It caught
the value in, and created, the great war song of the Republic.
I watched the Phocean. I thought of a man of his ancestry three
thousand years ago sitting here at the gates of these mountains
talking of his travels to dull, patient, and admiring northerners, and
travelling for gain up on into the Germanics, and I felt the
changeless form of Europe under me like a rock.
When he heard I was walking to Rome, this man of information turned
off his flood into another channel, as a miller will send the racing
water into a side sluice, and he poured out some such torrent as this:
'Do not omit to notice the famous view S.E. from the Villa So and So
on Monte Mario; visit such and such a garden, and hear Mass in such
and such a church. Note the curious illusion produced on the piazza of
St Peter's by the interior measurements of the trapezium, which are so
many years and so many yards, ...' &c., and so forth ... exactly like
a mill.
I meanwhile sat on still silent, still drinking beer and watching the
Phocean; gradually suffering the fascination that had captured the
villagers and the German friend. He was a very wonderful man.
