It is evidently only a sort of idealized form of loafing: a passive life in Rome, thanks to the number and the quality of one's impressions, takes on a very respectable likeness to activity.

It is still lotus-eating, only you sit down at table, and the lotuses are served up on rococo china.

It 's all very well, but I have a distinct prevision of this--that if Roman life does n't do something substantial to make you happier, it increases tenfold your liability to moral misery.

It seems to me a rash thing for a sensitive soul deliberately to cultivate its sensibilities by rambling too often among the ruins of the Palatine, or riding too often in the shadow of the aqueducts.

In such recreations the chords of feeling grow tense, and after-life, to spare your intellectual nerves, must play upon them with a touch as dainty as the tread of Mignon when she danced her egg-dance." "I should have said, my dear Rowland," said Cecilia, with a laugh, "that your nerves were tough, that your eggs were hard!" "That being stupid, you mean, I might be happy?
Upon my word I am not.
I am clever enough to want more than I 've got.