Hilda's Tower

When we have once known Rome, and left her where she lies, like a
long-decaying corpse, retaining a trace of the noble shape it was, but
with accumulated dust and a fungous growth overspreading all its more
admirable features, left her in utter weariness, no doubt, of her
narrow, crooked, intricate streets, so uncomfortably paved with little
squares of lava that to tread over them is a penitential pilgrimage, so
indescribably ugly, moreover, so cold, so alley-like, into which the sun
never falls, and where a chill wind forces its deadly breath into our
lungs,--left her, tired of the sight of those immense seven-storied,
yellow-washed hovels, or call them palaces, where all that is dreary
in domestic life seems magnified and multiplied, and weary of climbing
those staircases, which ascend from a ground-floor of cook shops,
cobblers' stalls, stables, and regiments of cavalry, to a middle region
of princes, cardinals, and ambassadors, and an upper tier of artists,
just beneath the unattainable sky,--left her, worn out with shivering
at the cheerless and smoky fireside by day, and feasting with our own
substance the ravenous little populace of a Roman bed at night,--left
her, sick at heart of Italian trickery, which has uprooted whatever
faith in man's integrity had endured till now, and sick at stomach
of sour bread, sour wine, rancid butter, and bad cookery, needlessly
bestowed on evil meats,--left her, disgusted with the pretence of
holiness and the reality of nastiness, each equally omnipresent,--left
her, half lifeless from the languid atmosphere, the vital principle
of which has been used up long ago, or corrupted by myriads of
slaughters,--left her, crushed down in spirit with the desolation of her
ruin, and the hopelessness of her future,--left her, in short, hating
her with all our might, and adding our individual curse to the infinite
anathema which her old crimes have unmistakably brought down,--when we
have left Rome in such mood as this, we are astonished by the discovery,
by and by, that our heart-strings have mysteriously attached themselves
to the Eternal City, and are drawing us thitherward again, as if it were
more familiar, more intimately our home, than even the spot where we
were born.