Page:Life in the Old World - Vol. II.djvu/280

290 individual character, and what beautiful institutions have not the two ecclesiastical faiths given birth to especially in England and Germany!

Individual persons have, in all Christian churches, attained to the same degree of human excellence. But in the free country, in the free community, the number of these persons is great; in those which are not free, it is few. This constitutes the difference between people and people.

And now—Good night, my R——!

May 18th.—The interest of Rome increases with every day that the stranger lingers there. Now, beautiful works are discovered by him in the churches, or in the streets and squares. The splendid villas, with their grounds, which the grandees so hospitably throw open to the visits of strangers; scenes from the life of the people, or from the life of the church, furnish increasing subjects of enjoyment or observation, and material for the diary of such at least, who, like myself, keep one.

Although formative art—especially the antique—acquired for me in Rome a higher significance, as the attempt of the human mind to express in beautiful forms its own advancing clearness of the ideal; the youthful view which the human race took of the Divine,

yet I shall not say much on the works of art which remain to me as revelations of the second order. They perpetuate for the beholder or observer the