Drove from Porta Angelica to Porta Portese; an immense round, possible, conceivable, only in Rome. I see for the first time theoutsideof the Vatican, galleries and gardens, realising the sort of fortified town it is, a Rome within Rome. And a fortified one: that long passage (Hall of the Ariadne) between the Belvedere and the Rotunda has battlements (oddly enough, Ghibelline); there are towers and counterforts I cannot identify; and then the immense buttressed walls, with their green vegetation, and slabs and coats of arms of Medicis, Roveres; with the clipped ilexes of the gardens, the pines and bays overtopping, on and on. And in a gap, suddenly, and close enough to take one's breath away, the immensity of St. Peter's and the Cupola.
And that this town, which is the Vatican and St. Peter's, these centres of so much life, should, as a fact, look on one side straight onto forsaken roads, and the most desolate of countries! Such a thing is impossible except in Rome; and even in Rome I never suspected it.
Continuing outside the walls, we come to the little church of San Pancrazio, on an empty road hedged with reed-tied dry thorns: the little porched doorway leading into an atrium which is an olive garden, big old trees set orderly, and a pillar with the cross; outside at least, a solemn little basilica, making one think of Ravenna.
We drove, apparently for miles, up and down, round and round, between two immediately successive gates, San Pancrazio and Portese. Green slopes, dry vineyards with almond blossom among the criss-cross canes, brakes of reeds; here and there rows of little triumphal bay-trees in flower over the walls; great overhanging ornamental gateways, leading to nothing; and, at long intervals, mouldering little villas andtrattorie, with mulberry-trees clipped into umbrellas. Rome totally disappeared, hidden, heaven knows where, in this country of which there seems an unlimited amount: always more green slopes, more dry vineyards, more distant Campagna. And yet, seemingly close by, the great bells of St. Peter's ring out the thanksgiving service for the Pope.
Antonia said, "Shall we go for a minute into St. Peter's? It will be all lit up."
And, in that endless emptiness, the words sounded absurd. St. Peter's? Rome? Where?
March13.
This morning, rambling along the unfinished Tiber quays, and the half pulled-down houses of the old Jewish quarter, attracted a little, perhaps, by the name "Vicolo dei Cenci," I let myself be importuned by a red-haired woman into entering the Casa di Beatrice Cenci, a dreary, squalid palace, given over to plasterers among the dust-heaps.
And afterwards, beguiled further up flights and flights of black stairs into someone's filthy little kitchen, I was made to look down, through a mysterious window, into the closed church of the Cencis. Looking down, always a curious impression, into a dark, musty place and onto vague somethings which are, they tell me, the tombs of the Cencis.
A grim and sordid impression altogether; and heaven knows how sickening a story. Yet what power of popular romance, of great poetry, has enveloped it all! A story one would be ashamed to read through in a cheap newspaper … and yet!…
March24.
Yesterday, with Maria, Antonia, and the poet Pascarella, to Rocca di Papa, lunching in a piece of the woods which M. has bought.
The grass of the campagna, beyond the aqueducts, is powdered with daisies like a cake with sugar. Further, where the slopes begin, the exquisite brilliant pink of the peach blossom is on the palest yellow criss-cross of reeds in the dry vineyards.
I am struck once more by the majestic air of that opening square of Frascati, expanding upwards into terraces, lawns, and ilexes, all flanked by pinnacled and voluted buildings, Villa Aldobrandini, or whatever it is.
We drive up through the sere chestnut woods, where wind-flowers and blue squills come up everywhere among the russet leaves. Suddenly, in the faint light, above a clearing, the stacked white trunks, the lilac sereness of the trees; and high up, shimmering and misty, the rock of Rocca di Papa with its piled-up houses.
Then through the woods again, on foot, up a path first deep in dry leaves, then paved with hard volcanic flags; chestnut woods, but no longer cut for charcoal (the smoke of its burning rises from below), but in clumps, straight slender boles rising from immense roots. Chestnuts so unlike those of our Apennines that, when, higher up, they are exchanged for beeches, it is only by picking up the fallen dry leaves that we could tell the difference. And beyond, descending towards Nemi, the woods reveal themselves for alder only by their catkins.
Immediately above the town of Rocca di Papa, before you begin that ascent through the woods of Monte Cavo, are the Campi d'Annibale, the former crater of the volcano of Mons Latialis, grass fields whose legend Pascarella tells us: that when Hannibal encamped there the Romans raised the necessary money by selling the ground of the enemy's camp! A strange, unexpected place; a great green basin, bleak and bare, marked only by fences like some northern hill-top; on such fell sides shall the Romans camp above the Tyne and Tweed.
We climbed up through the woods, Antonia and I, following the keeper in his riding boots, silent, or at most exchanging a word about the flowers, all blue, borage, squill, and dog violets, among the fallen leaves. And little by little there unrolled, deep below us, the dim green plain with a whiteness which is St. Peter's; and then there unfolded, gradually, unexpected, the pale blue of one lake and of a second. Till, near the top, they had both turned into steely mirrors, tarnished, as by breath, by the rapidly passing clouds. And the pink of the leafless woods stretches away, soft and feathery, to distant towns and villages. And we ascend, with the wind arising to meet us, always through softly winding paths, to the summit of the Latin mountain. To a long, gaunt, white, empty house, a circle of ancient moss-grown walls, a circle of old, wind-bent, leafless beeches, with the whole world of earliest Rome misty below, and thin clouds passing rapidly overhead. This is that sort of natural altar, visible as such even from the streets of Rome, of the Latin Jove, which, when we saw it again later from the ridge near Castel Gandolfo, above the deep circular chasm (fringed with asphodel) of the lake, seemed to smoke with a superhuman sacrifice.
How Renan, in thePr être di Némi, has rendered, without descriptions, the charm of that outlook towards Rome from this lower portion of the Latin hills! They cover a very small amount of country, volcanic and isolated; they are a kind of living whole in themselves, with their towns, woods, and those two deep lakes hidden in their fastnesses. The most living range of hills, surely, out of which the greatest life has spread, the vastest, perhaps, in the world.
Up there one looks not merely into space unlimited, but into time. What a strange country this Roman one! How different from the rest of Italy; this, with its great plain, its isolated groups of hills, its disdain of river-valley and gorge; a country set aside for different destinies.
And yet I own that what these hills represent most to me is the keenness of the air, the sweetness of those straight-boled, pinkish, leafless woods, the freshness of sprouting grass and flowers.
