I Could Not Manage The Glimpse Myself, But I Can Testify To The Unique Character Of The Avenue Of Clipped Box And Laurel Which The Key-Hole Also Commands.

Lovers of the supernatural, of which I am the first, will like to be reminded, or perhaps instructed, that

The Church of the Priory stands on the spot where Remus had a seance with the spiritual authorities and was advised against building Rome where he proposed, being shown only six vultures as against twelve that Romulus saw in favor of his chosen site. The fact gave the Aventine Hill the fame of bad luck, but any one may safely visit it now, after the long time that has passed.

I do not, however, advise visiting it above any other place in Rome. What I always say is, take your chances with any or every time or place; you cannot fail of some impression which you will always like recurring to as characteristically delightful. For instance, I once walked home from the Piazza di Spagna with some carnival masks frolicking about me through the sun-shotten golden dust of the delicious evening air, and I had a pleasure from the experience which I shall never forget. It was as rich as that I got from the rosy twilight in Avhich I wandered homeward another time from the Piazza di Venezia and found myself passing the Fountain of Trevi, and lingered long there and would not throw my penny into its waters because I knew I could not help coming back to Rome anyhow. Yet another time I was driving through a certain piazza where the peasants stand night long waiting to be hired by the proprietors who come to find them there, and suddenly the piety of the Middle Ages stood before me in the figure of the Brotherhood of the Misericordia, draped to the foot and hooded in their gray, unbleached linen. The brothers were ranged in a file at the doors of the church ready to visit the house of sickness or of mourning, barefooted, with their eyes showing spectrally through their masks and their hands coming soft and white out of their sleeves and betraying the lily class that neither toils nor spins and yet is bound, as in the past, to the poorest and humblest through the only Church that knows how to unite them in the offering and acceptance of reciprocal religious duties.

In Rome, as elsewhere in Catholic countries, it seemed to me that the worshippers were mostly of the poorer classes and were mostly old women, but in the Church of the Jesuits I saw worshippers almost as well dressed as the average of our Christian Scientists, and in that church, whose name I forget, but which is in the wide street or narrow piazza below the windows of the palace where the last Stuarts lived and died, my ineradicable love of gentility was flattered and my faith in the final sanctification of good society restored by the sight of gentlemen coming to and going from prayer with their silk hats in their hands.

Enter page number Go  Previous Next
Page 124 of 186
Words from 64534 to 65052 of 97259