WHEN "The Marble Faun" was first published, it attracted American readers, at least, almost as much by its descriptions of Roman ruins and Italian landscape by the delicate and imaginative touch with which it reproduced or gave new meaning to famous works of antique and Renaissance art, as by the weird fascination of its plot and psychological problems. How the author was enabled to impart this additional charm to his work is explained by a perusal of his "French and Italian Note-Books.
Of France he saw but little, and the main portion of these journals is therefore devoted to Italy, where he remained from the end of January, , until the middle of May, While he was in Rome the second time, his elder daughter, Una, then about sixteen years of age, had a severe attack of Roman fever, and his associations with the place were tinged with gloom.
Fields, "and shall rejoice to bid it farewell forever; and I. In fact, I wish the very site had been obliterated before I saw it. But his stay in Florence and at the Villa Montauto had been a pleasurable one, and in part compensated him for the painful impressions left upon his mind by his Roman experience.
It will be noticed that he continued to journalize steadily, however, though the vicissitudes of the residence in Rome; although doubtless the entries are not so voluminous as they would have been but for the interruption of illness in his household, and for the fact that he had already begun to outline "The Marble Faun.
Nor should it be supposed, as it has sometimes been done, because he made no pretension to the title of connoisseur, and in one instance preferred the work of an American painter named Thompson to many of the productions of the old masters, that he did not enter with deep sympathy into the beauty of the historic art which surrounded him. He spent hours at a time, musing and observing, amid its treasures.