March20.
We have been bicycling these two days in the campagna; sunny, windy days, the hills faint in the general blueness. About three miles along the Via Ardeatina we alighted and sat on the grass in a little valley. A little valley between two low grass hills; a stream, a few reeds, two or three scant trees in bud, and the usual fences, leading up to the mountain, framed in, with its white towns, between the green slopes. Grass still short and dry; larks, invisible, singing; a flock of sheep going along with shepherds stopping to set the new-born, tottering lambs to suck.
At the valley's mouth, over a wide horse-trough where a donkey cart was watering, a little recumbent river god, rudely carved and much time-stained.
March16.
A bright day of iciest tramontana, cutting you in two in the square, under the colonnades, and in the narrow chink-opening of the great green bronze doors.
Almost entirely empty, that great round place, the light, the cold haunting its grey dome. At the high-altar some priests in purple; the Crucifix and pictures veiled in violet silk. And in the organ loft, buttoned up in great coats, five wretched musicians; not on high, but in a sort of cage set down by the altar. Such singing! but an alto, two tenors and a bass, as in Marcello's psalms. And, frightful as was the performance, I was fascinated by their unaccompanied song: something of long vague passages, and suspended cadences, fitting, in its mixture of complexity and primitiveness, its very rudeness, barbarousness of execution, into the great round bleak temple, with the cold windy sky looking down its roof, the bleakness of outdoors, enclosed, as it were, within doors.
Palm Sunday, 1899.
I went into several small churches to see the sepulchres. Not like our Tuscan ones; wretched things, mainly tinsel and shabby frippery.
At Santa Prisca we trespassed into orchards, almond trees barely green, artichokes and dust-heaps, with the belfries of the Aventine behind, the pillared loggia of San Saba, and the great blocks of the Baths of Caracalla in front. The church, shut on ordinary days, was quite empty, only a dozen Franciscans at office, kneeling by the frame of lighted candles, one of which was extinguished with each verse of hoarse liturgy by a monk kneeling apart.
After Sta. Prisca, San Clemente, very Byzantine and fine in the gloom, and then to that dear church of the Santi Quattro Coronati, which has beckoned to me ever since my childhood; and which, with its fortified-looking apse, its yard and great gate-tower, looks like a remote abbey one would drive to, forgotten, hidden, unheard of, for hours and hours from some out-of-the-way country town. "We'll take you to so and so," one's host would say, and one would never have heard the name before…. And there it is, above the modernest slums of modern Rome!
The church was darkish; a little light from the sunset just picking out some green and purple of the broken pavement; the tapers of a curtained-off chapel, and tapers above the sepulchre, throwing a broad weak yellow light up to the arched triforium, to the grated gallery whence came the voices of nuns chanting the Lamentations.
From round the illuminated sepulchre rose, like a flock of birds on our entrance, a bevy of kneeling nuns inbéguinecloak and cap. And in the apse, before the high-altar, was stretched on the slabs, with a night-light at each corner, something dark and mysterious: the crucifix, the form barely defined, shrouded in violet.
When the nuns went away a number of children, tiny, tiny girls came in, and knelt round that veiled mysterious thing; a baby at the end of their procession. One of the little girls could not resist, and lifted a corner of the violet silk. But her elder sister quickly slapped her, pulled her kerchief straight, and all was order and piety.
The dear church, quite empty save for these children, was full of the smell of the fresh flowers round the sepulchre. A holy, fragrant, venerable, kindly church, safe-hidden behind its pillared atrium and gate-tower; and looking from afar like a hillside fortress among the jerry-built modern streets.
Maundy Thursday, 1899.
A meadow near the Tiber, of grass and daisies, tufted with yellow-hearted jonquils. Larks and sun and wind overhead; in the distance the pale mountains, patched with snow. All round, the pale green embosomings of the soft earth hills. If the Umbrians got their love of circular hill lines at home, they learned in Rome the real existence of the green grass valleys and hills unbroken by cultivation, like those behind Perugino'sCrucifixionand Spagna'sMuses.
All round, as I sit in that place, the dry last year's stalks dance in the wind above the new grass and flowers. O Easter, Resurrection, Renovation!
The larks proclaim it!
Easter, 1899.
Rome took hold of me again as usual, yesterday, bicycling near Porta S. Sebastiano. On the walls which enclose those remote forsaken vignas (fit abode for lamias and female vampyres, as in Frau von Degen's tale), nay, even on the gates of old Rome are painted great advertisements exhorting the traveller to go to such or such a curiosity shop. The Arch of Drusus was surrounded by a band of Cookites, listening inattentively to their Bear Leader; and the whole Via Appia, to beyond Cecilia Metella, was alive with cabs and landaus. But such things, which desecrate Venice and spoil Florence, are all right in Rome; Rome, somehow, knows how to subdue them all to her eternal harmony. That all the vulgarities of all the furthest lands should all pass through Rome, like all the barbarians, the nations and centuries, seems proper and fit. The spirit of the place requires them, as much as the captives who came in the triumphs, as the Goths and Huns, as the pilgrims of the Mediæval Jubilees, and it subdues them: subdues them, as it subdues with the chemistry of this odd climate of crumble and decay, the new dreadful houses; as it has made, with the marvellous rank Roman vegetation, a sort of Forum or Palatine of the knocked-down modern houses, the empty unfinished basements behind the hoardings under my window. Driving at midnight from the station, my eye and mind were caught not merely by Castor and Pollux under the electric light, and by the endless walls of high palaces, but also by a colossal advertisement of Anzio, in English, setting forth to the traveller its merits connected with Nero, and I think Coriolanus—Nero and Coriolanus as elements ofr éclame!
But here it seems all right; becoming only one of those immense ironies of Time, more dignified than any of Time's paltry creatures of which this place is full. Time, whose presence, whose very cruelties and gigantic jests, brings such peace to the soul in this place. Peace because hope. This litter, this dust-heap (for it is after all not much better, few great or precious or perfect things remaining), dust-heap or rag-fair symbolised by its own most barbarous and vilest and most venerable parts along the Tiber and under the Capitoline,—this Rome accustoms one to take patience and heart of grace. It helps one to conceive the fact that life comes everywhere out of death and subdues it; to feel that, as there are centuries in the Past, so there will be centuries and centuries in the Future. It helps the imagination with its remnants of old, used-up theatre scenes, to guess at all the scene-shifting that will be accomplished, and to take its stand, be it only in the emotion of an instant, as witness of the vague phantasmagoria of the future. Why despair? Why be impatient? only give time, only secure all the possible tickets in the lottery of chance, and our hopes must at last be realised, all will be all right. 'Tis only our miserable impatience, our miserable sense of our own impotent mortality, which makes us fret: and Rome bids us take patience and comfort.
