ious tale of his love and madness.

Owing to the mountain storms, which imposed on us the expense of a
carriage-journey to Rome, we shall be prevented from going further. One
great cause of this is the heavy fee required for passports in Italy. In
most of the Italian cities, the cost of the different vises amounts to
$4 or $5; a few such visits as these reduce our funds very materially.
The American Consul's fee is $2, owing to the illiberal course of our
government, in withholding all salary from her Consuls in Europe. Mr.
Brown, however, in whose family we spent last evening very pleasantly,
on our requesting that he would deduct something from the usual fee,
kindly declined accepting anything. We felt this kindness the more, as
from the character which some of our late Consuls bear in Italy, we had
not anticipated it. We shall remember him with deeper gratitude than
many would suppose, who have never known what it was to be a
_foreigner_.

To-morrow, therefore, we leave Rome--here is, at last, the limit of our
wanderings. We have spent much toil and privation to reach here, and
now, after two weeks' rambling and musing among the mighty relics of
past glory, we turn our faces homeward. The thrilling hope I cherished
during the whole pilgrimage--to climb Parnassus and drink from Castaly,
under the blue heaven of Greece (both far easier than the steep hill and
hidden fount of poesy, I worship afar off)--to sigh for fallen art,
beneath the broken friezes of the Parthenon, and look with a pilgrim's
eye on the isles of Homer and of Sappho--must be given up, unwillingly
and sorrowfully though it be. These glorious anticipations--among the
brightest that blessed my boyhood--are slowly wrung from me by stern
necessity. Even Naples, the lovely Parthenope, where the Mantuan bard
sleeps on the sunny shore, by the bluest of summer seas, with the
disinterred Pompeii beyond, and Paestum amid its roses on the lonely
Calabrian plain--even this, almost within sight of the cross of St.
Peter's, is barred from me. Farewell then, clime of "fame and eld,"
since it must be! A pilgrim's blessing for the lore ye have taught him!

CHAPTER XLII.

_Palo._--The sea is breaking in long swells below the window, and a
glorious planet shines in the place of the sunset that has died away.
This is our first resting-place since leaving Rome. We have been walking
all day over the bare and dreary Campagna, and it is a relief to look at
last o