It is a fine old town, with every promise of health
and vigor 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
incongruity, 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.
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