We despair of the future, for one reason, because we attribute to the future our own growing sense of fatigue, the feelings of evening. But the future will, for those to whom it belongs, be morning, with the vigour and buoyancy of the awakening. Our ideal would be to preserve in the future the beautiful things—certain flowers of tradition and privilege—of the past. 'Tis a delusion. We might as well hope to keep the old leaves on the trees into next summer. But after the old leaves have fallen and the trees have stood bare, new ones will come, not the same, but similar.
March11.
As a matter of fact Rome has never been so much Rome, never expressed its full meaning so completely, as nowadays. This change and desecration, this inroad of modernness, merely completes its eternity. Goethe has an epigram of a Chinese he met here; but a Chinese of the eighteenth century completed Rome less than an American of the nineteenth. Not only all roads in space, but all roads across Time, converge hither.
March11.
Went to take the English seeds to the gardener at S. Saba, and got in return some plants of border pinks. The most poetical and real place in all Rome.
Afterwards bicycled to S. Balbina. Impression of primitive church (the outside has from a distance a look as of something in a Pinturicchio fresco) given over to the Franciscan nuns—thirty—who look after two hundred unruly girls off the streets. Their thick grey cloaks are folded on the pews; images, screens, lecterns, all the litter of a priestly lumber-room, poked here and there, a little portable iron pulpit, not unlike a curtained washstand, in front of a beautiful tomb of a grave mediæval person above a delicate mosaic of the Cosmatis, and a small coloured Rue Bonaparte St. Joseph on the episcopal mosaic throne in the apse!
March15.
To-day Catacombs of S. Domitilla in Via Sette Chiese, with Maria, Guido and Pascarella. The impression of walking for miles by taper-light between those close walls of brown friable stone, or that soft dusty ground, in a warm vague stifling air; the monotonous rough sides, the monotonous corners, the widenings in and out of little Galla Placidia-like crypts, with rough hewn pillars and faded frescoes; of the irregularly cut pigeon-holes, where bits of bone moulder, and the brown earth seems half composed of bone.
That brown soft earth of the Catacombs, the stuff you would scratch off the damp walls with your nail; rotting stone, rotting bone: the very soil of Rome lilackish like cocoa, friable, light, which used somehow to give me the horrors already as a child; the soil in which the gardener of S. Saba grows his pinks and freesias without a spade or hoe visible anywhere; the soil which seems to demand no plough; the farthest possible from the honest and stiff clay, demanding human work, of nature; the Roman soil, acompost, as Whitman would say, ready manured! The work of man in this earth (of which a pinch transported into church front or roof produces great tufts of fennel and wild mignonette), the work of man in it merely to have died!
No sense of the ages in these Catacombs, or of the solemnity of death, or of the sweetness of religion; black narrow passages gutted for centuries, the poor wretched human remains (save those few turned up by the modern spade) packed, sent off, made presents of, sold to all the churches and convents of Christendom; bits of bones in cotton wool, with faded labels, in glass cases, such as we see in sacristies, &c., or enclosed in glories of enamel and gold!
But all gone, gone, those poor humble inhabitants, who were so anxious to be entire for the resurrection of the body!—patrician ladies, slaves, soldiers, eunuchs, theologians—all gone piecemeal all over the distant earth! the corridors swept and empty, the pigeon-holes with only a little brown cocoa-like dust!
It was raining all day, dull, dismal. Yet coming out of that place, out of that brown crumbly darkness, what was not the interest of the wet grey sky! How great the beauty, the movements of the lazy clouds! How complex and lovely the bare lane of wattled dry reeds—the ineffable exquisiteness of patches of green corn, of a few scant pink blossoms, of the shoots of elder! I remember the solemnity of the subterranean tombs at Perugia; the grisliness of the Beauchamp crypt at Warwick. But these catacombs, emptiness, desolation and that old brown lilacky, crumbly Roman earth, in which no plough need move nor spade,—thatterriccio, that pot-mould of the past.
March16.
Yesterday, in gusty weather, wandered round muddy streets of Rione Monti, and entered some churches. S.S. Cosmae Damiano in Forum: it has got lost, so to speak, in the excavations, and you seek it through blind alleys and a long dark passage—a dirty, tawdry church, with a few frowsy, sluttish people; and behind the ballroom chandeliers above the altar, a Ravenna apse, gold and blue; and lambs in procession on a green ground.
Then S. Pietro in Vincoli, which has a delightful position, with its big palm and tower and a certain Romantic Catherine Sforza character; also, what always refreshes me in Rome, its early Renaissance character, before Jesuits, &c. &c., an imported thing from Tuscany, and the fact of the tomb of the Pollajuolos! Michel Angelo'sMosessomehow belongs to Rome—has Rome's grandeur, emphasis, and Rome's theatrical quality. All round are buried seventeenth-century prelates. Cinthio Aldobrandini, &c., setting forth glories, but with skeletons as supporters!
Decidedly Rome was never more Roman than at present—the pulling down and building and excavating, the inappropriate jostlings of time and character merely add to the eternal quality, serene and ironical. Besides, these demolitions have disclosed many things hitherto hidden, and soon destroyed: here in Rione Monti, for instance, above the tram-lines, great green walls, boulders from Antiquity, and quiet convent gardens, with spaliered lemons, suddenly displayed above the illustrated hoardings of a street to be. In the midst of it, in a filthy, half modern, crowded street, a rugged Lombard church porch, dark ages all over: the object of my search, St. Praxed's church; but it was walled up, and I entered by a door in a side lane. Entered to remain on threshold, a Mass at a side altar. Eight small boys blocking the way, with a crowd of sluttish, tawdry worshippers, with the usual Roman church stifling dirty smell. These Roman churches, all save the basilicas, are inconceivably ill kept, frowsy, musty, tawdry, sluttish: they belong not to God, but to Rome—the same barbarous Rome of the tumble-down houses, the tattered begging people, the whole untidy squalor of its really Roman parts. Nothing swept and garnished; nothing evincing one grain of past or present reverence—a down-at-heel indifferent idolatry. At last the crowd streamed out, Mass being over, and I entered—and, oh wonder! found myself in a place of all Byzantine splendour: that little chapel, tapestried with crimson silk, lit with hanging lamps, its vaults a marvellous glory of golden—infinite tinted golden—mosaics with great white angels. A bit of Venice, of S. Mark's in this sluttish Rome.
