Italian Hours

Roman Rides

I shall always remember the first I took: out of the Porta del

Popolo, to where the Ponte Molle, whose single arch sustains a

weight of historic tradition, compels the sallow Tiber to flow

between its four great-mannered ecclesiastical statues, over the

crest of the hill and along the old posting-road to Florence. It

was mild midwinter, the season peculiarly of colour on the Roman

Campagna; and the light was full of that mellow purple glow, that

tempered intensity, which haunts the after-visions of those who

have known Rome like the memory of some supremely irresponsible

pleasure. An hour away I pulled up and at the edge of a meadow

gazed away for some time into remoter distances. Then and there,

it seemed to me, I measured the deep delight of knowing the

Campagna. But I saw more things in it than I can easily tell. The

country rolled away around me into slopes and dells of long-drawn

grace, chequered with purple and blue and blooming brown. The

lights and shadows were at play on the Sabine Mountains--an

alternation of tones so exquisite as to be conveyed only by some

fantastic comparison to sapphire and amber. In the foreground a

contadino in his cloak and peaked hat jogged solitary on his ass;

and here and there in the distance, among blue undulations, some

white village, some grey tower, helped deliciously to make the

picture the typical "Italian landscape" of old-fashioned art. It

was so bright and yet so sad, so still and yet so charged, to the

supersensuous ear, with the murmur of an extinguished life, that

you could only say it was intensely and adorably strange, could

only impute to the whole overarched scene an unsurpassed secret

for bringing tears of appreciation to no matter how ignorant--

archaeologically ignorant--eyes. To ride once, in these

conditions, is of course to ride again and to allot to the

Campagna a generous share of the time one spends in Rome.

It is a pleasure that doubles one's horizon, and one can scarcely

say whether it enlarges or limits one's impression of the city

proper. It certainly makes St. Peter's seem a trifle smaller and

blunts the edge of one's curiosity in the Forum. It must be the

effect of the experience, at all extended, that when you think of

Rome afterwards you will think still respectfully and regretfully

enough of the Vatican and the Pincio, the streets and the

picture-making street life; but will even more wonder, with an

irrepressible contraction of the heart, when again you shall feel

yourself bounding over the flower-smothered turf, or pass from

one framed picture to another beside the open arches of the

crumbling aqueducts. You look back at the City so often from some

grassy hill-top--hugely compact within its walls, with St.

Peter's overtopping all things and yet seeming small, and the

vast girdle of marsh and meadow receding on all sides to the

mountains and the sea--that you come to remember it at last as

hardly more than a respectable parenthesis in a great sweep of

generalisation. Within the walls, on the other hand, you think of

your intended ride as the most romantic of all your

possibilities; of the Campagna generally as an illimitable

experience. One's rides certainly give Rome an inordinate scope

for the reflective--by which I suppose I mean after all the

aesthetic and the "esoteric"--life. To dwell in a city which,

much as you grumble at it, is after all very fairly a modern

city; with crowds and shops and theatres and cafes and balls and

receptions and dinner-parties, and all the modern confusion of

social pleasures and pains; to have at your door the good and

evil of it all; and yet to be able in half an hour to gallop away

and leave it a hundred miles, a hundred years, behind, and to

look at the tufted broom glowing on a lonely tower-top in the

still blue air, and the pale pink asphodels trembling none the

less for the stillness, and the shaggy-legged shepherds leaning

on their sticks in motionless brotherhood with the heaps of ruin,

and the scrambling goats and staggering little kids treading out

wild desert smells from the top of hollow-sounding mounds; and

then to come back through one of the great gates and a couple of

hours later find yourself in the "world," dressed, introduced,

entertained, inquiring, talking about "Middlemarch" to a young

English lady or listening to Neapolitan songs from a gentleman in

a very low-cut shirt--all this is to lead in a manner a double

life and to gather from the hurrying hours more impressions than

a mind of modest capacity quite knows how to dispose of.

I touched lately upon this theme with a friend who, I fancied,

would understand me, and who immediately assured me that he had

just spent a day that this mingled diversity of sensation made to

the days one spends elsewhere what an uncommonly g********l may

be to the daily paper. "There was an air of idleness about it, if

you will," he said, "and it was certainly pleasant enough to have

been wrong. Perhaps, being after all unused to long stretches of

dissipation, this was why I had a half-feeling that I was reading

an odd chapter in the history of a person very much more of a

h*** de roman than myself." Then he proceeded to relate

how he had taken a long ride with a lady whom he extremely

admired. "We turned off from the Tor di Quinto Road to that

castellated farm-house you know of--once a Ghibelline fortress--

whither Claude Lorraine used to come to paint pictures of which

the surrounding landscape is still so artistically, so

compositionally, suggestive. We went into the inner court, a

cloister almost, with the carven capitals of its loggia columns,

and looked at a handsome child swinging shyly against the half-

opened door of a room whose impenetrable shadow, behind her, made

her, as it were, a sketch in bituminous water-colours. We talked

with the farmer, a handsome, pale, fever-tainted fellow with a

well-to-do air that didn't in the least deter his affability from

a turn compatible with the acceptance of small coin; and then we

galloped away and away over the meadows which stretch with hardly

a break to Veii. The day was strangely delicious, with a cool

grey sky and just a touch of moisture in the air stirred by our

rapid motion. The Campagna, in the colourless even light, was

more solemn and romantic than ever; and a ragged shepherd,

driving a meagre straggling flock, whom we stopped to ask our way

of, was a perfect type of pastoral, weather-beaten misery. He was

precisely the shepherd for the foreground of a scratchy etching.

There were faint odours of spring in the air, and the grass here

and there was streaked with great patches of daisies; but it was

spring with a foreknowledge of autumn, a day to be enjoyed with a

substrain of sadness, the foreboding of regret, a day somehow to

make one feel as if one had seen and felt a great deal--quite, as

I say, like a heros de roman. Touching such characters, it

was the illustrious Pelham, I think, who, on being asked if he

rode, replied that he left those violent exercises to the ladies.

But under such a sky, in such an air, over acres of daisied turf,

a long, long gallop is certainly a supersubtle joy. The elastic

bound of your horse is the poetry of motion; and if you are so

happy as to add to it not the prose of companionship riding comes

almost to affect you as a spiritual exercise. My gallop, at any

rate," said my friend, "threw me into a mood which gave an

extraordinary zest to the rest of the day." He was to go to a

dinner-party at a villa on the edge of Rome, and Madam X--, who

was also going, called for him in her carriage. "It was a long

drive," he went on, "through the Forum, past the Colosseum. She

told me a long story about a most interesting person. Toward the

end my eyes caught through the carriage window a slab of rugged

sculptures. We were passing under the Arch of Constantine. In the

hall pavement of the villa is a rare antique mosaic--one of the

largest and most perfect; the ladies on their way to the drawing-

room trail over it the flounces of Worth. We drove home late, and

there's my day."

