THE END OF THE PILGRIMAGE
Final Function of the Pilgrimage—St. John Lateran—A Daring Climb—A
Story of St. Francis of Assisi—Dante’s Tribute—Rome’s Ghetto—Yellow
Banksia Roses—Fair on the Eve of the Feast of St. John the
Baptist—Early Figs—St. Anthony and the Sucking Pig—Rome’s Studios—A
Picture of Hébert’s—Hamon’s Work.
The sixth day of July closes the Octave of the 29th of June with a
magnificent function, attended by the whole College of Cardinals, in
the Church of St. John Lateran, the outpost of the Eternal City on its
southern side. The Basilica faces in that direction and is the last
building within the city walls, which still raise their crenellated
barrier of Roman masonry between it and the Campagna beyond. This,
the real approach to the Church, is very beautiful. The portico is
surmounted by statues of the Apostles, which are visible from a great
distance away on the Campagna, and is reached by a series of shallow
marble steps, where, in my early days, many devout beggars were wont
to sit and ask for alms. Below the steps and commanding a glorious
view of the Campagna and its encircling hills, stretches a wide grassy
terrace where we often walked up and down for a long time, at the
end of an afternoon drive, thus following the example of many of the
Popes, with whom this was a favourite spot, when in residence at the
Lateran Palace. Distances are deceptive where spaces are so great;
the grassy stretch never looked very vast; the feathery mulberry trees
that grew under the old Aurelian wall seemed almost within reach; but
in reality were quite a little way from the green terrace. The wall
always fascinated me because of its crown of small loop-holed towers,
set near together and connected by a covered way that still looked
practicable enough, although I believe there was no mode of reaching it
except by scrambling up from the outside. In those days the sturdy ruin
was covered with wild flowers and creeping plants, the long garlands
of yellow camomile waving like strings of stars in the wind, some
lovely things, whose name I never knew, sending out arm-long shafts
of pink and purple from every crevice, two or three live-oak saplings
finding good root-hold on the top, and every foot of surface covered
with the velvety jewelled leaves and tiny lilac flowers of another
little old friend, which I think the wise men call the “parietary” and
which I found, true to its name, clothing whole walls of our temple
home in North China. There the blossoms were much larger, and during
the stagnating days of one scorching summer I used to pass hours in
the deep, damp court where they grew, and discovered (what I suppose
any botanist could have told me) that their strange lucency comes from
a sticky liquid effused over the petals, which themselves throw out
a network of all but invisible hairs; that flies and gnats settle on
these hairs, get caught by the treacherous gum—and then are quietly
sucked in and devoured by the flower!
It was always in my mind to make a secret expedition, with my
adventurous sister, to that old Aurelian wall, when no one should be
about, and somehow or other reach the top, but we never carried out
that plan, though we did some pretty risky climbing in other ruins,
notably at the Baths of Caracalla, where we scaled the very highest
point of the biggest arch and lay at full length—we dared not stand on
a block of stone that rocked as we moved—looking down from the dizzy
height on a world of tiny people and things below. Some glorious tufts
of wallflower were our only companions and I remember how wonderful
was that mass of fervid orange swaying in the sun, against the azure
of the sky and the deep, dreamy blue of the distant hills. We went
there many times—but at last there came a day when the authorities
decreed that that particular bit of the ruin was so near falling that
it constituted a menace to the remains below. It was removed, and some
of the approaches to the other heights were walled up so that no one
could risk life and limb upon them any more, and we never cared to go
to the Baths again. Now, of course, there is no temptation to linger
in any of the ruins, as the ignorant beauty-haters who took possession
of our Rome in 1870 declared that the unique vegetation which adorned
them was an agent of destruction and must be swept away. Every vestige
of flower and shrub was rooted out, the poor old buildings became an
eyesore instead of a delight, and the process of stripping off the
kindly mantle which the ages had cast over their nakedness inflicted
greater damage, the experts now tell us, than five hundred years more
of age and weather could possibly have done. My dear brother Marion
used to say that the world was peopled chiefly with fools and—blanked
fools. What a charming world it would be if the blanked fools never got
into power!
