"For this purpose, making the Capitol a central point, I drove first slowly through the Forum, and made the circuit of the Palatine hill, then by the arch of Janus (which by a late decision of the antiquarians has no more to do with Janus than with Jupiter,) and the temple of Vesta, back again over the site of the Circus Maximus, between the Palatine and the Aventine (the scene of the Rape of the Sabines,) to the baths of Caracalla, where I spent an hour, musing, sketching, and poetizing; thence to the Church of San Stefano Rotundo, once a temple dedicated to Claudius by Agrippina; over the Celian hill, covered with masses of ruins, to the Church of St. John and St. Paul, a small but beautiful edifice: then to the neighboring church of San Gregorio, from the steps of which there is such a noble view. Thence I returned by the arch of Constantine, and the Coliseum, which frowned on me in black masses through the soft and deepening twilight, through the street now called the Suburra, but formerly the Via Scelerata, where Tullia trampled over the dead body of her father, and so over the Quirinal, home. "My excursion was altogether delightful, and gave me the most magnificent, and I had almost said, the most _bewildering_ ideas of the grandeur and extent of ancient Rome: every step was classic ground; illustrious names, and splendid recollections crowded upon the fancy-- 'And trailing clouds of glory did they come.' On the Palatine Hill were the houses of Cicero and the Gracchi: Horace, Virgil, and Ovid resided on the Aventine; and Mecænas and Pliny on the Æsquiline. If one little fragment of a wall remained, which could with any shadow of probability be pointed out as belonging to the residence of Cicero, Horace, or Virgil, how much dearer, how much more sanctified to memory would it be than all the magnificent ruins of the fabrics of the Cæsars! But no--all has passed away. I have heard the remains of Rome coarsely ridiculed, because after the researches of centuries, so little is comparatively known, because of the endless disputes of antiquarians, and the night and ignorance in which all is involved. But to the imagination there is something singularly striking in this mysterious veil which hangs like a cloud upon the objects around us. I trod to-day over shapeless masses of building, extending in every direction as far as the eye could reach. Who had inhabited the edifices I trampled under my feet? What hearts had burned--what heads had thought--what spirits had kindled _there_, where nothing was seen but a wilderness and waste, and heaps of ruins, to which antiquaries--even Nibby himself, dare not give a name? All swept away--buried beneath an ocean of oblivion, above which rise a few great and glorious names, like rocks, over which the billows of time break in vain." Her journey from Rome to Naples was short and delightful. The following is one among innumerable descriptive passages in her diary: