I Might Have Stayed To Imagine Them Kneeling Among The
People Who Then Thronged The Genially Irregular Piazza, But As We Came
Up Some Ecclesiastical Students Were Playing Ball There, Their Robes
Tucked Into Their Girdles For Their Greater Convenience, And We Made Our
Way At Once Into The Church.
It forms one of a consecrated group of
edifices enshrining the memory of the best of the popes, who was also
the greatest; and here or in the adjacent convents a score of miracles
were wrought through the heavenly beauty of his life.
Of these miracles,
of whose inspiration you must feel the poetry even if you cannot feel
their verity, the loveliest has its substantial witness in one of the
little chapels next the church. There you may see with your eyes and
touch with your hands the table at which St. Gregory fed every morning
twelve poor men, till one morning a thirteenth appeared in the figure of
Christ the Lord, as if to own them His disciples. The chapel which
enshrines the table is one of three, quaint in form and rich in art,
standing in the garden called St. Silvia's, after the mother of St.
Gregory. 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. 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. At places they gave way under her, and she fell
down, but scrambled up again on the next stretch of arches, like some
fond cripple pursuing a friend on crutches; when at last our train
outran them, and there was no longer an arch to halt upon, she gave up
the vain chase and turned back within her walls, where we saw her domes
and bell-towers fading into the heaven to which they pointed.
It was a heaven of better than absolute blue, for there were soft, white
clouds in it, and the air that our Sunday breathed under it was, at the
beginning of April, as bland as that of an American May-end. The orchard
trees were in bloom - peach and plum, cherry and pear - whenever you chose
to look at them, and all nature seemed to rejoice in the cessation of
the two days' strike which had now enabled us to drive to the station
instead of walking and carrying our bags and bundles. There were so many
of these that we had taken two cabs, and at the station our drivers
attempted to rejoice with nature in an overcharge that would have
recouped them for the loss suffered in their recent leisure. But as we
were then leaving Koine, and were not yet melted with the grief of
absence, I had the courage to resist their demand. Long before we
reached Leghorn I was so Romesick that I would have paid them anything
they asked.
When we emerged from the suburbs upon the open Campagna, we passed
through many fields of wheat, more than we had yet seen on the grassy
waste, but there were also many flocks of sheep feeding with the cattle
in pastures.
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