also pass
away! Would to heaven that I could efface the last year from the
series of time, hide it from myself, bury it in oblivion, stamp it
into annihilation, that none of its dreary moments might ever rise up
again to haunt me, like spectres of pain and dismay! But this is
wrong--I feel it is--and I repent, I recall my wish. That great Being,
to whom the life of a human creature is a mere point, but who has
bestowed on his creatures such capacities of feeling and suffering, as
extend moments to hours and days to years, inflicts nothing in vain,
and if I have suffered much, I have also learned much. Now the last
hour is past--another year opens; may it bring to those I love all I
wish them in my heart! to me it can bring nothing. The only blessing I
hope from time is _forgetfulness_--my only prayer to heaven
is--_rest, rest, rest_.

_Jan. 4._--We _dispatched_, as L** would say, a good deal to-day: we
visited the Temple of Vesta, the Church of Santa Maria in Cosmadino,
the Temple of Fortune, the Ponte Rotto, and the house of Nicolo
Rienzi: all these lie together in a dirty, low, and disagreeable part
of Rome. Thence we drove to the Pyramid of Caius Cestus.--As we know
nothing of this Caius Cestus, but that he lived, died, and was buried,
it is not possible to attach any fanciful or classical interest to his
tomb, but it is an object of so much beauty in itself, and from its
situation so striking and picturesque, that it needs no additional
interest. It is close to the ancient walls of Rome, which stretch on
either side as far as the eye can reach in huge and broken masses of
brickwork, fragments of battlements and buttresses, overgrown in many
parts with shrubs and even trees. Around the base of the Pyramid lies
the burying-ground of strangers and heretics. Many of the monuments
are elegant, and their frail materials and diminutive forms are in
affecting contrast with the lofty and solid pile which towers above
them. The tombs lie around in a small space "amicably close," like
brothers in exile, and as I gazed I felt a kindred feeling with all;
for I, too, am a wanderer, a stranger and a heretic; and it is
probable that my place of rest may be among them. Be it so! for
methinks this earth could not afford a more lovely, a more tranquil,
or more sacred spot. I remarked one tomb, which is an exact model, and
in the same material with the sarcophagus of Cornelius Scipio, in the
Vatican. One small slab of white marble bo