ance as the sunbeams danced with the shadows.
Sometimes I seem to see them where the sun sifts through the young
green leaves, and her beauty--her human, deep-souled beauty--and
his fantastic grace are the only things here that cannot change.

"The walls will crumble; the busts of kings and heroes and poets
will lose their contours, the lovely Roman ladies also grow old and
fade, and vanish from sight and from memory; but still these two,
hopeless yet happy, will dance in these wild glades immortally
beyond the reach of the effacing years."

The visit to Rome of the Rev. Dr. Phillips Brooks--later the Bishop of
Massachusetts--is immortalized in the most lifelike portrait bust of the
great preacher ever modelled; a bust in which the genius of the
sculptor, Franklin Simmons, found one of its noblest expressions, and
has perpetuated, with masterly power, the energy of thought, at once
profound and intense, in the countenance of Bishop Brooks. These, and
many another whom the gods have loved and dowered with gifts, rise
before any retrospective glance over the comparatively recent past of
Rome. Bishop Brooks passed there the Holy Week of one Lenten season,
and of the Miserere in the Sistine Chapel he wrote that it was certainly
the most wonderful music to which he had ever listened; and he added:--

"The Miserere in the Sistine, the Benediction from the balcony, the
solemn moment of the elevation of the Host on Easter, and the
illumination of St. Peter's, these all seem to reach very
remarkably the great ideal of the central religious commemoration
of Christendom."

It was in the winter of 1828 that Mr. Longfellow first visited Rome,
which "is announced," he wrote, "by Nero's tomb," and he quotes Dupaty's
lines:--

"Quoi! c'est la Rome? quoi!
C'est le tombeau de Neron qui l'annonce."

Mr. Longfellow expressed his love for the Eternal City, and in a
personal letter[1] he said:--

"I have been so delighted with Rome that I have extended my
residence much beyond my original intention. There is so much in
the city to delay the stranger; the villages in the environs are so
beautiful, and there is such a quiet and stillness about everything
that, were it in my power, I should be induced to remain the whole
year round. You can imagine nothing equal to the ruins of Rome. The
Forum and the Coliseum are beyond all I had