne, meeting Gibson at a dinner given by T. Buchanan Read, wrote of him that it was whispered about the table that he had been in Rome for forty-two years and that he had a quiet, self-contained aspect as of one who had spent a calm life among his clay and marble.

Dwight Benton, an American painter and writer, who was for some time in the diplomatic service and whose home had been in Rome for more than a quarter of a century, lies buried here. For many years he was the editor of The Roman World, which still sustains the interesting character that marked it during his editorship. Of his work in art a friend wrote:-

"In painting, as in literature, Dwight Benton took his inspiration from nature. His paintings of Italian scenery are true and faithful representations of its character and atmospheric effects. His tramps on the Roman Campagna were long and often tiring, but he worked with all an artist's enthusiasm, unmindful of cold, rain, and even hunger. He would delight, as all true artists, in an old convent, a tree, a tower, a cross, which he would reproduce with a peculiar and striking perfection of tone and color. In his paintings of Keats's and Shelley's tombs, not only are the slabs and marble there, but there, also, in all their naturalness, are the stately pines and cypresses above, with the sunshine and shadows alternating between them, and in the background the turreted top of St. Paul's Gateway, the Pyramid of Caius Cestius, all lending effect and picturesqueness to the whole."

The present King of Italy purchased one of Mr. Benton's paintings, called "Giornata di tristezza."

While art abounds in Rome, less can be said for literature. There is a large and admirable selected Italian library in connection with the Collegio Romano; but while these books circulate, under certain conditions, to visitors, and the courtesy of the librarian and his staff is generously kind, the location and the Italian methods render it a matter of some difficulty to avail one's self of its resources. In the Piazza di Spagna there are two circulating libraries, but although one of these claims twenty-five thousand volumes, the majority are of mediocre fiction and almost none, if any, of the important modern works are to be found here. The visitor who is a subscriber to this library passes into a small, dark room, where one window looking on the street hardly does more than make the darkness visible, and he must take the catalogue to the window and stand in order to decipher the list, which is hardly, indeed, worth the trouble, as there are very few volumes of any pretension to importance in the collection, and of late years no additions, apparently, have ever been made. The other circulating library, while far preferable, is still in crowded rooms and the assortment is limited. The visitor in Rome who cares for reading matter looks forward with delight to Florence, with its noble circulating library, to which access is so easy and whose conduct in all ways is so convenient and grateful to the guest.

In Rome, however, one finds his romance embodied in life and his history written in the streets and in the marvellous structures. His poetry is in her art, her ruins, her magical loveliness of hillside vistas, her infinite views over the Campagna, her sapphire skies, and her luminous, golden atmosphere.

"Here Ischia smiles

O'er liquid miles,

And yonder, bluest of the isles,

Calm Capri waits

Her sapphire gates,

Beguiling to her bright estates."

"Oh, Signor! thine the amber hand,

And mine the distant sea

Obedient to the least command

Thine eyes impose on me."

"With dreamful eyes

My spirit lies

Where summer sings but never dies."

Naples is the paradise of excursions. It is set in the heart of incomparable loveliness. Over its sapphire sea one sails away-to the Fortunate Isles, or some others equally alluring. Its heights and adjacent mountains offer views that one might well cross the ocean to enjoy. Its atmosphere is full of classic interest; of song, and story, and legend, and romance; of history, too, which in its tragic and exciting episodes is not less vivid in color and in strange studies of human life than is any romance. Naples is the city of fascination. Rome is stately and impressive; Florence is all beauty and enchantment; Genoa is picturesque; Venice is a dream city; but Naples is simply-fascinating. There is the common life of the streets and the populace continually en scène; the people who are at home on the sunny side in winter, or the shady side in summer; there is the social life of the nobility, which is brilliant and vivacious. The excursions, of which Naples is the centre, are the chief interest to travellers, and these, while possible in winter, are far more enjoyable in the early spring. Still even in midwinter the days are sunny, and while the air is crisp and cool, it is not cold. The grass is as green as in June; but the foliage and flowers are more or less withered. Naples has the high and the lower town, the former the more desirable, and the fine hotels perched on the terraces, with the view all over the Bay of Naples, Capri, Sorrento, and Vesuvius, offer a vista hardly to be duplicated in the entire world. The lower town has its fine hotels on the water's edge, with a beautiful view over the bay, less enchanting than when seen from above. The Bay of Naples is enclosed in two semicircular arms that extend far out at sea, the southern reaching nearly to Capri, while near the termination of the northern,

"Fair Ischia smiles

O'er liquid miles."

Far out at sea the sun shines dazzlingly on the blue Mediterranean. The landscape is full of those curious formations that are always inherent in volcanic regions. The region surrounding Naples is abrupt, picturesque, with the same irregular outline of hills that characterizes the elevations in the Tonto basin in Arizona. The vegetation is of the tropical type. The cactus is common, although it grows to no such monstrous heights as in Arizona. Orange and lemon groves prevail as far as the eye can see. On every height towns and villages crown the crests and sweep in winding terraces around the hillsides. Olive orchards abound. Castles and ruins gleam white in the sunshine on the ledge of rocky precipices. The curved shores shine like broken lines of silver, with deep indentations at Naples and at Castellammare. Between these two points rises Vesuvius, the thin blue smoke constantly curling from the summit that, since the eruption of 1906, has lost much of its elevation. In many places there is hardly the width of a roadway between the low mountains and the coast, but the cliffs are tropically luxurious in vegetation. Everywhere the habitations of the people crowd the space. From the monasteries and the castles that crown the heights, both distant and near to the clustered villages of the plain and those clinging to the hillsides, the scene is one unending panorama of human life. For Naples is only the focussing point of these densely populated regions of Southern Italy. The city stretches along the coast on both sides her semicircular bay; but the terraced hills, the stretches of land beyond, and every peak and valley are thickly sown with human habitations. Its commanding heights, two of which rise in the middle of the town, and its beautiful mirrored expanse of water give to it the most unparalleled variety and beauty of landscape loveliness.

"What words can analyze," says George S. Hillard, "the parts and details of this matchless panorama, or unravel that magic web of beauty into which palaces, villas, forests, gardens, vineyards, the mountains, and the sea are woven? What pen can paint the soft curves, the gentle undulations, the flowing outlines, the craggy steeps, and the far-seen heights, which, in their combination, are so full of grace and, at the same time, expression? Words here are imperfect instruments, and must yield their place to the pencil and the graver. But no canvas can reproduce the light and color which play round this enchanting region. No skill can catch the changing hues of the distant mountains, the star-points of the playing waves, the films of purple and green which spread themselves over the calm waters, the sunsets of gold and orange, and the aerial veils of rose and amethyst which drop upon the hills from the skies of morning and evening. The author of the book of Ecclesiasticus seems to have described Naples, when he speaks of 'the pride of the height, the clear firmament, the beauty of heaven, with his glorious show.' 'See Naples and then die,' is a well-known Italian saying; but it should read, 'See Naples and then live.' One glance at such a scene stamps upon the memory an image which, forever after, gives a new value to life."

