ters of this period any record of her
first impressions of the Eternal City, the approach to which, before the
days of railroads in Italy, was unspeakably impressive and solemn.

Seated in the midst of her seven hills, with the desolate Campagna about
her, one could hardly say whether her stony countenance invited the
spirit of the age, or defied it. Her mediaeval armor was complete at all
points. Her heathen heart had kept Christianity far from it by using as
exorcisms the very forms which, at the birth of that religion, had
mediated between its spirit and the dull sense of the Pagan world. It
was the nineteenth century in America, the eighteenth in England, the
seventeenth in France, and the fifteenth in Rome. The aged hands of the
grandam still held fast the key of her treasures. Her haughty front
still said to Ruin and Desolation,--

"Here is my throne, bid kings come bow to it."

So the writer first saw Rome in the winter of 1843. Her walls seemed
those of a mighty sepulchre, in which even the new-born babe was born
into death. The stagnation of thought, the prohibition of question, the
denial of progress! Her ministers had a sweet Lethean draught with which
to lull the first clamors of awakening life, to quiet the first
promptings of individual thought. It was the draught of Circe, fragrant
but fatal. And those who fed upon it became pathetic caricatures of
humanity.

Not so did Margaret find Rome in 1847. The intervening years had wrought
a change. Within the defiant fortress of superstition a divine accident
had happened. A man had been brought to the chair of St. Peter who felt
his own human power too strongly to consent to the impotence of the
traditional _non possumus_. To the timid questioning of Freedom from
without he gave the bold answer of Freedom from within. The Papal crown
had sometimes covered the brows of honest, heroic men. Such an one would
he prove himself, and his first message was to that effect. Fortunate,
fatal error! The thrones of the earth trembled at it. Crowned heads
shook with the palsy of fear. The enslaved multitudes and their despised
champions sent up a ringing shout to heaven, for the apocalyptic hour
had come. The sixth seal was broken, and the cannon of St. Angelo, which
saluted the crowning of the new Pontiff, really saluted the installation
of the new era.

Alas! many woes had to intervene before this new order could establish
itself upon any permanent foundation. The