horrors of the past, the vacuity of the present, would drive one I
know not whither. I have had, more than ever this time, the sense of
horror at the barbarism of Rome, of civilisation being encamped in all
this human refuse, and doing nothing for it; and the feeling of horror
at this absorbing Italy, and at one's liking it! They are impressions
of the sort I had at Tangier. And the face of an idiot beggar--the
odd, pleased smile above his filth--suddenly brought back to me that
special feeling, I suppose of the East. We are wretched, transitional
creatures to be so much moved by such things, by this dust-heap of
time, and to be pacified in spirit by the sight of all this litter of
ages; 'tis a Hamlet and the gravedigger's attitude; and the attitude
of Whitman in the fertile field of _This Compost_ is a deal better.
SABATO SANTO.
POSTSCRIPT.
Yesterday morning, while looking through, with a view to copying out,
my Roman notes of the last eighteen years, I felt, with odd vividness,
the various myselfs who suffered and hoped while writing them. And,
even more, I felt the presence of the beloved ones who, unmentioned,
not even alluded to, had been present in those various successive
Romes of mine. All of them have changed; some are dead, others were
never really living. But while I turned over my note-books, there they
were back. Back with their feeling of _then_; back with their presence
(in one case the presence of a distant companion, to whom I could show
these things only in thought); their complete realisation, or their
half explicit charm, their still unshattered promise. Of all these I
find not a word, barely a name; nothing telling of them to others.
Only to me, in these sites, impersonal and almost eternal, on these
walls which have stood two thousand years and may stand two thousand
more, and these hillsides and roads full of the world's legend--there
appear, visible, distinct, the shadows cast by my own life; the forms
and faces of those changed, gone, dead ones; and my own.
FLORENCE, _April_, 1905.
TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE:
The edition from which this text was drawn is volume 4175 of the
Tauchnitz Edition of British Authors, where it appeared together with
_Laurus Nobilis_, also by Vernon Lee. The volume was published in
1910.
Section IV in under Spring 1902 is not named in the original book.
The following changes were made to the text:
turning out of great rag bag turning out of a great rag bag
bégunie béguine
comes home to theme comes home to them
solemn, meaning full abstraction solemn, meaningful abstraction