CASTEL SANT'ELMO, NAPLES

Naples gives to the visitor the impression of being a city without a past. If she has a history, it is not written in her streets. She is poetic and picturesque, not historic. The heights of Capodimonte and Sant'Elmo divide her into unequal parts, and there is the old Naples which only the antiquarian or the political economist would wish to see, and the new and modern city which is such a miracle of beauty that one longs to stay forever, and fails to wonder that the siren sought these shores. Naples has either been very much misrepresented as to its prevailing manners and customs, or else it has changed within the past decade, for, as a rule, the gentle courtesy and kindness of the people are especially appealing. Augustus often sojourned in Naples, and it was an especially poetic haunt of Virgil, whose tomb is here. Although the poverty and the primitive life of the great masses of the people have been widely discussed, it is yet true that Naples has a very charming social life, and that the University is a centre of learning and culture. One of the oldest universities in Europe, it has a faculty of over one hundred and twenty professors and more than five thousand students. A large and valuable library, and a mineralogical collection which specialists from all over the world come to study, are among the treasures of this University, which was founded in the early part of the thirteenth century by Emperor Frederick William II. There is now in process of erection a new group of buildings which will embody the latest laboratory and library and other privileges. Arch?ology is, naturally, a special feature of the University of Naples, and the proximity to Pompeii, Herculaneum, and to the wonderful Pompeian collection in the Museum of Naples affords peculiar and unrivalled advantages to students. A bust of Thomas Aquinas, during his life a lecturer at this University, is one of the interesting treasures. The Archives of the Kingdom of Naples attract many a scholar and savant to this city. There are in this collection (which is kept in the monastery adjoining the Church of San Severino) over forty thousand Greek manuscripts, some of which date back to the year 700. The Naples Museum is the great repository of all Pompeian art, and it is rich in sculpture; but it is badly arranged and the vast series of galleries and the long flights of stairs make any study of its work so fatiguing that a visit to it might rank as one of the seven labors of Hercules.

In the royal museum of the Palazzo di Capodimonte, which is located on the beautiful height bearing that name, there are some pictures that are well worth visiting, not because they are particularly good art, but because of the interest attaching to the subjects. This gallery is largely the work of modern Neapolitan artists. Here is the celebrated picture of Michael Angelo bending over the dead body of Vittoria Colonna, kissing only her hand, and haunted by the after-regret that he did not kiss her forehead. Virginia Lebrun has here portraits of Maria Theresa and of the Duchess of Parma; there is one canvas (by Celentano) showing Benvenuto Cellini at the Castel Sant'Angelo; a scene depicting the death of C?sar and a few others of some degree of interest.

Curiously, Naples has never produced great art. Salvator Rosa was, to be sure, a Neapolitan, but his is almost the only name that has made itself immortal in the art of this city. Domenico Morelli, who has recently died, made himself felt as an original painter with certain claims that arrested attention. He is not a draughtsman, but he is a colorist of passionate intensity; he has original power and, more than all, he has a curious endowment of what may be called artistic clairvoyance. Transporting himself by the magic of thought to places on which his eye never rested, he yet sees as in vision their special characteristics. In one of his most important works, the motive of which is the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness, he has painted the desert with a startling reality. Here is a great plain, the stony, parched Judean plain, with the very feeling of its desolation pervading the atmosphere. The Royal Chapel in Naples was decorated by Morelli, the ceiling painted with an "Assumption of the Virgin," which stands alone in all the interpretations of this theme; not by virtue of superior artistic excellence,-on the contrary its art does not make a strong appeal,-but by its originality of treatment. The "Salve Regina" and the "Da Scala d'Oro" are among the more interesting works of this artist, whose recent death has removed a figure of exceptional character in modern art, one who had, pre-eminently, the courage of his convictions. Some few years ago Morelli's "Temptation of St. Anthony" was exhibited in both Paris and Florence, and was generally condemned, perhaps because not wholly understood. The form of the temptation was supposed to be the shapes taken by a morbid and diseased imagination; but while as a psychological conception it was not without value, it was yet far from attractive as a work of art. The finest conception, perhaps, ever depicted of the temptation of St. Anthony-a subject that has haunted many an artist-is that painted by the late Carl Guthers of Washington, a lofty and gifted spirit whose too brief stay on earth ended in the early months of 1907. In this picture the temptation of the saint appears as a vision of all that is purest and sweetest in life,-wife, children, home; it was from all this peace and loveliness that St. Anthony turned, sacrificing personal happiness to the duty of consecrated service to his Master, in the exquisite conception of Mr. Guthers. Edoardo Dalbano is the typical leader of the Neapolitan school of painting of the present day, and his fascinating picture, called the "Isle of Sirens," representing the sirens singing in the sunlit Bay of Naples, might well be held as the keynote to all this enchanting region. Surely, if the sirens sing not in those blue waters, it were useless to search elsewhere for them. Buono is an artist of the Neapolitan shores, who paints its fisher-folk; Brancaccio catches the very spirit and animated atmosphere of the street scenes of Naples; Campriani and Pratello are landscapists of note; Esposito, too, despite his Spanish name, is a Neapolitan marine painter whose work is often most arresting in its power to catch the flickering sunshine over blue water that bathes the rocks rising out of the sea,-these isles of the sirens from which float the melodies that enchanted Odysseus.

The traveller may be surprised to find that in size Naples ranks fourth on the European Continent,-Paris, Berlin, and St. Petersburg, only, exceeding it. Naples should be, not only a port, a pleasure haunt, and a paradise for excursions, but one of the great cities of the world in commercial and in social importance. It has one of the finest natural harbors of the world; it has a beautiful and attractive adjoining country in which to extend, indefinitely, its residence and trade districts; it has the most enchanting fairyland of views that ever were seen this side the ethereal world; it has an atmosphere of song and story and a climate that is far from being objectionable. Naples is seldom the possessor of a higher temperature in summer than is New York or Boston; the winters are mild, and they offer weeks of sunny loveliness when Rome is swept by the icy tramontana from the snow-clad Alban hills. Naples offers, too, exceedingly good facilities for living; the groups of excellent hotels, both on the terraces and on the water's edge in the lower town and along the Villa Nazionale, offer every comfort, and the politeness and courtesy of the Neapolitans, as a rule, are among the alluring features of this enchanting city.