Poets really make places. I cannot pass the Consolazione Hospital without thinking of Pompilia's death there; and the imaginary bishop, of whom there is no visible trace, haunts Sta. Prassede.
In the afternoon we went to the Via Appia, and in the excavations of Villa Lugari, among sprouting corn and under the song of larks, saw those amphoræ Pascarella had told us of, which, after holding pagan wine, were used to bury Christian children. To me there is nothing repulsive in the thought of this burial in the earth's best product.
To-day, on the way to Porta Furba (the country, where one sees it near the gate, is beginning to be powdered over with peach blossom), I went into the Lateran, and heard and saw a beautiful canonical Mass. Here was the swept and garnished (but it was behind glass doors!) sanctuary, the canons dainty in minever, a splendid monsignore, grey-haired, in three shades of purple; exquisite white and gold officiating priests, like great white peacocks, at the altar; the perfect movement of the incensing, perfect courtesy and dignity of the mutual salutations; and a well-played organ, on a reed stop, giving an imitation Bachmusette. The whole ceremony, rather like the 6/8 of thatmusette, perhaps a trifle too much of the dancing element, but grave and very perfect. Why should not, at some future period, our philosophers sit in carved oak stalls, in minever and purple, and salute and be saluted, and speak with intervals ofmusetteson the organ? It would suit Renan at least; and surely this, which is so venerable and sanctioned by time in our eyes, would have seemed quite as odd and grotesque a thing if foretold to St. Paul.
I feel that, among other good things, Rome, while it gave my childhood notions of dignity, of time and solemn things, kept my eye and fancy on very short commons. How stunted are the trees (all except the weeds) here! how flowerless the hedges! how empty of life, grace, detail the country!
I remember the sort of rapture of the first acquaintance with Tuscan valleys, hills, woods, fields, and all the lovely fulness of dainty real detail.
Rome, as I said before, is all theatre scenes; marvellouscoup d'œils, into which, advancing (from the Capitol) from opposite the Palatine palms, from the Lateran steps, from the Tiber quays, you find nothingto go on with; and in so far it fits, it symbolises, perhaps, its own history—for what is history but a series of such admirable theatrical views; mere delusion, and behind them prose, mere prose? The reality of Rome is, one feels it, in its distant hills. There you can penetrate; thence history streamed.
March19.
After wandering between tremendous hailstorms about the Aventine (the black sky and turbid Tiber from S. Alessio, in odd contrast with the lemons and oranges and freesias of S. Sabina, and with the chill empty churches), I waited for a Mass at S. M. in Cosmedin. Garlands (how poor and inartistic compared to the Tuscan and Venetian ones!) hanging in porch and box strewn at the door. The church, just restored, very swept and garnished still, with its Byzantine delicacy of fluted ribbed columns, carved precious ambones and carpet of lovely marbles, a place for the perfect ritual and splendid vestments of an aristocratic worship, slowly filled with, oh! such a poor, poor, wretched congregation, while the two priests, two sacristans and small choir-boys looked on (with a glance at watch) like people preparing for a play and waiting for a full house; the bell-ringer occasionally hanging on to the rope near the door, and giving a jump as he let go. I don't mean merely poor in fortune, in ragged draggled clothes, the sweepings of those rag-fair quarters, but poor in wretched, ill-grown, ill, dull, stupid bodies and souls, draggle-tailed like their clothes, only two savage-looking peasants having dignity or grace. More like an Irish congregation than an Italian, the two policemen, the women nursing their babies, the dreary sickly nuns, the broken, idiot-looking shabby elderly men in overcoats.
At last the priests and choir-boys, to match, went in procession to the altar, and the service began; merely chants with a response from the crowd. But as soon as they began everything seemed to pull together, to be all right, to have significance….
Is it possible that of religious things only the æsthetic side is vital, universal, is what gives or seems to give a meaning, deludes us into a belief in some spirituality? Sometimes one suspects as much: that the unifying element is not so much religion, as, after all, art.
March23.
These are fragments of inscriptions from the Macellus Liviæ, of the time of Valens and Gratian, now transferred to the porch of S. Maria in Trastevere: "Maceus vixit dulcissime cum suis ad supremam diem. C. Gannius primogenitus vix: ann. VII. Desine jam mater lacrimis rinovare querellas—namque dolor talis non tibi contigit uni." So at least I read.
Another states that "M. Cocceius Ambrosius Aug: Lib: præpositus vestis albæ triumphalis (?) fecit." When he had lived with Nice (?) his wife forty-five years eleven days "sine ulla querela."
Also, "Dis Manib. Rhodope fecerent (?) Berenice et Drusilla delicatæ dulcissimæ suae (sic)."
Also, "Attidiæ felicissimæ uxori rariosimæ Fl: Antoninus."
How these inscriptions, of which I copied out a few yesterday during a heavy shower in the portico of S. M. in Trastevere, make one feel, again by this magic of Rome, the other half of the truth: How little the centuries matter, how vain are these thousands of years, which exist only in our thoughts, how solely important are the brief pangs of us poor obscure shortlived forgotten creatures!
March30.
This is the most Roman house, in my sense, of all Rome. The first evening, when I came into my room, the sunset streaming in, the lights beginning below, it was fantastic and overwhelming. What I said of this being a unique moment in Roman history—the genius of the city stripped of all veils, visible everywhere, is especially true about the view from this window. During my childhood Rome was closed, uniform, without either the detail or the panoramic efforts which speak to the imagination; and ten or fifteen years hence the great gaps will be filled up, and the deep historical viscera, so to speak, of the city closed and grown together. Now, with the torn-down houses, the swept-away quarters, one has not only views of hills and river and bridges, and of gardens and palaces and loggias, hidden once and to be hidden again, but into the very life of the people: the squalor of back streets revealed, of yards looked into, of the open places turned intoimmondezzaioand play and grazing ground, showing the barbarism and nakedness of the land—showing one that there is here no tradition of anything more active, decent or human than this present demolition. And theSventramentoalso reveals the past! From my window, under that sunset behind the trees and fountains and churches of the Janiculum, I look down on a sort of mediæval city of the Trastevere—upon a still stranger, imaginary one made by perspective and fancy; the old bridge, with its two doublehermesleading between towers, and the long prison-like walls of the inland buildings, into an imaginary square—an imaginary city with more towers, more Romanesque belfries. This is a case of the imaginary place due to perspective, to bird's-eye view, to some reminiscence. (I trace a resemblance to the arsenal gate at Venice, perhaps also to the inner town at Castelfranco.) This case is an illustration of how large a part illusion, even recognised as such, plays in our feeling.
