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! There is Hilda's tower!" and if Hilda
herself had waved to us from its battlements we could not have been
surer of it. The present vanished, and we were restored to our
citizenship in that Rome of the imagination which is greater than any
material Rome, and which it needs no archaeologist to discover in its
indestructible integrity.
No one to-day, probably, visits the Capitoline Museum for the Faun of
Praxiteles because it gave the romance its name; but at my latest sight
of it I remembered it with a thrill of the young piety which first drew
me to it, and involuntarily I looked again for the pointed, furry ears,
as I had done of old, to make sure that it was really the Marble Faun of
Hawthorne. I was now, however, for no merit of mine, in official and
scientific company with which it would have been idle to share my
satisfaction in the verification of the Faun's ears. Instead of boasting
it, I listened to very interesting talk of the deathless Dying
Gladiator, who is held to have been originally looked at more from below
than he has been seen in modern times, and who is presently to be lifted
to something like his antique level.
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