I shall always remember the first I took: out of the Porta del Popolo,
to where the Ponte Molle, whose single arch sustains a weight of
historic tradition, compels the sallow Tiber to flow between its four
great-mannered ecclesiastical statues, over the crest of the hill and
along the old posting-road to Florence. It was mild midwinter, the
season peculiarly of colour on the Roman Campagna; and the light was
full of that mellow purple glow, that tempered intensity, which haunts
the after-visions of those who have known Rome like the memory of some
supremely irresponsible pleasure. An hour away I pulled up and at the
edge of a meadow gazed away for some time into remoter distances. Then
and there, it seemed to me, I measured the deep delight of knowing
the Campagna. But I saw more things in it than I can easily tell. The
country rolled away around me into slopes and dells of long-drawn
grace, chequered with purple and blue and blooming brown. The lights and
shadows were at play on the Sabine Mountains--an alternation of tones
so exquisite as to be conveyed only by some fantastic comparison to
sapphire and amber. In the foreground a contadino in his cloak and
peaked hat jogged solitary on his ass; and here and there in the
distance, among blue undulations, some white village, some grey tower,
helped deliciously to make the picture the typical “Italian landscape”
of old-fashioned art. It was so bright and yet so sad, so still and yet
so charged, to the supersensuous ear, with the murmur of an extinguished
life, that you could only say it was intensely and adorably strange,
could only impute to the whole overarched scene an unsurpassed
secret for bringing tears of appreciation to no matter how
ignorant--archaeologically ignorant--eyes. To ride once, in these
conditions, is of course to ride again and to allot to the Campagna a
generous share of the time one spends in Rome.
It is a pleasure that doubles one’s horizon, and one can scarcely say
whether it enlarges or limits one’s impression of the city proper. It
certainly makes St. Peter’s seem a trifle smaller and blunts the edge of
one’s curiosity in the Forum. It must be the effect of the experience,
at all extended, that when you think of Rome afterwards you will think
still respectfully and regretfully enough of the Vatican and the Pincio,
the streets and the picture-making street life; but will even more
wonder, with an irrepressible contraction of the heart, when again you
shall feel yourself bounding over the flower-smothered turf, or pass
from one framed picture to another beside the open arches of the
crumbling aqueducts. You look back at the City so often from some grassy
hill-top--hugely compact within its walls, with St. Peter’s overtopping
all things and yet seeming small, and the vast girdle of marsh and
meadow receding on all sides to the mountains and the sea--that you come
to remember it at last as hardly more than a respectable parenthesis in
a great sweep of generalisation. Within the walls, on the other hand,
you think of your intended ride as the most romantic of all your
possibilities; of the Campagna generally as an illimitable experience.
One’s rides certainly give Rome an inordinate scope for the
reflective--by which I suppose I mean after all the aesthetic and the
“esoteric”--life. To dwell in a city which, much as you grumble at
it, is after all very fairly a modern city; with crowds and shops and
theatres and cafes and balls and receptions and dinner-parties, and all
the modern confusion of social pleasures and pains; to have at your
door the good and evil of it all; and yet to be able in half an hour to
gallop away and leave it a hundred miles, a hundred years, behind, and
to look at the tufted broom glowing on a lonely tower-top in the still
blue air, and the pale pink asphodels trembling none the less for the
stillness, and the shaggy-legged shepherds leaning on their sticks in
motionless brotherhood with the heaps of ruin, and the scrambling goats
and staggering little kids treading out wild desert smells from the
top of hollow-sounding mounds; and then to come back through one of the
great gates and a couple of hours later find yourself in the “world,”
dressed, introduced, entertained, inquiring, talking about “Middlemarch”
to a young English lady or listening to Neapolitan songs from a
gentleman in a very low-cut shirt--all this is to lead in a manner a
double life and to gather from the hurrying hours more impressions than
a mind of modest capacity quite knows how to dispose of.