What shall be said of one hotel, especially, perched on the cliffs, to which one ascends by an elevator, finding it the most luxurious fairyland that imagination can conjure? Leaving the street one walks through a marble tunnel lighted with electricity, wondering if he is, indeed, in the grotto of the Muses. Entering a "lift" truly American in its comfort and speed, he is wafted up the heights and steps out in-is it paradise? Here is a large salon entirely of glass with an incomparable view all over the gleaming bay, with Capri and Sorrento shining fair on the opposite sides and Vesuvius, a purple peak, in the near distance. The great city of Naples lies spread out below, with its interior heights of Capodimonte and others. It is a view for which alone one might well sail the four thousand miles of sea from the American shores. Through open French windows one may step out on the terrace. If it is cold he may still enjoy this sublimely wonderful view behind the glass walls that reveal all its beauty and protect him from wind or chill. Elsewhere adjoining salons stretch away, where sunshine, music, reading matter, and dainty writing-desks allure the guest and create for him, indeed, an earthly paradise.

Of the drive on the Strada Nuova di Posilipo, skirting the coast while following the winding rise of the hill, with the sumptuous villas and gardens on one side and the blue sea on the other,-what words can suggest its charm? On a jutting promontory on the ruins of the Palazzo di Donna Ana are seen the palace whose convenient location made it possible for the royal hosts to throw their guests into the sea whenever they became tiresome, an accommodation that the modern hostess might, at times, appreciate. On this road, winding up the Posilipo, is the villa where Garibaldi passed the last winter of his life and which is marked by a tablet. And everywhere and at every turn are the beautiful views, commanding Bagnoli, Camaldoli, Ischia, Baia and Procida, Capri, Nisida and the Neapolitan waters. The hill slopes are overgrown with myrtles and orange trees and roses. Here and there a defile is filled with a vineyard under careful culture.

In the presence of all this marvel of nature's loveliness the visitor hardly remembers the historic interest; yet it was on the little island of Nisida that Brutus and Cassius concocted the conspiracy against C?sar. The vast Phlegr?an Plain before the eye is invested with Hellenic traditions and is the region of many scenes in the poems of Virgil and Homer. In the years of the first and second centuries this plain was dotted with the rich villas of the Roman aristocracy. Here, too, lay the celebrated Lacus Avernus, a volcanic lake which the ancients regarded as the entrance to Avernus itself. Truly it required little imagination to see here the approach to the infernal regions. The air was so poisonous that no bird could fly over the lake and live. Virgil's scene of the descent of ?neas, guided by the sibyl, into the infernal depths is laid here; and near this lake are resorts of the latter-day tourist, known as the "Sibyl's Grotto," the "Grotto della Pace," the "Bagni di Sibyl," and the "Inferno."

ANCIENT TEMPLE, BAI?

Baia, on the coast, was the Newport of Rome in the days of Augustus, Hadrian, Cicero, and Nero. It was then the most magnificent summer watering-place known to the world. The glory of the Roman Empire was reflected in the glory of Baia. In one of the Epistles of Horace a Roman noble is made to say: "Nothing in the world can be compared with the lovely bay of Baia." Some five hundred years ago this region became so malarial that no one could dwell in it. Fragments and ruins still remain of the imposing baths and villas of the Roman occupancy. An old crater called the Capo Miseno is described by Virgil as the burial place of Misenus:-

"At pius ?neas ingenti mole sepulcrum

Inponit, suaque arma viro remumque tubamque

Monte sub aereo, qui nunc Misenus ab illo

Dicitur aeternumque tenet per saecula nomen."

Cum? was the most ancient Greek colony of Italy on the coast, and the last survivors of the Tarquinii died here. This is the most classic of all these legendary coast towns near Naples, as it was here that the Cum?an Sibyl dwelt with the mysterious sibylline leaves,-the books that were carried to Rome. A colossal Acropolis was once here, fragments of whose walls are now standing; and the rocky foundation is honeycombed with secret passages and openings. It is here that Virgil's "Grotto of the Sibyl" is supposed to have stood,-the grotto "whence resound as many voices, the oracles of the prophetess."

The journey from Naples to Herculaneum is easily made by electric train cars within an hour, and while there is not much to see it is still an excursion well worth making. Dr. de Petra, of the chair of Arch?ology in the University of Naples, and formerly the Director of the National Museum, is warmly in favor of the proposed excavation of this buried city, as is Professor Spinazzola of the San Martino museum, who believes that Italy may well become one vast museum of antiquities. "As the theatre of Herculaneum is actually at present a subterranean excavation," he observed, "why not excavate in a similar way the entire city underneath modern Resina? In this way a perfectly unique underground museum would be formed, which would have the merit of leaving magnificent Roman art treasures exactly in their proper places in the villas. Such a work ought to be perfectly practicable, with the resources of modern engineering, and would certainly be unique in the world.

"There would be no need to build a special museum for the objects discovered. Not only would this money be saved, but I feel convinced that so many visitors would be attracted as to more than pay for the maintenance. A subterraneous Herculaneum-surely a perfectly unique place of pilgrimage, just as it was nearly two thousand years ago-might be lighted by electric arc lights. I feel certain it would attract sight-seers from the ends of the world. At the same time work might go on in the open parts of the city.

"Pompeii was more of an industrial town, while Herculaneum was a favorite resort of the Roman patricians, who did not bring their treasures with them from their northern homes, but had them executed by Greek artists in the south."

Under the mighty floods of lava d'acqua that buried Herculaneum doubtless lie temples, a splendid forum, magnificent villas, and most valuable art and literary treasures. In the eighteenth century excavations brought to light rare bronzes, mosaics, and papyri. The famous equestrian statue of Balbo, in the Naples Museum, was excavated from Herculaneum. Professor Lanciani and Commendatore Boni of Rome-the latter the present director of the Forum, succeeding Lanciani-believe that some of the richest art of ancient times may be found in Herculaneum; as does Professor Dall'Osso, inspector of excavations at Pompeii.

Herculaneum is held to have been founded by Hercules when he landed at Campania, returning from Iberia, some three hundred years B.C., and it was in 63 A.D. that it was destroyed. Of this cataclysm Pliny, the Younger, wrote:-

"The sea seemed to roll back on itself by the convulsions of the earth. On the other side hung a black and dreadful cloud, bursting with fiery and serpentine vapors. Naught was heard in the darkness but the shrieks of women, the screams of children, and the frenzied cries of men calling for children, for wives, for parents,-all lifting hands to the gods, praying and wishing for death."

