itement. Reader, have
you ever approached the Eternal City? have you ever, from the dreary
solitudes of the Campagna, seen the dome of St. Peter's for the first
time? and have the monuments of the greatest men and the mightiest deeds
that ever the earth witnessed--have the names of the Caesars, and the
Catos, and the Scipios, excited a curiosity amounting to a sensation
almost too intense to be borne? I think I can venture to measure the
expansion of your mind, as it enlarged itself before the crowding
visions of the past, as the dim grandeur of ages rose up and developed
itself from amidst the shadows of time; and entranced amidst the magic
of your own associations, you desired to stop--you were almost content
to go no farther--your own Rome, you were in the midst of--Rome
free--Rome triumphant--Rome classical. And perhaps it is well you
awoke in good time from your shadowy dream, to escape from the unvaried
desolation and the wasting malaria that brooded all around. Reader, I
can fancy that such might have been your sensations when the domes
and the spires of the world's capital first met your vision; and I can
assure you, that while ascending the ridge that was to give me a view of
Patrick's Purgatory, my sensations were as impressively, as powerfully
excited. For I desire you to recollect, that the welfare of your
immortal soul was not connected with your imaginings, your magnificent
visions did not penetrate into the soul's doom. You were not submitted
to the agency, of a transcendental power. You were, in a word, a poet,
but not a fanatic. What comparison, then, could there be between the
exercise of your free, manly, cultivated understanding, and my feelings
on this occasion, with my thick-coming visions of immortality, that
almost lifted me from the mountain-path I was ascending, and brought me,
as it were, into contact with the invisible world? I repeat it, then,
that such were my feelings, when all the faculties which exist in the
mind were aroused and concentrated upon one object. In such a case,
the pilgrim stands, as it were, between life and death; and as it was
superstition that placed him there, she certainly conjures up to his
heated fancy those dark, fleeting, and indistinct images which are
adjusted to that gloom which she has already cast over his mind.
Although there could not be less than two hundred people, young and old,
boys and girls, men and women, the hale and the sickly, the blind and
the lam