_L’Allegro and Il Penseroso._
THERE is music by the best bands in Rome upon the Pincian Hill on
Sabbath afternoons. Sitting at the window of our tiny library,
affecting to read or write, my eyes wandered continually to the lively
scene beyond. My fingers were beating time to the waltzes, overtures,
and marches that floated over the wall and down the terraces—over the
orange and camellia-trees, the pansy and violet-beds, and lilac-bushes
in the court-yard, the pride of our handsome _portiere’s_ heart—up to
my Calvinistic ears. Drive and promenade were in full and near view,
and up both streamed, for two hours, a tossing tide of carriages and
pedestrians. It would flow down in variegated billows when the sun
should paint the sky behind St. Peter’s golden-red. Resigning even the
pretence of occupation by-and-by, I used to lie back in my easy-chair,
my feet upon the fender, hemming in the wood-fire we never suffered to
go out, and, watching the pleasure-making on the hill, dream until I
forgot myself and the age in which I lived.
At the foot of the Pincio, which now overtops the other hills of Rome,
beside the Porta del Popolo, or People’s Gate, are the convent and
church of S. Augustine. In the former, Luther dwelt during his stay in
the city of his love and longing. At this gate he prostrated himself
and kissed the earth in a passion of delight and thankfulness. In
the church he celebrated his first mass in Rome, and just before his
departure, soon after the change of feeling and purpose which befell
him upon the Sacred Staircase, he performed here his last service as a
priest of the Romish Church.
S. Augustine’s was raised upon the site of the tomb of Nero—a spot
infested, according to tradition, for hundreds of years, by flocks of
crows, who built, roosted, and cawed in the neighboring trees, becoming
in time such a nuisance as to set one of the popes to dreaming upon
the subject. In a vision, it was revealed to him that these noisy
rooks were demons contending for or exulting in the possession of
the soul of the wicked tyrant—a point on which there could have been
little uncertainty, even in the mind of a middle-ages pope. The trees
were leveled, and the birds, or devils, scared away by the hammers of
workmen employed upon a church paid for by penny collections among the
people. The Gate of the People owes its name to this circumstance.
Within the antique gateway, Christina of Sweden was welcomed to Rome
after her apostasy from Protestantism, cardinals and bishops and a long
line of sub-officials meeting her here in stately procession. It is
also known as the Flaminian Gate, opening as it does upon the famous
Flaminian Way. A side-road, branching off from this a few rods beyond
the walls, leads into and through the beautiful grounds of the Villa
Borghese.
Turning to the left, after entering the Porta del Popolo, one ascends
by a sinuous road the Pincio, or Hill of Gardens. Below lies the Piazza
del Popolo, the twin churches opposite the city-gate marking the
burial-place of Sylla. The red sandstone obelisk in the middle of the
square is from Heliopolis, and the oldest monument in Rome. The most
heedless traveler pauses upon the Pincian terraces to look down upon
“the flame-shaped column,” which, Merivale tells us, “was a symbol of
the sun, and originally bore a blazing orb upon its summit.” Hawthorne
reminds us yet more thrillingly that “this monument supplied one of
the recollections which Moses and the Israelites bore from Egypt into
the desert.” And so strong is the chain with which, in his “Marble
Faun,” this subtle and delicate genius has united the historical and
the imaginative, one recollects, in the same instant, that the parapet
by which he is standing is the one over which Kenyon and Hilda watched
the enigmatical pantomime of Miriam and the Model beside the “four-fold
fountain” at the base of the obelisk. Nowhere else in Rome is the
thoughtful traveler more tempted to borrow from this marvelous romance
words descriptive of scene and emotion than when he reaches the “broad
and stately walk that skirts the brow” of the Pincio. We read and
repeated the paragraph that, to this hour, brings the view to us with
the clearness and minuteness of a sun-picture, until it arose of itself
to our lips whenever we halted upon the outer edge of the semicircular
sweep of wall.
“Beneath them, from the base of the abrupt descent, the city spread
wide away in a close contiguity of red-earthen roofs, above which
rose eminent the domes of a hundred churches, besides here and there
a tower, and the upper windows of some taller, or higher situated
palace, looking down on a multitude of palatial abodes. At a distance,
ascending out of the central mass of edifices, they could see the
top of the Antonine column, and, near it, the circular roof of the
Pantheon, looking heavenward with its ever-open eye.”
