ve interfered so little with my
journal-keeping by your letters that I have been wondering and lamenting
that I did not hear from you for the last some time, and was all but
wrought up to the desperate pitch of writing to you _out of turn_, to
know what was the matter, when I received your last letter. I do not,
however, keep my journal with any sort of regularity; my time is
extremely and very irregularly occupied, and I should certainly preserve
no record whatever of my impressions but for the very disagreeable
conviction that it is my duty to do so, if there is, as I believe there
is, the slightest probability of my being able by this means to earn a
little money and to avoid drawing upon my father's resources. I have a
great contempt for this process, and a greater contempt for the barren
balderdash I write: but exchange is no robbery, a thing is worth what it
will fetch, and if a bookseller will buy my trash, I will sell it to
him; for beggars must, in no case, be choosers....

You say that I have yet told you nothing of my satisfaction in Rome. I
wish you had not made your challenge so large. How shall I tell you of
my satisfaction in Rome? and at which end of Rome, or my satisfaction,
shall I begin? You must remember, in the first place, that its
strangeness is not absolutely to me what it is to many English people;
the brilliant and enchanting sky is not unlike that with which I have
been familiar for some years past in America; the beautiful and (to us
Anglo-Saxon islanders) unusual vegetation bears some resemblance to that
of the Southern States in winter. Boston, you know, is in the same
latitude as Rome, and though the American northern winter is
incomparably more severe than that of Italy, the summer heat and the
southern semi-tropical vegetation are kindred features in that other
world and this. The difference of this winter climate and that of the
United States has hitherto been an unfavorable one to me; for I have
been extremely unwell ever since I have been here--the sirocco destroys
me body and soul while it lasts, and there is a sultry heaviness in the
atmosphere that gave me at first perpetual headaches, and still
continues to disagree extremely with me. Now, of these abatements of my
satisfaction I have told you, but of my satisfaction itself I should
find it impossible to tell, but I should think you might form some idea
of it, knowing both me and the place where I am.

I have hitherto been more a