And similarly as regards theinvisibleview. Here am I, in a house nesting in the theatre of Marcellus, the little orange and lemon garden presumably built actually onto those remaining black arches in which coppersmiths and coopers and saddlers, all the humble trades of a backward little country town or village, have burrowed: the thought of Virgil's line with it all. The mangy green grass in front, where the children fly kites and the inconceivable skeleton horses graze, is the site of the former Ghetto; and behind its remaining synagogue, the little belfry, the houses of the Cencis, are down at heel carts and ragged peasants round the little isolated Ghetto fountain; and on the other side the Aventine, the bridge of—was it Cocles? a land of ballad, of popular romance, of tragedy.
March30.
Appalling morning of wind and dust; I bicycled in agitation of spirit to Domine quo Vadis. A wretched little church, no kind of beauty about it, full of decayed, greasy pictures, and, far better than they, penny coloured prints of the Saviour and Infant Baptist, and of the Life and Death of the Religious and the Irreligious Person about 1850, both in high hats and tail-coats. The old custodian crone tells me she is half blind, and envies me my glasses. She points out a bit of fresco: "Questo è Gesu Nazzareno"—as the housekeeper might say, "This is the present Earl"—also points out the marble copy of the slab bearing the print ofi suoi santissimi piedi, square little feet, of such a squat, fat, short-jointed Christ, about as miraculous or venerable as the pattern on a pat of butter.
Turning my face, in that tornado of dust, towards Rome, its walls stretch suddenly before me across the vineyards and fields, broken walls, of any mediæval city you please, and hiding, it would seem, emptiness behind them. The desolation of this distant city, with its foreground of squalid hovels, and ill-favoured wine shop and smithies where the very inscriptions, "Vino di Marino," or "Ferracocchio," or "Ova di Giornata," look as if a megalomaniac, escaped from an asylum, had dipped a brush into a paint-pot and splashed all over; this foreground of vague tombs, masonry heaven knows what, all flowered with huge wild mignonette; this other moving background of ragged peasants and unutterable galled horses; the desolation of this dead city which I feel behind those mediæval walls comes home tothem, like the sting of the dust whirlpools and roar of the wind.Quomodo sedet sola civitas!
Meanwhile, close to one of those city gates, is a poster announcing lectures "Sur le costume des Premiers Chr étiens!"
But not less incongruous, behind those walls of Rome, are all of us, bringing our absurd modernnesses, our far-fetched things of civilisation into the solemn, starved, lousy, silent Past! At moments like these I feel that one needs be entirely engrossed either in making two ends meet (a clerk or shopkeeper, or one of these haranguing archæologists holding forth under the Arch of Drusus) for his dinner or in tea parties and "jours," and "sport," to endure the company of Rome.
I went into the vigna of S. Cesario for the key of the church. It is the place where there is a small fifteenth-century villa, with those mullioned windows like Palazzo di Venezia, and a little portico, seeming to tell, among the rubbish heaps and onions, of Riario and Borgia suppers. And in this church and the neighbouring one the impression of the inscriptions recording succession of popes and cardinals, all the magnificent locusts who came swarm after swarm, to devour this land, leaving the broken remains of their hurried magnificence, volutes, plaster churches, and, inscriptions! inscriptions!
April13.
Villa Falconieri, Frascati—abandoned, overgrown—the wonderful outline of huge Mondragone, with its pines against the mountains. All these villas near each other, and while they open up into the hill and woods (the lovely delicate rose of the budding chestnuts) are still almost within hail of the little town across the valley. So different from the Tuscan villa, even the grandest, say Mte. Gufoni, which is only the extendedfattoria, its place chosen by the accident of agricultural business. This mouldering rococo villa is inhabited in summer by the Trappists of Tre Fontane, of that Abbey of St. Anastasia which was the suzerain of all Maremma, great part of Umbria and the Tuscan islands! At the end of their miserably cultivated littleorto, presiding over the few leeks and garlics, on the balustrade towards Rome of all divinities, who but Hortorum Deus!
Near Grottaferrata in a flat green field, a nun, all in white, was seated under one of the big olives: a curious biblical figure.
April26.
Yesterday with P. D. P. at Porta Latina. He told me an extraordinary thing. In the blocked-up arch of that suppressed gate, at the end of a blind alley, an old old couple—a man of ninety and a woman of eighty, had taken up their abode for months; helped occasionally by the monks of the neighbouring convent (with pretty rose-garden) of S. Giovanni a Porta Latina, to whom however permission was refused (the Superior referring to the Card. Vicar and the Card. Vicar tohisConfessor) to give a roof to the couple because of the woman; also there was a suspicion that the couple had not been married in church. All this P. D. had learned when these people were still there, in the arch. But we found them gone; and the strangest sight instead. In the immense thickness of the gate a heap of reeds in a corner; and strewn all about in this artificial grotto, old rusty utensils, a grater, a strainer, broken pots, papers, rags, half-burnt logs, a straw hat, and a walking stick! And over a kind of recess, on a plank, a little shrine, two broken Madonnas picked out of some dust-heap, withered flowers in a crock, and a sprig of olive, evidently of last Palm Sunday! Poor little properties, so poor, so wretched that they had remained unmolested, despised even by the poorest, safe at the end of that blind road in that closed-up gate of Rome! That two human beings in our day should have lived there for months, even years (for they returned after an absence, the monk told us); lived, like some anchorites of old, in the ruins, in a grotto made by human hands; with the vineyards all round, and the shrubs and flowers waving from the broken masonry! Their rags and shreds of paper littered the rank grass and acanthus by the walled-up gate, where the little Bramantesque temple stands, built by a French prelate under Julius II., and inscribed "Au plaisir de Dieu."Au plaisir de Dieu!