Dr. Charles Waldstein of Cambridge University, the eminent arch?ologist, whose efforts toward initiating the excavation of Herculaneum were a notable event of 1906, thus writes of this buried city:-

"It is important to bear in mind that naturally all the best works in the Museum of Naples, especially the bronzes, came from Herculaneum and not from Pompeii.

"What is most striking is the marvellous preservation of these works. This fact of itself ought to counteract the strange but widespread misapprehension that, while Pompeii was covered with cinders and ashes, Herculaneum was covered with lava, and that the hardness of that material made excavation difficult, if not impossible. All geologists and arch?ologists are agreed that no lava issued from the eruption of 79 A.D. Herculaneum was covered by a torrent of mud consisting of ashes and cinders mixed with water. The mass which covers it, so far from being less favorable to the preservation of objects, is much more favorable than that which covers Pompeii. Pompeii was partially covered with hot ashes and pumice stones, which burnt or damaged the works of art. As it was not wholly covered, moreover, the inhabitants returned and dug up some of their greatest treasures. Herculaneum, on the other hand, had its actual life, arrested at the highest point, securely preserved from depredation, to a depth of eighty feet, by a material which preserved intact the most delicate specimens which have come down to us in a state so perfect as to be really remarkable.

"The most important of these delicate objects are manuscripts, of which that one villa produced 1750. The state of preservation is illustrated by one specimen, giving two pages from the works of the philosopher Philademus. Unfortunately, the possessor of the villa was a specialist, a student of Epicurean philosophy. While his taste in art was fortunately so catholic, his taste in literature was narrowed down by his special bent. Piso was the friend and protector of the philosopher Philo. Already sixty-five copies of that author's works have been found among the papyri.

"Yet the city of Herculaneum contained many such villas, and herein it differed from Pompeii. Pompeii was a commonplace provincial town devoted exclusively to commerce; it was not the resort of wealthy and cultured Romans. It was essentially illiterate. No manuscript can be proved to have been found there. It is true a wax tablet with writing has been found; yet this contains-receipts of auctions. Herculaneum, on the other hand, was the favorite resort of wealthy Romans, who built beautiful villas there as in our times people from modern Rome settle for the summer at Sorrento and Castellammare."

The present descent into the theatre of Herculaneum is made by a flight of more than a hundred steps, slippery and cold, in total darkness save for the candle that is carried by the guide, and the visitor sees only the stone seats of the amphitheatre and the stage with the two vacant niches, the statues that filled each being now placed in the Museum in Naples.

The journey of thirteen miles from Naples to Pompeii is through a succession of densely populated villages that seem to be an integral part of Naples itself, for there is no line of demarcation. Portici, Torre del Greco, Torre dell'Annunziata, and others all blend with each other and with Naples. However familiar one has become with the literature of Pompeii, with both arch?ological descriptions and imaginative interpretations in romance, and however familiar with its aspects he may have become from replicas in art museums, and from pictures, one can yet hardly approach this silent, phantom city without being thrilled by its deep significance. At a distance of a few miles over the gently undulating plain rises Vesuvius; one gazes on the paths where the rivers of molten fire must have rolled down. George S. Hillard, visiting Pompeii in 1853, thus described a house which the visitors of to-day study and admire:-

"The finest house we saw within the walls is one which had been discovered and laid bare about four months previous to the date of our visit, called the house of the Suonatrice, from a painting of a female playing on a pipe, at the entrance. This house was deemed of such peculiar interest that it was under the charge of a special custode, and was only to be seen on payment of an extra fee. It was not of large size, but had evidently been occupied by a person of ample fortune and exquisite taste. The paintings on the walls were numerous, and in the most perfect preservation. In the rear was a minute garden not more than twenty or thirty feet square, with a fairy fountain in the centre; around which were several small statues of children and animals, of white marble, wrought with considerable skill. The whole thing had a very curious effect, like the tasteful baby-house of a grown-up child. Everything in this house was in the most wonderful preservation. The metal pipes which distributed the water, and the cocks by which it was let off, looked perfectly suited for use. Nothing at Pompeii seemed so real as this house, and nowhere else were the embellishments so numerous and so costly.

"Pompeii, though a Roman city in its political relations, was everywhere strongly marked with the impress of the Greek mind. It stood on the northern edge of that part of Italy which, from the number of Grecian colonies it contained, was called Magna Gr?cia,-a region of enchanting beauty, in which the genius of Greece attained its most luxurious development. It has been conjectured that Pompeii had an unusually large proportion of men of property, who had been drawn there by the charms of its situation and climate, and that it thus extended a liberal patronage to Greek architects, painters, and sculptors. At any rate, the spirit of Greece still lives and breathes in its ashes. Its temples, as restored by modern architects, are Greek. Its works in marble and bronze claim a place in that cyclus of art of which the metopes of the Parthenon are the highest point of excellence. The pictures that embellish the walls, the unzoned nymphs, the bounding Bacchantes, the grotesque Fauns, the playful arabesques, all are informed with the airy and creative spirit of Greek art.

"The ruins of Pompeii are not merely an open-air museum of curiosities, but they have great value in the illustration they offer to Roman history and Roman literature. The antiquarian of our times studies the great realm of the past with incomparable advantage, by the help of the torch here lighted."

From Pompeii to Castellammare, the beautiful seaside summer resort of the Neapolitans, "a lover of nature could hardly find a spot of more varied attractions. Before him spreads the unrivalled bay,-dotted with sails and unfolding a broad canvas, on which the most glowing colors and the most vivid lights are dashed,-a mirror in which the crimson and gold of morning, the blue of noon, and the orange and yellow-green of sunset behold a livelier image of themselves,-a gentle and tideless sea, whose waves break upon the shore like caresses, and never like angry blows. Should he ever become weary of waves and languish for woods, he has only to turn his back upon the sea and climb the hills for an hour or two, and he will find himself in the depth of sylvan and mountain solitudes,-in a region of vines, running streams, deep-shadowed valleys, and broad-armed oaks,-where he will hear the ringdove coo, and see the sensitive hare dart across the forest aisles. A great city is within an hour's reach; and the shadow of Vesuvius hangs over the landscape, keeping the imagination awake by touches of mystery and terror."

The road to Sorrento, on a cliff a hundred feet or more above the sea, with mountains on the other side, towering up hundreds of feet high; a road cut in many places out of the solid rock, supported by galleries and viaducts from below,-a road that crosses deep gorges and chasms, always with the iridescent colors of the sea below,-and from Sorrento to Amalfi again, only, if possible, even more wonderful,-is there in the world any drive that can rival this picturesque and sublime route? Of it George Eliot wrote:-

"It is an unspeakably grand drive round the mighty rocks with the sea below; and Amalfi itself surpasses all imagination of a romantic site for a city that once made itself famous in the world."

