OU see you did right about the address, sending the letter to care of Paris banker. I have it, and it came “on time,” good time, not loitering by the way or flying off at a tangent. The one point I object to is the soft rebuke to me for not having specified an address. I had given you all that I expected to. It is too much of a risk to change my address with the changes of place of such a vagrant. Now, stick to H. & Co., etc., till I write you to do otherwise. You will be a sharp, yes, pre-destinated fault-finder if you can hook a grumble on that. I defy you. Thanks for your appreciation of the letter! I am sure I did not mean anything so extraordinary. You say so many pleasant things, I cannot ignore them, as is my wont. I hope you are like Lady Geraldine, who
“Said such good things natural,
As if she always thought them.”
Anyhow, it is wonderfully exhilarating to feel I have put out the Bermuda burner. Her scintillations were vastly oppressive.
I have recently been reveling in Guercino’s fresco of Aurora, widely different from Guido’s famous one, but I think I like it quite as much. Aurora herself is the central figure, a lovely, radiant creature embodying all the glimmer, glow and glamor of the dawn, seated in her car drawn by two splendid steeds, mottled with the dusk they were scattering and the light they were heralding. She was dropping flowers as she sped onward; a lovely cherub hovered in the air before stretching chaplets of exquisite flowers toward her; another, nestling in the cloudy folds of her drapery behind, looked over the edge of the car right into my eyes with his that seemed just as living. Do not tell on me; but I make rosebuds of my lips at him every time we catch each other’s eyes, and he seems to enjoy the pantomine. Just in front of the horses’ heads, the earliest hours, bewitching young maidens, are putting out the stars, each with extended forefinger and thumb, flashing lightly up to the pretty sparks. It looks the most fascinating “task to do.” You cannot help feeling a quiver in your own fingers to try it. Away ahead of all a bat is flying from the coming light. You think in a flash of that beautiful song:
“Come into the garden, Maud,
The black bat, Night, is fled.”
And now the quiver in my finger is gone:
I have put out that transcendant Star that made a “vexed Bermoothes” of me!
And I hope Guercino’s manes will take no offense at this association of ideas!
Ah! this imperial Rome—this unapproachable queen of the earth—every day I am more and more overcome by “the toils of her beauty” and enchantments. The magic of yesterday is lost in that of to-day; and for that of to-morrow I shall be dumb, having no words to express it. I wonder how anyone can ever get free from her wonderful fetters forged of everything that adds charm to life. From the deep blue of its sky, the crystalline dazzle of its atmosphere, the unutterable fusion “of all the hues of all the earth,” and the varied outline of hill and vale and mount and wide-spread campagna—all this, just the mere outside, the physical Rome, to her treasures of myths, history, etc., everything you know, why attempt to enumerate? She is in everything—“Mistress of the World.” I, for one, am her willingest, lealest, lovingest subject or slave, as you will. It seems to me at times as if of all I have ever known there is nothing very worthy that has not some associations with her. Living within her walls brings out all that was written long ago on the memory, but grown from the lapse of time and the swift succession of experiences into an “invisible writing,” as it were. Yes, brings it out just as heat will bring that out. At every turn there is a great name, or some great monument of the mighty dead, and as you pause to look you ponder and remember what made the name great, who built the great monument, who indeed were the mighty dead! Sometimes you know so much it is a kind of intoxicating joy. Oh! yes; many times—most times of course, you know so little.
Do not think of being afraid or ashamed of admitting that. And then such a hunger and thirst as takes possession of you for knowledge, more knowledge, and yet more and more. The hunger and thirst of one perishing in the desert can but faintly shadow this forth. You think of that wonder-story of Eve, and the condemnation of her that has been a birth-right and grown with your orthodox growth, insensibly softens into sympathy. Presently you will find yourself admitting you too might have—yes, would have eaten that apple! For it meant—knowledge, more knowledge! I—I—am shocking you. Well, come thou also, and see if it be possible not to rave—