“Last night there was another wonder, the Girandola, which we saw excellently well from the windows of the American legation. Close behind me, by the way, stood Silvio Pellico (a Jesuit now), a little withered old man in spectacles, looking so very dry that I could scarce believe he had ever been shut up in a _damp_ dungeon in his life. This was (I mean the Girandola) the most brilliant and at the same time tasteful display of fireworks I ever saw. I had no idea that so much powder could be burned to so good purpose. For the first time in my life I saw rockets that seemed endowed with life and intelligence. They might have been thought filled with the same vivacity and enjoyment so characteristic of the people. Our rockets at home seem business-like in comparison. They accomplish immense heights in a steady straight-forward way, explode as a matter of course, and then the stick hurries back to go about its terrestrial affairs again. And yet why should I malign those beautiful slow curves of fire, that I have watched with Charlie and Jemmie from Simonds’s Hill, and which I would rather see again than twenty Girandolas? If Michelangelo had designed our fireworks, and if it did not by some fatal coincidence always rain on the evening of 4th July, doubtless they would be better.” Something of the total impression made upon Lowell in this first visit to Rome may be seen in the fragment of a letter to Mr. John Holmes, written near the end of his stay:-- “After all, this is a wonderful place. One feels disappointed at first, everything looks so modern. But as the mind, taking in ruin after ruin, gradually reconstructs for itself the grandeur and the glory, of which these city-like masses are but the splinters sprinkled here and there by the fall of the enormous fabric, and conceives the spiritual which has outlived that temporal domination, and even surpassed it, laying its foundations deeper than the reach of earthquake or Gaul, and conquering worlds beyond the ken of the Roman eagles in their proudest flight, a feeling of the sublime, vague and vast, takes the place of the first hurried curiosity and interest. Surely the American (and I feel myself more intensely American every day) is last of all at home among ruins--but he is at home in Rome. I cannot help believing that in some respects we represent more truly the old Roman Power and sentiment than any other people. Our art, our literature, are, as theirs, in some sort exotics; but our genius for politics, for law, and, above all, for colonization, our instinct for aggrandizement and for trade, are all Roman. I believe we are laying the basis of a more enduring power and prosperity, and that we shall not pass away till we have stamped ourselves upon the whole western hemisphere so deeply, so nobly, that if, in the far-away future, some Gibbon shall muse among our ruins, the history of our Decline and Fall shall be more mournful and more epic