Hawthorne’s second visit to Rome, in the winter of 1859, was not a fortunate one.  His own health was excellent during his sojourn there, but several members of his family fell ill, and he became very nervous and longed to get away.  In one of his letters he says:—­

“I bitterly detest Rome, and shall rejoice to bid it farewell forever; and I fully acquiesce in all the mischief and ruin that has happened to it, from Nero’s conflagration downward.  In fact, I wish the very site had been obliterated before I ever saw it.”

He found solace, however, during the series of domestic troubles (continued illness in his family) that befell, in writing memoranda for “The Marble Faun.”  He thus announces to me the beginning of the new romance:—­

“I take some credit to myself for having sternly shut myself up for an hour or two almost every day, and come to close grips with a romance which I have been trying to tear out of my mind.  As for my success, I can’t say much; indeed, I don’t know what to say at all.  I only know that I have produced what seems to be a larger amount of scribble than either of my former romances, and that portions of it interested me a good deal while I was writing them; but I have had so many interruptions, from things to see and things to suffer, that the story has developed itself in a very imperfect way, and will have to be revised hereafter.  I could finish it for the press in the time that I am to remain here (till the 15th of April), but my brain is tired of it just now; and, besides, there are many objects that I shall regret not seeing hereafter, though I care very little about seeing them now; so I shall throw aside the romance, and take it up again next August at The Wayside.”

He decided to be back in England early in the summer, and to sail for home in July.  He writes to me from Rome:—­

“I shall go home, I fear, with a heavy heart, not expecting to be very well contented there....  If I were but a hundred times richer than I am, how very comfortable I could be!  I consider it a great piece of good fortune that I have had experience of the discomforts and miseries of Italy, and did not go directly home from England.  Anything will seem like Paradise after a Roman winter.

“If I had but a house fit to live in, I should be greatly more reconciled to coming home; but I am really at a loss to imagine how we are to squeeze ourselves into that little old cottage of mine.  We had outgrown it before we came away, and most of us are twice as big now as we were then.

“I have an attachment to the place, and should be sorry to give it up; but I shall half ruin myself if I try to enlarge the house, and quite if I build another.  So what is to be done?  Pray have some plan for me before I get back; not that I think you can possibly hit on anything that will suit me....  I shall return by way of Venice and Geneva, spend two or three