down in spirit by the desolation of her ruin, and the hopelessness of her future,--left her, in short, hating her with all our might, and adding our individual curse to the infinite anathema which her old crimes have unmistakeably brought down:--when we have left Rome in such mood as this, we are astonished by the discovery, by-and-by, that our heartstrings have mysteriously attached themselves to the Eternal City, and are drawing us thitherward again, as if it were more familiar, more intimately our home, than even the spot where we were born." This is the attractive and sympathetic power of Rome which Byron so fully appreciated-- "Oh Rome my country! city of the soul! The orphans of the heart must turn to thee, Lone mother of dead empires! and controul In their shut breasts their petty misery. What are our woes and sufferance? Come and see The cypress, hear the owl, and plod your way O'er steps of broken thrones and temples. Ye! Whose agonies are evils of a day-- A world is at our feet as fragile as our clay. "The Niobe of nations! there she stands Childless and crownless, in her voiceless woe; An empty urn within her withered hands, Whose sacred dust was scattered long ago; The Scipios' tomb contains no ashes now; The very sepulchres lie tenantless Of their heroic dwellers: dost thou flow, Old Tiber! through a marble wilderness? Rise, with thy yellow waves, and mantle her distress!" The impressiveness of an arrival at the Eternal City was formerly enhanced by the solemn singularity of the country through which it was slowly approached. "Those who arrive at Rome now by the railway," says Mrs. Craven in her 'Anne Severin,' "and rush like a whirlwind into a station, which has nothing in its first aspect to distinguish it from that of one of the most obscure places in the world, cannot imagine the effect which the words 'Ecco Roma' formerly produced, when on arriving at the point in the road from which the Eternal City could be descried for the first time, the postillion stopped his horses, and pointing it out to the traveller in the distance, pronounced them with that Roman accent which is grave and sonorous, as the name of Rome itself." "How pleasing," says Cardinal Wiseman, "was the usual indication to early travellers, by voice and outstretched whip, embodied in the well-known exclamation of every vetturino, 'Ecco Roma.' To one 'lasso maris et viarum,' like Horace, these words brought the first promise of approaching rest. A few more miles of weary hills, every one of which, from its summit, gave a more swelling and majestic outline to what so far constituted 'Roma,' that is, the great cupola, not of the church, but of the city, its only discernible part, cutting, like a huge peak, into the dear winter sky, and the long journey was ended, and ended by the full realization of well-cherished hopes."