“I feel better here than at Ravenna. Aquilo, the north wind from the mountains, cools and revives me. I can breathe, and bathe. Perhaps also there is a bracing north wind from the past, from the days of our forefathers, who came here six hundred years ago, when Rome was young, to form an outpost on the frontier against the barbarians of those days. These churches also have reverberated to great voices, even in thy days. Jerome perhaps gathered strength here for his fight for his translation of the Scriptures into the vulgar tongue, and his many other battles. And, moreover, the Lady Digna, to whom thy letter has introduced me, is herself as a fresh breeze from the mountains, and a revival of the old Rome my father loves, in her noble simplicity of life. Her palace is near the walls, with a lofty tower looking on the crystal waters of the river Natiso and towards the blue mountains of the north. She reminds me of the Aventine, and of thee and of my father and his old Rome. One feels she might have been one of the grand, pure matrons of the Republic.” From Aquileia Marius went through the plains of Lombardy by the south of Gaul to Lyons. Thence he wrote— “I think of thee continually here, and how in our childhood was engraven on our hearts, from thy lips, the story of the Passion and the Victory of the martyrs of Lyons and Vienne; of the ninety-years-old Bishop Pothinus dying, beaten with the iron rods, in prison; of the mistress and the slave Blandina (like the African Perpetua and Felicitas) suffering the same tortures, sustaining each other in the same conflict, crowned with a similar crown. Blandina the slave maiden kept alive to the last, and, ‘as a noble mother animating her children, and sending them home to the Great King,’ after the torture from the tossing by the wild beasts, ‘going forth as to a marriage-feast to her death,’ with the simple confession of faith, ‘_I am a Christian; no wickedness is done among us._’ “Ah, beloved, what a golden time that seems to look back on! None of these dividing names, these heresies and schisms, but one glorious name, ‘Christian.’ None of these degraded lives among His followers. To be a Christian meant then to be _good_, ‘to do no wickedness.’ Who would not win back such a time of faith and courage, of love and purity, at any cost? If it were only the Huns that ravaged the Empire! If it were only the heathen that did wickedness! If it were only the heretics who persecuted! But I must not write a Book of Lamentations. We have, as our Luciola always says, to live _here_ and _now_.