I touched lately upon this theme with a friend who, I fancied, would
understand me, and who immediately assured me that he had just spent a
day that this mingled diversity of sensation made to the days one spends
elsewhere what an uncommonly good novel may be to the daily paper.
“There was an air of idleness about it, if you will,” he said, “and it
was certainly pleasant enough to have been wrong. Perhaps, being after
all unused to long stretches of dissipation, this was why I had a
half-feeling that I was reading an odd chapter in the history of a
person very much more of a _héros de roman_ than myself.” Then he
proceeded to relate how he had taken a long ride with a lady whom he
extremely admired. “We turned off from the Tor di Quinto Road to that
castellated farm-house you know of--once a Ghibelline fortress--whither
Claude Lorraine used to come to paint pictures of which the surrounding
landscape is still so artistically, so compositionally, suggestive. We
went into the inner court, a cloister almost, with the carven capitals
of its loggia columns, and looked at a handsome child swinging shyly
against the half-opened door of a room whose impenetrable shadow, behind
her, made her, as it were, a sketch in bituminous water-colours. We
talked with the farmer, a handsome, pale, fever-tainted fellow with a
well-to-do air that didn’t in the least deter his affability from a turn
compatible with the acceptance of small coin; and then we galloped away
and away over the meadows which stretch with hardly a break to Veii. The
day was strangely delicious, with a cool grey sky and just a touch of
moisture in the air stirred by our rapid motion. The Campagna, in the
colourless even light, was more solemn and romantic than ever; and a
ragged shepherd, driving a meagre straggling flock, whom we stopped to
ask our way of, was a perfect type of pastoral, weather-beaten misery.
He was precisely the shepherd for the foreground of a scratchy etching.
There were faint odours of spring in the air, and the grass here and
there was streaked with great patches of daisies; but it was spring
with a foreknowledge of autumn, a day to be enjoyed with a substrain of
sadness, the foreboding of regret, a day somehow to make one feel as if
one had seen and felt a great deal--quite, as I say, like a _heros
de roman_. Touching such characters, it was the illustrious Pelham,
I think, who, on being asked if he rode, replied that he left those
violent exercises to the ladies. But under such a sky, in such an
air, over acres of daisied turf, a long, long gallop is certainly
a supersubtle joy. The elastic bound of your horse is the poetry
of motion; and if you are so happy as to add to it not the prose of
companionship riding comes almost to affect you as a spiritual exercise.
My gallop, at any rate,” said my friend, “threw me into a mood which
gave an extraordinary zest to the rest of the day.” He was to go to a
dinner-party at a villa on the edge of Rome, and Madam X--, who was also
going, called for him in her carriage. “It was a long drive,” he went
on, “through the Forum, past the Colosseum. She told me a long story
about a most interesting person. Toward the end my eyes caught through
the carriage window a slab of rugged sculptures. We were passing under
the Arch of Constantine. In the hall pavement of the villa is a rare
antique mosaic--one of the largest and most perfect; the ladies on their
way to the drawing-room trail over it the flounces of Worth. We drove
home late, and there’s my day.”