Sorrento, with its memories and associations of Tasso, seems a place in which one cares only to sit on the balcony of the hotel overhanging the sea and watch the magic spectacle of a panorama unrivalled in all the beauty of the world. Flowers grow in riotous profusion; the fairy sail of a flitting boat is caught in the deepening dusk; the dark outline of Vesuvius is seen against the horizon; and orange orchards gleam against gray walls. Here Tasso was born, in 1544, fit haunt for a poet, with tangles of gay blossoms and the aerial line of mountain peaks. A low parapet borders the precipice, and over it one leans in the air heavy with perfume of locust blossoms. Has the lovely town anything beside sunsets and stars and poets' dreams? Who could ask for more?

To La Cava,-to Amalfi,-still all a dream world!

"O summer day, beside the joyous sea!

O summer day so wonderful and white,

So full of gladness and so full of pain!"

How Amalfi sets itself to song and music! Who can enter it without hearing in the air Longfellow's beautiful lines?-

"Sweet the memory is to me

Of a land beyond the sea,

Where the waves and mountains meet,

Where, amid her mulberry-trees,

Sits Amalfi in the heat,

Bathing ever her white feet

In the tideless summer seas.

*****

'Tis a stairway, not a street,

That ascends the deep ravine,

Where the torrent leaps between

Rocky walls that almost meet.

*****

This is an enchanted land!

Round the headlands, far away,

Sweeps the blue Salernian bay

With its sickle of white sand;

Further still and furthermost

On the dim discovered coast,

P?stum with its ruins lies,

And its roses all in bloom."

If ever a region was dropped out of paradise designed, solely, for a poet's day-dreams, it is Amalfi, and the even more beautiful Ravello just above. One fancies that it must have been in the mystic loveliness of this eyrie that the poet lost himself in a day-dream while Jupiter was dividing all the goods of the world. When he reproached the god for not saving a portion for him, Jupiter replied that all the goods were gone, it was true, but that his heaven was always open to the poet.

The ancient Amalfi, the city of activities and merchandise, is gone.

"Where are now the freighted barks

From the marts of east and west?

Where the knights in iron sarks

Journeying to the Holy Land,

Glove of steel upon the hand,

Cross of crimson on the breast?

Where the pomp of camp and court?

Where the pilgrims with their prayers?

Where the merchants with their wares?

*****

Vanished like a fleet of cloud,

Like a passing trumpet-blast,

Are those splendors of the past,

And the commerce and the crowd!

Fathoms deep beneath the seas

Lie the ancient warves and quays,

Swallowed by the engulfing waves."

It is impossible to realize that Amalfi was once a flourishing city of Oriental trade. One looks in vain for any trace of ruin or shrine that still suggests the ancient splendors of activity. The strata of the past, so visible in other medi?val cities, are not apparent here. The great cathedral is a most interesting study in the art of architecture,-its exquisite arcades, its delicate, lofty campanile glittering in the sun. The green-roofed cupola is a distinctive feature, and up the many flights of stairs the old Capuccini convent lies,-the unique, romantic hotel where the cells of the monks are now the rooms of the perpetual procession of guests. Does the wraith of Cardinal Capuano, who founded this convent, still wander in midnight hours through the dim cloisters? Does he still keep watch by the body of St. Andrew, the apostle, which he is said to have found and brought to the cathedral where the saint lies, as a saint should lie, gloriously entombed. St. Andrew was the patron saint of Amalfi, but at his death his body was carried from Patras to the Bosphorus, where it was placed in a church in Constantinople. The legend runs that Cardinal Capuano, being in Constantinople, entered the Church of the Holy Apostles to pray, and knowing that the body of the saint was in that city, he besought the heavenly powers to guide him to it. Rising from his devotions he was approached by an aged priest, who announced to the Cardinal that the object of his search was in that very church in which he was praying for guidance; and, aided by unseen powers, he was able to recover it and convey it to Amalfi. All Italian towns that respect themselves offer the allurement of an entombed saint and if, occasionally, the same identical saint does duty for more than one city, who is to decide the local genuineness of the claim? Nothing in all Italy is so curious as is this town of staircases instead of streets; of houses perched on the angles of impossible eyries suggesting that, as the Venetians go about in gondolas, so the Amalfians must have airships, or the wings of Icarus, with which to circle in air from their dwellings to the beach.

The precipitous gorges and dark ravines have on their crests low parapets of stone walls over which the visitor lingers and leans watching the bluest of seas lying fair under the bluest of skies. The main road,-there is only one,-descending from the hill to the water's edge, makes its progress through a tunnel.

The old Amalfi, with its palaces, its arches and colonnades, lies under the sea. Just as the Pensione Caterina with its rose walks and terraces slipped into the sea in December of 1899, when two guests and several fishermen lost their lives, so the ancient Amalfi fell, its cliffs swallowed up in the waters below.

"Hidden from all mortal eyes,

Deep the sunken city lies;

Silent streets and vacant halls,

Ruined roofs and towers and walls;

Even cities have their graves!"

When, on a May evening, the white moonlight falls in cascades of silver sheen over terraces and sea, with Amalfi all alabaster and pearl like a dream city in the ethereal air; when the stars hang low in the skies and the fairy lights of the fishermen's boats twinkle far out at sea; when the summer silence is suddenly thrilled by the melody of Neapolitan songs on the air, as if it were a veritable chant d'amour of sirens,-then does one believe in the buried city. These rich baritone voices are surely those of some singers of the buried ages. They are floating across the centuries since Amalfi had its pride and place among the great centres of activity. Atrani, Amalfi's twin city, lies in the adjoining defile of the mountains which arch above them. The strange old houses are all dazzlingly white, transfigured under the moon to an unearthly loveliness.

The tragedy of the ruin of Amalfi is related by Petrarca, who was then living in Naples. It was in 1343 that a terrible cataclysm-an earthquake accompanied by a tempest-caused the destruction and the submergence of the city in the sea.