On your exit from most of the gates of Rome you have generally

half-an-hour's progress through winding lanes, many of which are

hardly less charming than the open meadows. On foot the walls and

high hedges would vex you and spoil your walk; but in the saddle

you generally overtop them, to an endless peopling of the minor

vision. Yet a Roman wall in the springtime is for that matter

almost as interesting as anything it conceals. Crumbling grain by

grain, coloured and mottled to a hundred tones by sun and storm,

with its rugged structure of brick extruding through its coarse

complexion of peeling stucco, its creeping lacework of wandering

ivy starred with miniature violets, and its wild fringe of

stouter flowers against the sky--it is as little as possible a

blank partition; it is practically a luxury of landscape. At the

moment at which I write, in mid-April, all the ledges and

cornices are wreathed with flaming poppies, nodding there as if

they knew so well what faded greys and yellows are an offset to

their scarlet. But the best point in a dilapidated enclosing

surface of vineyard or villa is of course the gateway, lifting

its great arch of cheap rococo scroll-work, its balls and shields

and mossy dish-covers--as they always perversely figure to me--

and flanked with its dusky cypresses. I never pass one without

taking out my mental sketch-book and jotting it down as a

vignette in the insubstantial record of my ride. They are as sad

and dreary as if they led to the moated grange where Mariana

waited in desperation for something to happen; and it's easy to

take the usual inscription over the porch as a recommendation to

those who enter to renounce all hope of anything but a glass of

more or less agreeably acrid vino romano. For what you

chiefly see over the walls and at the end of the straight short

avenue of rusty cypresses are the appurtenances of a

vigna--a couple of acres of little upright sticks

blackening in the sun, and a vast sallow-faced, scantily windowed

mansion, whose expression denotes little of the life of the mind

beyond what goes to the driving of a hard bargain over the tasted

hogsheads. If Mariana is there she certainly has no pile of old

magazines to beguile her leisure. The life of the mind, if the

term be in any application here not ridiculous, appears to any

asker of curious questions, as he wanders about Rome, the very

thinnest deposit of the past. Within the rococo gateway, which

itself has a vaguely esthetic self-consciousness, at the end of

the cypress walk, you will probably see a mythological group in

rusty marble--a Cupid and Psyche, a Venus and Paris, an Apollo

and Daphne--the relic of an age when a Roman proprietor thought

it fine to patronise the arts. But I imagine you are safe in

supposing it to constitute the only allusion savouring of culture

that has been made on the premises for three or four generations.

There is a franker cheerfulness--though certainly a proper amount

of that forlornness which lurks about every object to which the

Campagna forms a background--in the primitive little taverns

where, on the homeward stretch, in the waning light, you are

often glad to rein up and demand a bottle of their best. Their

best and their worst are indeed the same, though with a shifting

price, and plain vino bianco or vino rosso (rarely

both) is the sole article of refreshment in which they deal.

There is a ragged bush over the door, and within, under a dusky

vault, on crooked cobble-stones, sit half-a-dozen contadini in

their indigo jackets and goatskin breeches and with their elbows

on the table. There is generally a rabble of infantile beggars at

the door, pretty enough in their dusty rags, with their fine eyes

and intense Italian smile, to make you forget your private vow of

doing your individual best I to make these people, whom you like

so much, unlearn their old vices. Was Porta Pia bombarded three

years ago that Peppino should still grow up to whine for a

copper? But the Italian shells had no direct message for

Peppino's stomach--and you are going to a dinner-party at a

villa. So Peppino "points" an instant for the copper in the dust

and grows up a Roman beggar. The whole little place represents

the most primitive form of hostelry; but along any of the roads

leading out of the city you may find establishments of a higher

type, with Garibaldi, superbly mounted and foreshortened, painted

on the wall, or a lady in a low-necked dress opening a fictive

lattice with irresistible hospitality, and a yard with the

classic vine-wreathed arbour casting thin shadows upon benches

and tables draped and cushioned with the white dust from which

the highways from the gates borrow most of their local colour.

None the less, I say, you avoid the highroads, and, if you are a

person of taste, don't grumble at the occasional need of

following the walls of the city. City walls, to a properly

constituted American, can never be an object of indifference; and

it is emphatically "no end of a sensation" to pace in the shadow

of this massive cincture of Rome. I have found myself, as I

skirted its base, talking of trivial things, but never without a

sudden reflection on the deplorable impermanence of first

impressions. A twelvemonth ago the raw plank fences of a Boston

suburb, inscribed with the virtues of healing drugs, bristled

along my horizon: now I glance with idle eyes at a compacted

antiquity in which a more learned sense may read portentous dates

and signs--Servius, Aurelius, Honorius. But even to idle eyes

the prodigious, the continuous thing bristles with eloquent

passages. In some places, where the huge brickwork is black with

time and certain strange square towers look down at you with

still blue eyes, the Roman sky peering through lidless loopholes,

and there is nothing but white dust in the road and solitude in

the air, I might take myself for a wandering Tartar touching on

the confines of the Celestial Empire. The wall of China must have

very much such a gaunt robustness. The colour of the Roman

ramparts is everywhere fine, and their rugged patchwork has been

subdued by time and weather into a mellow harmony that the brush

only asks to catch up. On the northern side of the city, behind

the Vatican, St. Peter's and the Trastevere, I have seen them

glowing in the late afternoon with the tones of ancient bronze

and rusty gold. Here at various points they are embossed with the

Papal insignia, the tiara with its flying bands and crossed keys;