On your exit from most of the gates of Rome you have generally
half-an-hour’s progress through winding lanes, many of which are hardly
less charming than the open meadows. On foot the walls and high hedges
would vex you and spoil your walk; but in the saddle you generally
overtop them, to an endless peopling of the minor vision. Yet a Roman
wall in the springtime is for that matter almost as interesting as
anything it conceals. Crumbling grain by grain, coloured and mottled
to a hundred tones by sun and storm, with its rugged structure of brick
extruding through its coarse complexion of peeling stucco, its creeping
lacework of wandering ivy starred with miniature violets, and its wild
fringe of stouter flowers against the sky--it is as little as possible a
blank partition; it is practically a luxury of landscape. At the moment
at which I write, in mid-April, all the ledges and cornices are wreathed
with flaming poppies, nodding there as if they knew so well what faded
greys and yellows are an offset to their scarlet. But the best point in
a dilapidated enclosing surface of vineyard or villa is of course the
gateway, lifting its great arch of cheap rococo scroll-work, its balls
and shields and mossy dish-covers--as they always perversely figure
to me--and flanked with its dusky cypresses. I never pass one without
taking out my mental sketch-book and jotting it down as a vignette in
the insubstantial record of my ride. They are as sad and dreary as if
they led to the moated grange where Mariana waited in desperation for
something to happen; and it’s easy to take the usual inscription over
the porch as a recommendation to those who enter to renounce all hope of
anything but a glass of more or less agreeably acrid _vino romano_. For
what you chiefly see over the walls and at the end of the straight short
avenue of rusty cypresses are the appurtenances of a _vigna_--a couple
of acres of little upright sticks blackening in the sun, and a vast
sallow-faced, scantily windowed mansion, whose expression denotes
little of the life of the mind beyond what goes to the driving of a hard
bargain over the tasted hogsheads. If Mariana is there she certainly has
no pile of old magazines to beguile her leisure. The life of the mind,
if the term be in any application here not ridiculous, appears to any
asker of curious questions, as he wanders about Rome, the very thinnest
deposit of the past. Within the rococo gateway, which itself has a
vaguely esthetic self-consciousness, at the end of the cypress walk,
you will probably see a mythological group in rusty marble--a Cupid and
Psyche, a Venus and Paris, an Apollo and Daphne--the relic of an age
when a Roman proprietor thought it fine to patronise the arts. But I
imagine you are safe in supposing it to constitute the only allusion
savouring of culture that has been made on the premises for three or
four generations.
There is a franker cheerfulness--though certainly a proper amount of
that forlornness which lurks about every object to which the Campagna
forms a background--in the primitive little taverns where, on the
homeward stretch, in the waning light, you are often glad to rein up and
demand a bottle of their best. Their best and their worst are indeed
the same, though with a shifting price, and plain _vino bianco_ or _vino
rosso_ (rarely both) is the sole article of refreshment in which they
deal. There is a ragged bush over the door, and within, under a dusky
vault, on crooked cobble-stones, sit half-a-dozen contadini in their
indigo jackets and goatskin breeches and with their elbows on the table.
There is generally a rabble of infantile beggars at the door, pretty
enough in their dusty rags, with their fine eyes and intense Italian
smile, to make you forget your private vow of doing your individual best
I to make these people, whom you like so much, unlearn their old vices.
Was Porta Pia bombarded three years ago that Peppino should still grow
up to whine for a copper? But the Italian shells had no direct message
for Peppino’s stomach--and you are going to a dinner-party at a villa.
So Peppino “points” an instant for the copper in the dust and grows up a
Roman beggar. The whole little place represents the most primitive form
of hostelry; but along any of the roads leading out of the city you may
find establishments of a higher type, with Garibaldi, superbly mounted
and foreshortened, painted on the wall, or a lady in a low-necked dress
opening a fictive lattice with irresistible hospitality, and a yard with
the classic vine-wreathed arbour casting thin shadows upon benches and
tables draped and cushioned with the white dust from which the highways
from the gates borrow most of their local colour. None the less, I
say, you avoid the highroads, and, if you are a person of taste, don’t
grumble at the occasional need of following the walls of the city. City
walls, to a properly constituted American, can never be an object of
indifference; and it is emphatically “no end of a sensation” to pace in
the shadow of this massive cincture of Rome. I have found myself, as I
skirted its base, talking of trivial things, but never without a sudden
reflection on the deplorable impermanence of first impressions. A
twelvemonth ago the raw plank fences of a Boston suburb, inscribed with
the virtues of healing drugs, bristled along my horizon: now I glance
with idle eyes at a compacted antiquity in which a more learned sense
may read portentous dates and signs--Servius, Aurelius, Honorius. But
even to idle eyes the prodigious, the continuous thing bristles with
eloquent passages. In some places, where the huge brickwork is black
with time and certain strange square towers look down at you with still
blue eyes, the Roman sky peering through lidless loopholes, and there is
nothing but white dust in the road and solitude in the air, I might take
myself for a wandering Tartar touching on the confines of the Celestial
Empire. The wall of China must have very much such a gaunt robustness.