The believers in astrology will find their faith re-enforced by the fact that a bishop, who was also an astrologist, had read in the stars that in December of 1343 a terrible disaster would occur on the Naples coast. It arrived on schedule time. Petrarca, writing of it to Giovanni Colonna, states that in consequence of the prediction of the bishop, the people were in a condition of wild terror, endeavoring to repent of their sins and aspiring to a purer moral life. In this tide of religious emotion, ordinary occupations were neglected. On the very day of the calamity people were crowding the churches and kneeling in prayer. At night, after the people were in bed, the shock came. The sunset had been fair, the evening quiet, and the people were reassured. But they were awakened from sleep by the violence of falling walls and the terror of the tempest. Petrarcha was lodging in a convent, and he heard the monks calling to one another as they rushed from cell to cell. They hastily gathered crosses and sacred relics in their hands, and, preceded by the prior, sought the chapel, where they passed the night in prayer while the tempest raged outside. The sea broke against the rocks with a fury that seemed to tear the very foundations of the earth. The thunder pealed, and mingled with it were the shrieks of the frightened populace. The rain fell in torrents, deluging the city as if the sea itself were pouring on it. When the morning came the darkness still continued. In the harbor broken ships crashed helplessly together. The sands were strewn with mutilated dead bodies. Between Capri and the shore the sea ran mountains high. Amalfi was completely destroyed, and has never regained her prestige.

The cathedral at Ravello has traces of the rich art it once enshrined, and the rose gardens of the Palazzo Rufolo might enchant Hafiz himself. The terrace on the very crest of the mountain commands one of the wonderful views of the world. The cloistered colonnades of this old Saracenic palace reveal views even to the plains of P?stum. There are rare mosaics and fragments of bronzes and marbles yet remaining.

The noble Greek ruins at P?stum-the three temples-stand in all the majesty of utter desolation. They are overgrown with flowers, however, and they stand "dewy in the light of the rising dawn-star."

"The shrine is ruined now, and far away

To east and west stretch olive groves, whose shade,

Even at the height of summer noon, is gray.

*****

"Yet this was once a hero's temple, crowned

With myrtle boughs by lovers, and with palm

By wrestlers, resonant with sweetest sound

Of flute and fife in summer evening's calm,

And odorous with incense all the year,

With nard and spice and galbanum and balm."

The detour to P?stum is full of significance. The massive columns of the temples stand like giants of the ages. "It is difficult," writes John Addington Symonds, "not to return again and again to the beauty of coloring at P?stum. Lying basking in the sun on a flat slab of stone, and gazing eastward, we overlook a foreground of dappled light and shadow; then come two stationary columns built, it seems, of solid gold, where the sunbeams strike along their russet surface. Between them lies the landscape, a medley first of brakefern and asphodel and feathering acanthus and blue spikes; while beyond and above is a glimpse of mountains, purple almost to indigo with cloud shadows, and flecked with snow."

The sail from Amalfi to P?stum is one incomparable in loveliness. The sunshine is all lurid gold. The faint, transparent blue haze fills all the defiles of the mountains; the cliffs disclose yawning caverns where vast clusters of stalactites hang; and as the boat floats toward Capri from the Sorrento promontory its rocky headlands rise and flame into purple and rose against the glowing sky. Across the Bay of Naples rises the great city. It stands in some subtle way reminding one of the scene where one

". . . rowing hard against the stream,

Saw distant gates of Eden gleam."

Capri is the idyllic island of prismatic light and shade, of gay and joyous life. Here Tiberius had his summer palace, and it was from these shores that he sent the historic letter which revolutionized the life of Sejanus. The letter-verbosa et grandis epistola-is still vivid in the historic associations of Rome. Capri is one of the favorite resorts both for winter and summer. Its former modest prices are now greatly increased, like all the latter-day expenses of Italy; but its beauty is perennial, and the artist and poet can still command there a seclusion almost impossible to secure elsewhere in Italy. The distinguished artist, Elihu Vedder of Rome, has a country house on Capri, and another well-known artist, Charles Caryl Coleman, makes this island his home. There are days-sometimes several days in succession-that the sea is high and the boats cannot run between Naples, Sorrento, and Capri; and the enforced seclusion is still the seclusion of the poet's dream. For he shares it with Mithras, the "unconquered god of the sun," whose cult influenced all the monarchs of Europe and who holds his court in the Grotto de Matrimonia. Into this grotto one descends by a flight of nearly two hundred feet; he strolls among the ruins of the villa of Tiberius, where the very air is still vital and vocal with those strange and tragic chapters of Roman life. The Emperor Augustus first founded here palaces and aqueducts. Tiberius, who retired to Capri in the year 27 A.D., had his architects build twelve villas, in honor of the gods, the largest of these being for Jupiter and known as the Villa Jovis. In 31 A.D. occurred that dramatic episode in Roman history, the fall of Sejanus, and six years later Tiberius died. The vast white marble baths he had built for him are now submerged on the coast, and boats glide over the spot where they stood. The Villa Jovis stood on a cliff seven hundred feet above the sea, and the traditions of the barbarities and atrocities that took place there still haunt the island. The natives apparently regard them as a certain title to fame, but the wise tourists persistently ignore horrors; life is made for joy, sweetness, and charm; it is far wiser to think on these things.

And there is charm and joy to spare on lovely Capri. "Sea-mists are frequent in the early summer mornings, swathing the cliffs of Capri and brooding on the smooth water till the day wind rises," says John Addington Symonds. "Then they disappear like magic, rolling in smoke-wreaths from the surface of the sea, condensing into clouds and climbing the hills like Oceanides in quest of Prometheus, or taking their station on the watch towers of the world as in the chorus of the Nephelai. Such a morning may be chosen for the giro of the island. The Blue Grotto loses nothing of its beauty, but rather gains by contrast, when passing from dense fog you find yourself transported to a world of wavering subaqueous sheen. It is only through the very topmost arch that a boat can glide into this cavern; the arch itself spreads downward through the water so that all the light is transmitted from beneath and colored by the sea. Outside the magic world of pantomime there is nothing to equal these effects of blue and silver. . . . Numberless are the caves at Capri. The so-called Green Grotto has the beauty of moss agate in its liquid floor; the Red Grotto shows a warmer chord of color; and where there is no other charm to notice, endless beauty may be found in the play of sunlight upon roofs of limestone, tinted with yellow, orange, and pale pink, mossed over, hung with fern, and catching tones of blue or green from the still deeps beneath. . . . After a day upon the water it is pleasant to rest at sunset in the loggia above the sea. The Bay of Naples stretches far and wide in front, beautiful by reason of the long fine line descending from Vesuvius, dipping almost to a level, and then gliding up to join the highlands of the north. Now sun and moon begin to mingle: waning and waxing splendors. The cliffs above our heads are still blushing like the heart of some tea-rose; when lo, the touch of the huntress is laid upon those eastern pinnacles, and the horizon glimmers with her rising. Was it on such a night that Ferdinand of Aragon fled from his capital before the French, with eyes turned ever to the land he loved, chanting, as he leaned from his galley's stern, that melancholy psalm, 'Except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain,' and seeing Naples dwindle to a white blot on the purple shore?"

