than that of the huge Empire amid the dust of whose once world-shaking heart these feelings so often come upon me.” The last week before leaving Rome was spent in an excursion with Story to Subiaco, as related at length in “Leaves from my Journal in Italy.” On their way to Naples the Lowells made a halt at Terracina, from which place Lowell wrote to Robert Carter: “Here I am, with a magnificent cliff opposite my window crowned by twelve arches of what is called the Palace of Theodoric. I have just come in from seeing the Cathedral, the dirtiest church I have seen in Italy (with a very picturesque old Campanile, however), and the remains of the old Roman port, which astonished me by their size even after all I had seen of Roman hugeness. The port is now filled with soil, and there is a fine orange garden where vessels used to lie. Terracina is nothing like what I expected to see. The inn (or ‘Grand’ Albergo, as it is called) is one of the least cutthroat looking places I ever saw. It is quite out of the town, between the great cliff and the sea. Behind it, on the beach, the scene is quite Neapolitan--forty or fifty bare-legged fishermen are drawing a great seine out of the water, and forty or fifty dirty, laughing, ragged, happily-wretched children gather round you and beg for _caccose_ or CECCO, by which they mean _qualche cosa_. The women sit round the doors, nasty and contented, urging on their offspring in their professional career. They are the most obstinate beggars I have seen yet. In Rome the waving of the two first fingers of the hand and a decided _non c’è_ is generally sufficient, but here I tried every expedient in vain. The prickly pear grows bloatedly in all the ledges of the cliff, an olive orchard climbs half-way up the back of it where the hill is less steep, and farther to the left there are tall palms in a convent garden, but I cannot see them. “The drive over the Pontine marshes is for more than twenty miles a perfectly straight, smooth avenue, between double rows of elms. I had been told it was very dull, but did not find it so; for there were mountains on one side of us, cultivated, or cattle and horse-covered fields or woods on the other, and the birds sang and the sun shone all the way. It seemed like the approach to some prince’s pleasure-house.... On the whole, the result of my experience thus far is that I am glad that I came abroad, though the knowledge one acquires must rust for want of use in a great measure at home. To be sure, one’s political ideas are also somewhat modified--I don’t mean retrograded.”