THE church and convent of S. Onofrio crown the steepest slope of the Janiculan. Our cocchieri always insisted, more or less strenuously, that we should alight at the bottom of the short Salita di S. Onofrio, and ascend on foot while the debilitated horses followed at their ease. Our first drive thither was upon a delicious morning in February, when the atmosphere was crystalline to the Sabine Hills. The terrace before the church-portico was clean and sunny, the prospect so enchanting, that we hung over the parapet guarding the verge of the hill, for a long quarter of an hour. Under the Papacy, S. Onofrio was barred against women, except upon the 25th of April, the anniversary of the death of Torquato Tasso, for whose sake, and that alone, strangers would care to pass the threshold.

Beyond the tomb of Tasso, and that of the lingual prodigy, Cardinal Mezzofanti, the church offers no temptation to sight-seers. We therefore turned almost immediately into the cloisters of the now sparsely inhabited monastery. The young priests and acolytes are winning honest bread by honest labor elsewhere. Gray-bearded monks stumble along the corridors, keep up the daily masses, and sun themselves among the salad and artichoke beds of the garden.

“Slow to learn!” said Caput, shaking his head before a fresco in the side-arcade of the church.

It represented St. Jerome, gaunt, wild-eyed and distraught with the sense of his impotence and sinfulness, at the moment thus described by him;—“How often, when alone in the desert with wild beasts and scorpions, half dead with fasting and penance, have I fancied myself a spectator of the sins of Rome, and of the dances of its young women!”

Victor Emmanuel had biting reasons of his own for knowing what is the sway of the flesh and the devil, leaving the world out of the moral sum. Merciful humanitarian as well as wise ruler, he led would-be saints into the wholesome air of God’s working-day world.

The passage from the church to the conventual buildings is decorated with unlovely scenes from the life of that unlovely hermit, S. Onofrio. His neglected nakedness and ostentatious contempt for the virtue very near akin to commonplace godliness, make one wonder the more at the sweet cleanliness of the halls and rooms nominally under his guardianship.

“Ecco!” said our guide, opening the door of a large chamber.

Directly opposite, in strong relief against the bare wall, stood a man. Dressed in the doublet and hose worn by Italian gentlemen two hundred years ago, he leaned lightly on the nearest wainscot, with the easy grace of one who listens, ready to reply to friend or guest. The beautiful head was slightly bent,—a half-smile lighted features that were else sad. A step into the room, a second’s thought dispelled the illusion. Some of the company said it had never existed for them. For myself, I gladly own that I was startled by the life-like expression of figure and face. It is a fresco, and critics say, cheap and tawdry,—a mere trick, and not good even as a trick. I got used, after awhile, to disagreement with the critics, and when a thing pleased me, liked it, in my own heart, without their permission. This fresco helped me believe that this was Tasso’s room; that he had trodden this floor, perhaps leaned against the wall over there, while he looked from that window upon the Rome that had done him tardy justice by summoning him to receive in her Capitol the laureate’s crown.

Wrecked in love and in ambition; robbed and maligned; deserted by friends and hounded by persecutors; confined for cause as yet unknown, for seven years in a madman’s cell, he was at fifty-one—uncheered by the blaze of popular favor shed upon him at evening-time—bowed in spirit, infirm in body. The Coronation was postponed until Spring in consideration for his feeble health. The ceremony was to surpass all former literary pageants, and preparations for it were in energetic progress when Tasso removed, for rest and recuperation, to the Convent of S. Onofrio. He had worked hard that winter in spite of steadily-declining strength. He would rally his forces against the important day that was to declare his life to have been triumph, not failure. We recall the bitterer address of Wolsey at the door of the convent in which he had come to lay his bones, in reading Tasso’s exclamation to the monks who welcomed him: “My fathers! I have come to die amongst you!” When informed by his physician that the end was very near, he thanked him for the “pleasant news” and blessed Heaven for “a haven so calm after a life so stormy.”