But to return to the porch of the Lateran and its devout beggars. On a
certain day some eight hundred years ago, the Pope was walking on that
green stretch just below it, followed by a silent group of Cardinals
and Chamberlains, silent because the Holy Father was evidently thinking
hard about some high and important problem. Innocent III was a great
and good Pope, but he lived in a turbulent age. During fourteen years
of his reign two rivals, Philip and Otto, were rending Europe with
their struggles for the supreme honours of the Holy Roman Empire;
the Albigensian heresy was holding a hideous carnival of sacrilege,
carnage, and obscenity in some of its fairest lands; Rome itself was
the scene of ever-recurring battles between the great nobles, who would
ride forth in the morning followed by great companies of armed men,
on the chance of meeting an enemy or an enemy’s retainer to kill. And
with all this there were the vast affairs of the Church to govern,
and many spiritual matters to regulate. No wonder that the Pontiff,
walking in absorbed silence, and meditating on his course of action,
should have been extremely irritated when a company of travel-stained,
dusty beggars, disregarding the protestations of the horrified guard of
officials, came straight towards him and cast themselves at his feet!
He looked down at them in frowning disapproval. What did such conduct
mean? Their leader was a pale young man with dark eyes and a face
lighted up with a very fire of enthusiasm. Like his companions, he
was dressed in a coarse brown robe with a simple girdle, and his
bare feet showed many a cut and bruise from which the ragged sandals
had not saved them in the long tramp from Assisi down through Umbria
and Romagna. For this was the Blessed St. Francis with his “little
brothers,” come to ask the Pope for leave to found a new order, the
Order of Poverty. And the Pope scarcely answered him. Was it likely
that these ragged, ignorant tramps should have been chosen by Divine
Providence to found a new family in the Church? Ah, no!—Innocent shook
his head, reproved them for their presumption, and ordered them to
retire.
They accepted the rebuke, withdrew from his presence with perfect
humility, and laid their case before the Lord in prayer. The Pope,
doubtless finding that the view from the green terrace had lost its
charm at this squalid incursion, retired to his apartments in the
Lateran Palace, and when night fell lay down and went to sleep. And
in sleep his eyes were opened to that which had been hidden from them
by day. He dreamed that a tender young palm-tree sprang suddenly from
the ground beneath his feet and in a moment shot up to the sky and
threw out strong branches on every side, forming a vast roof of fresh
verdure under which millions of men found refuge and refreshment. Then
he understood that the poor mendicants who had knelt before him that
day were chosen by Heaven to found an order that should cover the world
with a mantle of charity; and as soon as he awoke he sent messengers in
haste to seek the little brown brothers—who were sure to be found in or
near the Lateran Basilica, and bring them to him.
We all know the result of the interview. How the Pope lovingly received
the brothers, but how strongly he protested against St. Francis’
apparent imprudence in founding his institution on a vow of absolute
poverty. How St. Francis refused to be shaken in his loyalty to his
loved bride, the “Lady Poverty,” and how at last the great Pope yielded
to the great Saint, discerning that Heaven itself was leading him
on this thorny path. So much has been written about St. Francis by
heretics, unbelievers, and amateurs, from whose company he would have
fled in horror, on earth, who have bespattered him with their poisonous
praises, who have each and all insulted him by the lies which they
invented in order to represent him as the patron of their abominable
errors, that a Catholic pen almost hesitates to write his blessed name.
As one good man says: “He has conquered the world, and his victory
would make him weep!” But he conquered it in another way too—in the way
he intended. Travel where you will, to the very ends of the earth, and
you will find the brown robes, the sandalled feet, the arms held open
to the poor and the suffering and the despised; you will find the Sons
of St. Francis toiling in the stoniest, roughest part of the vineyard,
with and of the poor, praying for all men, teaching the children,
nursing the sick, baptising the babes and the heathen, burying the
dead, begging, more for their poor than for themselves, from door to
door, leading the hardest of lives, yet always cheery and contented,
the friends of all who need them, the “gente poverella” are indeed
friends who never change or fail.
Of all the panegyrics of St. Francis, and of the “Lady Poverty,” I
think the one that Dante put into the mouth of St. Thomas Aquinas in
the eleventh canto of the “Paradiso,” is the most perfect and complete.
And the description of St. Dominic in the next canto is its match.
Here, Dante let his “great, grieved heart” have its way for once, and
every line that he wrote about these glorious friends of God throbs
with passionate veneration. Brothers in heart they were on earth,
and he sees them not separated in Heaven. How one wishes that he had
left us, in the two lines that are all he needs to paint an immortal
picture, a description of their first meeting in the Church of St. John
Lateran!
