t into despair."

"There is but one fitting approach to Rome. By any other road the
majesty of the Old Capital is lost in the lesser grandeur of the
Medieval City. Whoever goes there let him come up from Naples and
enter by the Jerusalem Gate."

"Jerusalem fiddlesticks! Why, there's no such gate!"

"There the very spirit of Antiquity sits enthroned to welcome the
traveller, and all the solemn Past sheds her influences over his
soul--"

"Excuse me; there is a Jerusalem Gate."

"Perhaps so--in Joppa."

"There the Imperial City lies in the sublimity of ruin. It is the Rome
of our dreams--the ghost of a dead and buried Empire hovering over its
own neglected grave!"

"Dick, it's not fair to work off an old college essay as European
correspondence."

"Nothing may be seen but desolation. The waste Campagna stretches its
arid surface away to the Alban mountains, uninhabited, and forsaken of
man and beast. For the dust and the works and the monuments of
millions lie here, mingled in the common corruption of the tomb, and
the life of the present age shrinks away in terror. Long lines of
lofty aqueducts come slowly down from the Alban hills, but these
crumbled stones and broken arches tell a story more eloquent than
human voice.

"The walls arise before us, but there is no city beyond. The
desolation that reigns in the Campagna has entered here. The palace
of the noble, the haunts of pleasure, the resorts of the multitude,
the garrison of the soldier, have crumbled to dust, and mingled
together in one common ruin. The soil on which we tread, which gives
birth to trees, shrubs, and wild flowers without number, is but an
assemblage of the disintegrated atoms of stones and mortar that once
arose on high in the form of palace, pyramid, or temple."

"Dick, I advise you to write all your letters before you see the
places you speak of. You've no idea how eloquent you can be!"

"Now if we pass on in this direction, we soon come to a spot which is
the centre of the world--the place where most of all we must look when
we search for the source of much that is valuable in our age.

"It in a rude and a neglected spot. At one end rises a rock crowned
with houses; on one side are a few mean edifices, mingled with masses
of tottering ruins; on the other a hill formed altogether of crumbled
atoms of bricks, mortar, and precious marbles. In the midst are a few
rough columns blackened by time and exposure. The soil