Not an oak, but a plant and flower of light, Lowell might shortly have said, for this is the last reference in life to the child suddenly stricken down and left behind in a Roman grave by the mourning parents, when, on the 29th of April, they went away from Rome to Naples with the one child of their four who lived to them. On the 13th of the month Lowell wrote to his eldest sister: “We are now within a fortnight of bidding farewell to what I am now forced to call dear old Rome. In spite of its occupation by an army of ten thousand French soldiers, in spite of its invasion by that more terrible force, the column of English travellers, in spite of the eternal drumming and bugling and sentinelling in the streets, and the crowding of that insular Bull--_qui semper habet fœnum in cornu_--there is an insensible charm about the place which grows upon you from hour to hour. There must be few cities where one can command such absolute solitude as here. One cannot expect it, to be sure, in the Colosseum by moonlight, for thither the English go by carriage loads to be lonely with a footman in livery behind them, and to quote Byron’s stuff out of Murray’s Guide; there perch the French in voluble flocks, under the necessity (more painful to them than to any other people) of being poetical--chattering _Mon Dieu! qu’un joli effet!_ But an hour’s walk will take one out into the Campagna, where you will look across the motionless heave of the solitude dotted here and there with lazy cattle to the double wall of mountain, the nearest opaline with change of light and shadow, the farther Parian with snow that only grows whiter when the cloud shadows melt across it--the air overhead rippling with larks too countless to be watched, and the turf around you glowing with strange flowers, each a wonder, yet so numberless that you would as soon think of gathering a nosegay of grass blades. On Easter Sunday I spent an incomparable day at the Fountain of Egeria, stared at sullenly, now and then, by one of those great gray Campagna bulls, but totally safe from the English variety which had gone to get broken ribs at St. Peter’s. The show-box unholiness of Holy Week is at last well over. The best part of it was that on Holy Thursday all the Vatican was open at once--fifteen miles of incomparable art. For me the Pope washed perfumed feet, and the Cardinal Penitentiary wielded his long rod in vain. I dislike such spectacles naturally, and saw no reason why I should undergo every conceivable sort of discomfort and annoyance for the sake of another discomfort or annoyance at the end....