For it was there that they met. St. Dominic had had a strange dream
the night before, in which he beheld the Saviour preparing to smite and
exterminate the wicked—the proud, the voluptuaries, the misers; but His
Blessed Mother suddenly appeared, and stayed His wrath by presenting
to Him two monks: one was Dominic himself; the other, a poor holy man
clothed in rags, whom he had never seen. Greatly exercised in soul,
he went to the Lateran Church in the morning to ask for light and
guidance. As he entered his eyes fell on a ragged mendicant who was
praying so fervently that his face was all aflame with love and joy.
It was the face Dominic had seen in his dream. He rushed to Francis
and clasped him in his arms, exclaiming: “Thou art my comrade and my
brother! We run one race, we pant for the same goal. Let us be united
henceforth, and no enemy can conquer us!”
And so it was. These two suns of warmth and light, as Dante calls them,
founded each his own great spiritual family, worked wherever their
beloved Master sent them, in separate fields, but from that morning
moment in the Church of San Giovanni in Laterano to the end of their
blessed lives they were, as the old chronicle says, “One heart and one
soul in God.”
Of the riches and glories of the Lateran Basilica and the Lateran
Palace it is not for me to write. The mere lists of them occupy whole
chapters in the guidebooks and even there they have to be much boiled
down, often only a word or two indicating objects and places of
paramount interest to Catholic travellers; and these slighting mentions
are defaced for us, even in such valuable and sweet-minded works as
Augustus Hare’s “Walks in Rome,” by a question mark or an exclamation
mark, intended to denote ridicule, inserted after the word “miracle”
or “relic,” to show that the writer was anxious to be exonerated from
any suspicion of sharing the pious beliefs of devout persons on such
subjects. I have seen one or two Catholic guidebooks to Rome, but they
were meagre and unsatisfactory, more pamphlets than books. If a really
good modern one exists, I should be grateful to any reader who would
tell me about it.
There are some very ancient ones indeed, compiled between the Seventh
and the Tenth centuries, which were apparently well known and readily
available for the pilgrims of the age of Faith, although, so far as I
know, there are but very few copies of any of them in existence now.
They are called the “Salzburg,” the “Einsiedeln,” and the “Malmesbury”
guides, and must make interesting reading not only for their own
sake, but on account of the actual descriptions of the city which has
undergone so many changes and revolutions of its topography during the
last thousand years of its history. The changes of the last fifty years
have been perhaps the most surprising of all, considering that they
were not brought about by the time-honoured means of war and pillage,
but forced upon Rome under the comprehensive but sometimes mendacious
name of “improvements.” There was plenty of room for improvements,
and where these have been genuine nobody would wish to quarrel with
them, although even some of them were not needed, as claimed, for
the health of the city. The Ghetto, for instance, was an eyesore—and
looked, with its squalid crowds of rag-pickers and old-clothes dealers,
as if it must be a hot-bed of disease. It was precisely the contrary.
When the old pestilence or the new cholera were carrying off many
hundreds a day in the better parts of the city, there was not a single
case in the Ghetto. My brother points out, in “Ave, Roma Immortalis,”
that the regulation confining them to that tiny district, from the
gates of which they might not issue after dark, though intended as a
measure of repression, was really a great advantage to them, in that
behind those gates they were protected from robbery and violence and
governed themselves according to their own queer laws without any
interference from the municipal authorities. Certain industries they
monopolised altogether. I remember that whenever a new carpet was to
be put down in my mother’s house, Lucia, the housekeeper, would send
one of her underlings to summon “la Giudea” to sew it—and fierce old
Lucia would never have let a Jewess cross the threshold had she been
able to find a Christian to undertake the task! I was always glad
when this happened, for Lucia’s particular Jewess was a most cheery,
sociable soul, who would sit on the hard stone floor all day making
her huge needle fly in and out of the heavy carpet-stuff, and look up
and shake her black ringlets and greet me with the merriest of smiles
every time I passed through the room. Not only such coarse work, but
all the finest of darning was entrusted to her. Some disastrous rent in
new broad-cloth—“un sette” as the Italians call it, because it always
outlines the figure seven—would come back from her dark thin hands
so deftly mended that it was difficult to find the place; did some
careless guest drop a lighted cigarette on one of the satiny damask
table-cloths—quick, send it to the Giudea and the Signora herself may
forget that it ever was burnt! Darning and patching came to the women
naturally, I suppose, seeing that the chief industry of the Ghetto
consists in mending old clothes and selling them for new. Pius IX set
the Jews free from all the old humiliating restrictions of their life
in Rome, but until the Ghetto was swept away by the present Government,
they clung to it tenaciously, and no wonder, for it was their very
own, a little fortress of Jewry where no Christian ever came to disturb
them, either at work or worship.
