St. Peter's Will Not Be, By Any Means, Your Oldest Friend, But It Will Be An Acquaintance Of Such Long Standing That You May Not Wish To Use It With All The Frankness Which Its Faults Invite.

If you say, when you drive into its piazza between the sublime colonnades which stretch forth their mighty embrace as if to take the whole world to the church's heart, that here is the best of St. Peter's, you will not be wrong.

If you say that here is grandeur, and that there where the temple fronts you grandiosity begins, you will be rhetorical, but, again, you will not be wrong. The day of my furtive visit was sober and already waning, with a breeze in which the fountains streamed flaglike, and with a gentle sky on which the population of statues above the colonnades defined themselves in leisure attitudes, so recognizable all that I am sure if they had come down and taken me by the hand we could have called one another by name without a moment's hesitation. Every detail of a prospect which is without its peer on earth, but may very possibly be matched in Paradise, had been so deeply stamped in my remembrance that I smiled for pleasure in finding myself in an environment far more familiar than any other I could think of at the time. It was measurably the same within the church, but it was not quite the same in the reserves I was obliged to make, the reefs I was obliged to take in my rapture.

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