ROME, _2d June, 1874_.
Ah if you were but among the marbles here, though there are none finer
than that you so strangely discerned in my study; but they are as a
white company innumerable, ghost after ghost. And how you would
rejoice in them and in a thousand things besides, to which I am dead,
from having seen too much or worked too painfully--or, worst of all,
lost the hope which gives all life.
Last Sunday I was in a lost church found again,--a church of the
second or third century, dug in a green hill of the Campagna, built
underground;--its secret entrance like a sand-martin's nest. Such the
temple of the Lord, as the King Solomon of that time had to build it;
not "the mountains of the Lord's house shall be established above the
hills," but the cave of the Lord's house as the fox's hole, beneath
them.
And here, now lighted by the sun for the first time (for they are
still digging the earth from the steps), are the marbles of those
early Christian days; the first efforts of their new hope to show
itself in enduring record, the new hope of a Good Shepherd:--there
they carved Him, with a spring flowing at His feet, and round Him the
cattle of the Campagna in which they had dug their church, the very
self-same goats which this morning have been trotting past my window
through the most populous streets of Rome, innocently following their
shepherd, tinkling their bells, and shaking their long spiral horns
and white beards; the very same dew-lapped cattle which were that
Sunday morning feeding on the hillside above, carved on the
tomb-marbles sixteen hundred years ago.
How you would have liked to see it, Susie!
And now to-day I am going to work in an eleventh century church of
quite proud and victorious Christianity, with its grand bishops and
saints lording it over Italy. The bishop's throne all marble and
mosaic of precious colors and of gold, high under the vaulted roof at
the end behind the altar; and line upon line of pillars of massive
porphyry and marble, gathered out of the ruins of the temples of the
great race who had persecuted them, till they had said to the hills,
Cover us, like the wicked. And then _their_ proud time came, and their
enthronement on the seven hills; and now, what is to be their fate
once more?--of pope and cardinal and dome, Peter's or Paul's by name
only,--"My house, no more a house of prayer, but a den of thieves."
I can't write any more this morning. Oh me, if one could only write
and draw all one wanted, and have our Susies and be young again,
oneself and they! (As if there were two Susies, or _could_ be!)
Ever my one Susie's very loving
J. RUSKIN.
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