to regret, but from mixed and
melancholy emotions, and partly perhaps from that weakness which makes
my hand tremble while I write--which has bound down my mind, and all
its best powers, and all its faculties of enjoyment, to a languid
passiveness, making me feel at every moment, I am not what I was, or
ought to be, or might have been.

We arrived, after a short and most delightful journey by Albano, the
Lake Nemi, Gensao, etc. at Velletri, the birth-place of that wretch
Octavius, and famous for its wine. The day has been as soft and as
sunny as a May-day in England, and the country, through which we
travelled but too rapidly, beyond description lovely. The blue
Mediterranean spread far to the west, and on the right we had the
snowy mountains, with their wild fantastic peaks "rushing on the sky."
I felt it all in my heart with a mixture of sadness and delight which
I cannot express.

This land was made by nature a paradise: it seems to want no charm,
"unborrowed from the eye,"--but how has memory sanctified, history
illustrated, and poetry illumined the scenes around us; where every
rivulet had its attendant nymph, where every wood was protected by its
sylvan divinity; where every tower has its tale of heroism, and "not a
mountain lifts its head unsung;" and though the faith, the glory, and
the power of the antique time be passed away--still

A spirit hangs,
Beautiful region! o'er thy towns and farms,
Statues and temples, and memorial tombs.

I can allow that one-half, at least, of the beauty and interest we
see, lies in our own souls; that it is our own enthusiasm which sheds
this mantle of light over all we behold: but, as colours do not exist
in the objects themselves, but in the rays which paint them--so beauty
is not less real, is not less BEAUTY, because it exists in
the medium through which we view certain objects, rather than in those
objects themselves. I have met persons who think they display a vast
deal of common sense, and very uncommon strength of mind, in rising
superior to all prejudices of education and illusions of romance--to
whom enthusiasm is only another name for affectation--who, where the
cultivated and the contemplative mind finds ample matter to excite
feeling and reflection, give themselves airs of fashionable
_nonchalance_, or flippant scorn--to whom the crumbling ruin is so
much brick and mortar, no more--to whom the tomb of the Horatii and
Curiatii