_June 2._ Sunday. Heard a sermon in the afternoon at the church of St. Praxed. (Alas! the tomb of Browning’s Bishop is not there, nay, probably Browning had another church in his eye.) The priest in the middle of his sermon, yawned, and said, “Basta!” Then, for the first time during this visit, for the first time since twenty years, I felt the unmistakable thrill of recognition, and said, “This is Rome.” Or there is another method. That is the contemplative historic description of something you have never seen (the Belloc method). You don’t pretend to have seen it; but you describe what you might have felt, had you seen it. It is something like this:-- I have never been to Arles. But yesterday as I was walking along the Roman Road between Chanctonbury and Horsham, I thought of Arles. Arles is perpetually seeking new things in Europe. Arles has the spirit, the judgment, and the greatness of the thirteenth century. Chicago differs utterly in mood from Arles. In Chicago there is war. You buy a newspaper and ten to one the leading article will be an affirmation or a denial of a creed or a dogma. In Arles you may buy newspapers for a month and get nothing but the record of the weather, two days old. And, as I consider the two towns, neither of which I have visited, I find almost as great a pleasure in imagining them as in remembering the sharp pictures of Birmingham and Swindon. I have been to Swindon; and that reminds me, Swindon has a song of its own. It is called “If the Swin was in the Swim.” I have great hopes of the town of Swindon. The world has become introspective and subjective. People no longer write about what they heard or saw. They assume that the reader knows all that. But they describe what they felt and thought on Monday, or on Tuesday, or on any other day of the week. Anatole France started the game by saying that criticism was the adventures of the soul among masterpieces.