In my eagerness to proceed, I looked neither to the right nor to the left. We went through crooked and narrow streets, until we came to a bridge lined with statues. The stream beneath was the Tiber. It was full, turbid, swift, sinuous, and it might be three hundred feet wide, or perhaps not quite so wide as the Seine at Paris at the same season. The difference, however, is not material, and each is about half as wide as the Thames above London Bridge on a full tide, which is again three-fourths of the width of the Hudson at Albany. A large round castellated edifice, with-flanking walls and military bastions, faced the bridge: this was the tomb of Adrian, converted into a citadel by the name of the Castle of St. Angelo, an angel in bronze surmounting the tower. Turning to the left, we followed the river until a street led us from its windings, and presently I found myself standing at the foot of a vast square, with colonnades on a gigantic scale sweeping in half circles on each side of me, two of the most beautiful fountains I had ever seen throwing their waters in sheets down their sides between them, and the façade of St. Peter’s forming the background. A noble Egyptian obelisk occupied the centre of the area. Every one had told me I should be disappointed in the apparent magnitude of this church, but I was not. To me it seemed the thing it is, possibly because some pains had been taken to school the eye. Switzerland often misled me in both heights and distances, but a ship or an edifice rarely does so. Previously to seeing Switzerland, I had found nothing to compare with such a nature, and all regions previously known offered no rules to judge by; but I had now seen too many huge structures not to be at once satisfied that this was the largest of them all. The laquais would have me stop to admire some of Michael Angelo’s sublime conceptions, but I pressed forward. Ascending the steps, I threw out my arms to embrace one of the huge half columns of the façade, not in a fit of sentimentalism, but to ascertain its diameter, which was gigantic, and helped the previous impression. Pushing aside the door in common use, I found myself in the nave of the noblest temple in which any religious rites were ever celebrated.