to the high style of which the grace that attaches to almost any

lost cause--even if not quite the "tender" grace of a day that is

dead--considerably adds a style. With the dome of St. Peter's

resting on their cornice and the hugely clustered architecture of

the Vatican rising from them as from a terrace, they seem indeed

the valid bulwark of an ecclesiastical city. Vain bulwark, alas!

sighs the sentimental tourist, fresh from the meagre

entertainment of this latter Holy Week. But he may find

monumental consolation in this neighbourhood at a source where,

as I pass, I never fail to apply for it. At half-an-hour's walk

beyond Porta San Pancrazio, beneath the wall of the Villa Doria,

is a delightfully pompous ecclesiastical gateway of the

seventeenth century, erected by Paul V to commemorate his

restoration of the aqueducts through which the stream bearing his

name flows towards the fine florid portico protecting its clear-

sheeted outgush on the crest of the Janiculan. It arches across

the road in the most ornamental manner of the period, and one can

hardly pause before it without seeming to assist at a ten

minutes' revival of old Italy--without feeling as if one were in

a c****d hat and sword and were coming up to Rome, in another

mood than Luther's, with a letter of recommendation to the

mistress of a cardinal.

The Campagna differs greatly on the two sides of the Tiber; and

it is hard to say which, for the rider, has the greater charm.

The half-dozen rides you may take from Porta San Giovanni possess

the perfection of traditional Roman interest and lead you through

a far-strewn wilderness of ruins--a scattered maze of tombs and

towers and nameless fragments of antique masonry. The landscape

here has two great features; close before you on one side is the

long, gentle swell of the Alban Hills, deeply, fantastically blue

in most weathers, and marbled with the vague white masses of

their scattered towns and villas. It would be difficult to draw

the hard figure to a softer curve than that with which the

heights sweep from Albano to the plain; this a perfect example of

the classic beauty of line in the Italian landscape--that beauty

which, when it fills the background of a picture, makes us look

in the foreground for a broken column couched upon flowers and a

shepherd piping to dancing nymphs. At your side, constantly, you

have the broken line of the Claudian Aqueduct, carrying its broad

arches far away into the plain. The meadows along which it lies

are not the smoothest in the world for a gallop, but there is no

pleasure greater than to wander near it. It stands knee-deep in

the flower-strewn grass, and its rugged piers are hung with ivy

as the columns of a church are draped for a festa. Every archway

is a picture, massively framed, of the distance beyond--of the

snow-tipped Sabines and lonely Soracte. As the spring advances

the whole Campagna smiles and waves with flowers; but I think

they are nowhere more rank and lovely than in the shifting shadow

of the aqueducts, where they muffle the feet of the columns and

smother the half-dozen brooks which wander in and out like silver

meshes between the legs of a file of giants. They make a niche

for themselves too in every crevice and tremble on the vault of

the empty conduits. The ivy hereabouts in the springtime is

peculiarly brilliant and delicate; and though it cloaks and

muffles these Roman fragments far less closely than the castles

and abbeys of England it hangs with the light elegance of all

Italian vegetation. It is partly doubtless because their mighty

outlines are still unsoftened that the aqueducts are so

impressive. They seem the very source of the solitude in which

they stand; they look like architectural spectres and loom

through the light mists of their grassy desert, as you recede

along the line, with the same insubstantial vastness as if they

rose out of Egyptian sands. It is a great neighbourhood of ruins,

many of which, it must be confessed, you have applauded in many

an album. But station a peasant with sheepskin coat and bandaged

legs in the shadow of a tomb or tower best known to drawing-room

art, and scatter a dozen goats on the mound above him, and the

picture has a charm which has not yet been sketched away.

