MY DEAR ELIZABETH,--I could not have believed I could be in Rome a day without announcing it to you in words and expressions which would have the effect at least of the bell of St. Peter's or the cannon of St. Angelo. . . . But my soul has been iced over, as well as the hitherto flowing fountains of the Piazza, di San Pietro. I have not been able to expand like corn and melons under a summer sun. Nipped have been all my blossoming hopes and enthusiasms, and my hands have been too numb to hold a pen. Added to this, Mr. Hawthorne has had the severest cold he ever had, because bright, keen cold he cannot bear so well as damp; and .Rosebud has not been well since she entered the city. It is colder than for twenty years before. We find it enormously expensive to live in Rome; our apartment is twelve hundred a year.

But I am in Rome, Rome, Rome! I have stood in the Forum and beneath the Arch of Titus, at the end of the Sacra Via. I have wandered about the Coliseum, the stupendous grandeur of which equals my dream and hope. I have seen the sun kindling the open courts of the Temple of Peace, where Sarah Clarke said, years ago, that my children would some time play. (It is now called Constantine's Basilica.) I have climbed the Capitoline and stood before the Capitol, by the side of the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius,--the finest in the world [my father calls it "the most majestic representation of kingly character that ever the world has seen "],--once in front' of the Arch of Septimius Severus. I have been into the Pantheon, whose sublime portico quietly rises out of the region of criticism into its own sphere,--a fit entrance to the temple of all the gods. How wise was the wise and tact-gifted Augustus to reject the homage of Agrippa, who built it for his apotheosis, and to dedicate it to the immortal gods! It is now dedicated to the Immortal God.

And I have been to St. Peter's! There alone in Rome is perpetual summer. You have heard of the wonderful atmosphere of this world of a basilica. It would seem to be warmed by the ardent soul of Peter, or by the breath of prayer from innumerable saints. One drops the hermetical seal of a curtain behind, upon entering, and behold, with the world is also shut out the bitter cold, and one is folded, as it were, in a soft mantle of down, as if angels wrapped their wings about us. I expanded at once under the invisible sun. There have been moments when I have felt the spell of Rome, but every one says here that it dawns gradually upon the mind. It would not have been so with me, I am convinced, if I had been warm. Who ever heard of an icicle glowing with emotion? What is Rome to a frozen clod? . . .