It is not often I am in a reminiscent mood. Even should the mood
come upon me, I can seldom indulge it. In this work-a-day world the
cares and duties of the present crowd out the memories of the past.
But ever as the blessed season of Christmas comes round the mind is
in a measure freed from the tyrant grasp of the present. And at the
approach of this festival mine loves to go back, swiftly overleaping
the barriers of space and time, to the dear old City on the Tiber,
where I spent five of the happiest years of my life. I can remember
as distinctly as though it were yesterday the day when first I set
foot in Rome. It was toward the end of October, 1879. The sun shone
out brightly from the deep blue of the Italian sky, and the soft,
balmy breath of summer still lingered in the air. From early morning
we had traversed a land of almost ideal loveliness, now skirting the
shores of the sparkling Mediterranean, now dashing past villas and
vineyards where the air was laden with the fragrance of the vintage.
The sun was slowly sinking in the west as we passed Civita Vecchia,
the seaport of Rome, and sped on our way through the dreary waste of
the Roman Campagna. Soon the Alban Hills loomed up in front, while
the line of sea-coast stretching away on the right was fast fading
from the view. There, where the Tiber flings its tawny waters into
the Mediterranean, once stood the City of Ostia, the ancient seaport
of Rome, facing, as every student of Virgil knows, in the far
distance, Carthage, Rome's most dreaded rival while yet she was
"dives opum studiisque asperrima belli."
And now we are within the city walls, the train draws up to the
depot, and I step forth, a stranger indeed, yet not with the feelings
of one who sets foot in a strange city: for Rome, though force has
made it the capital of United Italy, is and always will be the
capital of Christendom, the centre from which radiate the lights of
Catholicity over all the earth, and the home of the pilgrim from
every land.
One who goes from America into Europe realizes that to have crossed
the Atlantic is not merely to have left one part of the habitable
globe and gone into another. It is a passing from the New World into
the Old, in almost every respect a different world from the one that
is left behind. And in no place as at Rome is it brought home to one
who crosses the ocean that the Atlantic is not the only gulf that
divides these two worlds. Rome is the typical city of the Old World,
or rather is the Old World in miniature. There all its most striking
characteristics meet as they do in no other European city. There you
may study old world customs and the old world life in its many
phases, old world art and architecture, and above all those old-world
monuments and ruins around which gather a thousand historical
associations. Here rises the Palatine Hill, the original site and
centre of the embryo mistress of the world, where tradition places
the dwelling of Romulus, and where later stood the gorgeous palace of
the Caesars, whose ruins still attest its old-time grandeur. Below
is the Roman Forum which once rang with the eloquence of Cicero, and
traversing it from north to south, the Via Sacra or Sacred Way. At
one end of the Forum is the Mamertine Prison, a dark and dismal
underground dungeon, where kings led captive by pagan Rome were
strangled or starved to death, and where still exists the spring
which, according to tradition, St. Peter, imprisoned here under Nero,
miraculously caused to flow in order to baptize his jailers. At some
distance to the south stands the Colosseum, nearly one-third of a
mile in circumference, and originally containing seats for 87,000
spectators. Here, in the arena, the scene of gladiatorial combats,
thousands of Christian martyrs fought the good fight and won the
crown. A quaint prophetic saying, which dates from the 8th century,
has it that
While stands the Colosseum, Rome shall stand,
When falls the Colosseum, Rome shall fall,
And when Rome falls, with it shall fall the World.
But I should never end if I were to speak of all the monuments of
both Pagan and Christian Antiquity that make Rome the connecting link
between the ancient and the modern world.
The Rome of to-day is not the Rome of twenty years ago. The tourist
who wandered and mused among the ruins in and around it then would
scarcely know it now, so vast is the change that has come over it.
