Drawn in twenty different directions on starting from my lodgings this morning, I found myself, undecided where to pass my day, in front of St. Peter's. Some gorgeous ceremony was just over, and the sumptuous equipages of the cardinals, blazing in the sun with their mountings of gold and silver, were driving up and dashing away from the end of the long colonnades, producing any effect upon the mind rather than a devout one. I stood admiring their fiery horses and gay liveries, till the last rattled from the square, and then mounted to the deserted church. Its vast vestibule was filled with beggars, diseased in every conceivable manner, halting, groping, and crawling about in search of strangers of whom to implore charity--a contrast to the splendid pavement beneath and the gold and marble above and around, which would reconcile one to see the "mighty dome" melted into alms, and his holiness reduced to a plain chapel and a rusty cassock. Lifting the curtain I stood in the body of the church. There were perhaps twenty persons, at different distances, on its immense floor, the farthest off (_six hundred and fourteen feet from me!_) looking like a pigmy in the far perspective. St. Peter's is less like a church than a collection of large churches enclosed under a gigantic roof. The chapels at the sides are larger than most houses of public worship in our country, and of these there may be eight or ten, not included in the effect of the vast interior. One is lost in it. It is a city of columns and sculpture and mosaic. Its walls are encrusted with precious stones and masterly workmanship to the very top, and its wealth may be conceived when you remember that, standing in the centre and raising your eyes aloft, there are _four hundred and forty feet_ between you and the roof of the dome--the height, almost of a mountain. I walked up toward the tomb of St. Peter, passing in my way a solitary worshipper here and there, upon his knees, and arrested constantly by the exquisite beauty of the statuary with which the columns are carved. Accustomed as we are in America, to churches filled with pews, it is hardly possible to imagine the noble effect of a vast mosaic floor, unencumbered even with a chair, and only broken by a few prostrate figures, just specking its wide area. All Catholic churches are without fixed seats, and St. Peter's seems scarce measurable to the eye, it is so far and clear, from one extremity to the other.