“The very dust of Rome,” he writes again, “is historic, and inevitably
settles on our page and mingles with our ink.”
Thus, the Pincio—the gayest place in Rome on “music-afternoon,” and
one of the loveliest at all seasons and every day;—a modern garden,
with parterres of ever-green and ever-blooming roses; with modern
fountains and plantations, rustic summer-houses and play-grounds, all
erected and laid out—if Hare is to be credited—within twenty years, in
the “deserted waste where the ghost of Nero was believed to wander”
in the dark ages, had its story and its tragedy antedating the bloody
death and post-mortem peregrinations of him over whose grave the crows
quarrelled at the bottom of the hill. Other gardens smiled here when
Lucullus supped in the Hall of Apollo in his Pincian Villa with Cicero
and Pompey, and was served with more than imperial luxury. Here,
Asiaticus, condemned to die through the machinations of the wickedest
woman in Rome, who coveted ground and house, bled himself to death
after “he had inspected the pyre prepared for him in his own gardens,
and ordered it to be removed to another spot that an umbrageous
plantation which overhung it might not be injured by the flames.”
Here grew the tree up which climbed Messalina’s creature on the night
of her last and wildest orgy with her lover, and flung down the
warning—“I see an awful storm coming from Ostia!” The approaching
tempest was the injured husband, Claudius, the Emperor, whose swift
advance drove Messalina, half-drunken and half-clad, to a hiding-place
“in the shade of her gardens on the Pincio, the price of the blood of
the murdered Asiaticus.” There she died. “The hot blood of the wanton
smoked on the pavement of his garden, and stained, with a deeper hue,
the variegated marbles of Lucullus.”[B]
At the intersection of the two fashionable drives which constitute
“the round,”—a circuit that can be accomplished with ease in five
minutes—is an obelisk, also Egyptian, erected, primarily, upon the
Nile, by Hadrian and his Empress, in memory of the drowned Antinöus.
Urban VIII. left his mark and a memento of the inevitable Bernini on
the Pincio, in the Moses Fountain. It commands, through an artful
opening in the overhanging trees, an exquisitely lovely view of
St. Peter’s, framed in an arch of green. The fountain consists of
a circular basin, and, in the middle of this, Jochebed, the mother
of Moses, upon an island. She looks heavenward while she stoops to
extricate a hydrocephalus babe from a basket much too small for his
trunk and limbs, not to say the big head.
Caput’s criticism was professionally indignant.
“It is simply preposterous to fancy that a child with such an abnormal
cerebral development could ever have become a leader of armies or a
law-giver. The wretched woman naturally avoids the contemplation of the
monstrosity she has brought into the world.”
From that section of the Pincian Gardens overlooking the Borghese Villa
and grounds projects a portion of the ancient wall of Rome, that was
pronounced unsafe and ready to fall in the time of Belisarius. Being
miraculously held in place by St. Peter, there is now no real danger,
unsteady as it looks, that this end of the Pincio will give way under
the weight of the superincumbent wall, and plunge down the precipice
among the ilex-trees and stone-pines beneath. In the shadow of this
wall, tradition holds that blind Belisarius begged from the passers-by.
With the deepening glow of the sunset—
“Flushing tall cypress-bough,
Temple and tower”—
the Roman promenaders and riders flock homeward from Borghese and
Pincio. Foreigners, less familiar with the character of the unwholesome
airs and noxious dews of twilight, linger later until they learn
better. Mingling with the flood of black coats that poured down the
shorter ascent in sight of my windows were rills of scarlet and purple
that puzzled me for awhile. At length I made it my business to examine
them more closely from the parlor balcony in their passage through the
street at the front of the house.
“There go the _ganders_!” shouted Boy, who accompanied me to the
look-out.
“I should call them flamingoes?” laughed I.
