and it was pursued with tolerable diligence. But Mr. Longfellow was
never a good sight-seer. He was impatient of lingering in picture
galleries, churches, or ruins. He saw quickly the essential points,
and soon tired of any minuter examination."

But long, indeed, before nineteenth-century artists and authors laid
siege to the Eternal City, in the far-away years of 1638, Milton visited
Rome, and there still remains the tablet, on the wall of the _casa_ in
the Via delle Quattro Fontane in which he stayed, a tablet bearing an
inscription giving the date of his visit; as, also, in Via Machella,
there is an inscription marking the place where Scott lived during his
visit to Rome. Goethe made his memorable tour to Italy in 1786--fourteen
years before the dawn of the nineteenth century--and wrote: "I feel the
greatest longing to read Tacitus in Rome;" and again (an observation
with which every visitor to the Eternal City will sympathize) he
noted:--

"It grows more and more difficult for me to render an account of my
residence in Rome, for as we always find the sea deeper the further
we go, so it is with me in observation of this city.... Wherever we
go and wherever we stand, we see about us a finished
picture,--forms of every kind and style; palaces and ruins; gardens
and wastes; the distant and the near houses; triumphal arches and
columns,--often all so close together that they might be sketched
on a single sheet. One should have a thousand points of steel with
which to write, and what can a single pen do? and then in the
evening one is weary and exhausted with the day of seeing and
admiring. Here one reads history from within outward."

Chateaubriand, who in his earliest youth had visited America as the
guest of Washington, passed the winter of 1803-4 in Rome, and his
pictorial transcriptions of the city and its environs are among the most
exquisite things in literary record. As, for instance, this description
of a sunset from Monte Mario:--

"I was never weary of seeing, from the Villa Borghese, the sun go
down behind the cypresses of Monte Mario, and the pines of the
Villa Pamphili planted by Le Notre. I have stood upon the Ponte
Molle to enjoy the sublime spectacle of the close of day. The
summits of the Sabine hills appeared of lapis lazuli and pale gold,
while their bases and sides were bathed in vapors of violet o