Over the walls, the great bones of the Baths of Caracalla half hidden by trees: and, closing the distance, St. Peters. We went into the little damp church, with a twelfth-century campanile and well in the rose-garden; a deserted little place, only a bit of opus Alexandrinum, and a string of Cosmati work remaining, all the rest overlaid by the frescoes and stuccoes of a seventeenth-century Rasponi. The grey Franciscan who showed us round told us that a lady had given five hundred francs for admission of the old man and woman of the gate at the Petites Soeurs; but these required the religious marriage. About a month ago the couple was married and taken off to the Petites Soeurs; the day after the poor old man died! The old people had desired the monks to distribute their bedding and rags to the poor, now they themselves were provided for. And that is how the place came to be abandoned. The old man told the monks he much preferred the arch to the damp cellar where a greengrocer of Rome used to make him sleep. "They had good sides those people," I remarked. "Sfido! bonissimi," said the Franciscan; he was from Albi, but had got to speak with a Roman accent.
While we were there, under the impression of that story, of the deserted church, the ragged grey monk, and of that whole squalid, imaginative Roman corner, a little cart drove up with a young man and two little girls, who went round with us and gathered sprays of hawthorn off the walls, leaving the pony to graze meanwhile. "No Romans," said P. D.; and indeed they turned out to be Vicentines, the young man a student of law taking out his young cousins for ascampagnata. P. D. very characteristically made them write their names for him in his pocket-book, and bowed to the little girls as if they were duchesses. More characteristically still, my friend carried off the old beggar's stick to keep in his study.
April26.
Yesterday wandered in Trastevere and about Piazza Mattei and Montanara and back by 'bus; again this morning tramm'd to Lateran in showers. The squalor of this Rome and of its people! The absence of all trace of any decent past, ancient barbarism as down at heel and unkempt as any modern slum! The starved galled horses, broken harness, unmended clothes and wide-mouthed sluttishness under the mound on which stand the Cenci's houses, a foul mound of demolition and rag-pickers, only a stone's-throw from the brand-new shop streets, the Lungo Tevere, the magnificence of palaces like the Mattei, Caetani, &c. If Rome undoubtedly gives the soul peace by its assurance that the present is as nothing in the centuries, it also depresses one, in other moods, with the feeling that all history is but a vast rubbish-heap and sink; that nothing matters, nothing comes out of all the ages save rags and brutishness. There is a great value for our souls in any place which tells us, by however slight indications, of a past of self-respect, activity and beauty; and I long for Tuscany.
February25.
In the Forum this morning with Css. B. and the excavator Boni. In the Director's shed a "Campionario," literally pattern sheets of the various strata of excavation: bits of crock, stone, tile, iron, little earthenware spoons for putting sacrificial salt in the fire, even what looked like a set of false teeth. Time represented thus in space. And similarly with the excavations themselves: century under century, each also represented by little more than foot-prints, bases of gone columns, foundations of rough edifices. Among these neatly-dug-out layers of nothingness, these tidy heaps of chips with so few things, stand out the few old column- and temple-ends which Piranesi already drew.
I felt very keenly that the past is only a creation of the present. Boni, a very interesting and ardent mind, poetical and mystical, showed us things not really of this earth, not really laid bare by the spade, but existing in realms of fantastic speculation, shaped by argument, faultlessly cast in logical moulds. Too faultlessly methought, for looking at the mere heaps of architectural rubbish, let alone the earth, the various vegetations which have accumulated upon it, I had a sense of the infinite intricacy of all reality, and of the partiality and insufficiency of the paths which our reason (or our fancy in the garb of reason) cuts into it. Rituals and laws whose meaning had become mere shibboleths two thousand years ago, races whose very mien and aspect (often their language) can only be speculated on: all this reappears, takes precision and certainty. But is not this a mere creation, like that of art or of systematic metaphysics? What struck me as the only certainty among these admirable cogent arguments was that the once tank of Juturna, round whose double springs Rome must have arisen to drink and worship, this sacred and healing water where the Dioscuri watered their steeds after Lake Regillus, has been fouled by human privies so deeply that years of dredging and pumping will be required to restore its purity. Of how many things is not this tank a symbol as cogent as any which our archæologist ascribed to those old symbol-mongers of his discourse!
With us was a man who took no interest in all these matters; none in the significance of rituals, symbols, or the laws of racial growth and decadence.Hewanted to be shown the place where Cæsar had fallen; he was a survivor of the old school of historical interest. Very out of date and droll; but is not this old-fashioned interest in half-imaginary dramatic figures as legitimate as our playing with races, rituals, the laws, the metaphysical essence of the past?
February27.
The meet the other day, at Maglianella, beyond Porta S. Pancrazio. Desolate, rolling country, pale green wide dells, where streams should be, but are not; roads excavated in the brown volcanic rock, here and there fringed with a few cork-trees; the approach, very much, to Toscanella. But raced along by carriages, bicycles and motor-cars, and leading to a luncheon tent, a car full of hounds, school of cavalry officers, and the redcoats preparing to start. The cloud banks sat on the horizon as on the sea; the sky very pale and blue, moist, with song of larks descending from it. And as the horses cantered along the soft grass, the scent of last year's mint and fennel rose from stubble-fields, and the rank, fresh smell of crushed succulent asphodels.
February27.
The cabman who, yesterday evening, took me to Palazzo Gabbrielli instead of Palazzo Orsini, excused himself saying that priests even blunder at the altar—"anche li preti sbajano all' altare." Very Roman!
With E. de V. on Monte Mario. The weather has cleared; slight tramontana, pure sky, with white storm- or snow-clouds collected like rolled-up curtains, everywhere on the horizon. Great green slopes of grass appear as far as one could see, here and there a little valley full of ilex scrub; in the mist of the distance conical shepherds' huts, with smoke wreath. We sat on a piece of turf, cut in by horses' hoofs, by a stack of faggots; song of lark and bleating of sheep. But for the road, the carriage, it might have been in the Maremma for utter loneliness and freshness. Turning round a few yards further, carriages and motor-cars, and all Rome, with its unfinished new quarters nearest, stretched under us.
March3.
Day before yesterday with dear Paso along Via Ostiense. Perhaps the most solemn of all those solemn Roman roads, with the solemnity and desolation of the great brimful brown Tiber, between barren banks of mud, added to the solemnity of the empty green country. It is the refusal of vegetation in great part which makes this country strange and solemn. Such vegetation as there is, the asphodels and rare blackthorn along the road, the stumpy oaks or cork-trees or the bends of the river, gaining an importance, a significance out of all proportion; and the thinnest little distant spinny, looking like a mysterious consecrated wood. We got to the top of a hill, and there, far off against the grey flatness, was the lavender line of the sea. It was a brilliant day of freshly fallen distant snow; the air keen and windless, with a feel of the sea as we went towards it.