The other quarter of the Campagna has wider fields and smoother

turf and perhaps a greater number of delightful rides; the earth

is sounder, and there are fewer pitfalls and ditches. The land

for the most part lies higher and catches more wind, and the

grass is here and there for great stretches as smooth and level

as a carpet. You have no Alban Mountains before you, but you have

in the distance the waving ridge of the nearer Apennines, and

west of them, along the course of the Tiber, the long seaward

level of deep-coloured fields, deepening as they recede to the

blue and purple of the sea itself. Beyond them, of a very clear

day, you may see the glitter of the Mediterranean. These are the

occasions perhaps to remember most fondly, for they lead you to

enchanting nooks, and the landscape has details of the highest

refinement. Indeed when my sense reverts to the lingering

impressions of so blest a time, it seems a fool's errand to have

attempted to express them, and a waste of words to do more than

recommend the reader to go citywards at twilight of the end of

March, making for Porta Cavalleggieri, and note what he sees. At

this hour the Campagna is to the last point its melancholy self,

and I remember roadside "effects" of a strange and intense

suggestiveness. Certain mean, mouldering villas behind grass-

grown courts have an indefinably sinister look; there was one in

especial of which it was impossible not to argue that a

despairing creature must have once committed suicide there,

behind bolted door and barred window, and that no one has since

had the pluck to go in and see why he never came out. Every

wayside mark of manners, of history, every stamp of the past in

the country about Rome, touches my sense to a thrill, and I may

thus exaggerate the appeal of very common things. This is the

more likely because the appeal seems ever to rise out of heaven

knows what depths of ancient trouble. To delight in the aspects

of sentient ruin might appear a heartless pastime, and the

pleasure, I confess, shows the note of perversity. The sombre and

the hard are as common an influence from southern things as the

soft and the bright, I think; sadness rarely fails to assault a

northern observer when he misses what he takes for comfort.

Beauty is no compensation for the loss, only making it more

poignant. Enough beauty of climate hangs over these Roman

cottages and farm-houses--beauty of light, of atmosphere and of

vegetation; but their charm for the maker-out of the stories in

things is the way the golden air shows off their desolation. Man

lives more with Nature in Italy than in New or than in Old

England; she does more work for him and gives him more holidays

than in our short-summered climes, and his home is therefore much

more bare of devices for helping him to do without her, forget

her and forgive her. These reflections are perhaps the source of

the character you find in a moss-coated stone stairway climbing

outside of a wall; in a queer inner court, befouled with rubbish

and drearily bare of convenience; in an ancient quaintly carven

well, worked with infinite labour from an overhanging window; in

an arbour of time-twisted vines under which you may sit with your

feet in the dirt and remember as a dim fable that there are races

for which the type of domestic allurement is the parlour hearth-

rug. For reasons apparent or otherwise these things amuse me

beyond expression, and I am never weary of staring into gateways,

of lingering by dreary, shabby, half-barbaric farm-yards, of

feasting a foolish gaze on sun-cracked plaster and unctuous

indoor shadows. I mustn't forget, however, that it's not for

wayside effects that one rides away behind St. Peter's, but for

the strong sense of wandering over boundless space, of seeing

great classic lines of landscape, of watching them dispose

themselves into pictures so full of "style" that you can think of

no painter who deserves to have you admit that they suggest him--

hardly knowing whether it is better pleasure to gallop far and

drink deep of air and grassy distance and the whole delicious

opportunity, or to walk and pause and linger, and try and grasp

some ineffaceable memory of sky and colour and outline. Your pace

can hardly help falling into a contemplative measure at the time,

everywhere so wonderful, but in Rome so persuasively divine, when

the winter begins palpably to soften and quicken. Far out on the

Campagna, early in February, you feel the first vague earthly

emanations, which in a few weeks come wandering into the heart of

the city and throbbing through the close, dark streets.

