nceive one more historical contrast: the gigantic broken
revelations of that Imperial and Papal city thrust abruptly on the
notions of a girl who had been brought up in English and Swiss
Puritanism, fed on meagre Protestant histories and on art chiefly of
the hand-screen sort; a girl whose ardent nature turned all her small
allowance of knowledge into principles, fusing her actions into their
mould, and whose quick emotions gave the most abstract things the
quality of a pleasure or a pain; a girl who had lately become a wife,
and from the enthusiastic acceptance of untried duty found herself
plunged in tumultuous preoccupation with her personal lot. The weight
of unintelligible Rome might lie easily on bright nymphs to whom it
formed a background for the brilliant picnic of Anglo-foreign society;
but Dorothea had no such defence against deep impressions. Ruins and
basilicas, palaces and colossi, set in the midst of a sordid present,
where all that was living and warm-blooded seemed sunk in the deep
degeneracy of a superstition divorced from reverence; the dimmer but
yet eager Titanic life gazing and struggling on walls and ceilings; the
long vistas of white forms whose marble eyes seemed to hold the
monotonous light of an alien world: all this vast wreck of ambitious
ideals, sensuous and spiritual, mixed confusedly with the signs of
breathing forgetfulness and degradation, at first jarred her as with an
electric shock, and then urged themselves on her with that ache
belonging to a glut of confused ideas which check the flow of emotion.
Forms both pale and glowing took possession of her young sense, and
fixed themselves in her memory even when she was not thinking of them,
preparing strange associations which remained through her after-years.
Our moods are apt to bring with them images which succeed each other
like the magic-lantern pictures of a doze; and in certain states of
dull forlornness Dorothea all her life continued to see the vastness of
St. Peter's, the huge bronze canopy, the excited intention in the
attitudes and garments of the prophets and evangelists in the mosaics
above, and the red drapery which was being hung for Christmas spreading
itself everywhere like a disease of the retina.

Not that this inward amazement of Dorothea's was anything very
exceptional: many souls in their young nudity are tumbled out among
incongruities and left to "find their feet" among them, while their
elders go about their bu