I Saw Some Small Boys In Steeple-Crowned Soft Hats And Short
Jackets, With Their Little Legs Wound Round With
The favorite bandaging
of brigands; and some mothers suitable for Madonnas, perhaps, with babes
at the breast; there was a
Patriarchal old man or two, ready no doubt to
pose for the prophets, or, at a pinch, for yet more celestial persons;
but for the rest the Steps were rather given up to flower-girls,
fruit-peddlers, and beggars pure and simple, on levels distinctly below
those infested by the post-card peddlers. The whole neighborhood abounds
in opportunities for charity, and at the corner of the Via Sistina there
is a one-legged beggar who professes to black shoes in the intervals of
alms-taking, and who early made me his prey. If sometimes I fancied
escaping by him to my lounge against the parapet of the steps, he
joyously overtook me with a swiftness of which few two-legged men are
capable; he wore a soldier's cap, and I hoped, for the credit of our
species, that he had lost his leg in battle, but I do not know.
On a Sunday evening I once hung there a long time, watching with one eye
the people who were coining back from their promenade on the Pincian
Hill, and with the other the groups descending and ascending the Steps.
On the first landing below me there was a boy who gratified me, I dare
say unconsciously, by trying to stand on his hands; and a little
dramatic spectacle added itself to this feat of the circus. Two pretty
girls, smartly dressed in hats and gowns exactly alike, and doubtless
sisters, if not twins, passed down to the same level. One was with a
handsome young officer, and walked staidly beside him, as if content
with her quality of captive or captor. The other was with a civilian, of
whom she was apparently not sure. Suddenly she ran away from him to the
verge of the next fall of steps, possibly to show him how charmingly she
was dressed, possibly to tempt him by her grace in flight to follow her
madly. But he followed sanely and slowly, and she waited for him to come
up, in a capricious quiet, as if she had not done anything or meant
anything. That was all; but I am not hard to suit; and it was richly
enough for me.
Her little comedy came to its denouement just under the shoulder of the
rose-roofed terrace jutting from a lowish, plainish house on the left,
beyond certain palms and eucalyptus-trees. It is one of the most sacred
shrines in Rome, for it was in this house that the "young English poet
whose name was writ in water" died to deathless fame three or fourscore
years ago. It is the Keats house, which when he lived in it was the
house of Severn the painter, his host and friend. I had visited it for
the kind sake of the one and the dear sake of the others when I first
visited Rome in 1864; and it was one of the earliest stations of my
second pilgrimage. It is now in form for any and all visitors, but the
day I went it had not yet been put in its present simple and tasteful
keeping. A somewhat shrill and scraping-voiced matron inquired my
pleasure when she followed me into the ground-floor entrance from
somewhere without, and then, understanding, called hor young daughter,
who led me up to the room where Keats mused his last verse and breathed
his last sigh. It is a very little room, looking down over the Spanish
Steps, with their dike of bloom, across the piazza to the narrow stretch
of the Via del Babuino. I must have stood in it with Severn and heard
him talk of Keats and his ultimate days and hours; for I remember some
such talk, but not the details of it. He was a very gentle old man and
fondly proud of his goodness to the poor dying poet, as he well might
be, and I was glad to be one of the many Americans who, he said, came to
grieve with him for the dead poet.
Now, on my later visit, it was a cold, rainy day, and it was chill
within the house and without, and I imputed my weather to the time of
Keats's sojourn, and thought of him sitting by his table there in that
bare, narrow, stony room and coughing at the dismal outlook. Afterward I
saw the whole place put in order and warmed by a generous stove, for
people who came to see the Keats and Shelley collections of books and
pictures; but still the sense of that day remains. The young girl
sympathized with my sympathy, and wished to find a rose for me in the
trellis through which the rain dripped. She could not, and I suggested
that there would be roses in the spring. "No," she persisted, "sometimes
it makes them in the winter," but I had to come away through the reeking
streets without one.
When it rains, it rains easily in Rome. But the weather was divine the
evening I looked one of my latest looks down on the Spanish Steps. The
sun had sunk rather wanly beyond the city, but a cheerful light of
electrics shone up at me from the Via dei Condotti. I stood and thought
of as much as I could summon from the past, and I was strongest, I do
not know why, with the persecutions of the early Christians. Presently a
smell of dinner came from the hotels around and the houses below, and I
was reminded to go home to my own _table d'hote._ My one-legged beggar
seemed to have gone to his, and I escaped him; but I was intercepted by
the sight of an old woman asleep over her store of matches.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 34 of 95
Words from 33808 to 34809
of 97259
