"I could not realize that I had actually touched those shores to which I had looked forward all my life, where it seemed that the heart would expand, and the whole nature be turned to delight. Seen by a cutting wind, the marble palaces, the gardens, the magnificent water-view, failed to charm." Both here and in Leghorn Margaret visited Italians at their houses, and found them very attractive, "charming women, refined and eloquent men." The Mediterranean voyage was extended as far as Naples, which she characterizes as "priest-ridden, misgoverned, full of dirty, degraded men and women, yet still most lovely." And here, after a week which appeared to be "an exact copy of the miseries of a New-England spring," with a wind "villanous, horrible, exactly like the worst east wind of Boston," Margaret found at last her own Italy, and found it "beautiful, worthy to be loved and embraced, not talked about.... Baiæ had still a hid divinity for me, Vesuvius a fresh baptism of fire, and Sorrento--oh! Sorrento was beyond picture, beyond poesy." After Naples came Margaret's first view of Rome, where she probably arrived early in May, and where she remained until late in the month of June. We do not find among her letters of this period any record of her first impressions of the Eternal City, the approach to which, before the days of railroads in Italy, was unspeakably impressive and solemn. Seated in the midst of her seven hills, with the desolate Campagna about her, one could hardly say whether her stony countenance invited the spirit of the age, or defied it. Her mediæval armor was complete at all points. Her heathen heart had kept Christianity far from it by using as exorcisms the very forms which, at the birth of that religion, had mediated between its spirit and the dull sense of the Pagan world. It was the nineteenth century in America, the eighteenth in England, the seventeenth in France, and the fifteenth in Rome. The aged hands of the grandam still held fast the key of her treasures. Her haughty front still said to Ruin and Desolation,-- "Here is my throne, bid kings come bow to it." So the writer first saw Rome in the winter of 1843. Her walls seemed those of a mighty sepulchre, in which even the new-born babe was born into death. The stagnation of thought, the prohibition of question, the denial of progress! Her ministers had a sweet Lethean draught with which to lull the first clamors of awakening life, to quiet the first promptings of individual thought. It was the draught of Circe, fragrant but fatal. And those who fed upon it became pathetic caricatures of humanity.