The roses of Capri would form a chapter alone. What walks there are where the air is all fragrance of acacia and rose and orange blossoms! Cascades of roses in riotous luxuriance festoon the old gray stone walls; the pale pink of the early dawn or of a shell by the seashore, the amber of the Banskeia rose, the great golden masses of the Maréchal Niel, their faint yellow gleaming against the deep green leaves of myrtle and frond. The intense glowing scarlet of the gladiolus flames from rocks and roadside, and rosemary and the purple stars of hyacinths garland the ways, until one feels like journeying only in his singing robes. The deep, solemn green of stone pines forms canopies under the sapphire skies, and through their trunks one gazes on the sapphire sea. Is Capri the isle of Epipsychidion?

"Is there now any one that knows

What a world of mystery lies deep down in the heart of a rose?"

One walks among these rose-lined lanes, hearing in the very air that exquisite lyric by Louise Chandler Moulton:-

"Roses that briefly live,

Joy is your dower;

Blest be the Fates that give

One perfect hour.

And, though too soon you die,

In your dust glows

Something the passer-by

Knows was a Rose."

Monte Cassino is one of the most interesting inland points in Southern Italy,-the monastery lying on the crest of a hill nearly two thousand feet above the sea. Dante alludes to this in his Paradiso (XXII, XXXVII), and in the prose translation made by that eminent Dantean scholar, Professor Charles Eliot Norton, this assurance of Beatrice to Dante is thus rendered:-

"That mountain on whose slope Cassino is, was of old frequented on its summit by the deluded and ill-disposed people, and I am he who first carried up thither the name of Him who brought to earth the truth which so high exalts us; and such grace shone upon me that I drew away the surrounding villages from the impious worship which seduced the world. Those other fires were all contemplative men, kindled by that heat which brings to birth holy flowers and fruits. Here is Macarius, here is Romuald, here are my brothers, who within the cloisters fixed their feet, and held a steadfast heart. And I to him, 'The affection which thou displayest in speaking with me, and the good semblance which I see and note in all your ardors, have so expanded my confidence as the sun does the rose, when she becomes open so much as she has power to be. Therefore I pray thee, and do thou, father, assure me if I have power to receive so much grace, that I may see thee with uncovered shape.' Whereon he, 'Brother, thy high desire shall be fulfilled in the last sphere, where are fulfilled all others and my own. There perfect, mature, and whole is every desire; in that alone is every part there where it always was: for it is not in space, and hath not poles; and our stairway reaches up to it, wherefore thus from thy sight it conceals itself. Far up as there the patriarch Jacob saw it stretch its topmost part when it appeared to him so laden with Angels. But now no one lifts his feet from earth to ascend it; and my rule is remaining as waste of paper. The walls, which used to be an abbey, have become caves; and the cowls are sacks full of bad meal. But heavy usury is not gathered in so greatly against the pleasure of God, as that fruit which makes the heart of monks so foolish. For whatsoever the Church guards is all for the folk that ask it in God's name, not for one's kindred, or for another more vile. The flesh of mortals is so soft that a good beginning suffices not below from the springing of the oak to the forming of the acorn. Peter began without gold and without silver, and I with prayers and with fasting, and Francis in humility his convent; and if thou lookest at the source of each, and then lookest again whither it has run, thou wilt see dark made of the white. Truly, Jordan turned back, and the sea fleeing when God willed, were more marvellous to behold than succor here."

Dante adds that the company "like a whirlwind gathered itself upward," and that "the sweet lady urged me behind them, with only a sign, up over that stairway; so did her virtue overcome my nature. But never here below, where one mounts and descends naturally, was there motion so rapid that it could be compared unto my wing."

The time was when Dante and Beatrice met, and he "was standing as one who within himself represses the point of his desire, and attempts not to ask, he so fears the too-much." And then he heard: "If thou couldst see, as I do, the charity which burns among us thy thoughts would be expressed. But that thou through waiting mayst not delay thy high end, I will make answer to thee, even to the thought concerning which thou art so regardful."

The vast monastery of Monte Cassino, lying on the crest of a hill nearly two thousand feet above the sea, has one of the most magnificent locations in all Italy. This monastery was founded (in 529 A.D.) by St. Benedict, on the site of an ancient temple to Apollo. Dante alludes to this also in the Paradiso (Canto XX, 11). As seen from below this monastery has the appearance of a vast castle, or fortress. Its location is one of the most magnificent in all Italy. The old entrance was a curious passage cut through solid rock and it is still used for princes and cardinals-no lesser dignitaries being allowed to pass through it-and within the past thirty years a new entrance has been constructed. In the passageway of the medi?val entrance St. Benedict is said to have had his cell, and of recent years the German Benedictines, believing they had located the original cell, had it located, restored, and decorated with Egyptian frescoes. Several of the courts of this convent are connected by beautiful arcades with lofty arches, and adorned with statues, among which are those of St. Benedict and his sister, St. Scholastica. Still farther up the hill, upon the monastery, stands the church which is built on the site of the ancient one that was erected by St. Benedict himself-this present edifice dating back to 1637. Above the portals there is a long inscription in Latin relating the history of the monastery and the church. These portals are solid bronze, beautifully carved, with inlaid tablets of silver on which are inscribed a list of all the treasures of the abbey in the year 1006. The church is very rich in interior decoration of mosaics, rare marbles, and wonderful monumental memorials. Either side of the high altar are monuments to the Prince of Mignano (Guidone Fieramosca) and also to Piero de Medico. Both St. Benedict and his sister, St. Scholastica, are entombed under the high altar, which is one of the most elaborately sculptured in all the churches of Italy.

Among the pictorial decorations of this church are a series of fresco paintings by Luca Giordano, painted in the seventeenth century, representing the miracles wrought by St. Benedict. In the refectory is the "Miracle of the Loaves," by Bassano; and in the chapel below are paintings by Mazzaroppi and Marco da Siena. Nothing can exceed the richness and beauty of the carvings of the choir stalls. These were executed in the seventeenth century by Coliccio.