The colour of the Roman ramparts is everywhere fine, and their rugged
patchwork has been subdued by time and weather into a mellow harmony
that the brush only asks to catch up. On the northern side of the city,
behind the Vatican, St. Peter’s and the Trastevere, I have seen them
glowing in the late afternoon with the tones of ancient bronze and rusty
gold. Here at various points they are embossed with the Papal insignia,
the tiara with its flying bands and crossed keys; to the high style
of which the grace that attaches to almost any lost cause--even if not
quite the “tender” grace of a day that is dead--considerably adds a
style. With the dome of St. Peter’s resting on their cornice and the
hugely clustered architecture of the Vatican rising from them as from a
terrace, they seem indeed the valid bulwark of an ecclesiastical city.
Vain bulwark, alas! sighs the sentimental tourist, fresh from the meagre
entertainment of this latter Holy Week. But he may find monumental
consolation in this neighbourhood at a source where, as I pass, I never
fail to apply for it. At half-an-hour’s walk beyond Porta San Pancrazio,
beneath the wall of the Villa Doria, is a delightfully pompous
ecclesiastical gateway of the seventeenth century, erected by Paul V to
commemorate his restoration of the aqueducts through which the stream
bearing his name flows towards the fine florid portico protecting its
clear-sheeted outgush on the crest of the Janiculan. It arches across
the road in the most ornamental manner of the period, and one can hardly
pause before it without seeming to assist at a ten minutes’ revival of
old Italy--without feeling as if one were in a cocked hat and sword and
were coming up to Rome, in another mood than Luther’s, with a letter of
recommendation to the mistress of a cardinal.
The Campagna differs greatly on the two sides of the Tiber; and it is
hard to say which, for the rider, has the greater charm. The half-dozen
rides you may take from Porta San Giovanni possess the perfection of
traditional Roman interest and lead you through a far-strewn wilderness
of ruins--a scattered maze of tombs and towers and nameless fragments of
antique masonry. The landscape here has two great features; close before
you on one side is the long, gentle swell of the Alban Hills, deeply,
fantastically blue in most weathers, and marbled with the vague white
masses of their scattered towns and villas. It would be difficult to
draw the hard figure to a softer curve than that with which the heights
sweep from Albano to the plain; this a perfect example of the classic
beauty of line in the Italian landscape--that beauty which, when it
fills the background of a picture, makes us look in the foreground for
a broken column couched upon flowers and a shepherd piping to dancing
nymphs. At your side, constantly, you have the broken line of the
Claudian Aqueduct, carrying its broad arches far away into the plain.
The meadows along which it lies are not the smoothest in the world for
a gallop, but there is no pleasure greater than to wander near it. It
stands knee-deep in the flower-strewn grass, and its rugged piers are
hung with ivy as the columns of a church are draped for a festa. Every
archway is a picture, massively framed, of the distance beyond--of the
snow-tipped Sabines and lonely Soracte. As the spring advances the whole
Campagna smiles and waves with flowers; but I think they are nowhere
more rank and lovely than in the shifting shadow of the aqueducts, where
they muffle the feet of the columns and smother the half-dozen brooks
which wander in and out like silver meshes between the legs of a file
of giants. They make a niche for themselves too in every crevice and
tremble on the vault of the empty conduits. The ivy hereabouts in the
springtime is peculiarly brilliant and delicate; and though it cloaks
and muffles these Roman fragments far less closely than the castles
and abbeys of England it hangs with the light elegance of all Italian
vegetation. It is partly doubtless because their mighty outlines are
still unsoftened that the aqueducts are so impressive. They seem
the very source of the solitude in which they stand; they look like
architectural spectres and loom through the light mists of their grassy
desert, as you recede along the line, with the same insubstantial
vastness as if they rose out of Egyptian sands. It is a great
neighbourhood of ruins, many of which, it must be confessed, you have
applauded in many an album. But station a peasant with sheepskin
coat and bandaged legs in the shadow of a tomb or tower best known to
drawing-room art, and scatter a dozen goats on the mound above him, and
the picture has a charm which has not yet been sketched away.
