It would only be a kind of despair, however, that would ever make me dream of finding a home in Italy

October 11th 1858

Again I went to the cathedral this morning, and spent an hour listening to the music and looking through the orderly intricacies of the arches, where many vistas open away among the columns of the choir. There are five clustered columns on each side of the nave; then under the dome there are two more arches, not in a straight line, but forming the segment of a circle; and beyond the circle of the dome there are four more arches, extending to the extremity of the chancel. I should have said, instead of "clustered columns " as above, that there are five arches along the nave supported by columns. This cathedral has certainly bewitched me, to write about it so much, effecting nothing with my pains. I should judge the width of each arch to be about twenty feet, and the thickness of each clustered pillar is eight or ten more, and the length of the entire building may be between two and three hundred feet; not very large, certainly, but it makes an impression of grandeur independent of size...

I never shall succeed even in reminding myself of the venerable magnificence of this minster, with its arches, its columns, its cornice of Popes' heads, its great wheel-windows, its manifold ornament, all combining in one vast effect, though many men have laboured individually, and through a long course of time, to produce this multifarious handiwork and headwork.

I now took a walk out of the city. A road turned immediately to the left as I emerged from the city, and soon proved to be a rustic lane leading past several villas and farmhouses. It was a very pleasant walk, with vineyards and olive-orchards on each side, and now and then glimpses of the towers and sombre heaped-up palaces of Siena, and now a rural seclusion again; for the hills rise and the valleys fall like the swell and subsidence of the sea after a gale, so that Siena may be quite hidden within a quarter of a mile of its wall, or may be visible, I doubt not, twenty miles away, It is a fine old town, with every promise of health and vigour in its atmosphere, and really, if I could take root anywhere, I know not but it could as well be here as in another place. It would only be a kind of despair, however, that would ever make me dream of finding a home in Italy; a sense that I had lost my country through absence or incon gruity, and that earth is not an abiding-place. I wonder that we Americans love our country at all, it having no limits and no oneness; and when you try to make it a matter of the heart, everything falls away except one's native State neither can you seize hold of that unless you tear it out of the Union, bleeding and quivering. Yet, unquestionably, we do stand by our national flag as stoutly as any people in the world, and I myself have felt the heart throb at sight of it, as sensibly as other men. I think the singularity of our form of government contributes to give us a kind of patriotism, by separating us from other nations more entirely. If other nations had similar institutions if England, especially, were a democracy we should as readily make ourselves at home in another country as now in a new State.