Your matter-of-fact modern man, who scowls at antiquity and lives in
and for the present only, would say that the change has been greatly
for the better. Streets have been widened and straightened,
numberless new ones have been opened, and the wide space east and
south of the Esquiline Hill, once studded with venerable ruins, is
now occupied by rows of huge brick buildings, inferior in make and
unsightly. In a word, the old Rome, amid whose magnificent ruins
still abode the genius of Antiquity, has all but disappeared, and the
new Rome, a third-rate modern city, shorn of much of its historical
interest, has usurped its place. "Rome in twenty or thirty years,"
wrote Mr. Frederick Harrison recently in the "Fortnightly Review,"
"has become like any other European city--big, noisy, vulgar,
overgrown, Frenchified and syndicate-ridden."
Rome, Rome thou art no more
As thou hast been!
On thy seven hills of yore
Thou sat'st a queen.
Newman had written of it, on visiting it for the first time in the
early thirties of last century: "And now what can I say of Rome, but
that it is the first of all cities, and that all I ever saw are but
as dust (even dear old Oxford inclusive) compared with its majesty
and glory?" It has certainly since then lost much of its charm for
the tourist and the antiquarian. But the majesty and glory that so
impressed Newman--these no spoiler's hand can pluck from the brow of
the queenly city on the Tiber.
It is not merely the glamour antiquity throws around it that makes
Rome a centre of attraction. In the wondrous works of art gathered
into it from every side, in the number and magnificence of its
churches and shrines, in the prestige it possesses as the capital of
the Christian world for eighteen hundred years, it stands peerless
among the cities of the earth. Anything like a detailed account of
the art treasures in the Vatican alone would fill volumes. Almost
every church in Rome, too, and every palace, has its works of art,
its paintings, mosaics, and sculptures, of priceless value. And as
for the churches, no words can fittingly describe them. "They could
not have been in any place but Rome, which has turned the materials
and buildings of the Empire to the purposes of religion." The
exterior, save in the case of the large basilicas, is not striking;
their beauty, like the glory of the king's daughter, is within. St.
Peter's, of course, stands apart from and above them all, a world of
wonders in itself. The first visit does not reveal its vastness nor
the exquisite grace and delicacy of its proportions. It is only by
visiting it again and again that one can, so to speak, take it all
in, if indeed one can ever do so. There is this peculiarity about
it, too, that it has what, for want of a better word to convey the
idea, I am tempted to call a climate of its own. In winter, when
Rome is swept by the tramontana, a penetrating and chilling wind
which blows for days at a time from the snow-capped Apennines, making
life scarce worth living in the fireless apartments of the Roman
dwellings, you will find warmth and comfort within St. Peter's. And
in vain will you seek amid the shady groves of the Roman villas for a
tithe of the delicious coolness that dwells within the charmed circle
of its walls all through the broiling heat of the summer months in
Rome.
And what of the festival of Christmas in the Eternal City? In
September, 1870, Victor Emmanuel's troops entered Rome by the breach
of Porta Pia, and with their coming in the old-time Christmas and the
old-time Easter went out. The faithful Romans have not had a Merry
Christmas since. The Pope used to proceed in person to celebrate the
midnight Mass at St. Mary Major's, where is preserved the Crib in
which the Infant Saviour was laid on the night of His Nativity. With
the exception of the Easter celebrations, it was the most imposing
ceremony that could be witnessed at Rome in those days. The
Saviour's Crib is always borne in procession through the church of
St. Mary Major's on Christmas Eve. In some of the churches, and even
in private houses, the scene of the Christ Child's birth in Bethlehem
is represented in a wonderfully artistic and life-like way. One of
these representations, which are got up mainly for the children, is
to be seen in the church of Santa Maria in Aracoeli, situated on the
Capitoline Hill, where once stood a temple of Jove. Hither we
students of the Propaganda used to wend our way, during the days
within the octave of Christmas, to listen to the "children preachers
of Aracoeli." These little ones, from five to ten years of age,
standing on a platform facing the Christmas Crib, lifted their fresh
young voices in greeting and prayer to their new-born King. It
recalled the scene described in Matt. 21:15-16: the children crying
in the temple, "Hosanna to the Son of David," and Jesus saying to
those who would rebuke them, "Yea, have you never read, Out of the
mouths of infants and sucklings thou has perfected praise."