To a friend, he wrote—“I am come to begin my conversation in Heaven in this elevated place.” The Pope sent him absolution under his own hand and seal. “I shall be crowned!” said the dying poet. “Not with laurel, as a poet in the Capitol, but with a better crown of glory in Heaven.”

The monk who watched and prayed with him on the night ending with the dawn of April 25, 1595, caught his last murmur:—

“In manus tuas, Domine!”

He had instructed his friend, Cardinal Aldobrandini, to collect and destroy all his printed works, the mutilation of which had nettled him to frenzy, a few years before. They were nothing to him now; the memories of his turbulent life a dream he would forget “in this elevated place.”

A glass case in this chamber holds a wax cast of his face taken after death. It is brown, cracked, dreesome, the features greatly changed by sorrow and pain from those of a marble bust near by, and very unlike those of the frescoed portrait. The head is small and well-formed, the forehead high, with cavernous temples. A shriveled laurel-wreath is bound about them, discolored and brittle as the wax. The crucifix used by him in his last illness and which was enclasped by his dead hands is also exhibited, with his inkstand, a page of MS. and the iron box in which he lay buried until the erection of his monument. But for the graceful figure upon the wall in the corner by the left-hand window, and the view framed by the casements, we could not have remembered that life, no less than death, had been here;—still less, that this was, in truth, a Coronation-room.

Through the garden a broad alley leads between beds of thrifty vegetables to Tasso’s oak. From the shattered trunk, which has suffered grievously from the winds, shoots a single vigorous branch. We picked ivy and grasses from the earth about the roots where Tasso sat each day, while he could creep so far;—the city at his feet, the Campagna beyond the city unrolled to the base of the mountains, and Heaven beyond the hills. The only immortelle I saw growing in Italy, I found so near to Tasso’s oak that his foot must often have pressed the spot.

At the left of the oak, and winding along the crest of the hill is a terrace bordered by a low, broken wall, bright that day, with mid-winter turf and bloom. Rust-brown and golden wall-flowers were rooted among the stones; pansies smilingly pushed aside the grass to get a good look at the sun; daisies, like happy, lawless children, ran everywhere.

“This is what I crossed the Atlantic to see and to be!” Caput pronounced, deliberately, throwing himself down on the sward, and resting an elbow upon the wall, just where the flowers were thickest, the sunshine warmest, the prospect fairest. “You can go home when you like. I shall remain here until the antiquated fathers up at the house drive me from the premises. I can touch Heaven—as the Turks say—with my finger!”

While we affected to wait upon his pleasure, we remembered that a more genial saint than the patron of the convent—to wit—S. Filippo Neri, was wont to assemble here Roman children and teach them to sing and act his oratorios. What a music-gallery! And what a theme for artist’s brush or pen were those rehearsals under this sky, at this height, with the shadow of Tasso’s oak upon the al fresco concert-hall!

“The view from Tusculum is said to be more beautiful than this,” observed our head, murmurously, from the depths of his Turkish trance. “We will see it before the world is a week older!”

Nevertheless, the earth was two months further on in her swing around the sun, and that sun had kissed into life a thousand blushing flowers, where one had bloomed in February, when we really set out for the site of that venerable town. We had appointed many other seasons for the excursion, and been thwarted in design, crippled in execution. Mrs. Blimber’s avowal that she could go down to the grave in peace could she but once have seen Cicero in his villa at Tusculum, was worn into shreds among us. When we did meet, by appointment, our friends, the V——s at the station in time for the eleven o’clock train to Frascati, we had a story of an inopportune call that had nearly been the fortieth obstacle to the fruition of our scheme.

