I have passed a day between the two palaces Doria and Sciarra, nearly opposite each other in the Corso at Rome. The first is an immense gallery of perhaps a thousand pictures, distributed through seven large halls, and four galleries encircling the court. In the first four rooms I found nothing that struck me particularly. In the fifth was a portrait, by an unknown artist, of Olivia Waldachini, the favorite and sister-in-law of Pope Innocent X., a handsome woman, with that round fulness in the throat and neck, which (whether it existed in the originals, or is a part of a painter's ideal of a woman of pleasure), is universal in portraits of that character. In the same room was a portrait of a "celebrated widow," by Vandyck,[7] a had-been beautiful woman, in a staid cap (the hands wonderfully painted), and a large and rich picture of Semiramis, by one of the Carraccis. In the galleries hung the landscapes by Claude, famous through the world. It is like roving through a paradise, to sit and look at them. His broad green lawns, his half-hidden temples, his life-like luxuriant trees, his fountains, his sunny streams--all flush into the eye like the bright opening of a Utopia, or some dream over a description from Boccaccio. It is what Italy might be in a golden age--her ruins rebuilt into the transparent air, her woods unprofaned, her people pastoral and refined, and every valley a landscape of Arcadia. I can conceive no higher pleasure for the imagination than to see a Claude in travelling through Italy. It is finding a home for one's more visionary fancies--those children of moonshine that one begets in a colder clime, but scarce dares acknowledge till he has seen them under a more congenial sky. More plainly, one does not know whether his abstract imaginations of pastoral life and scenery are not ridiculous and unreal, till he has seen one of these landscapes, and felt _steeped_, if I may use such a word, in the very loveliness which inspired the pencil of the painter. There he finds the pastures, the groves, the fairy structures, the clear waters, the straying groups, the whole delicious scenery, as bright as in his dreams, and he feels as if he should bless the artist for the liberty to acknowledge freely to himself the possibility of so beautiful a world.