Once more, dearest father and mother, my New Year's festival is passed away from you. It makes it sad, but I do not complain.
It is a great deal that God has so kindly favored and promoted all the objects for which I came to
Europe, has spared my life and increased my health, and, by bringing me nearer to the period when I shall finish the pursuits that separated me from you, [has] made it more probable that we shall meet again in the happiness we once so gladly enjoyed together. . . . .
With
Rome, I find every day more reason to be contented; and if I were condemned to live in
Europe, I am sure this is the place I should choose for my exile beyond any other I have yet seen.
Nature here is so beautiful, as soon as you leave the immediate environs and go a little way among the hills, that it seems as if the works of man were hardly necessary for his happiness,—and yet where has man done so much?
Antiquity has left such traces of splendor and magnificence that
Rome might be well content with ruins alone,—and yet the modern city has more fine buildings than all the rest of the world beside . . . . But these are not all the attractions of
Rome, for they bring here a deputation from the elegant and refined class from every nation in
Europe, who, when united, form a society such as no other capital can boast. . . . .
My chief occupation now is
Italian literature, in which I have nearly finished all I proposed to myself. . . . . The only difficulty I find is in speaking, and this I really know not how I can get over.
With my servant and such persons I speak nothing else, of course, but there the thing ends; for, though I go every evening into society somewhere, I never hear a word of
Italian any more than I should in Kamtchatka, unless it be at
Canova's, and sometimes at the
Portuguese Ambassador's. It is not, in fact, the language of conversation and intercourse anywhere, and therefore I can never acquire the facility and fluency I have in German and