It was April, but the verdure of early summer was in trees and herbage. Nature never sleeps in Italy. At the worst, she only lapses into drowsiness on winter nights, and, next morning, confesses the breach of decorum with a bewitching smile that earns for her abundant pardon. The exuberance of her mood on this day was tropical and superb. The tall grasses of the Campagna were gleaming surges before the wind, laden with odors stolen from plains of tossing purple spikes—not balls—yet which were clover to taste and smell. Red rivulets of poppies twisted in and out of the corn-fields and splashed up to the edge of the railway, and ox-eyed daisies were foamy masses upon the scarlet streams. Even in Italy, and in spring-tide, the olive is the impersonation of calm melancholy. In all the voluptuous glory of this weather, the olive trees stood pale, passionless, patient, holding on to their hillsides, not for life’s, but for duty’s sake, sustaining resolution and disregarding gravitation, by casting backward, grappling roots above the soil, like anchors played out in rough seas. They could not make the landscape sad, but they chastened it into milder beauty. Between dark clumps of ilex, overtopped by stately stone pines—ruined towers and battlements told their tale of days and races now no more, as the white walls of modern villas, embosomed in groves of nectarine and almond, and flowering-chestnut trees—like sunset clouds for rosy softness—bespoke present affluence and tranquillity in which to enjoy it.

In half an hour we were at the Frascati station. A mile of steep carriage-drive that granted us, at every turn in the ascent, new and delightful views, brought us to the cathedral. It is very ugly and uninteresting except for the circumstance that just within it is the monument dedicated by Cardinal York to his brother, Charles Edward, better known by his sobriquet of “Young Pretender,” than by the string of Latin titles informing us of his inherited rights and claim. Vexatious emptiness though these were, the recitation of them appears to have been the pabulum of soul and spirit to the exiled Stuarts unto the third generation.

We lunched moderately well—being hungry—at the best inn in Frascati, and discarding the donkeys and donkey-boys clustering like flies in the cathedral piazza, we bargained for four “good horses” to take us up to Tusculum. Mrs. V—— was not well, and remained at the hotel while our cavalcade, attended by two guides, wound up the hill. The element of the ludicrous, never lacking upon such expeditions, came promptly and boldly to the front by the time we were fairly mounted, and hung about the party until we alighted in the same spot on our return. Dr. V—— stands six feet, four, in low-heeled slippers, and to him, as seemed fit, was awarded the tallest steed. Prima’s was a gaunt beast, whose sleepy eyes and depressed head bore out the master’s asseveration that he was quiet as a lamb. Caput’s horse was of medium height and abounding in capers, a matter of no moment until it was discovered that my lamb objected to be mounted, and refused to be guided by a woman. After a due amount of prancing and curveting had demonstrated this idiosyncrasy to be no mere notion on my part, a general exchange, leaving out Prima, was effected. I was lifted to the back of the lofty creature who had borne Dr. V——. Caput demanded the privilege of subduing the misogynist. To the lot of our amiable son of Anak fell a Rosinante, who, as respectable perhaps in his way as his rider was in his, became, by the conjunction of the twain, an absurd hexaped that provoked the spectators to roars of laughter, his rider leading and exceeding the rest.

“The tomb of Lucullus!” he sobered us by exclaiming, pointing to a circular mass of masonry by the roadside. “That is to say, the reputed tomb. We know that he was Cicero’s neighbor—that they borrowed one another’s books in person.”

The books that, Cicero tells Atticus, “gave a soul to his house!” The brief, every-day phrase indicative of the neighborliness of the two celebrated Romans made real men of them, and the region familiar ground. The road lay between oaks, chestnuts, laurels, and thickets of laurestinus, the leaves shining as with fresh varnish—straight up the mountain, until it became a shaded lane, paved with polygonal blocks of lava. This is, incontestably, the ancient road to Tusculum, discovered and opened within fifty years. The banks were a mosaic of wild flowers;—the largest daisies and anemones we had yet seen, cyclamen, violets, and scores of others unknown by sight or name to us. In response to our cry of delight, both gentlemen reined in their horses, and Dr. V—— alighted to collect a bouquet. The tightening of Caput’s rein brought his horse’s ears so near his own, he had to throw his head back suddenly to save his face. The animal had a camel’s neck in length and suppleness,—a mule’s in stubbornness, and put upon, or off, his mettle by the abrupt jerk, he gave marvelous illustrations of these qualities. He could waltz upon four legs or upon two; dance fast or slow; rear and kick at once, or stand like a petrifaction under whip, spur, and an enfilading fire of Italian and American expletives; but his neck was ever the feature of the performance. Whether he made of it a rail, an inclined iron plane, the handle of a jug, or a double bow-knot, it was true to one purpose—not to obey rein or rider.