The other quarter of the Campagna has wider fields and smoother turf and
perhaps a greater number of delightful rides; the earth is sounder, and
there are fewer pitfalls and ditches. The land for the most part lies
higher and catches more wind, and the grass is here and there for great
stretches as smooth and level as a carpet. You have no Alban Mountains
before you, but you have in the distance the waving ridge of the nearer
Apennines, and west of them, along the course of the Tiber, the long
seaward level of deep-coloured fields, deepening as they recede to the
blue and purple of the sea itself. Beyond them, of a very clear day,
you may see the glitter of the Mediterranean. These are the occasions
perhaps to remember most fondly, for they lead you to enchanting nooks,
and the landscape has details of the highest refinement. Indeed when my
sense reverts to the lingering impressions of so blest a time, it seems
a fool’s errand to have attempted to express them, and a waste of words
to do more than recommend the reader to go citywards at twilight of the
end of March, making for Porta Cavalleggieri, and note what he sees. At
this hour the Campagna is to the last point its melancholy self, and
I remember roadside “effects” of a strange and intense suggestiveness.
Certain mean, mouldering villas behind grass-grown courts have an
indefinably sinister look; there was one in especial of which it was
impossible not to argue that a despairing creature must have once
committed suicide there, behind bolted door and barred window, and that
no one has since had the pluck to go in and see why he never came out.
Every wayside mark of manners, of history, every stamp of the past in
the country about Rome, touches my sense to a thrill, and I may thus
exaggerate the appeal of very common things. This is the more likely
because the appeal seems ever to rise out of heaven knows what depths
of ancient trouble. To delight in the aspects of _sentient_ ruin might
appear a heartless pastime, and the pleasure, I confess, shows the note
of perversity. The sombre and the hard are as common an influence from
southern things as the soft and the bright, I think; sadness rarely
fails to assault a northern observer when he misses what he takes for
comfort. Beauty is no compensation for the loss, only making it more
poignant. Enough beauty of climate hangs over these Roman cottages and
farm-houses--beauty of light, of atmosphere and of vegetation; but their
charm for the maker-out of the stories in things is the way the golden
air shows off their desolation. Man lives more with Nature in Italy than
in New or than in Old England; she does more work for him and gives
him more holidays than in our short-summered climes, and his home is
therefore much more bare of devices for helping him to do without her,
forget her and forgive her. These reflections are perhaps the source of
the character you find in a moss-coated stone stairway climbing outside
of a wall; in a queer inner court, befouled with rubbish and drearily
bare of convenience; in an ancient quaintly carven well, worked with
infinite labour from an overhanging window; in an arbour of time-twisted
vines under which you may sit with your feet in the dirt and remember
as a dim fable that there are races for which the type of domestic
allurement is the parlour hearth-rug. For reasons apparent or otherwise
these things amuse me beyond expression, and I am never weary of staring
into gateways, of lingering by dreary, shabby, half-barbaric farm-yards,
of feasting a foolish gaze on sun-cracked plaster and unctuous indoor
shadows. I mustn’t forget, however, that it’s not for wayside effects
that one rides away behind St. Peter’s, but for the strong sense
of wandering over boundless space, of seeing great classic lines of
landscape, of watching them dispose themselves into pictures so full of
“style” that you can think of no painter who deserves to have you admit
that they suggest him--hardly knowing whether it is better pleasure
to gallop far and drink deep of air and grassy distance and the whole
delicious opportunity, or to walk and pause and linger, and try and
grasp some ineffaceable memory of sky and colour and outline. Your
pace can hardly help falling into a contemplative measure at the time,
everywhere so wonderful, but in Rome so persuasively divine, when the
winter begins palpably to soften and quicken. Far out on the Campagna,
early in February, you feel the first vague earthly emanations, which