The library of this monastery is renowned all over Europe-indeed, it is famous all over the world-for its preservation of ancient manuscripts done by the monks. These are carefully treasured in the archives. Among them is the record of a vision that came to the monk Alferic, in the twelfth century, on which it is believed that Dante founded his immortal "Divina Commedia;" there is also a fourteenth-century edition of Dante with margined notes; and the Commentary of Origen (on the Epistle to the Romans), dating back to the sixteenth century; there is the complete series of Papal bulls that were sent to the monastery of Monte Cassino from the eleventh century to the present time, many of them being richly illuminated and decorated with curiously elaborate seals. There is an autograph letter of the Sultan Mohammed II to Pope Nicholas IV, with the Pope's reply,-the theme of the correspondence being the Pope's threat of war. The imperial Mohammed seems to have been in terror of this, and in his epistle he expresses his willingness, and, indeed, his intention, to be converted as soon as he shall visit Rome! Apparently the Holy Father of that day laid little stress on the sincerity of this offer on the part of the Sultan. Here, too, is a wonderful correspondence between Don Erasmo Gattola, the historian of the abbey, and a great number of the celebrated men of his time; and there are hundreds of other letters, manuscripts, and documents relating to kings, nobles, emperors, and many of the nobility of the age.

In this monastery there is a most interesting collection of relics, in bronze, silver, gold, and rosso antico. The library proper contains some eleven thousand volumes, dating back to the very dawn of the discovery of the art of printing.

Mr. Longfellow, whose poet's pen has pictured so many of the Italian landscapes and ancient monuments, thus set Monte Cassino to music, picturing the entire landscape of the Terra di Lavoro region:-

"The Land of Labor and the Land of Rest,

Where medi?val towns are white on all

The hillsides, and where every mountain's crest

Is an Etrurian or a Roman wall.

*****

"There is Aquinum, the old Volscian town,

Where Juvenal was born, whose lurid light

Still hovers o'er his birthplace like the crown

Of splendor seen o'er cities in the night.

"Doubled the splendor is, that in its streets

The Angelic Doctor as a school-boy played,

And dreamed perhaps the dreams that he repeats

In ponderous folios for scholastics made.

"And there, uplifted, like a passing cloud

That pauses on a mountain summit high,

Monte Cassino's convent rears its proud

And venerable walls against the sky.

"Well I remember how on foot I climbed

The stony pathway leading to its gate;

Above, the convent bells for vespers chimed,

Below, the darkening town grew desolate.

*****

"The silence of the place was like a sleep,

So full of rest it seemed; each passing tread

Was a reverberation from the deep

Recesses of the ages that are dead.

"For, more than thirteen centuries ago,

Benedict fleeing from the gates of Rome,

A youth disgusted with its vice and woe,

Sought in these mountain solitudes a home.

"He founded here his Convent and his Rule

Of prayer and work, and counted work as prayer;

The pen became a clarion, and his school

Flamed like a beacon in the midnight air.

*****

"From the high window, I beheld the scene

On which Saint Benedict so oft had gazed,-

The mountains and the valley in the sheen

Of the bright sun,-and stood as one amazed.

*****

"The conflict of the Present and the Past,

The ideal and the actual in our life,

As on a field of battle held me fast,

Where this world and the next world were at strife."

The monastery of Monte Cassino entertains, as its guests, for dinner or for a night, all gentlemen who visit it; but there is an alms box on the ancient gate into which the guest is supposed to place whatever contribution he pleases for the poor of the place. The Italian government, in 1866, declared this monastery to be a "Monumento Nazionale," and it is now a famous ecclesiastical school with some two hundred students and a resplendent faculty of fifty learned monks under the direction of the Abbot. Some of the most celebrated prelates in Europe have been educated at Monte Cassino.

Quite near Monte Cassino, as Longfellow depicts in his lines, is Monte Aquino, a picturesque hillside where the "Doctor Angelicus," Thomas Aquinas, was born (in 1224), the son of Count Landulf, in the Castel Roccasecca. He was educated in the monastery, and one finds himself recalling here these lines of Thomas William Parsons, entitled "Turning from Darwin to Thomas Aquinas:"-

"Unless in thought with thee I often live,

Angelic doctor! life seems poor to me.

What are these bounties, if they only be

Such boon as farmers to their servants give?

That I am fed, and that mine oxen thrive,

That my lambs fatten, that mine hours are free-

These ask my nightly thanks on bended knee;

And I do thank Him who hath blest my hive,

And made content my herd, my flock, my bee.

But, Father! nobler things I ask from Thee.

Fishes have sunshine, worms have everything!

Are we but apes? Oh! give me, God, to know

I am death's master; not a scaffolding,

But a true temple where Christ's word could grow."

It was at Aquinum, too, at the foot of Monte Aquino, Juvenal was born. Near the peaks of Monte Cassino and Monte Aquino is that of Monte Cairo, five thousand five hundred feet high, from whose summit one of the finest views of all southern Europe is attained. The Gulf of Gaeta, the valley of San Germano, the wild and romantic mountain region of the Abruzzi and a view, too, of the blue sea are in the panorama, bathed in the opalescent, gleaming lights that often invest the Italian landscape with jewelled splendor.

"I ask myself, Is this a dream?

Will it all vanish into air?

Is there a land of such supreme

And perfect beauty, anywhere?"

It might have been in this pictured dream-region that Hercules came to rest.

"When Heracles, the twelve great labors done,

To Calpe came, and there his journey stayed,

He raised two pillars toward the evening sun,

And carved them by a goddess' subtle aid.

Upon their shafts were sacred legends traced,

And round the twain a serpent cincture placed:

'T was at this bound the primal world stood still,

And of Atlantis dreamed, with baffled will."

But still in unmeasured space, still beyond and afar and unattained, still lost in the unpenetrated realms of the poet's fancy,-

"Atlantis lies beyond the pillars yet!"

"Here Ischia smiles

O'er liquid miles."

* * *

High o'er the sea-surge and the sands,

Like a great galleon wrecked and cast

Ashore by storms, thy Castle stands

A mouldering landmark of the Past.

Upon its terrace-walk, I see

A phantom gliding to and fro;

It is Colonna,-it is she

Who lived and loved so long ago.

Longfellow.

We are the only two that, face to face,

Do know each other, as God doth know us both.

-O fearless friendship, that held nothing back!

O absolute trust, that yielded every key,

And flung each curtain up, and drew me on

To enter the white temple of thy soul,

So vast, so cold, so waste!-and give thee sense

Of living warmth, of throbbing tenderness,

Of soft dependencies! O faith that made

Thee free to seek the spot where my dead hopes

Have sepulture, and read above the crypt

Deep graven, the tearful legend of my life!

There, gloomed with the memorials of my past,

Thou once for all didst learn what man accepts

Lothly-(how should he else?)-that never woman,

Fashioned a woman,-heart, brain, body, soul,-

Ever twice loved.

"Vittoria Colonna to Michael Angelo."

Margaret J. Preston.