ause Winckelmann and Goethe went,
and because he can find there a sausage stronger than his own; the
Frenchman, that he may flavor his infidelity with a bitter dash of
Ultramontanism, or find fresher zest in his chattering boulevard
after the sombre loneliness of Rome; the Englishman, because the same
Providence that hears the young ravens when they cry is careful to
furnish prey to the courier also, and because his money will make him
a _Milor in partibus_. But to the American, especially if he be of an
imaginative temper, Italy has a deeper charm. She gives him cheaply what
gold cannot buy for him at home, a Past at once legendary and authentic,
and in which he has an equal claim with every other foreigner. In
England he is a poor relation whose right in the entail of home
traditions has been docked by revolution; of France his notions are
purely English, and he can scarce help feeling something like contempt
for a people who habitually conceal their meaning in French; but Rome is
the mother-country of every boy who has devoured Plutarch or taken his
daily doses of Florus. Italy gives us antiquity with good roads, cheap
living, and, above all, a sense of freedom from responsibility. For
him who has escaped thither there is no longer any tyranny of public
opinion; its fetters drop from his limbs when he touches that
consecrated shore, and he rejoices in the recovery of his own
individuality. He is no longer met at every turn with "Under which king,
bezonian? Speak, or die!" He is not forced to take one side or the
other about table-tipping, or the merits of General Blank, or the
constitutionality of anarchy. He has found an Eden where he need not
hide his natural self in the livery of any opinion, and may be as happy
as Adam, if he be wise enough to keep clear of the apple of High
Art. This may be very weak, but it is also very agreeable to certain
temperaments; and to be weak is to be miserable only where it is a duty
to be strong.

Coming from a country where everything seems shifting like a quicksand,
where men shed their homes as snakes their skins, where you may meet
a three-story house, or even a church, on the highway, bitten by the
universal gad-fly of bettering its position, where we have known a tree
to be cut down merely because "it had got to be so old," the sense
of permanence, unchangeableness, and repose which Italy gives us is
delightful. The oft-repeated _non e piu come era prima_ may be true
enough o