the Baths, but
the Rome of the Villas, the Fountains, the Churches. He would have given
all the Colosseums in the world for the Villa Medici, the Campo Vaccino
for the Piazza di Spagna, the Arch of Titus for the Fountain of the
Tortoises. The princely magnificence of the Colonnas, the Dorias, the
Barberinis, attracted him far more than the ruins of imperial grandeur.
It was his dream to possess a palace crowned by a cornice of Michael
Angelo's, and with frescos by the Carracci like the Farnese palace--a
gallery of Raphaels, Titians and Domenichini like the Borghese; a villa
like that of Alessandro Albani, where deep shadowy groves, red granite
of the East, white marble from Luni, Greek statues and Renaissance
pictures should weave an enchantment round some sumptuous amour of his.
In an album of 'Confessions' at his cousin's, the Marchesa d'Ateleta,
against the question--'What would you most like to be?' he had written,
'A Roman prince.'

Arriving in Rome about the end of September, he set up his 'home' in the
Palazzo Zuccari, near the Trinita de' Monti, where the obelisk of Pius
VI. marks with its shadow the passing hours. The whole of October was
devoted to furnishing them. When the rooms were all finished and
decorated to his taste, he passed some days of invincible melancholy and
loneliness in his new abode. It was a St. Martin's summer, a 'Springtime
of the Dead,' calmly sad and sweet, in which Rome lay all golden, like a
city of the Far East, under a milk-white sky, diaphanous as the
firmament reflected in Southern seas.

All this languor of atmosphere and light, in which things seemed to lose
their substance and reality, oppressed the young man with an infinite
weariness, an inexpressible sense of discontent, of discomfort, of
solitude, emptiness and home-sickness, mostly, no doubt, the result of
the change of climate and customs.

It was just this, that he was entering upon a new phase of life. Would
he find therein the woman and the work capable of dominating his heart
and becoming an object in life to him? Within himself he felt neither
the conviction of power nor the presage of fame or happiness. Though
penetrated, impregnated with art, as yet he had not produced anything
remarkable. Eager in the pursuit of pleasure and of love, he had never
yet really loved or really enjoyed whole-heartedly. Tortured by
aspirations after an Ideal, and abhorring pain both by nature and
education, he was vulnerable on every