Who has entered the aged city of Rome and not felt the power of its thrilling associations? How the doors of history swing open before the traveller, and how sublime the panorama which unfolds to his view! How swiftly pass the scenes of pomp and the parades of heroes! It cannot be described. It must be felt to be understood. It requires no very active imagination to see again the strong walls, the towers, the gates, the majestic temples, and the superb Capitol rising over all. To be able to walk its paved streets, and wend about its Corinthian porches, and through its marvellous arches; to rush with the crowds of Romans to a seat in the Coliseum; to march in the triumphal processions, and to listen to the echo of Cicero’s voice among the pillars of the Forum, is no very difficult dream, when the same buildings which saw and heard those things are yet before you. One can stand in the shadows of ancient ruins, when the moon gives light enough to see the outline, but not sufficient to show the scars which the ages have given them, and witness again the gatherings of the Roman people, and make out the forms of Cincinnatus, of Scipio, of Marius, of CÆsar, of Cicero, of Augustus, or of Constantine, as their lumbering chariots jolt over the pavements and around the palace walls. The Tiber, which rolls on its ceaseless course, and which saw the faces of Livy, Horace, and Virgil, moves by the Tarpeian Rock, and the Campus Martius, with the same eddying playfulness as it exhibited then. New glories gild the clouds, and new temples adorn the adjacent plains. Jupiter gives way to Jehovah, priests of Janus and Venus stand aside for monks and friars to fill their office. The Coliseum crumbles, as St. Paul’s lifts its grand faÇades. Capitolinus falls and St. Peter’s fills the bow of heaven. Marvels of ancient art grow dusty with the ages, while new forms, so divinely conceived, so incomparably wrought, and so immaculate in modesty and matchless in color, spring into being at the call of the later civilization. All is interesting, exciting, glorious! One walks the streets in dreams, lulled by the musical cadences of the rippling native language. Words cannot convey the feelings awakened by that new sense, which discerns and interprets the ancient and modern associations of Rome. The traveller feels as if he were a companion of the great and powerful, of the refined and good, who have walked those streets before him, and ever after the words they spoke, and the books they wrote, have a fresh and unabating interest.

So Bayard saw the ancient city, although he has described it somewhat differently. Rome was to Florence what the Apollo is to the Venus de Medici, each enhancing the beauty of the other, and losing nothing by comparison. It was near the first of January, 1846, when the subject of these sketches entered Rome and took up his abode in a lowly tavern opposite the front of the Pantheon. In a most humble, almost beggarly way, he obtained his food at the cheapest places, and walked among those old ruins in the most unobtrusive manner. He was too poor, and earned too little as a newspaper correspondent, to spend aught on the luxuries of Rome. Hence all his time and attention were on that which pleased the eye and satisfied the mind, rather than upon those things which gratify the appetite or inflate the pride. He walked to the Coliseum by moonlight, and heeded not fatigue. For within its cragged circuit he saw again the excited hosts, the gay ladies about the imperial throne, the writhing Christian, and the lions with bloody jaws. Or he saw the fiercer human beings engaged in the gladiatorial combat, saw the flash of shields and swords, heard the groan of the dying as it was drowned by the rising shouts for the victor. He searched the hidden recesses of the baths, palaces, arches, prisons, and churches, which remain as reminders of the old city; he marched far out on the Appian Way and contemplated its tombs and mysterious piles in laborious detail; he sketched the spirals of Trajan’s Column, and drew a plan of the ancient Capitol. In awe-stricken silence he walked beneath the dome of mighty St. Peter’s, and marvelled in worshipful mood before those exquisite mosaics. He lingered long and lovingly in the great labyrinth of the Vatican, wept at the sight of some of those great paintings, and bowed with respect to the greatest productions of the greatest sculptors. Few will give credit to the glowing pictures which he draws of the arts in Rome, nor believe the strong assertions we herein make, who have not been there and experienced the same sensations.

He visited in pious respect the tombs of Tasso, Keats, and Shelley, and found his way into the studios of the modern artists. He took short trips into the country, and once stopped for the night under the shadows of the Temple of Vesta at Tivoli. Beyond Rome he could not go. For once, Dame Fortune turned her back upon him. If he would see Naples, Pompeii, and Samos, he must have money. Money he could not get. Grievously disappointed, yet thankful for what he had seen, he most devoutly thanks God, and turns northward.

