I Remembered Those Peaceful Pagans So Perfectly That I Could
Have Gone Confidently To This Or That And Hailed Him
Friend; and though
I might not have liked to claim the acquaintance of all of them in the
flesh, in
The marble I fled to it as refuge from the cruel visions of
Christian art. If this is perhaps saying too much, I wish also to hedge
from the wholesale censure of my fellow-sight-seers which I may have
seemed to imply. They did not prevail so clutteringly in the sculpture
galleries as in the Sistine Chapel and the Stanze. One could have the
statues as much to one's self as one liked; there were courts with
murmuring fountains in them; and there was a view of Rome from a certain
window, where no fellow-tourist intruded between one and the innumerable
roofs and domes and towers, and the heights beyond whose snows there was
nothing but blue sky. It was a beautiful morning, with a sun mild as
English summer, which did not prevent the afternoon from turning cold
with wind and raining and hailing and snowing. This in turn did not keep
off a fine red sunset, with an evening star of glittering silver that
brightened as the sunset faded. At Rome the weather can be of as many
minds in March as in April at New York.
But through all one's remembrance of the Roman winter a sentiment of
spring plays enchantingly, like that grace of Botticelli's Primavera in
his Sistine frescos. It is not a sentiment of summer, though it is
sometimes a summer warmth which you feel, and except in the steam-heated
hotels it does not penetrate to the interiors. In the galleries and the
churches you must blow your nails if you wish to thaw your fingers, but,
if you go out-of-doors, there is a radiant imitation of May awaiting
you. She takes you by your thick glove and leads you in your fur-lined
overcoat through sullen streets that open upon sunny squares, with
fountains streaming into the crystal air, and makes you own that this is
the Italian winter as advertised - that is, if you are a wanderer and a
stranger; if you are an Italian and at home you keep in the out-door
warmth, but shun the sun, and in-doors you wrap up more thickly than
ever, or you go to bed if you have a more luxurious prejudice against
shivering. If you are a beggar, as you very well may be in Rome, you
impart your personal heat to a specific curbstone or the spot which you
select as being most in the path of charity, and cling to it from dawn
till dark. Or you acquire somehow the rights of a chair just within the
padded curtain of a church, and do not leave it till the hour for
closing. The Roman beggars are of all claims upon pity, but preferably I
should say they were blind, and some of these are quite young girls, and
mostly rather cheerful.
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