N
THE FETE.--AMERICANS GENERALLY IN ITALY.--HYMNS IN FLORENCE IN HONOR
OF PIUS IX.--HAPPY AUGURY TO BE DRAWN FROM THE WISE DOCILITY OF THE
PEOPLE.--AN EXPRESSION OF SYMPATHY FROM AMERICA TOWARD ITALY EARNESTLY
HOPED FOR.

Rome, October 18, 1847.

In the spring, when I came to Rome, the people were in the
intoxication of joy at the first serious measures of reform taken
by the Pope. I saw with pleasure their childlike joy and trust. With
equal pleasure I saw the Pope, who has not in his expression the signs
of intellectual greatness so much as of nobleness and tenderness of
heart, of large and liberal sympathies. Heart had spoken to heart
between the prince and the people; it was beautiful to see the
immediate good influence exerted by human feeling and generous
designs, on the part of a ruler. He had wished to be a father, and
the Italians, with that readiness of genius that characterizes them,
entered at once into the relation; they, the Roman people, stigmatized
by prejudice as so crafty and ferocious, showed themselves children,
eager to learn, quick to obey, happy to confide.

Still doubts were always present whether all this joy was not
premature. The task undertaken by the Pope seemed to present
insuperable difficulties. It is never easy to put new wine into old
bottles, and our age is one where all things tend to a great crisis;
not merely to revolution, but to radical reform. From the people
themselves the help must come, and not from princes; in the new state
of things, there will be none but natural princes, great men. From the
aspirations of the general heart, from the teachings of conscience
in individuals, and not from an old ivy-covered church long since
undermined, corroded by time and gnawed by vermin, the help must come.
Rome, to resume her glory, must cease to be an ecclesiastical capital;
must renounce all this gorgeous mummery, whose poetry, whose picture,
charms no one more than myself, but whose meaning is all of the past,
and finds no echo in the future. Although I sympathized warmly with
the warm love of the people, the adulation of leading writers, who
were so willing to take all from the hand of the prince, of the
Church, as a gift and a bounty, instead of implying steadily that it
was the right of the people, was very repulsive to me. The moderate
party, like all who, in a transition state, manage affairs with a
constant eye to prudence, lacks dignity always in its expositions; it
is di