With the inherited aversion and all the old traditions strong in us,
we children of Rome never set foot there more than once or twice in
all our lives. Our home was at the other end of the city, on the noble
heights of the Esquiline, and almost all that we loved best grouped
itself in that quarter. I have the most delightful recollections of
the walk from Santa Maria Maggiore, our own Church, to the great free
spaces round the Lateran. The last part of the way led through the Via
San Giovanni, on the right side of which were scarcely any buildings
at all, but only a long wall overhung, in the late spring, with masses
of yellow Banksia roses, their trailing wreaths hanging so near our
heads that we had but to spring and snatch to carry away big handfuls
of the flowers, and what flowers! Yard-long arcs of ruffled honey
tossed up against that Roman blue, every petal of the million a wing
of translucent gold in sun and breeze; no stem, no foliage visible
through the crowded blooms, except where the trailers tapered to the
last tiny cluster of unopened buds, set like yellow pearls in the
green calix, tapered to a point so delicate that the faintest breath
would set them waving and quivering as if mad to burst their bonds and
flutter in the sunshine like the rest. And their perfume, that perfume
of warm wax, the purest and sweetest in this world, filled the whole
street—not altogether honestly perhaps, for, by a rare harmony of the
eternal fitness of things, the long wall on which they grew sheltered,
in the middle of a beautiful garden, a wax factory where Church candles
of every size were made, from the four-foot pillar, painted like a
missal, that serves for the Paschal candle in Church, to the slim taper
that the poorest could buy to light before the picture of their patron
saint. It was worth while to be young, with every sense unspoiled,
and to go dancing along that road on a summer afternoon; to stop where
a low gateway led into the hidden garden and buy from the gardener’s
wife some of her fat bunches of red carnations and lavender, for the
sake of the Blessed St. John, whose especial flowers they are—also the
cones of lavender made by tying a bundle just below the flowers, then
turning the stalks back over these and tying them again to form an
egg-shaped casket from which nothing could escape, and within which the
flowers themselves could crumble to fragrant dust that would keep your
linen sweet for at least ten years from the day they were gathered.
We never felt the summer had really come till the 24th of June, when
the Feast of John the Baptist was kept in and around the Church of St.
John the Evangelist. On the eve the Piazza was always the scene of a
great fair, the only one held in Rome, during the whole year, except
that of the “Befana”[14] in the heart of winter, on the eve of the
Epiphany. Of course the “Eve of St. John” is the midsummer eve that
was regarded with special and superstitious veneration not only by the
pagans of Southern Europe, but by our own Teutonic and Scandinavian
ancestors as well, from the times of the Druids themselves; for all
it has been the festival of fire—because, I imagine, people wanted to
scare away the dead who are supposed to leave their graves and. revisit
their old haunts on that night, but still more, in the beginning of
man-made worships, to render homage to the sun at the moment of his
supreme triumph during those two or three days of midsummer. The
bonfires were the great feature of the Roman fair; scores of them were
lighted in the broad Piazza, and the boys and young men chased each
other through them, trying to clear the flames at a leap and screaming
out unintelligible old songs that probably served their ancestors
for charms. The Feast of St. John is the first day on which it is
considered safe to eat fresh figs, and the booths around the Piazza
were piled up with baskets of these. We used to get the big purple
ones, bursting with crimson syrup, some weeks earlier, but the Romans
do not consider them as real figs. They are called “Fior di fico”; the
pale green sort, with firm rose-coloured pulp and holding each its drop
of amber gum on the tip, is the real fig, and it stays with us right
through the summer. In Tuscany I used to climb into a fig tree (their
smooth bark and fat low branches afford delightful seats) and stay
there half the day, with a book, eating all I could desire of the ripe
fruit and quite forgetting the feast when dinner time came. But when
I was young the word “dyspepsia” had not crossed the Atlantic, and it
had never dawned on any of us that any one could possibly be upset by
such a trifle as mere food, whatever the kind or quantity indulged in!
