ndor and magnificence. All the ghosts of the
Revolution are somehow laid," she writes, and she spends six weeks
here enjoying to the full the gorgeous autumn weather, the sights, the
picture galleries, the bookshops, the whole brilliant panorama of the
life; and early in December she starts for Italy.

And now once more we come upon that keen zest of enjoyment, that
pure desire and delight of the eyes, which are the prerogative of the
poet,--Emma Lazarus was a poet. The beauty of the world,--what a rapture
and intoxication it is, and how it bursts upon her in the very land of
beauty, "where Dante and Petrarch trod!" A magic glow colours it all; no
mere blues and greens anymore, but a splendor of purple and scarlet
and emerald; "each tower, castle, and village shining like a jewel; the
olive, the fig, and at your feet the roses, growing in mid-December."
A day in Pisa seems like a week, so crowded is it with sensations and
unforgettable pictures. Then a month in Florence, which is still more
entrancing with its inexhaustible treasures of beauty and art; and
finally Rome, the climax of it all,--

"wiping out all other places and impressions, and opening
a whole new world of sensations. I am wild with the
excitement of this tremendous place. I have been here a
week, and have seen the Vatican and the Capitoline Museums,
and the Sistine Chapel, and St. Peter's, besides the ruins
on the streets and on the hills, and the graves of Shelley
and Keats.

"It is all heart-breaking. I don't only mean those beautiful
graves, overgrown with acanthus and violets, but the mutilated
arches and columns and dumb appealing fragments looming up in
the glowing sunshine under the Roman blue sky."

True to her old attractions, it is pagan Rome that appeals to her most
strongly,--

"and the far-away past, that seems so sad and strange and
near. I am even out of humor with pictures; a bit of broken
stone or a fragment of a bas-relief, or a Corinthian column
standing out against this lapis-lazuli sky, or a tremendous
arch, are the only things I can look at for the moment,--
except the Sistine Chapel, which is as gigantic as the rest,
and forces itself upon you with equal might."

Already, in February, spring is in the air; "the almond-trees are in
bloom, violets cover the grass, and oh! the divine, the celestial, the
unheard-of beauty of it all!" It is alm