Springtime in Rome is an immensely poetic affair; but you must

stand often far out in the ancient waste, between grass and sky,

to measure its deep, full, steadily accelerated rhythm. The

winter has an incontestable beauty, and is pre-eminently the time

of colour--the time when it is no affectation, but homely verity,

to talk about the "purple" tone of the atmosphere. As February

comes and goes your purple is streaked with green and the rich,

dark bloom of the distance begins to lose its intensity. But your

loss is made up by other gains; none more precious than that

inestimable gain to the ear--the disembodied voice of the lark.

It comes with the early flowers, the white narcissus and the

cyclamen, the half-buried violets and the pale anemones, and

makes the whole atmosphere ring like a vault of tinkling glass.

You never see the source of the sound, and are utterly unable to

localise his note, which seems to come from everywhere at once,

to be some hundred-throated voice of the air. Sometimes you fancy

you just catch him, a mere vague spot against the blue, an

intenser throb in the universal pulsation of light. As the weeks

go on the flowers multiply and the deep blues and purples of the

hills, turning to azure and violet, creep higher toward the

narrowing snow-line of the Sabines. The temperature rises, the

first hour of your ride you feel the heat, but you beguile it

with brushing the hawthorn-blossoms as you pass along the hedges,

and catching at the wild rose and honeysuckle; and when you get

into the meadows there is stir enough in the air to lighten the

dead weight of the sun. The Roman air, however, is not a tonic

medicine, and it seldom suffers exercise to be all exhilarating.

It has always seemed to me indeed part of the charm of the latter

that your keenest consciousness is haunted with a vague languor.

Occasionally when the sirocco blows that sensation becomes

strange and exquisite. Then, under the grey sky, before the dim

distances which the south-wind mostly brings with it, you seem to

ride forth into a world from which all hope has departed and in

which, in spite of the flowers that make your horse's footfalls

soundless, nothing is left save some queer probability that your

imagination is unable to measure, but from which it hardly

shrinks. This quality in the Roman element may now and then

"relax" you almost to ecstasy; but a season of sirocco would be

an overdose of morbid pleasure. You may at any rate best feel the

peculiar beauty of the Campagna on those mild days of winter when

the mere quality and temper of the sunshine suffice to move the

landscape to joy, and you pause on the brown grass in the sunny

stillness and, by listening long enough, almost fancy you hear

the shrill of the midsummer cricket. It is detail and ornament

that vary from month to month, from week to week even, and make

your returns to the same places a constant feast of

unexpectedness; but the great essential features of the prospect

preserve throughout the year the same impressive serenity.

Soracte, be it January or May, rises from its blue horizon like

an island from the sea and with an elegance of contour which no

mood of the year can deepen or diminish. You know it well; you

have seen it often in the mellow backgrounds of Claude; and it

has such an irresistibly classic, academic air that while you

look at it you begin to take your saddle for a faded old arm-

chair in a palace gallery. A month's rides in different

directions will show you a dozen prime Claudes. After I had seen

them all I went piously to the Doria gallery to refresh my memory

of its two famous specimens and to enjoy to the utmost their

delightful air of reference to something that had become a part

of my personal experience. Delightful it certainly is to feel the

common element in one's own sensibility and those of a genius

whom that element has helped to do great things. Claude must have

haunted the very places of one's personal preference and adjusted

their divine undulations to his splendid scheme of romance, his

view of the poetry of life. He was familiar with aspects in which

there wasn't a single uncompromising line. I saw a few days ago a

small finished sketch from his hand, in the possession of an

American artist, which was almost startling in its clear

reflection of forms unaltered by the two centuries that have

dimmed and cracked the paint and canvas.

