important interests to every visitor in the Eternal City. In those days
the traveller did not land with his touring car at Naples, make "the
run" to Rome in a record that distanced any possibilities of railroad
trains, pass two or three days in motoring about the city and its
environs, seeing the exterior of everything in a dissolving view and the
interior of nothing,--as within this time, at least, he must flash on
in his touring car to Florence. On the contrary, the traveller proceeded
to Rome with serious deliberation, and with a more realizing sense of
undertaking a journey than Walter Wellman experiences in attempting to
fly in his aero-car to the North Pole and send his observations across
the polar seas by wireless telegraphy. The visitor went to Rome for a
winter, for a year, and gave himself up to leisurely impressions. Rome
was an atmosphere, not a spectacle, and it was to be entered with the
lofty and reverent appreciation of the poet's power and the artist's
vision.

In Rome, Thomas Cole painted some of his best pictures; and in Rome or
Florence wrought a long list of painters and sculptors. Whether in the
Eternal City or in the Flower City, their environment was alike
Italy--the environment of the Magic Land. Among the more prominent of
all these devotees of Beauty several nationalities were represented.
Each might have said of his purpose, in the words of William Watson:--

"I follow Beauty; of her train am I,
Beauty, whose voice is earth and sea and air;
Who serveth, and her hands for all things ply;
Who reigneth, and her throne is everywhere."

Among these artists there flash upon memory the names of Vanderlyn,
Benjamin West, Allston, Rauch, Ange, Veit, Tenerani, Overbeck, Schadow,
Horace Vernet, Thorwaldsen, John Gibson, Hiram Powers, Crawford, Page,
Clark Mills, Randolph Rogers, William Rinehart, Launt Thompson, Horatio
and Richard Greenough, Thomas Ball, Anne Whitney, Larkin G. Mead, Paul
Akers, William Wetmore Story, Harriet Hosmer, J. Rollin Tilton, and,
later, Elihu Vedder, Moses Ezekiel, Franklin Simmons, Augustus St.
Gaudens, and Charles Walter Stetson, the name of Mr. Stetson linking the
long and interesting procession with the immediate life of to-day. Of
these later artists Story, Miss Hosmer, Ezekiel, Vedder, Simmons, and
Stetson are identified with Rome as being either their permanent or
their prolonged residence. Mr. St. Gaudens was a transient student,
returning to