Yesterday P. D. P. took me to see a former Marescotti palace in the Via della Pigna. A very quiet aristocratic part of Rome, of narrow streets between high palaces, and little untraversed squares. The gloominess of the outside succeeded by the sunlight, the spaciousness of a vast courtyard, on to which look sixteenth-, seventeenth-, eighteenth-century windows, closed by the back of a church with its clock-tower, so that, as Pierino says, it might almost be the piazza of a provincial town. A campanile, fountain, piazza, almost asun, all to oneself. One wonders with what these palaces could ever have been filled by the original owners.
We then went into another palace yard; and there was a shop with three young men working at a huge sawdust doll, with porcelain sandalled feet. I thought it was a doll for displaying surgical apparatus, but it turned out to be a female saint, whose head we were shown, life-size, properly expressive with rolling eyes and a little halo.
March6.
That I should feel it most on return here; find I have returned withouther, travelled without her, that she is not there to tell; the sense of utter loneliness, of the letter one would write, the greeting one would give—and which no creature now wants!
Yesterday morning, feeling ill and very sad, Rome came for half-hour with its odd consolation. I sat on the balcony of the corner room, very high up, in the sunshine. Cabs, with their absurd Roman canter, crossing the diaper of the little square, circling, as I remember them doing in my childhood, round the unwilling fare. A soldier rode across, dismounted, took his beast by the bridle to the cattle-trough in the palace wall opposite; a bit of campagna intruded into town. And motor-cars snorted and bells rang. High up on the same level with me was the hidden real Rome—all that you do not guess while walking in the streets below. Colonna gardens with bridges over the way, and green-clipped hedges and reddening Judas-trees under the big pines, and a row of marble Emperors turning their backs; and, further, the Quirinal with tip of obelisk, and plaster trumpet-blowing Fame; and a palm-tree, its head rising out of I know not what hidden yard, in front of a terrace of drying rags. And at every vista end, pines of the Pincian, Villa Doria, &c.; and domes; and the pale blond roofs with the telephone wires like gossamer stretched over them. Sunshine; distant noise and incessant bells. Rome in a fashion consoling; but how empty!
April3.
This morning I know not what ceremony in the Portico of SS. Apostoli: a little procession, some monks, a priest in purple, and a few draggle-tailed people before the closed door, chanting at intervals, till the door opened and they entered, their silver cross in its purple bag ahead, and their little branches of olive. The fine carved Roman eagle in its magnificent garland of oak-leaves, presiding, very fierce and contemptuous, over this little scene. When one effaces the notion of habit, how very odd to see a company of nineteenth-century people, battered and galled by life like old cab-horses, stationing in a portico singing verses and holding branches of olive! There is something refreshing, something of the fields and hills, of leisure and childishness, in the proceeding, if only the poor creatures realised it. But to most of them, I take it, the bearing of a silver cross, of an olive branch, is in reality as utilitarian (though utilitarian in regard to another world) as holding the tail of a saucepan or rattling a money-box. For how many, one wonders, is that door, opening to the cross and the olive branches, the door of an inner temple, of a place swept and garnished in the pious fancy? alas! alas!
I went on, on foot, past the Capitol, through the Montanara region, with a growing sense, which I have had ever since return here, of the squalor, the lousiness, the dust-heap, the unblushingimmondezzaioquality of Rome and its inhabitants. Everything ragged, filthy, listless; the very cauliflowers they were selling looking all stalk, fit for that refuse midden which symbolises the city. By the Temple of Vesta a lot of carts were drawn up, with galled horses and ragged crouching peasants—that sort of impression which Piranesi gives.
A school of little girls, conducted by a nun, was filing out of S. Maria in Cosmedin, and I helped up the leathern curtain for them to pass. Tatters, squalor, with that abundant animal strength and beauty of these people; one feels they have been eating and drinking, and befouling the earth and the streets with the excrements of themselves and their lives, love-making and begetting, and suffering stolidly all through the centuries, and one wonders why? as one wonders before a ditch full of tadpoles. Low mass was going on at a side altar, and the canon's mass in the beautiful marble choir, behind the ambones, behind those delicate marble railings and seats, which, with their inclusion, makes the fine aristocratic, swept and garnished quality of that Byzantine architecture more delicate and dainty still. The church was finished restoring two years ago, but the population of that low part of Rome, the Piazza Montanara St. Giles, has already given it the squalor of ages. I cannot say how deeply, though vaguely, I felt the meaningless tragic triviality of these successive generations of reality, in the face of that solemn,meaningfulabstraction which we call history, which we call humanity, the centuries, Rome.
The great holes through which, as through earthquake rents, the innermost life of Rome has become visible in the last thirty years, are beginning to close up. In that sort of rag-fair, witch-burning ground limited only by the island and the belfries of Trastevere which I used to look down upon from Palazzo Orsini, the Jews are building a colossal synagogue. One does not grudge it them, after their Holy Cross Days! But that strange simultaneous vision of the centuries (like that of their life which drowning folk are said to have) is ending with the death agony of old Rome.
April4.
The white peacocks apparently all gone; but two superb green ones, their tails outspread, glittering on the grass under the olives just below the villa terrace. Near the terrace, where a lot of olive wood was being chopped on a stump of fine fluted column, a bay-tree of the girth of a good-sized oak, bearing pale yellow leaves and blossom, as of beaten metal, the golden bough of the Sibyl. Hard by another bay-tree, a ramping python, rearing up a head of bright green leaves. The loveliness of the chestnut woods on the hill behind, not yet in leaf, but rosy with rising sap; big round olives also, dark silver in front. The same colours and same wonderful rounded dimpled volcanic lie of the land as round Villa Lante at Viterbo. We walked, the Carlo R.'s little governess and I, along round above Mondragone and down by Villa Falconieri; the three children on donkeys in front, Gabriella's boys and their cousins. The pleasantness of the children's voices, of their bear-fighting in the train coming back. A splendid day of sun, wind, of dove's-wing distant Campagna view.
April14.
San Saba to-day, for the second time this year, with those pleasant English people the P.s. It was Thursday, and we were not admitted into the garden (though we were very kindly allowed into the loggia) because the pupils of the Germanic College were having their weekly recreation, a hundred of them. We saw their gowns, like geraniums or capsicums, moving between the columns and under the blossoming orange-trees. And a party of them sat among the fallen pillars and broken friezes outside the little churches singing—and what?—the Lorelei in chorus, "Sie kämmt sich mit goldenem Kamme und singt ein Lied dabei." Oh, friendly romance of Germany, lurking even in the house of the Lord, and cheek-by-jowl with De Propaganda Fide!
