r
purple. Sometimes lovely clouds, like fairy cars, borne along by
the evening wind with inimitable grace, recall the mythological
tales of the descent of the deities of Olympus. Sometimes old Rome
seems to have spread all over the west the purple of her consuls
and her Caesars, beneath the last steps of the god of day. This rich
decoration does not vanish so quickly as in our climate. When we
think the hues are about to disappear they revive on some other
point of the horizon; one twilight follows another and the magic of
sunset is prolonged."

It was in the same year that Mme. de Stael visited Rome and recorded, in
her glowing romance, "Corinne," the impressions she received. In the
spring of 1817 Lord Byron found in Rome the inspiration that he
transmitted into that wonderful line in "Childe Harold":--

"The Niobe of Nations! There she stands."

It was two years later that Shelley passed the spring in the
Seven-hilled City, retiring to Leghorn later, to write his tragedy of
"The Cenci."

In Rome the visitor follows Michael Angelo and Raphael through the
various churches and museums. The celebrated sibyls of Raphael are in
the Santa Maria della Pace; his "Isaiah" is in San Agostino and his
"Entombment" in the Casino of the Villa Borghese. While the sublime work
of Michael Angelo in the Sistine Chapel is always one of the first
things in Rome to which the traveller goes to study that incomparable
work portraying the Creation--the Prophets and the Sibyls, the Angels
and the Genii, that record the impassioned power of the master--yet all
footsteps turn quickly, too, to the church called San Pietro in Vincoli,
near the house in which Lucrezia Borgia lived, in which is the colossal
Moses of Michael Angelo. As it stands, it fails to convey the first
design of the great sculptor. Originally intended for the tomb of Pope
Julius II, the plan included a massive block of marble (some forty by
twenty feet) surmounted by a cornice and having its niches, its columns,
and its statues, of which the Moses was to have been one. It would then
have been judged relatively to the entire group, while now it is seen
alone, and thus out of the proportions that were in the mind of the
artist. The entire conception, indeed, was to unite sculpture and
architecture into one splendid combination. "Thus the statue of Moses
was meant to have been raised considerably above the eye of the
spectator