At last, dearest Louisa, I take up my pen to address you. Here we are, you see, with the seven-and-seventy boxes, Courier, Papa and Mamma, the children, and Mary and Susan: Here we all are at Rome, and delighted of course with St. Peter’s, And very pleasantly lodged in the famous Piazza di Spagna. Rome is a wonderful place, but Mary shall tell you about it; Not very gay, however; the English are mostly at Naples; There are the A.’s, we hear, and most of the W. party. George, however, is come; did I tell you about his mustachios? Dear, I must really stop, for the carriage, they tell me, is waiting; Mary will finish; and Susan is writing, they say, to Sophia. Adieu, dearest Louise,—evermore your faithful Georgina. Who can a Mr. Claude be whom George has taken to be with? Very stupid, I think, but George says so _very_ clever. IV. CLAUDE TO EUSTACE. No, the Christian faith, as at any rate I understood it. With its humiliations and exaltations combining, Exaltations sublime, and yet diviner abasements, Aspirations from something most shameful here upon earth and In our poor selves to something most perfect above in the heavens,— No, the Christian faith, as I, at least, understood it, Is not here, O Rome, in any of these thy churches; Is not here, but in Freiburg, or Rheims, or Westminster Abbey, What in thy Dome I find, in all thy recenter efforts, Is a something, I think, more _rational_ far, more earthly, Actual, less ideal, devout not in scorn and refusal, But in a positive, calm, Stoic-Epicurean acceptance. This I begin to detect in St. Peter’s and some of the churches, Mostly in all that I see of the sixteenth-century masters; Overlaid of course with infinite gauds and gewgaws, Innocent, playful follies, the toys and trinkets of childhood, Forced on maturer years, as the serious one thing needful, By the barbarian will of the rigid and ignorant Spaniard. Curious work, meantime, re-entering society: how we Walk a livelong day, great Heaven, and watch our shadows! What our shadows seem, forsooth, we will ourselves be. Do I look like that I you think me that: then I am that. V. CLAUDE TO EUSTACE.