Pal. Sciarra,April16.
This morning with Antonia at S. Cecilia in Trastevere, having a special permission from Minister to see the Cavalieri frescoes in the nuns' choir gallery (like poorer, clumsier,jowlierDuccio; Byzantine, with antique braided hair and "Greek" features). The impression of the conventclausura—little vestibule, a strongly grated small window inside it, apparently ending only in darkness; the "Ruota," behind which a voice spoke mysteriously as through a telephone, the wooden shelf turning on itself and offering us a key—key opening (by instructions of mysterious voice) an adjacent small room: two straw chairs on either side of small table before a thick black grating; another grating behind that, and a kind of perforated shutter between. The latter rattled away, a nun's face uncertainly seen—faded cheeks, immense eyes, white dress, behind the black double bars; the key restored to the Ruota, and engulfed after directions from the mysterious voice; another door, sound of keys and bolts. In all this a predominant and lugubrious impression of keys and bolts. The little portress, Donna Maria Geltude (for these nuns are Benedictines, and have the handle to their names), a wizen, very ugly little woman, in incredibly shabby but spotless dress, white wool washed threadbare to an appearance of linen, voluminous skirts and black veil. A glazed cloister (with twelfth-century columns), a few pictures, seventeenth-century tables and chairs, as in a passage; more passages similar, withprie Dieuand scant peasant furniture. The little library, a smallish glass press with nothing but Filotea, Fr. de Sales, Vite dei Santi, &c. Might they read them? Yes, but only on asking the Abbess. Terror of nun lest Antonia and I should go on or into anything not mentioned in our permit—the impression that in this life all can be done, but done only by permission. "Men allowed to visit?" Only by permission of Cardinal Segretario di Stato. "Men working in garden, masons, &c.?" Yes, but always with special permission; permission and bars!
In all these corridors and stairs not a creature; only at one moment a door stirred, Antonia thought she saw a nun?? Little garden, with box hedges and lemon-trees. The inner windows (cells) open on this garden, are large, ordinary, and without bars. There was even one long ground floor window with a little balcony and steps with a cat on them. But never a soul! Great bareness, fair neatness, and order.
The gilt box of the choir, looking down into church; the stalls; the Abbess's gold-headed crozier stuck into her stall (St. Cecilia with harp in it), two lecterns with Latin lessons of the day—the day's martyrology.
April22.
With Contessa Z. to-day in Colonna Gardens. Great surprise on finding them more romantic than from the outside. A terrace, with all Rome, blond; all manner of unexpected towers and cupolas. The pines of the Janiculum, staircase fountains, waterless but noisy, the Roman veil of vegetation everywhere; and great vague walls of spaliered roses and lemons. In the midst of these terraces and balustrades and crowded nurseries of flowers, the surprise of finding that that great vague building I have noticed from below is a ruin, roofless, full of wild fig, a castle's square keep. Mediæval? antique? the place surely whence the imaginary Nero watched the burning, and harped!
April25.
Palo Beach yesterday; motored there by my French friends. I have had fever some days past, and there was more than mere pleasure and amusement in sitting on the sand and breathing the clean cloudless sea-air, instead of the scirocco stuff we had left, alternately simmering and shivering in Rome. By the way, how little the sea gives to Rome (except at the Aventine corner sometimes by a violent libeccio), and how one feels the futility of this tideless Mediterranean, unable to purify or renovate even a few yards of the inland! Think of the estuaries of the North! of the cleansing vivifying tides and draughts which the ocean thrusts into the very vitals of the countries!
No one, one feels, ever landed (since Æneas and his companions) upon this shallow strand, save the raiding Saracens and Barbary pirates, against whom the castle, the martello tower, barely more of Palo, was built. For there is not even here what represents the life of the Mediterranean, the jutting rocks, the sucking in of sea, by the cliffs, the sudden squalls of the stony coasts where sea and land really play and fight together, waves leaping tower-high, and battering at hillsides and swirling in and out of creeks. Here, one understands that a storm would mean mere passive submerging: the water rising higher, covering the straight narrow beach, the low green fields, noiselessly, and retreating when so inclined, with neat stacks of seaweed and samphire left behind. The renovation of Rome, like its drinking water, has always come from the mountains; the Tiber mouth is their outlet, not the inlet of the sea. And the mountain clouds change in shape, stagnate and brood in this low trough; the mountain air faints, dies, in these fever levels.
The beach of Palo is only a few yards wide: a low natural wall of corroded tufo, covered with no maritime bent, but ordinary grass; a line of sea refuse, a band of fine black sparkling sand, and little waves fringed black with that mournful sand, breaking feebly against it. A high sky, with a few sailing clouds; and in it, rather than on the sea, some boats, like toy ducks, on the offing, motionless. We sat on the sand, digging into its moist warmth, and amused (I at least) that this glittering beach left no trace on the land; making Carpaccio St. George Dragons (with inserted eyes of sand flint) out of blistered drift-wood; and looking about, later, for bits of antique marble and brick upon the sands. For this lazy sea appears to wash no pebbles of its own bringing, but only fragments of stone brought by man, broken off man's buildings, shot by him into the Tiber, in the days, no doubt, when columns were sawed into discs and smashed into petal-shaped wedges for theOpus Alexandrinum. I don't think we saw one natural looking stone upon that beach; everything seemed vaguely, precious and outlandish, basalt, porphyry, agate, Rossoantique, and serpentine still bearing its original polish; also fine white marble, Mme. B. possessing a beautiful piece of salty Parian found there, and shaped delicately, curved and bossy, into a perfect heart, the heart of a marble Artemis or Amazon. This the lazy Roman sea does, and it is surely an unusual feat: roll its shingle into vague shapes of symbolic hearts, hearts of serpentine, of jasper, of various beautiful rose and lilac breccias, of basalt, and of fine rose brick, all scattered on the glittering black sand (with funny mourning edges of violet shells), and in the lip of those little black waves. But far more beautiful and extraordinary and brilliant (and to me far more wonderful and odd) was the still uncorrupted little corpse of a kingfisher: sky-blue breast, greenish turquoise ruff, and glossy dark back, lying in state, as dead birds do.
April29.