This unbroken continuity of the impressions I have tried to

indicate is an excellent example of the intellectual background

of all enjoyment in Rome. It effectually prevents pleasure from

becoming vulgar, for your sensation rarely begins and ends with

itself; it reverberates--it recalls, commemorates, resuscitates

something else. At least half the merit of everything you enjoy

must be that it suits you absolutely; but the larger half here is

generally that it has suited some one else and that you can never

flatter yourself you have discovered it. It has been addressed to

some use a million miles out of your range, and has had great

adventures before ever condescending to please you. It was in

admission of this truth that my discriminating friend who showed

me the Claudes found it impossible to designate a certain

delightful region which you enter at the end of an hour's riding

from Porta Cavalleggieri as anything but Arcadia. The exquisite

correspondence of the term in this case altogether revived its

faded bloom; here veritably the oaten pipe must have stirred the

windless air and the satyrs have laughed among the brookside

reeds. Three or four long grassy dells stretch away in a chain

between low hills over which delicate trees are so discreetly

scattered that each one is a resting place for a shepherd. The

elements of the scene are simple enough, but the composition has

extraordinary refinement. By one of those happy chances which

keep observation in Italy always in her best humour a shepherd

had thrown himself down under one of the trees in the very

attitude of Meliboeus. He had been washing his feet, I suppose,

in the neighbouring brook, and had found it pleasant afterwards

to roll his short breeches well up on his thighs. Lying thus in

the shade, on his elbow, with his naked legs stretched out on the

turf and his soft peaked hat over his long hair crushed back like

the veritable bonnet of Arcady, he was exactly the figure of the

background of this happy valley. The poor fellow, lying there in

rustic weariness and ignorance, little fancied that he was a

symbol of old-world meanings to new-world eyes.

Such eyes may find as great a store of picturesque meanings in

the cork-woods of Monte Mario, tenderly loved of all equestrians.

These are less severely pastoral than our Arcadia, and you might

more properly lodge there a damosel of Ariosto than a nymph of

Theocritus. Among them is strewn a lovely wilderness of flowers

and shrubs, and the whole place has such a charming woodland air,

that, casting about me the other day for a compliment, I

declared that it. reminded me of New Hampshire. My compliment had

a double edge, and I had no sooner uttered it than I smiled--or

sighed--to perceive in all the undiscriminated botany about me

the wealth of detail, the idle elegance and grace of Italy alone,

the natural stamp of the land which has the singular privilege of

making one love her unsanctified beauty all but as well as those

features of one's own country toward which nature's small

allowance doubles that of one's own affection. For this effect of

casting a spell no rides have more value than those you take in

Villa Doria or Villa Borghese; or don't take, possibly, if you

prefer to reserve these particular regions--the latter in

especial--for your walking hours. People do ride, however, in

both villas, which deserve honourable mention in this regard.

Villa Doria, with its noble site, its splendid views, its great

groups of stone-pines, so clustered and yet so individual, its

lawns and flowers and fountains, its altogether princely

disposition, is a place where one may pace, well mounted, of a

brilliant day, with an agreeable sense of its being rather a more

elegant pastime to balance in one's stirrups than to trudge on

even the smoothest gravel. But at Villa Borghese the walkers have

the best of it; for they are free of those adorable outlying

corners and bosky byways which the rumble of barouches never

reaches. In March the place becomes a perfect epitome of the

spring. You cease to care much for the melancholy greenness of

the disfeatured statues which has been your chief winter's

intimation of verdure; and before you are quite conscious of the

tender streaks and patches in the great quaint grassy arena round

which the Propaganda students, in their long skirts, wander

slowly, like dusky seraphs revolving the gossip of Paradise, you

spy the brave little violets uncapping their azure brows beneath

the high-stemmed pines. One's walks here would take us too far,

and one's pauses detain us too long, when in the quiet parts

under the wall one comes across a group of charming small school-

boys in full-dress suits and white cravats, shouting over their

play in clear Italian, while a grave young priest, beneath a

tree, watches them over the top of his book. It sounds like

nothing, but the force behind it and the frame round it, the

setting, the air, the chord struck, make it a hundred wonderful

things.

1873.