As We Came Out Through It The Westering Sun Poured The Narrow
Court Before The Chapel Full Of Golden Light And Threw The Black Shadow
Of A Cypress Across The Way That A File Of Comaldolese Monks Were Taking
To The Adjoining Convent.
They were talking cheerily together, and swung
unheeding by in their white robes so near that I could almost feel the
waft of them across the centuries that parted their faith and mine.
We had come to St. Gregory's from the Baths of Caracalla, which we had
set out to see on the first of our Roman holidays, and, after turning
aside for the Coloseum, had now visited on next to the last of them. The
stupendous ruin could scarcely have been growing in the ten or twelve
weeks that had passed, but a bewildering notion of something like this
obsessed me as I saw it bulking aloof in overhanging cliffs and
precipices, through the cool and bright April air, against a sky of
absolute blue. As if it had been cast up out of the earth in some
convulsive throe of nature, it floundered over its vast area in
shapeless masses which seemed to have capriciously received the effect
of human design in the coping of the inaccessible steeps, in the arches
flinging themselves across the spaces between the beetling crags, in the
monstrous spring and sweep of the vaults, in the gloom of the cavernous
apertures of its Titanic walls. For the moment its immensity dwarfed the
image of all the other fragments of the Roman world and set definite
bounds to their hugeness in the mind.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 278 of 353
Words from 76277 to 76548
of 97259