in a few weeks come wandering into the heart of the city and throbbing
through the close, dark streets. Springtime in Rome is an immensely
poetic affair; but you must stand often far out in the ancient waste,
between grass and sky, to measure its deep, full, steadily accelerated
rhythm. The winter has an incontestable beauty, and is pre-eminently the
time of colour--the time when it is no affectation, but homely verity,
to talk about the “purple” tone of the atmosphere. As February comes and
goes your purple is streaked with green and the rich, dark bloom of the
distance begins to lose its intensity. But your loss is made up by other
gains; none more precious than that inestimable gain to the ear--the
disembodied voice of the lark. It comes with the early flowers, the
white narcissus and the cyclamen, the half-buried violets and the pale
anemones, and makes the whole atmosphere ring like a vault of tinkling
glass. You never see the source of the sound, and are utterly unable to
localise his note, which seems to come from everywhere at once, to be
some hundred-throated voice of the air. Sometimes you fancy you just
catch him, a mere vague spot against the blue, an intenser throb in the
universal pulsation of light. As the weeks go on the flowers multiply
and the deep blues and purples of the hills, turning to azure and
violet, creep higher toward the narrowing snow-line of the Sabines. The
temperature rises, the first hour of your ride you feel the heat, but
you beguile it with brushing the hawthorn-blossoms as you pass along the
hedges, and catching at the wild rose and honeysuckle; and when you get
into the meadows there is stir enough in the air to lighten the dead
weight of the sun. The Roman air, however, is not a tonic medicine, and
it seldom suffers exercise to be all exhilarating. It has always
seemed to me indeed part of the charm of the latter that your keenest
consciousness is haunted with a vague languor. Occasionally when the
sirocco blows that sensation becomes strange and exquisite. Then, under
the grey sky, before the dim distances which the south-wind mostly
brings with it, you seem to ride forth into a world from which all
hope has departed and in which, in spite of the flowers that make your
horse’s footfalls soundless, nothing is left save some queer probability
that your imagination is unable to measure, but from which it hardly
shrinks. This quality in the Roman element may now and then “relax”
you almost to ecstasy; but a season of sirocco would be an overdose of
morbid pleasure. You may at any rate best feel the peculiar beauty of
the Campagna on those mild days of winter when the mere quality and
temper of the sunshine suffice to move the landscape to joy, and you
pause on the brown grass in the sunny stillness and, by listening long
enough, almost fancy you hear the shrill of the midsummer cricket. It
is detail and ornament that vary from month to month, from week to
week even, and make your returns to the same places a constant feast
of unexpectedness; but the great essential features of the prospect
preserve throughout the year the same impressive serenity. Soracte, be
it January or May, rises from its blue horizon like an island from the
sea and with an elegance of contour which no mood of the year can deepen
or diminish. You know it well; you have seen it often in the mellow
backgrounds of Claude; and it has such an irresistibly classic, academic
air that while you look at it you begin to take your saddle for a
faded old arm-chair in a palace gallery. A month’s rides in different
directions will show you a dozen prime Claudes. After I had seen them
all I went piously to the Doria gallery to refresh my memory of its
two famous specimens and to enjoy to the utmost their delightful air of
reference to something that had become a part of my personal experience.
Delightful it certainly is to feel the common element in one’s own
sensibility and those of a genius whom that element has helped to do
great things. Claude must have haunted the very places of one’s personal
preference and adjusted their divine undulations to his splendid scheme
of romance, his view of the poetry of life. He was familiar with aspects
in which there wasn’t a single uncompromising line. I saw a few days ago
a small finished sketch from his hand, in the possession of an American
artist, which was almost startling in its clear reflection of forms
unaltered by the two centuries that have dimmed and cracked the paint
and canvas.
