"We spent an exquisite half-hour," she wrote, "mooning, or rather sunning about; the whole Campagna and city lying at our feet, the sea on one side like a golden laver below the declining sun, the windings of the Tiber and the hills of Lucretilis on the other, with Frascati, Tivoli, Tusculum on their cypress sides, for in that clear atmosphere you could see the very cypresses of Maecenas' villa at Tivoli; with long stripes of violet and pomegranate coloured light sweeping over the plain like waves; one stone pine upon the edge of our Mellini hill; and Rome, the fallen Babylon, like a dead city beneath, no sound of multitudes ascending, but the only life these great crimson lights and shadows (for here the shadow of a red light is violet) like the carnation-coloured wings of angels, themselves invisible, flapping over the plain and leaving this place behind them. We rushed down as fast as we could for the sun was setting, and we reached St. Peter's just as the doors were going to close. We had the great Church all to ourselves, the tomb of St. Peter wreathed with lights. It felt like the times when a Christian knight watched by his arms before some great enterprise at the Holy Sepulchre; and one shadowy white angel we could see through the windows over the great door; and do you know he quite made us startle as he stood there in the gloaming. Of course it was the marble statue on the facade; and there were workmen still laughing and talking at the extreme end, and their sounds, as they were repeated under the long vaults, were like the gibbering of devils, and their lanthorns, as they wavered along close to the ground, were like corpse-lights. I thought of St. Anthony and holy knights and their temptations. And at last the Sacristan took us out of that vast solemn dome through a _tomb_! and we glided into the silvery moonlight, and walked home over Ponte St. Angelo, where I made a little invocation to St. Michael to help me to thank; for why the Protestants should shut themselves out, in solitary pride, from the Communion of Saints in heaven and in earth, I never could understand. And so ended this glorious day." The obsession of Rome, which sooner or later comes upon every intelligent visitor to the Eternal City, dated in the case of Florence Nightingale from this golden-letter day. She surmounted the sense of confusion which sometimes oppresses the traveller. "I do not feel," she wrote, "though Pagan in the morning, Jew in the afternoon, and Christian in the evening, anything but a unity of interest in all these representations. To know God we must study Him as much in the Pagan and Jewish dispensations as in the Christian (though that is the last and most perfect manifestation), and this gives unity to the whole--one continuous thread of interest to all these pearls."