350
The King's Gifts _Emily A. Braddock_ 718
The Sea's Secret _G. A. Davis_ 240
Three Roses _Julia C. R. Dorr_ 585
Under the Grasses _Dora Reed Goodale_ 502

LIPPINCOTT'S MAGAZINE

OF

_POPULAR LITERATURE AND SCIENCE._

JULY, 1880.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1880, by J. B.
LIPPINCOTT & CO., in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at
Washington.

THE PALACE OF THE LEATHERSTONEPAUGHS.

[Illustration: RUINS OF THE PALACES OF THE CAESARS.]

Every sentimental traveller to Rome must sometimes wonder if to come to
the Eternal City is not, after all, more of a loss than a gain: Rome
unvisited holds such a solitary place in one's imaginings. It is then a
place around which sweeps a different atmosphere from that of any other
city under the sun. One sees it through poetic mists that veil every
prosaic reality. It is arched by an horizon against which the figures of
its wonderful history are shadowed with scarcely less of grandeur and
glory than those the old gods cast upon the Sacred Hill.

One who has never seen Rome is thus led to imagine that those of his
country-people who have lived here for years have become in a manner
purged of all natural commonplaceness. One thinks of them as
refined--sublimated, so to speak--into beings worthy of reverence and to
be spoken of with awed admiration. For have not their feet wandered
where the Caesars' feet have trod, till that famous ground has become
common earth to them? Have they not dwelt in the shadow of mountains
that have trembled beneath the tramp of Goth, Visigoth and Ostrogoth,
till those shadows have become every-day shadows to them? Have they not
often watched beneath the same stars that shone upon knightly vigils,
till the whiteness of those shining hosts has made pure their souls as
it purified the heroic ones of old? Have they not listened to the
singing and sighing of the selfsame winds that sung and sighed about the
spot where kingly Numa wooed a nymph, till it must be that into the
commoner natures has entered some of the sweetness and wisdom of that
half-divine communion?

Thus the dreamer comes to Rome expecting to enter and become enfolded by
those poetic mists, to live an ideal life amid the tender melancholy
that broods over stately and storied ruin,