So the full weeks passed on. Half _Eleanor_ had been written, and in June we turned homeward. But before then, one visitor came to the Villa Barberini in our last weeks there, who brought with him, for myself, a special and peculiar joy. My dear father, with his second wife, arrived to spend a week with us. Never before, throughout all his ardent Catholic life, had it been possible for him to tread the streets of Rome or kneel in St. Peter's. At last, the year before his death, he was to climb the Janiculum, and to look out over the city and the plain whence Europe received her civilization and the vast system of the Catholic Church. He felt as a Catholic; but hardly less as a scholar, one to whom Horace and Virgil had been familiar from his boyhood, the greater portion of them known by heart, to a degree which is not common now. I remember well that one bright May morning at Castle Gandolfo, he vanished from the villa, and presently, after some hours, reappeared with shining eyes. "I have been on the Appian Way--I have walked where Horace walked!" In his own autobiography he writes: "In proportion to a man's good sense and soundness of feeling are the love and admiration, increasing with his years, which he bears toward Horace." An old-world judgment, some will say, which to us, immersed in this deluge of war which is changing the face of all things, may sound, perhaps, as a thin and ghostly voice from far away. It comes from the Oxford of Newman and Matthew Arnold, of Jowett and Clough; and for the moment, amid the thunder and anguish of our time, it is almost strange to our ears. But when the tumult and the shouting die, and "peace has calmed the world," whatever else may have passed, the poets and the thinkers will be still there, safe in their old shrines, for they are the "ageless mouths" of all mankind, when men are truly men. The supposed reformers, who thirst for the death of classical education, will not succeed, because man doth not live by bread alone, and certain imperishable needs in him have never been so fully met as by some Greeks and some Latins, writing in a vanished society, which yet, by reason of their thought and genius, is still in some real sense ours. More science? More foreign languages? More technical arts? Yes! All these. But if democracy is to mean the disappearance of the Greek and Latin poets from the minds of the future leaders of our race, the history of three thousand years is there to show what the impoverishment will be.