Page:Margaret Fuller by Howe, Julia Ward, Ed. (1883).djvu/172

Rh those shores to which I had looked forward all my life, where it seemed that the heart would expand, and the whole nature be turned to delight. Seen by a cutting wind, the marble palaces, the gardens, the magnificent water-view, failed to charm." Both here and in Leghorn Margaret visited Italians at their houses, and found them very attractive, "charming women, refined and eloquent men." The Mediterranean voyage was extended as far as Naples, which she characterizes as "priest-ridden, misgoverned, full of dirty, degraded men and women, yet still most lovely." And here, after a week which appeared to be “an exact copy of the miseries of a New-England spring," with a wind "villainous, horrible, exactly like the worst east wind of Boston," Margaret found at last her own Italy, and found it “beautiful, worthy to be loved and embraced, not talked about.... Baiæ had still a hid divinity for me, Vesuvius a fresh baptism of fire, and Sorrento—oh! Sorrento was beyond picture, beyond poesy."

After Naples came Margaret's first view of Rome, where she probably arrived early in May, and where she remained until late in the month of June. We do not find among her letters 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 mediæval armour was complete at all points. Her heathen hcart had kept Christianity far from it by using as exorcisms the very forms which, at the birth of that religion, had mediated between its