From Santiago Mgr. Muzi and his party went to Valparaiso, and embarked for their return voyage on the 30th of October, 1824. The remarks of the celebrated Spaniard Balmes upon the visit of the future pope to the New World find their place here: “There is certainly in nature’s grand scenes an influence which expands and nerves the soul; and when these are united to the contemplation of different races, varied in civilization and manners, the mind acquires a largeness of sentiment most favorable to the development of the understanding and the heart, widening the sphere of thought and ennobling the affections. On this account it is pleasing, above all things, to see the youthful missionary, destined to occupy the chair of S. Peter, traverse the vast ocean; admire the magnificent rivers and superb chains of mountains in America; travel through those forests and plains where a rich and fertile soil, left to itself, displays with ostentatious luxury its inborn treasures by the abundance, variety, and beauty of its productions, animate and inanimate; run risks among savages, sleep in wretched hovels or on the open plain, and pass the night beneath that brilliant canopy which astonishes the traveller in the southern hemisphere. Providence, which destined the young Mastai-Ferretti to reign over a people and to govern the universal church, led him by the hand to visit various nations, and to contemplate the marvels of nature.”[225]
A remote but very providential consequence of the visit of Pius IX. to America, during his early career, was the establishment of the South American College at Rome, called officially in Italian the Pio-Latino Americano,[226] which educates aspirants to the priesthood from Brazil and all parts of the American continent where the Spanish language is spoken. A wealthy, intelligent, and influential Chilian priest, Don Ignacio Eyzaguirre,[227] who had been vice-president of the House of Representatives in 1848, and was an author of repute, was charged by Pius IX. in 1856 to visit the dioceses of South and Central America and Mexico, to obtain the views of the several bishops upon the necessity of founding an ecclesiastical seminary at Rome. The project was universally acceptable, and funds having been provided—the Holy Father giving liberally from his private purse—a beginning was made in 1858, when a part of the Theatine Convent of San Andrea della Valle was given up to the students, who were put under the direction of Jesuit Fathers. This location was only temporary; and the college was soon transferred to the large house of the general of the Dominicans, attached to the convent of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, and facing the piazza. However, it has been moved again, and in 1869 occupied the right wing of the novitiate at San Andrea on the Quirinal, with fifty-five inmates. As if this worthy establishment had to figure in its shifting fortune the unsettled state of so many of the Spanish American countries, it has again been disturbed; yet to suffer at the hands of Victor Emanuel and his sacrilegious band is the indication of a good cause, and will prepare to meet other, although hardly worse, enemies in the New World.
FREE WILL.
I.
The river glideth not at its sweet will:
The fountain sends it forth;
And answering to earth’s finger doth it still
Go east, west, south, or north.
II.