The students in the Propaganda wear long gowns, black, red, or purple,
and broad-brimmed hats, each nationality having its uniform. The
members of each division take their “constitutional” at morning and
evening in a body, striding along with energy that sends their skirts
flapping behind them in a gale of their own making. They seldom missed
a band-afternoon upon the Pincio, and were a picturesque element in the
lively display. Boy’s name for them was an honest mispronunciation of a
polysyllable too big for him to handle. But I never saw them stalking
in a slender row across the Piazza di Spagna and up the hill without a
smile at the random shot. The name had a sort of aptness when fitted
to the sober youngsters whose deportment was solemn to grotesqueness
by contrast with the volatile crowd they threaded in their progress to
the pools of refreshment prescribed as a daily recreation—the fleeting
glimpses of the world outside of their pasture.
The gates of the avenues by which access is had to the gardens are
closed soon after sundown. No one is allowed to walk there after dark,
or remain there overnight. But theatres and other places of amusement
are open in the evening, the best operatic and dramatic entertainments
being reserved for Sunday night. We wearied soon of the bustle and
gayety of such Sabbath afternoons. We could not shut out from our
apartment the strains that seduced thought away from the books we
would fain study. The tramp and hum of the street were well-nigh as
bewildering. In the beginning, to avoid this—afterward, from love of
the place and the beauty and quiet that reign there, like the visible
benediction of the All-Father—we fell into the practice of driving out
every week to the Protestant Cemetery.
Boy was always one of the carriage-party. The streets were a continual
carnival to him on this, the Christian’s Lord’s Day, being alive with
mountebanks and strolling musicians. Behind the block in which were
our apartments was an open square, where a miniature circus was held
at least one Sabbath per month, it was said, for the diversion of the
boy-prince who is now the heir-apparent. In view of the fact that
_our_ heir-apparent was to be educated for Protestant citizenship in
America, we preferred for him, as for ourselves, Sabbath meditations
among the tombs to the divers temptations of the town—temptations not
to be shunned except by locking him up in a windowless closet and
stuffing his ears with cotton. The route usually selected, because it
was quietest on the holiday that drew the populace elsewhere, granted
us peeps at many interesting objects and localities.
In the vestibule of the church of Santa Maria in Cosmedin is the
once-noted Bocca della Verità, or Mouth of Truth—a round, flat wheel,
like an overgrown grindstone set on edge, a gaping mouth in the centre.
The first time we visited it (it was _not_ on the Sabbath) the Average
Briton was before us, and affably volunteered an explanation of the
rude mask.
“You see, when a fellah was suspected of perjury—false swearing,
you know—he was brought heah and made to put his harnd in
those—ah!—confoundedly beastly jaws; when, if he had lied
or—ah!—prevaricated, you know, the mouth would shut upon his harnd,
and, in short, bit it off! The truth was, I farncy, that there was a
fellah behind there with a sword or cleaver, or something of that kind,
you know.”
Across the church square, which is adorned by a graceful fountain,
often copied in our country, is a small, circular Temple of Vesta,
dating back to the reign of Vespasian, if not to Pompey’s time. It is a
tiny gem of a ruin, if ruin it can be called. The interior is a chapel,
lighted by slits high in the wall. A row of Corinthian columns, but
one of them broken, surrounds it; a conical tiled roof covers it. This
heathen fane is a favorite subject with painters and photographers.
Near it is a much older building—the Temple of Fortune—erected by
Servius Tullius, remodeled during the Republic. Other houses have been
built into one side, and the spaces between the Ionic columns of the
other three been filled in with solid walls to make a larger chamber.
It is a church now, dedicated to St. Mary of Egypt.
An alley separates this from the House of Rienzi, the Last of the
Tribunes. The marble or stucco coating has peeled away from the
walls, but, near the eaves are fragments of rich sculpture. The Latin
inscription over the doorway has reference to the honors and might of
the ancient owners. Beyond these there is not a symptom of beauty or
grandeur about the ugly, rectangular homestead. The Tiber rolls near,
and its inundations have had much to do with the defacement of the
lower part of the house. The suspension-bridge which crosses the slow
yellow waters at this point, rests at one end upon piers built by
Scipio Africanus. From this bridge—the Ponte Rotto—the pampered body of
Heliogabalus was thrown into the river. Further down the stream are the
foundations of other piles, which have withstood current and freshet
for two thousand years. We always paused when opposite these. Boy knew
the point, and never wearied of hearing and telling—
“How well Horatius kept the bridge
In the brave days of old.”
