A
Glimpse, Through Overhanging Foliage, Of The Steps To The Campidoglio,
With Castor And Pollux Beside Their Horses At Top, May Be A Fortunate
Accident Of His Course.
If this happens it will help to rehabilitate for
him the Rome of the paganism to which these divinities remained true
through all temptations to Judaize during the unnumbered centuries of
their sojourn, forgotten, in the Ghetto.
It is hardly possible that his
glimpse will include even the top of Marcus Aurelius's head where he
sits his bronze charger - an extremely fat one - so majestically in the
piazza beyond those brothers, as if conscious of being the most noble
equestrian statue which has ridden down to us from antiquity.
A more purposed sight of all this will, of course, supply any defects of
chance, though I myself always liked chance encounters with the
monuments of the past. I had constantly cherished a remembrance of the
nobly beautiful facade which is all that is left of the Temple of
Neptune, and I meant deliberately to revisit it if I could find out
where it was. A kind fortuity befriended me when one day, driving
through the little piazza where it lurks behind the Piazza Co-lonna, I
looked up, and there, in awe-striking procession, stood the mighty
antique columns sustaining the entablature of mediaeval stucco with
their fluted marble. I could not say why their poor, defaced, immortal
grandeur should have always so affected me, for I do not know that my
veneration was due it more than many other fragments of the past; but no
arch or pillar of them all seems so impressive, so pathetic.
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