"Visions arose in my mind of all that might be done in our country by associations of men and women who have received the benefits of literary culture, giving such evening lessons throughout our cities and villages." Margaret wishes, however, that such disinterested effort in our own country should not be accompanied by the priestly robe and manner which for her marred the humanity of the Christian Brotherhood of Paris.
The establishment of the Protestant Deaconesses is praised by Margaret. She visited also the School for Idiots, near Paris, where her feelings vented themselves in "a shower of sweet and bitter tears; of joy at what has been done, of grief for all that I and others possess, and cannot impart to these little ones." She was much impressed with the character of the master of the school, a man of seven or eight and twenty[200] years, whose fine countenance she saw "looking in love on those distorted and opaque vases of humanity."
Turning her face southward, she thus takes leave of the great capital:—
"Paris! I was sad to leave thee, thou wonderful focus, where ignorance ceases to be a pain, because there we find such means daily to lessen it."
Railroads were few in the France of forty years ago. Margaret came by diligence and boat to Lyons, to Avignon, where she waded through the snow to visit the tomb of Laura, and to Marseilles, where she embarked for Genoa. Her first sight of this city did not disappoint her, but to her surprise, she found the weather cold and ungenial:—
"I could not realize that I had actually touched those shores to which I had looked forward all my life, where it seemed that the heart would expand, and the whole nature be turned to delight. Seen by a cutting wind, the marble palaces, the gardens, the magnificent water-view, failed to charm." Both here and in Leghorn Margaret visited Italians at their houses, and found them very attractive, "charming women, refined and eloquent men." The Mediterranean voyage was extended as far as Naples, which she characterizes as "priest-ridden, misgoverned, full[201] of dirty, degraded men and women, yet still most lovely." And here, after a week which appeared to be "an exact copy of the miseries of a New-England spring," with a wind "villanous, horrible, exactly like the worst east wind of Boston," Margaret found at last her own Italy, and found it "beautiful, worthy to be loved and embraced, not talked about.... Baiæ had still a hid divinity for me, Vesuvius a fresh baptism of fire, and Sorrento—oh! Sorrento was beyond picture, beyond poesy."
After Naples came Margaret's first view of Rome, where she probably arrived early in May, and where she remained until late in the month of June. We do not find among her letters of this period any record of her first impressions of the Eternal City, the approach to which, before the days of railroads in Italy, was unspeakably impressive and solemn.
Seated in the midst of her seven hills, with the desolate Campagna about her, one could hardly say whether her stony countenance invited the spirit of the age, or defied it. Her mediæval armor was complete at all points. Her heathen heart had kept Christianity far from it by using as exorcisms the very forms which, at the birth of that religion, had mediated between its spirit and the dull sense of the Pagan world. It was the nineteenth century in America, the[202] eighteenth in England, the seventeenth in France, and the fifteenth in Rome. The aged hands of the grandam still held fast the key of her treasures. Her haughty front still said to Ruin and Desolation,—
"Here is my throne, bid kings come bow to it."
So the writer first saw Rome in the winter of 1843. Her walls seemed those of a mighty sepulchre, in which even the new-born babe was born into death. The stagnation of thought, the prohibition of question, the denial of progress! Her ministers had a sweet Lethean draught with which to lull the first clamors of awakening life, to quiet the first promptings of individual thought. It was the draught of Circe, fragrant but fatal. And those who fed upon it became pathetic caricatures of humanity.