“The wretched brute has no martingale on!” cried the latter, at length. “See, here! you scamp! Ecco! VoilÀ! V——! what is the Italian for martingale? Ask that fellow what he means by giving such a horse to a lady, or to any one whose life is of any value, without putting curb or martingale upon him?”

The doctor, who, by the way, was once described to me by a Roman shopkeeper as the “tall American, with the long beard, and who speaks Italian so beautifully,” opened parley, when he could control his risibles, with the owner of the “molto buono” animal.

“He says he could not put upon him what he does not possess,” was the epitome of the reply. “That he has but three martingales. And there are four horses. Supply inadequate to demand, my dear fellow! He implores the signore Americano to be reasonable.”

“Reasonable!” The signore swung himself to the ground. “Say to him, with my compliments, that I implore him to take charge of a horse that is altogether worthy,—if that could be—of his master! I shall walk! He ought to be made to ride!”

We begged off the cowering delinquent from this extreme of retribution. Picking up the bridle flung to him, he followed us at a disconsolate and respectful distance. Cicero had a fine, peppery temper of his own. Did he ever have a fracas with his charioteer in this steep lane, I wonder?

We dismounted at what are supposed to be the ruins of his Villa. Some archÆologists give the preference to the spot now occupied by the Villa Ruffinella, which we had seen on our way up. The best authorities had decided, at the date of our excursion to Tusculum, that the orator’s favorite residence, “ad latera superiora” of the eminence culminating in the Tusculan fortress, stood nearer the city than was once thought, and that its remains are the thick walls and vaulted doorway we examined in profound belief in this theory. It is not an extensive nor a very picturesque remainder, although the buried foundations may be traced over a vast area. Against the sunniest wall grows an immense ivy-tree, spreading broad arms and tenacious fingers over the brick-work. The side adhering to the wall is flat, of course. We measured the outer surface, at the height of five feet from the ground. It was thirty-nine inches from side to side. This may almost be rated as the diameter, the bark being very slightly protuberant.

For beauty of situation the Villa was without an equal. Forsyth says,—“On the acclivity of the hill were scattered the villas of Balbus, Brutus, Catullus, Metellus, Crassus, Pompey, CÆsar, Gabinus, Lucullus, Lentulus and Varro, so that Cicero was in the midst of his acquaintances and friends.”

“In that place, alone”—wrote Cicero of his Tusculan home to his best friend and correspondent—“do I find rest and repose from all my troubles and toil.”

In his “Essay upon Old Age,” he drawls an attractive picture of the country-life of a gentleman-farmer at that time. I have not room to transcribe it here, faithfully as it portrays the real tastes and longings of the ambitious lawyer and successful politician. “What need”—and there is a sigh for the Tusculan upper hillside in the sentence—“to dwell upon the charm of the green fields, the well-ordered shrubberies, the beauty of vineyards and olive-groves?”

These smile no more about the site of the desolated villa. Terraces, slopes and summits are overgrown with wild grass. A few goats were feeding upon these at the door where little Tullia—the “Tulliola” of the fond father—his “delicia nostrÆ”—may have frolicked while he watched her from the colonnade overlooking Rome,—or one of “the seats with niches against the wall adorned with pictures;”—or, still, within sound of her voice, wrote in his library to Atticus, that the young lady threatened to sue him, (Atticus,) for breach of contract in not having sent her a promised gift.