Once, I remember, our faithful “O Sté” of Rocca di Papa was terribly
concerned because Marion, aged eight, whom he had conducted to the Fair
at Grotia Ferrata, had eaten, as the old man thought, a little too
voraciously. “The Signorino has frightened me,” he said tremblingly
to our governess as he restored the youngster to her in the evening.
“Twelve eggs and half a sucking pig he consumed for his dinner—I could
not stop him—but I pray that he may come to no harm!”
That excursion must have been made for the Feast of Sant’ Antonio, our
Blessed Saint Anthony of Padua, for, as it falls on the 13th of June,
it is the occasion of the sale of the first piglings of the season,
and everybody makes it a point of honour to eat roast sucking pig
on that day, unless he buys the little pinky white thing to fatten
for the winter. This is why, in some of the representations of St.
Anthony, there is a little pig lying at his feet. I saw a funny sight
in Sorrento once on the day of his feast. There were baby pigs for sale
everywhere, all along the deep lanes that intersect the Penisola, and
a young seminarist, in ecclesiastical hat and soutane, had made up his
mind to take one home as a present to his family. Anxiously he looked
at and felt of a dozen or so before he made his choice; then came
the bargaining for the price—half the fun to both buyer and seller.
The boy was of the country and knew just what he ought to pay; the
owner, seeing his costume, had taken him for a greenhorn and tried to
impose upon him; the duel was long and vivacious. At last the matter
was settled, the right sum paid, and then the seminarist undertook
to carry his fairing home. But the pig refused to go, and a much more
amusing duel than the first one took place before my eyes, the little
pig slipping away from its would-be captor’s hands and scuttling
off in a cloud of dust down the lane, the seminarist in pursuit, his
soutane flying, his three-cornered hat pushed back, his round young
face crimson with excitement, while the man who had sold him the animal
looked on in roars of laughter. Finally the pig was conquered, and
the last I saw of him was his wriggling hindquarters and curled-up
tail protruding from the folds of the cassock in which the boy had
rolled him up and tucked him under his arm, while he raced for home,
triumphant, yet fearful that the obstinate little beast would get the
best of him on the road.
One interest that generally came with the spring and early summer was
that of making the round of the studios, where the artists let their
friends look at the result of the year’s work before leaving town on
their vacation wanderings. Sometimes the studio and its surroundings
were more attractive than the productions it contained and then
it required some self-control to keep one’s eye, under the jealous
observation of the artist, on the canvases or the statues, instead
of on the view from the windows or the beautiful draperies and curios
which the wealthiest ones were even then beginning to collect around
them. This has always seemed to me to be a mistake. The old idea was
that the artist’s workshop should contain nothing unconnected with his
work or at any rate contributive to it. On entering the studio of a
modern successful artist one has to pinch oneself to make sure one is
not in a bric-à-brac establishment where spoils from all the curiosity
shops in Europe have been tumbled together in view of a quick sale.
There is none of the impressive space and concentration of purpose that
one felt in the old ascetic studio with its hard north light, its aged
painting table, its few seriously thought-out pictures, and its shoals
of preparatory drawings and sketches. There were no “studio teas” in
those days; the artist opened the door himself and told one frankly
whether the visit were well-timed or not; if he were prosperous his
one familiar, some humble “Giuseppe” or “Antonio,” came in at the end
of the day to wash the brushes and perhaps sweep the floor; most of
the time there were no chairs except one for the model and one for the
painter. But the atmosphere of work was there, and the respect for it
struck every one who crossed the threshold, so that voices were lowered
and even the most enthusiastic admiration very soberly expressed.
I always felt like an ignorant intruder when I had penetrated into one
of these sanctuaries, but there were some from which I could not keep
away. One belonged to Hébert, the then president of the French Academy
in Rome. He was a grave, dark-eyed man with a low voice and much
indulgence for youth and ignorance, and he never asked one for comments
or ideas—just let one stand before his glowing paintings and dream—as
his Madonnas seemed to dream—in silent happiness. Not that his superb
Armenian beauties were really Madonnas at all; their loveliness was
mysterious but not spiritual; the unfathomable eyes had seen all the
glory and the tragedy of earth, but they had never looked on Heaven;
the glowing cheeks had never paled with awe, the exquisite idle hands
could never have been folded in prayer. It was perfect beauty, but
beauty unbaptised, a type which might have served for a Cleopatra,
could Cleopatra have lived without sin, but never for Mary of Nazareth.
