Some sight-seeing Margaret still undertook, as we learn from a letter dated November 17, in which she speaks of going about "in a coach with several people," and confesses that she dissipates her thoughts on outward beauty. Such was her delight, at this time, in the "atmosphere of the European mind," that she even wished, for a time, to be delivered from the sound of the English language. The beginning of this winter was, as it usually is in Italy, a season of fine weather. On the 17th of December Margaret rises to bask in beneficent floods of sunlight, and to find upon her table the roses and grapes which, in New England, would have been costly hot-house luxuries. Her letter of this date is full of her delight in having penetrated from the outer aspect to the heart of Rome, classic, mediæval, and modern. And here we come upon the record of those first impressions concerning which we latterly indulged in some speculation. "Ah! how joyful to see once more this Rome, instead of the pitiful, peddling, Anglicized Rome first viewed in unutterable dismay from the _coupé_ of the vettura,--a Rome all full of taverns, lodging-houses, cheating chambermaids, vilest _valets de place_, and fleas! A Niobe of nations indeed! Ah! why (secretly the heart blasphemed) did the sun omit to kill her too, when all the glorious race which wore her crown fell beneath his ray?" All this had now disappeared for Margaret, and a new enchantment had taken the place of the old illusion and disappointment. For she was now able to disentangle the strange jumble of ancient and modern Rome. In this more understanding and familiar view, she says:-- "The old kings, the consuls and tribunes, the emperors, drunk with blood and gold, return for us. The seven hills tower, the innumerable temples glitter, and the Via Sacra swarms with triumphal life once more." In the later Papal Rome she discerns, through the confusion of rite and legend, a sense which to her marks the growth "of the human spirit struggling to develop its life." And the Rome of that day was dear to her in spite of its manifold corruptions; dear for the splendor of the race, surviving every enslaving and deforming influence; dear for the new-born hope of freedom which she considered safe in the nursing of Pope Pius. Most of the occasions chronicled by Margaret in her letters of this period are of the sort familiarly known to travellers, and even to readers of books of travel. The prayers for the dead, early in November, the festival of San Carlo Borromeo, the veiling of a nun, the worship of the wooden image called "the most Holy Child," idolatrous, Margaret thinks, as that of the Capitoline Jove, the blessing of the animals, the festival of the Magi at the Propaganda,--these events are all described by her with much good thought and suggestion.