At Civita Vecchia to which place he, as usual, walked, he embarked, third class, on a steamboat for Marseilles. The beds were rough planks, the food was drenched like himself, and fleas infested every stitch of covering. It stormed, and Bayard might have perished with exposure to the bad weather, had not a sailor taken compassion on him and his companion, and lent them some clothing. That kindness he ever remembered, and it may have been in his mind when, after meeting many sailors, he wrote of them:—

He arrived at Marseilles with but five dollars for the expense of a journey of five hundred miles on foot. Dark outlook, indeed, on entering for the first time a country with whose language he was unacquainted. Through rain and mud, sunshine and darkness, he moved on, courageous as ever, and enjoying with the same zest his glimpses of ancient cathedrals and renowned localities. At Lyons he received a small amount of money by mail, and at a time when death by starvation seemed but a few hours removed. The story of his mishaps by land and by water, on his way from Lyons to Paris is a very exciting narration, as he relates them in his “Views Afoot,” and yet shows the best side of a most terrible experience. But Paris was reached at last, and in the first week of February, 1846, they found a lodging place in the Rue de la Harpe, at the rate of two dollars and eighty cents a month. He lived on twenty cents a day, and in place of a teacher of French, subscribed at a circulating library and picked out the words and phrases by downright hard study in his fireless and damp attic. For five weeks he studied and rambled and endured privation, learning Paris by heart and finding himself made free and happy by the atmosphere of gayety which pervades everything there. His favorite resort was the Place de la Concorde, which is an open space at one side of the palace of the Tuileries, and at the foot of that magnificent embowered avenue called the Champs ElysÉes. There were then, as now, the enchanting groves, with the gardens, concert bowers, and shy booths. There was the obelisk from Luxor, which called Bayard’s attention to Egypt and created a strong desire to see that ancient land of the Nile. There were the solid walls of the Tuileries upon one side, the river Seine upon another, while the twin palaces, with the distant front of the Madeleine Church showing between them, shut out the populous city on the other. But the pavements, flowers, fountains, bronze figures, obelisk and palaces were the least of the attractions which called this persevering young student to that celebrated square. It was there that many of the most important acts in the history of France were performed. It was there that kings were made, and there they were beheaded. It was there that priests had preached, and there that they were murdered. It was there that in the crimson and lurid days of ’94, the Red Revolutionists each day filled the baskets at the foot of the guillotine with the heads of twoscore and often threescore citizens. Who would surmise that in a city so gay, so cheerful, so imbued with the very spirit of pleasure and childlike life, such hideous deeds of blood and destruction could be performed! Quick-tempered, excitable people, going with the flash of a thought from one extreme to the other. No place in all Paris better exhibits the character of the nation, than the Place de la Concorde. There Bayard often lingered and pondered, seeing clearly through the film of gay attire, garlands of roses, delightful wines, and gorgeous carriages, the dangerous yet often heroic elements, which have so often thrown off the crust of fashion and politeness, and flooded the beautiful city with seething torrents from the deepest hell.

He sought out the master-pieces of art in the galleries, cathedrals, and parks, and dwelt long and caressingly upon their entrancing forms, having now passed through a school that left him a competent critic. He gazed after the carriage where Louis Philippe rode in state, and wondered if such a monarchy could endure, and with a powerful yearning fumbled the unintelligible leaves of Victor Hugo, Beranger, and Lamartine—not, however, to be long unintelligible.

There, again, he was in financial distress, and was saved from great suffering by the unexpected kindness of a merchant, who, like Mr. Chandler and Mr. Patterson at the beginning of his career, loaned him money, although Bayard was a stranger and could give no security.

From Paris via Versailles and Rouen, he walked to Dieppe, and, after crossing the Channel, travelled by third-class car to London, where he arrived with but thirty cents in French money. With no money to pay his lodging, with a letter from home in the post-office, on which he could not pay the postage, he made desperate attempts to obtain employment as a printer. But the “Trade Unions” were so omnipotent, that no stranger without a certificate could be set at work without a “strike.” At last, when long without his usual meals, and sure of being refused a lodging, he applied to Mr. Putnam, who was conducting the London agency of the American publishing firm, who loaned him five dollars, and he could again eat and sleep. Several weeks of waiting intervened, in which Mr. Putnam kindly kept Bayard in employment, at a salary sufficient to pay his board, before the money came from America to take them home. Even then the captain of the vessel on which he returned with his two friends who started with him nearly two years before, was compelled to take a promise for a part of the fare. Captain Morgan, who commanded the vessel, was one of the noblest men that ever paced a deck, and so popular did he become, that his biography was published thirty years after this passage, in an illustrated number of “Scribner’s Magazine.” Their voyage was a fair one, their landing in New York a happy one; but no pen except his own can describe the joy of seeing again his own country, and of walking at evening into the door of that home which he left two years before as a boy, and to which he then returned a man.