One year, I remember, Hébert had devoted all his time to one great
allegorical canvas, the Shunamite of the Canticle seeking news of
her Beloved from the maidens by the gate. The faint eastern dawn was
paling the sky and bringing out mistily a few features of the city
in the background, as a train of girls who had been to fetch water
were returning from the well. They were human girls, and had been
chattering gaily as they approached the gate; then the words died on
their lips, the foremost ones fell back, crowding those behind, for
they were met by the Shunamite, a maid in all the white beauty of first
youth, undraped, naked as truth, and pure as Eve on the morning of
her creation, her eyes shining with love through brimming tears, and
her hands stretched out entreatingly as she asked, “Have ye seen my
Beloved, ye daughters of Jerusalem?”
It was a strange picture; the thought was the same that Titian
expressed in his “Divine and Earthly Love,” which is, to me, the most
beautiful of his paintings. Hébert had got away from his own gorgeous
traditions altogether and had painted with true inspiration. The girl’s
body was like a slender reed of flame, just hovering on earth before
rising to Heaven.
There was every year an exhibition, at the French Academy, of the
work of the students, who, having won the “Prix de Rome” in Paris,
were privileged to study in Rome for three years at the expense of
the French Government. Unfortunately for the attractiveness of the
exhibition, it was incumbent on the students to introduce one or more
nude figures into their paintings to show what progress they were
making in anatomical drawing. The more zealous ones would sometimes
cover a fifteen-foot canvas with a crowd of nude warriors in every
stress of effort that the most violent conflict could call forth, the
copious bloodshed depicted demonstrating, to a thoughtful mind, the
young painter’s feelings towards the strict and exigent judges who were
to pronounce upon his merits. I remember a “Rape of the Sabines,” where
some rather dandified Roman robbers were taking no end of trouble to
possess themselves of a mob of huge, beefy viragos who were kicking and
struggling with all their might—creatures whom no practical man would
attempt for a moment to bring into his home.
But, once free from the drill of training, the French painters of
those days gave us some very charming and poetical productions. One
of my favourite artists was Hamon, a man whose fancies were usually
as delicate and elusive as thistledown floating on a moonbeam. He
saw everything through dawnlight or twilight; his nymphs and loves,
hovering over flowers, painting the morning-glories, sowing white
stars for lilies and golden ones for honeysuckles, were too ethereal
to be quite human, too alluring to be all spiritual—but exquisite
beyond words. Yet he too painted one serious picture which, once
seen, could never be forgotten. It was called “Le triste Rivage.” In
the foreground rolled the inky Styx, with Charon, sitting, dark and
saturninely indifferent, in his skiff, oars shipped ready to put out
as soon as the craft should be full. And to it, down a narrow canyon
between high granite walls, pressed a stream of humanity, old men and
youths, kings and pontiffs and beggars, mothers with their babies in
their arms, young beauties in all the pomp of silk and pearls, sages
with calm sapient eyes, and naked criminals dragging their chains,
not one conscious of any presence but his own—the awful loneliness of
death stamped on every face—yet all crowding and pushing forward to
the narrow beach and the waiting boat—every eye strained to catch some
glimpse of the land that lay, shrouded in darkness, on the other side.
It made one think.
Talking of pictures, I must speak of one that my sister and I saw
in Munich or Dresden, in 1867, I think, a year which was considered
remarkably rich in good modern exhibitions abroad—where, by the way,
the average was immeasurably higher than I ever found it at the Academy
shows in London. This that we fell in love with was a painting of a
Sphinx—a great white marble creature with globed breasts and a face
of bestial beauty, cold as ice. She crouched on her high pedestal in
a tangle of white roses flooded with moonlight. A young man, little
more than a boy, was falling back from her, his ashy face, sublime
in death, still transfigured with the mortal ecstasy of her kiss; and
her pitiless marble talons were yet clutching his body. I wish I could
remember the name of the painter. He must have been a true poet.