The anxiety, also, which Lowell felt over his father’s illness benumbed his faculties and made him restless; but with fair weather, better news came, and the travellers gave themselves up more unreservedly to the pleasures which the great city afforded them. But Rome does not thrill one from the start. It takes time for its ancient hands to get that clutch which at last never loosens, and Lowell at first seemed somewhat unaffected. “I like,” he wrote to his father, just before Christmas, “to walk about in the fine sunshine and get unexpected and unguide-booked glimpses of fine scenery, but systematic sight-seeing is very irksome to me. Though we have been in Rome now nearly as long as we were in Florence, I have not learned to like it as well. We were able to enjoy Florence sincerely and without any reproaches, because we had not heard of your illness. Then, too, the churches here are nearly all alike. Going to see them is like standing to watch a procession of monks,--the same thing over and over again, and when you have seen one you have seen all. There is a kind of clumsy magnificence about them, like that of an elephant with his castle on his back and his gilded trappings, and the heaviness somehow weighs on one. There is no spring and soar in their architecture as in that of the Lombard churches I have seen. The Roman columns standing here and there look gentleman-like beside them, and reproach them with their tawdry _parvenuism_. The finest interior in Rome is that of the Sta. Maria degli Angeli, which Michelangelo made out of a single room in the baths of Diocletian. Even the _size_ of St. Peter’s seems inconsiderable in a city where the Coliseum still stands in crater-like ruin, and where one may trace the foundations of a palace large enough almost for a city.... Yesterday I walked out upon the Campagna, but by a different gate from my favorite San Sebastiano. Leaving the Porta del Popolo, we followed the road as far as the Ponte Molle, then turned to the right on the hither bank of the Tiber, which we followed as far as the confluence of the Tiber and Anio, where was once the city of Antemnæ. As it had been destroyed by Romulus, however, there was nothing to be seen of the old Sabine stronghold except the flatiron-shaped bluff on which it stood, the natural height and steepness of which, aided no doubt by art, must have made the storming of it no very agreeable diversion. The view from the top is very beautiful, and it is a good place to study the Campagna scenery from,--I mean the Campagna in a state of nature. Below us flowed the swift and dirty Tiber, and the yet swifter and dirtier Anio. In front the Campagna wallowed away as far as the line of snow-streaked mountains which wall it in. Herds of cattle and of horses dotted it here and there, the gray cows looking like sheep in the distance to an eye used always to expect red in kine. Sometimes a sort of square tower rose, lonely and with no sign of life about it.