. . . By This Time It Has Divided Itself, Being
Crossed And Opposed By The Rocks, Into Four Several Streams, Each Of
Which, In Emulation Of The Greater One, Will Tumble Down, Too:
And it
does tumble down, but not from an equally elevated place; so that you
have at one view
All these cascades intermixed with groves of olive and
little woods, the mountains rising behind them, and on the top of one
(that which forms the extremity of the half-circle's horns) is seated
the town itself. At the very extremity of that extremity, on the brink
of the precipice, stands the Sibyls' Temple, the remains of a little
rotunda, surrounded with its portico, above half of whose beautiful
Corinthian pillars are still standing and entire."
For the reader who has been on the spot the poet's words will paint a
vivid picture of the scene; for the reader who has not been there, so
much the worse; he should lose no time in going, and drinking a cup of
the local wine at a table of the restaurant now in possession of Mr.
Gray's point of view. I do not know a more filling moment, exclusive of
the wine, than he can enjoy there, with those cascades before him and
those temples beside him; for Mr. Gray has mentioned only one of the
two, I do not know why, that exist on this enchanted spot, and that
define their sharp, black shadows as with an inky line just beyond the
restaurant tables. One is round and the other oblong, and the round one
has been called the Sibyls', though now it is getting itself called
Vesta's - the goddess who long unrightfully claimed the temple of Mater
Matuta in the Forum Boarium at Rome. As Vesta has lately been
dispossessed there by archaeology (which seems in Rome to enjoy the
plenary powers of our Boards of Health), she may have been given the
Sibyls' Temple at Tivoli in compensation; but all this does not really
matter. What really matters is the mighty chasm which yawns away almost
from your feet, where you sit, and the cataracts, from their brinks,
high or low, plunging into it, and the wavering columns of mist weakly
striving upward out of it: the whole hacked by those mountains Mr. Gray
mentions, with belts of olive orchard on their flanks, and wild paths
furrowing and wrinkling their stern faces. To your right there is a
sheeted cataract falling from the basins of the town laundry, where the
toil of the washers melts into nmsic, and their chatter, like that of
birds, drifts brokenly across the abyss to you. While you sit musing or
murmuring in your rapture, two mandolins and a guitar smilingly intrude,
and after a prelude of Italian airs swing into strains which presently,
through your revery, you recognize as "In the Bowery" and "Just One
Girl," and the smile of the two mandolins and the guitar spreads to a
grin of sympathy, and you are no longer at the Caffe Sibylla in Tivoli,
but in your own Manhattan on some fairy roof-garden, or at some
sixty-cent _table d'hote,_ with wine and music included.
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