The paved road, firm velvet ridges of turf rising between the blocks, runs beyond the Villa, directly to a small theatre. The upper walls are gone, but the foundations are entire, with fifteen rows of seats. It is a semicircular hollow in the turfy bank, excavated by Lucien Bonaparte while he lived at Villa Ruffinella. We descended half a dozen steps and stood upon the stone platform where it is generally believed Cicero held the famous Tusculan Disputations. The topics of these familiar dialogues or talks were “Contempt of Death,” “Constancy in Suffering,” and the like. Did he draw consolation from a review of his own philosophy, upon that bitter day when, deserted by partisans, and chased by his enemies, he withdrew to his beloved “Tusculaneum” and from these heights looked down upon the city whose pride he had been?—

“Rerum, pulcherrima Roma!”

Waiting, doubting, dreading, he at length received the news that a price had been set upon his head, fled in a blind, strange panic; returned upon his steps; again took flight, doubled a second time upon the track, and sat down, stunned and desperate, to await the death-blow.

Instead of the myrtle-tree, thorn-bushes and brambles grow rankly in

“The white streets of Tusculum.”

The reservoir that fed the aqueducts; the ruins of Forum and Theatre; piles of nameless stones breaking through uncultivated moors; on the side nearest Rome, mossy pillars of the old gateway; outside of this, a stone drinking-trough set there in the days of the Consulate, and through which still runs a stream of pure cold water,—this is what is left of the town founded by the son of Circe and Ulysses; erst the stanch ally of Rome, and the queen-city of Latium up to the battle of Lake Regillus. The best view of the encompassing country is to be had a little beyond the gateway. From this point is visible the natural basin, shut in by wooded hills, which contains Lake Regillus, now a stagnant pond, quite dry in summer. Under our feet were the stones from which the hoofs of Mamilius’ dark-gray charger struck fire on the day of battle.

Repeating the rhyme, we looked around to trace the route by which

“Poetry—not history!” objected one.

“Better than statistical facts!” said another.

Glancing in the direction of Rome, we were the witnesses of an extraordinary atmospheric phenomenon. The city, a dozen miles away, was lifted from the plain and floating upon a low-lying band of radiant mist. The dome of St. Peter’s actually appeared to sway and tremble as a balloon strains at its cords. The roofs were silver; the pinnacles aËrial towers. Thus the background, while between it and our mountain, the Campagna was a gulf black as death with the shadow of a thundercloud that had come we know not from what quarter. It was not there five minutes ago. We had barely time to exclaim over the marvel of contrasted light and gloom, when the cloud dropped like monstrous bat-wings upon the valley, flew faster than did ever bird of day or night toward us. There was not a roof in Tusculum. The guides brought up the horses in haste, and three of us were in the saddle by the time the first big drops dashed in our faces.

“Ride!” ejaculated the fourth, in response to the supplicating pantomime of the leader of the unmartingaled beast. “On that thing!”

Tusculum rain had not extinguished his sense of injury, and this was insult. There was but one umbrella amongst us, and this was forced upon me. Caput threw my bridle over his arm and walked at my tall horse’s head, calmly regardless of the drenching storm. Dr. V—— and his four-footed adjunct jogged placidly at the head of the line. Next rode Prima, humming softly to herself, while cascades poured from her hat-brim upon her shoulders, and her soaked dress distilled green tears upon the sides of her white horse. We followed, I very high, and selfishly dry. The guides, to whose outer men the plentiful washing was an improvement, straggled along in the rear, leading the recalcitrant horse. It was a forlorn-looking, but perfectly good-humored procession. There was little danger of taking cold from summer rain in this warm air. However this might be, to fret would be childish, to rebel foolishly useless. Caput uttered the only protest against the proceedings of the day, and that not until we left our horses in the piazza in front of the cathedral, and waited in the sunshine succeeding the shower, while the guides were paid.

“I don’t mind the walk up and down the mountain,” beating the wet from his hat, and wiping the drops from his face. “Nor the wetting very much, although my boots are ruined. I do grudge giving ten francs for the privilege of seeing that brigand lead his villanous horse three miles!”

But he paid the bill.