Chigi and Odescalchi--who passed
away at the age of twenty, in the saddest of all ways--in childbirth.
It goes to one's heart to think of the desolate home and the bereaved
husband left, as he says, "in solitude and grief." And though the
weeper has gone with the wept, and the sore wound which death
inflicted has been healed by his own hand nearly a hundred years ago,
we feel a wondrous sympathy with that old domestic tragedy. It is a
touch of nature that affects one more than all the blazonry and
sculpture around. In this weird church of Santa Maria del Popolo,
which seems more a mausoleum of the dead than a place of worship for
the living, the level rays of the afternoon sun come through the
richly-painted windows of the choir; and the warm glory rests first
upon a strange monument of the sixteenth century at the entrance,
where a ghastly human skeleton sculptured in yellow marble looks
through a grating, and then upon a medallion on a tomb, representing a
butterfly emerging from the chrysalis, illumining the inscription, "Ut
Phoenix multicabo dies." And this old expressive symbol speaks to us
of death as the Christian's true birth, in which the spirit bursts its
earthly shell, and soars on immortal wings to God. And the church
straightway to the inner eye becomes full of a transfiguration glory
which no darkness of the tomb can quench, and which makes all earthly
love immortal.

A venerable monastery, tenanted by monks of the order of St.
Augustine, is attached to this church, upon whose brown-tiled roofs,
covered with gray and yellow lichens, and walls and windows of extreme
simplicity, the eye of the visitor gazes with deepest interest. For
this was the residence of Luther during his famous visit to Rome. He
came to this place in the fervour of youthful enthusiasm; his heart
was filled with pious emotions. He knelt down on the pavement when he
passed through the Porta del Popolo, and cried, "I salute thee, O holy
Rome; Rome venerable through the blood and the tombs of the martyrs!"
Immediately on his arrival he went to the convent of his own order,
and celebrated mass with feelings of great excitement. But, alas! he
was soon to be disenchanted. He had not been many days in Rome when he
saw that the city of the saints and martyrs was wholly given up to
idolatry and social corruption, and was as different as possible from
the city of his dreams. He cared not for the fine arts which covered
this pollution with a dec