grets did he journey southwards, and on reaching the summit of the
Brenner he writes: "I turned round once more and gave, through the
streams flowing northwards, a last greeting to my German land." After
four months' absence, home comforts brought rest to his troubled mind.

Overbeck, after the death of his wife in 1853, left the Cenci Palace and
went to dwell in the more quiet region of the Esquiline Hill, near the
church of Santa Maria Maggiore. Later on he removed to the house in
which he died, belonging to a convent, in the Via Porta Pia on the
Quirinal Hill, near to the little church of San Bernardo, where he
worshipped and lies buried. I remember the sequestered dwelling on the
Esquiline, lying away from the road in one of those Italian wildernesses
called a garden or a vineyard. The surroundings were inspiring; the eye
wandered among churches and ruins, and beyond stretched the Roman
Campagna, spanned by aqueducts and bounded by the Alban Hills, with
Rocca di Papa, the painter's country retreat. The studio, which on
Sundays continued to be crowded with strangers from all countries, had
little in common with the ordinary run of painting rooms. Showy
sketches, picturesque costumes, gay carpets and draperies, which
commonly make a fashionable lounge, were wholly wanting. Like the studio
of Steinle in Frankfort, all was in keeping with an art not dependent on
outward materials, but reliant on inward thought. Around were ranged
compositions embodying ideas, cartoons and drawings in no way
decorative, but simple and austere studies of form in light and shade,
or slightly tinted. At this period were thus evolved the pictorial
series of the _Via Crucis_ and _The Seven Sacraments_. Turning from
these creations to the painter himself, the visitor might be tempted to
indulge in psychological speculations touching the processes whereby the
spirit of the man passed into objective shape. More and more the old and
solitary master withdrew his affections from earthly concerns, he
approached the close of life as the sun which sets to rise on a new day,
and his art breathed the atmosphere of those pure regions where his
beloved ones were at rest.

In the summer time was usually sought some country abode, not for
remission of labour, but for refreshment through change of scene amid
the beauties of nature. Overbeck, in 1856, was full of work, and in the
autumn he journeyed to Perugia, and took as his travelling companions
the small