Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: What can charm us more? Life hath lost its sweetness! Weary lags the hour?
Time hath lost its fleetness ! As the buds in May Were the joys we cherished, Sweet?but frail as they, Thus they passed and perished ! And the few bright hours Wintry age can number, Sickly, senseless flowers, Lingering through December ! Rome, March 15. We arrived here yesterday morning about one, after a short but delightful journey from Velletri. We have now a suite of apartments in the Hotel d'Europe; and our accommodations are in all respects excellent, almost equal to Schneiderf’s at Florence. On entering Rome through the gate of the Lateran, I was struck by the emptiness and stillness of the streets, contrasted with those of Naples; and still more by the architectural grandeur and beauty which every where met the eye. This is as it should be: the merry, noisy, half- naked, merry-andrew set of ragamuffins which crowd the streets and shores of Naples, would strangely misbecome the desolate majesty of the
Eternal City. Though we now reside in the most fashionable and frequented part of Rome, the sound of carts and carriages is seldom heard. After nine in the evening a profound stillness reigns; and I distinguish nothing from my window but the splashing of the Fountain della Barchetta. The weather is lovely; we were obliged to close our Venetian blinds against the heat at eight this morning, and afterwards we drove to the gardens of the Villa Borghese, where we wandered about in search of coolness and shade. 26.?I must now descend to the common occurrences of our every-day life. For the last week we have generally spent the whole or part of the morning, in some of the galleries of art; and the afternoon in the gardens of the neighbouring villas. Those…