Rome
such as it never had before. Every seventh day, as with the Jews, only
upon a different day of the week, do the Christians assemble for the
purposes of religious worship. And, I can assure you, it is with no
trifling accession of strength for patient doing and patient bearing,
that we return to our every-day affairs, after having listened to the
prayers, the reasonings, or exhortations of Probus.

So great is the difference in my feelings and opinions from what they
were before I left Rome for Palmyra, that it is with difficulty I
persuade myself that I am the same person. Between Piso the Pyrronist
and Piso the Christian, the distance seems immeasurable--yet in how
short a time has it been past. I cannot say that I did not enjoy
existence and value it in my former state, but I can say that my
enjoyment of it is infinitely heightened as a Christian, and the rate at
which I value it infinitely raised. Born and nurtured as I was, with
Portia for my mother, a palace for my home, Rome for my country and
capital, offering all the luxuries of the earth, and affording all the
means I could desire for carrying on researches in study of every kind,
surrounded by friends of the noblest and best families in the city,--I
could not but enjoy life in some very important sense. While mere youth
lasted, and my thoughts never wandered beyond the glittering forms of
things, no one could be happier or more contented. All was fair and
beautiful around me--what could I ask for more? I was satisfied and
filled. But, by and by, my dream of life was disturbed--my sleep broken.
Natural questions began to propose themselves for my solution, such, I
suppose, as, sooner or later, spring up in every bosom. I began to
speculate about myself--about the very self that had been so long, so
busy, about everything else beside itself. I wished to know something of
myself--of my origin, my nature, my present condition, my ultimate fate.
It seemed to me I was too rare and curious a piece of work to go to
ruin, final and inevitable--perhaps to-morrow--at all events in a very
few years. Of futurity I had heard--and of Elysium--just as I had heard
of Jupiter, greatest and best, but, with my earliest youth, these things
had faded from my mind, or had already taken upon themselves the
character of fable. My Virgil, in which I early received my lessons of
language, at once divested them of all their air of reality, and left
them naked fiction. The other poe