But For All The Outlandish Suggestion Of
These Pillars, The Villa Now Belongs To The Jesuits, Who Have A College
There, where only the sons of noble families are received for education.
As we rounded a sunny wall in driving
Away, we saw a line of people, old
and young of both sexes, but probably not of noble families, seated with
their backs against the warm stone eating from comfortable bowls
a soup which our driver said was the soup of charity and the daily dole
of the fathers to such hungry as came for it. The day was now growing
colder thaa it had been, and we felt that the poor needed all the soup,
and hot, that they could get.
After a vain visit to Grotta Ferrata, which was signally disappointing,
in spite of the traces of a recent country fair and the historical
merits of a church of the Greek rite, with a black-bearded monk coming
to show it through a gardened cloister, we were glad to take the tram
back to Rome and to get into the snug inside of it. The roof, which had
been so popular and populous in the morning, was now so little envied
that a fat lady descended from it and wedged herself into a row of the
interior where a sylph would have fitted better but might not have added
so much to the warmth. No one, myself of the number, thought of getting
up, though there were plenty of straps to hang by if one had chosen to
stand. This was quite like home, and so was it like home to have the
conductor ask me to Avait for my change, with all the ensuing fears that
wronged the long-delayed remembrance of his debt. In some things it
appears that at Rome the Romans do as the Americans do, but I wish we
were like them in having such a place as Frascati within easy tram-reach
of our cities.
XV
A FEW REMAINING MOMENTS
In the days of the earlier sixties, we youth who wished to be thought
elect did not feel ourselves so unless we were deeply read in
Hawthorne's romance of _The Marble Faun._ We made that our aesthetic
handbook in Rome, and we devoutly looked up all the places mentioned in
it, which were important for being mentioned; though such places as the
Tarpeian Rock, the Forum, the Capitoline Museum, and the Villa Bor-ghese
might secondarily have their historical or artistic interest. In like
manner Story's statue of Cleopatra was to be seen, because it was the
"original" of the imaginary sculptor Kenyon's Cleopatra, and a certain
mediaeval tower was sacred because it was universally identified as the
tower where the heroine Hilda lived dreaming and drawing, and fed the
doves that circled around its top. We used to show the new arrivals
where Hilda's tower was, and then stand with them watching the pigeons
which made it unmistakable. I should then have thought I could never
forget it, but I must have passed it several times unnoting in my latest
Roman sojourn, when one afternoon in a pilgrimage to the Via del Gambero
a contemporary of that earlier day glanced around the narrow piazza
through which we were passing and, seeing a cloud of doves wheeling
aloft, joyfully shouted, "Look!
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