Upon the thither bank were mustered the hosts who made Lars Porsenna “a
proud man” “upon the trysting-day.”
“There lacked not men of prowess,
Nor men of lordly race;
For all Etruria’s noblest
Were ’round the fatal place.”
From the same shore captive Clelia plunged into the river on horseback,
and swam over to the city. A short distance above our halting-place the
Cloaca Maxima, a huge, arched opening upon the brink, debouches into
the river, still doing service as the chief sewer of Rome.
Macaulay does well to tell us that the current of Father Tiber was
“swollen high by mouths of rain” when recounting the exploit of
Horatius Coccles. The ramparts from which the Romans frowned upon their
foes exist no longer, but the low-lying river gives no exalted estimate
of their altitude when
“To the highest turret-tops
Was splashed the yellow foam.”
“In point of fact,” as the Average Briton would say, the Tiber is
a lazy, muddy water-course, not half as wide, I should say, as the
Thames, and less lordly in every way. At its best, _i. e._, its
fullest, it is never grand or dignified; a sulky, unclean parent Rome
should be ashamed to claim.
“How dirty Horatius’ clothes must have been when he got out!” said
Boy, seriously, eying with strong disfavor the “tawny mane,” sleek to
oiliness in the calm afternoon light.
Dredging-boats moor fast to the massive piers of the Pons Sublicius,
better known to us as the Horatian Bridge. They were always at work
upon the oozy bed of the river, to what end, we could never discover.
The Monte Testaccio, a hill less than two hundred feet high, starts
abruptly out of the rough plain in front of the English Cemetery. It
is composed entirely of pot-sherds, broken crockery of all kinds,
covered with a slow accretion of earth thick enough to sustain scanty
vegetation. Why, when, and how, the extraordinary pile of refuse grew
into its present proportions, is a mystery. It is older than the
Aurelian wall in whose shelter nestles the Protestant burying-ground.
The custodian, always civil and obliging, learned to know and welcome
us by and by, and after answering our ring at the gate would say,
smilingly:—“You know the way!” and leave us to our wanderings. Boy had
permission to fill his cap with scarlet and white camellias which had
fallen from the trees growing in the ground and open air at mid-winter.
I might pick freely the violets and great, velvet-petaled pansies
covering graves and borders. When the guardian of the grounds bade
us “Good-day” at our egress, he would add to gentle chidings for the
smallness of my bouquet, a bunch of roses, a handful of double purple
violets or a spray of camellias. We were at home within the enclosure,
to us a little sanctuary where we could be thoughtful, peaceful—hardly
sad.
“It is enough to make one in love with death to think of sleeping in so
sweet a spot,” wrote Shelley.
“Strangers always ask first for Shelley’s tomb,” said the custodian.
It lies at the top of a steep path, directly against the hoary wall
where the ivy clings and flaunts, and the green lizards play in the
sunshine, so tame they scarcely stir or hide in the crevices as the
visitor’s shadow touches them.
“PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY,
COR CORDIUM.
NATUS IV. AUG. MDCCXCII.
OBIT VIII. JULY MDCCCXXI.
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.”
Leigh Hunt and Trelawney have made familiar the strange sequel of
a wild, strange life. Overtaken upon the Mediterranean by a sudden
squall, Shelley had hardly time to start from his lounging-place on
deck, and thrust into his jacket-pocket the copy of Keats’ Lamia he was
reading, when the yacht capsized. His body, with that of Williams, his
friend and fellow-voyager, was cast on shore by the waves several days
afterward, and burned in the presence of Byron, Trelawney, Hunt, and
others.
“Shelley, with his Greek enthusiasm, would not have been sorry to
foresee this part of his fate,” writes Hunt. Frankincense, wine and
spices, together with Keats’ volume found in his pocket, open at the
page he had been reading, were added to the flames.
“The yellow sand and blue sky were intensely contrasted with one
another,” continues the biographer. “Marble mountains touched the
air with coolness, and the flame of the fire bore away toward heaven
in vigorous amplitude, waving and quivering with a brightness of
inconceivable beauty. It seemed as though it contained the glassy
essence of vitality.”
