It Seemed To Have Been Not So Much
A Single Edifice As A Whole City, The Dwelling Instead Of The Resort Of
The Multitudes That Once Thronged It.
The traces of the ornamentation
which had enriched it everywhere and which it had taken ages of ravage
to
Strip from it, accented its savage majesty, and again the sentiment
of spring in the fresh afternoon breeze and sunshine, and the innocent
beauty of the blooming peach and cherry in the orchards around, imparted
to it a pathos in which one's mere brute wonder was lost. But it was a
purely adventitious pathos, and it must be owned here, at the end, that
none of the relics of ancient Rome stir a soft emotion in the beholder,
and, as for beauty, there is more of it in some ivy-netted fragment of
some English abbey which Henry's Cromwell "hammered down" than in the
ruin of all the palaces and temples and theatres and circuses and baths
of that imperial Rome which the world is so well rid of.
VII
A WEEK AT LEGHORN
We left Rome with such a nostalgic pang in our hearts that we tried to
find relief in a name for it, and we called ourselves Romesick.
Afterward, when we practised the name with such friends as we could get
to listen, they thought we said homesick. Being better instructed, they
stared or simpered, and said, "Oh!" That was not all we could have
asked, but Rome herself would understand, and, while we were seeking
this outlet for our grief, she followed us as far as she could on her
poor, broken aqueducts.
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