leasure to leaving England
for the Continent, he was no sooner on the farther side of the narrow
seas than he began to be conscious of discomfort, which was only partly
bodily or sensible. An unacknowledged homesickness afflicted him--an
Old-Homesickness, rather than a yearning for America. He may have
imagined that it was America that he wanted, but, when at last we
returned there, he still looked back towards England. As an ideal,
America was still, and always, foremost in his heart; and his death was
hastened partly by his misgiving, caused by the civil war, lest her best
days were past. But something there was in England that touched a deep,
kindred chord in him which responded to nothing else. America might
be his ideal home, but his real home was England, and thus he found
himself, in the end, with no home at all outside of the boundaries of
his domestic circle. A subconscious perception of this predicament,
combined with his gradually failing health, led him to say, in a moment
of frank self-communion, "Since this earthly life is to come to an end,
I do not try to be contented, but weary of it while it lasts."

It is true that Rome, vehemently as at first he rebelled against it,
came at last to hold a power over him. Rome, if you give it opportunity,
subtly fastens its grasp upon both brain and heart, and claims
sympathies which are as undeniable as our human nature itself. Yet there
is something morbid in our love for the mystic city, like a passion for
some beautiful but perilous woman with a past--such as Miriam in The
Marble Faun, for example. Only an exceptionally vigorous and healthy
constitution can risk it without danger. Had my father visited Rome in
his young manhood, he might have both cared for it less and in a sense
have enjoyed it more than he did during these latter years of his life.

But from the time we left London, and, indeed, a little before that, he
was never quite himself physically. Our departure was made at the most
inclement moment of a winter season of unusual inclemency; they said (as
they always do) that no weather to be compared with it had been known
for twenty years. We got up before dawn in London, and after a dismal
ride in the train to Folkestone, where the bitter waves of the English
Channel left edgings of ice on the shingle beach where I went to pick
up shells, we were frost-bitten all our two-hours passage across to
Boulogne, where it became cold in dead earnest, and so cont