Trelawney’s account of the ceremony is realistic and revolting. The
heart remained perfect amid the glowing embers, and Trelawney accredits
himself with the pious act of snatching it from the fire. It and the
ashes were sent to Rome for interment “in the place which he had so
touchingly described in recording its reception of Keats.”
On week-days, the little cemetery which we had to ourselves on Sabbath,
is a popular resort for travelers. Instead of the holy calm that to
us, had become one with the caressing sunlight and violet-breath,
the old wall gives back the chatter of shrill tongues and gruff
responses, as American women and English men trip and tramp along
the paths in haste to “do” this one of the Roman sights. We were by
Shelley’s tomb, one day, when a British matron approached, accompanied
by two pretty daughters or nieces. Murray was open in her hand at
“Burial-ground—English.”
“Ah, Shelley!” she cooed in the deep chest-voice affected by her class,
screwing her eye-glass well in place before bringing it to bear upon
the horizontal slab. “The poet and infidel, Shelley, me dears! A man
of some note in his day. I went to school with his sister, I remember.
Quite a nice girl, too, I assure you. Poor Shelley! it was a pity he
imbibed such very-very sad notions upon certain subjects, for he really
was not without ability!”
The fancy of how the wayward genius would have listened to these
comments above a poet’s grave would have provoked a smile from
melancholy itself.
In another quarter of the cemetery rests the mortal part of one whom we
knew for ourselves, to have been a good man and a useful. Rev. N. C.
Burt, formerly a Baltimore pastor, died in Rome, whither he had come
for health, and sleeps under heartsease and violets that are never
blighted by winter.
“In so sweet a spot!” We said it aloud, in gathering for his wife a
cluster of white violets growing above his heart.
Death and the grave cannot be made less fearful than in this garden of
the blest:—
“Where, like an infant’s smile, over the dead,
A light of laughing flowers along the grass is spread.”
Keats is buried in the old cemetery, of which the new is an adjunct.
It is bounded at the back by the Aurelian wall; on two sides, by a
dry moat, and the fourth by the pyramid of Cestius. An arched bridge
crosses the narrow moat, and the gate is kept locked. On the side of
the arch next his grave is a profile head of Keats in basso-relievo;
beneath it, this acrostic—
“Keats! if thy cherished name be ‘writ in water,’
Each drop has fallen from some mourner’s cheek,—
A sacred tribute, such as heroes seek,
‘Though oft in vain—for dazzling deeds of slaughter.
Sleep on! Not honored less for epitaph so meek!”
The tomb is an upright head-stone, simple but massive, with the
well-known inscription:—
“This Grave
Contains all that was Mortal
of a
Young English Poet
Who
on his Death Bed
in the Bitterness of his Heart
at the Malicious Power of his Enemies
Desired
these Words to be engraven on his Tomb Stone:
“Here lies One
Whose Name was writ in Water.”
Feb. 24^{th} 1821”
A marble bar runs around the sides and foot, and the space enclosed
is literally covered with violets. An English lady pays the expense
of their renewal as fast as they die, or are plucked. They must bloom
forever upon the grave of Keats. So runs her order.
The custodian added to those he gave us, a rose and a sprig of a
fragrant shrub that grew by the head-stone, and wondered politely when
I knelt to pick the daisies smiling in the grass.
“I gather and I shall preserve them,” I explained, “because when Keats
was dying, he said—‘I feel the daisies growing over me!’”
Daisies thronged the place all winter, and blossomed as abundantly in
the sward on the other side of the moat. The most distinct mind-picture
I have of those Sabbath afternoon walks and talks among and beside the
dead shows me the broken battlements of the wall, the ivy streaming
through the useless loop-holes; the flowery slope of the graves down
to the moat, on the other side of which lies Keats under his fragrant
coverlet; the solemn old pyramid casting a shadow upon turf and tomb,
and in the foreground Boy skipping over the grass, “telling himself a
story,” very softly because the silent sleepers are so near, or busily
picking daisies to add to the basket of flowers that are to fill our
_salle_ with perfume until we come again.
“So sweet a spot!”
FOOTNOTE:
[B] Merivale, vol. vi., p. 176.