One Sunday afternoon we went with some artistic friends to visit the
studio of the great German painter, Overbeck; and since I first read
Uhland I have known no pleasure so illogical as I felt in looking at
this painter's drawings. In the sensuous heart of objective Italy he
treats the themes of mediæval Catholicism with the most subjective
feeling, and I thought I perceived in his work the enthusiasm which
led many Protestant German painters and poets of the romantic school
back into the twilight of the Romish faith, in the hope that they
might thus realize to themselves something of the earnestness which
animated the elder Christian artists. Overbeck's work is beautiful,
but it is unreal, and expresses the sentiment of no time; as the work
of the romantic German poets seems without relation to any world men
ever lived in.
Walking from the painter's house, two of us parted with the rest
on the steps of the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore, and pursued our
stroll through the gate of San Lorenzo out upon the Campagna, which
tempts and tempts the sojourner at Rome, until at last he must go
and see--if it will give him the fever. And, alas! there I caught the
Roman fever--the longing that burns one who has once been in Rome to
go again--that will not be cured by all the cool contemptuous things
he may think or say of the Eternal City; that fills him with fond
memories of its fascination, and makes it forever desired.
We walked far down the dusty road beyond the city walls, and then
struck out from the highway across the wild meadows of the Campagna.
They were weedy and desolate, seamed by shaggy grass-grown ditches,
and deeply pitted with holes made in search for catacombs. There was
here and there a farm-house amid the wide lonesomeness, but oftener
a round, hollow, roofless tomb, from which the dust and memory of the
dead had long been blown away, and through the top of which--fringed
and overhung with grasses, and opening like a great eye--the evening
sky looked marvelously sad. One of the fields was full of grim,
wide-horned cattle, and in another there were four or five buffaloes
lying down and chewing their cuds,--holding their heads horizontally
in the air, and with an air of gloomy wickedness which nothing could
exceed in their cruel black eyes, glancing about in visible pursuit
of some object to toss and gore. There were also many canebrakes,
in which the wind made a mournful rustling after the sun had set in
golden glitter on the roofs of the Roman churches and the transparent
night had fallen upon the scene.
In all our ramble we met not a soul, and I scarcely know what it is
makes this walk upon the Campagna one of my vividest recollections
of Rome, unless it be the opportunity it gave me to weary myself upon
that many-memoried ground as freely as if it had been a woods-pasture
in Ohio. Nature, where history was so august, was perfectly simple
and motherly, and did so much to make me at home, that, as the night
thickened and we plunged here and there into ditches and climbed
fences, and struggled, heavy-footed, back through the suburbs to
the city gate, I felt as if half my boyhood had been passed upon the
Campagna.