This unbroken continuity of the impressions I have tried to indicate is
an excellent example of the intellectual background of all enjoyment in
Rome. It effectually prevents pleasure from becoming vulgar, for your
sensation rarely begins and ends with itself; it reverberates--it
recalls, commemorates, resuscitates something else. At least half the
merit of everything you enjoy must be that it suits you absolutely; but
the larger half here is generally that it has suited some one else and
that you can never flatter yourself you have discovered it. It has been
addressed to some use a million miles out of your range, and has had
great adventures before ever condescending to please you. It was in
admission of this truth that my discriminating friend who showed me the
Claudes found it impossible to designate a certain delightful region
which you enter at the end of an hour’s riding from Porta Cavalleggieri
as anything but Arcadia. The exquisite correspondence of the term in
this case altogether revived its faded bloom; here veritably the oaten
pipe must have stirred the windless air and the satyrs have laughed
among the brookside reeds. Three or four long grassy dells stretch away
in a chain between low hills over which delicate trees are so discreetly
scattered that each one is a resting place for a shepherd. The elements
of the scene are simple enough, but the composition has extraordinary
refinement. By one of those happy chances which keep observation in
Italy always in her best humour a shepherd had thrown himself down under
one of the trees in the very attitude of Meliboeus. He had been washing
his feet, I suppose, in the neighbouring brook, and had found it
pleasant afterwards to roll his short breeches well up on his thighs.
Lying thus in the shade, on his elbow, with his naked legs stretched out
on the turf and his soft peaked hat over his long hair crushed back
like the veritable bonnet of Arcady, he was exactly the figure of the
background of this happy valley. The poor fellow, lying there in
rustic weariness and ignorance, little fancied that he was a symbol of
old-world meanings to new-world eyes.
Such eyes may find as great a store of picturesque meanings in the
cork-woods of Monte Mario, tenderly loved of all equestrians. These are
less severely pastoral than our Arcadia, and you might more properly
lodge there a damosel of Ariosto than a nymph of Theocritus. Among them
is strewn a lovely wilderness of flowers and shrubs, and the whole place
has such a charming woodland air, that, casting about me the other day
for a compliment, I declared that it reminded me of New Hampshire. My
compliment had a double edge, and I had no sooner uttered it than I
smiled--or sighed--to perceive in all the undiscriminated botany about
me the wealth of detail, the idle elegance and grace of Italy alone, the
natural stamp of the land which has the singular privilege of making one
love her unsanctified beauty all but as well as those features of one’s
own country toward which nature’s small allowance doubles that of one’s
own affection. For this effect of casting a spell no rides have more
value than those you take in Villa Doria or Villa Borghese; or don’t
take, possibly, if you prefer to reserve these particular regions--the
latter in especial--for your walking hours. People do ride, however,
in both villas, which deserve honourable mention in this regard. Villa
Doria, with its noble site, its splendid views, its great groups of
stone-pines, so clustered and yet so individual, its lawns and flowers
and fountains, its altogether princely disposition, is a place where one
may pace, well mounted, of a brilliant day, with an agreeable sense of
its being rather a more elegant pastime to balance in one’s stirrups
than to trudge on even the smoothest gravel. But at Villa Borghese
the walkers have the best of it; for they are free of those adorable
outlying corners and bosky byways which the rumble of barouches never
reaches. In March the place becomes a perfect epitome of the spring.
You cease to care much for the melancholy greenness of the disfeatured
statues which has been your chief winter’s intimation of verdure; and
before you are quite conscious of the tender streaks and patches in the
great quaint grassy arena round which the Propaganda students, in their
long skirts, wander slowly, like dusky seraphs revolving the gossip of
Paradise, you spy the brave little violets uncapping their azure brows
beneath the high-stemmed pines. One’s walks here would take us too far,
and one’s pauses detain us too long, when in the quiet parts under
the wall one comes across a group of charming small school-boys in
full-dress suits and white cravats, shouting over their play in clear
Italian, while a grave young priest, beneath a tree, watches them over
the top of his book. It sounds like nothing, but the force behind it and
the frame round it, the setting, the air, the chord struck, make it a
hundred wonderful things.
1873.