to-day marked the completion of the purposes which
were then inaugurated.

A printed notice had invited all English and Americans in Rome,
interested in the subject, to attend at the English cemetery at
three o'clock, the day having been fixed by the fact that it was the
anniversary of the day of Keats's death. It was also, as it happened,
the second day of our boisterous and rollicking Carnival, and those
who attended had to absent themselves from the attractions of the
Corso. Nevertheless, the gathering was a large one, and the contrast
between the scene passing in that remote and quiet corner of old Rome
under the cypresses and in the shade of the pyramid of Caius Cestius,
and that which was at the same time being enacted in the Corso, was
about as great as can well be conceived. We had it all to ourselves.
With the exception of the coachmen, who remained lazily dozing on the
boxes of the carriages which had brought us from the living Rome of
to-day to this far-away spot, there was not a soul on the ground save
English and Americans.

It must be quite needless to remind those who have ever seen it of
the features of that most poetically suggestive spot, and I can hardly
hope to enable any who have not seen it to form an adequate idea of
its exceeding beauty. It is just within the city wall, niched in an
angle of it, in the immediate vicinity of the Porta San Sebastiano,
but it is difficult to imagine that one is within the limits of a
great city; and it was especially so when the noise and racket of a
city in Carnival time had just been left behind one. But the fact is,
that large tracts of space, utterly uninhabited and unoccupied save
by scattered masses of the ruins of ancient Rome, lie between the
inhabited parts of the modern city and this far corner. The most
marked characteristic of the spot is its perfect quietude. The
ivy-grown city-wall, a group of fine cypresses, a few stone-pines
with their lovely velvet-like verdure, the gray old pyramid of
Caius Cestius immediately behind the cemetery, and a glimpse of the
dreamy-looking Alban Hills on the farther side of the Campagna, make
up a landscape which no artistic eye can rest on without being deeply
penetrated by the charm of it. February as it was, the day might have
been deemed a summer day anywhere to the northward of the Alps. It was
the very perfection of weather--warm, genial, still, and breathing the
sweet breath of a thousand wild flowers. The violet