I.

ROME AGAIN.

Yesterday, after D. Laura's, took Du B. that walk through the Ghetto, along the Tiber quays by the island; a stormy, wet day. Rome again! As we stood by the worn Januses of the bridge and looked into the swirling water, thinking of how that Terme Apollo had lain there, the Tiber, like Marsyas, flaying one fair flank of the god; I felt Rome and its unchanging meaning grip me again, and liberate me from the frettings of my own past and present.

We went in to see some people who are furnishing an apartment in Palazzo Orsini. A very Roman impression this: the central court of that fortified palace built into the theatre of Marcellus; lemons spaliered and rows of Tangerine trees, with little Moorish-looking fountains between; only the sky above, only the sound of the bubbling fountains.

You look out of a window and behold, close by, the unspeakable rag-fair of that foul quarter, with its yells and cries rising up and stench of cheap cooking. We saw some small Renaissance closets, still with their ceilings and fire-places, where tradition says a last Savelli was stabbed. A feudal fortress this, and, like those of the hills round Rome which these ruins mimic, raising its gardens and pompous rooms above the squalor of the mediÆval village. Immediately below, the corridors of the theatre; below that, the shops, where pack-saddles, ploughs, scythes, wooden pails—the things of a village—are for sale in the midst of those black arches. And then the dining-room, library, bath-rooms of excellent New Englanders crowning it all; and in the chapel, their telephone! "Take care," I said, "the message will come some day—not across space, but across time. Con chi parlo?" Well, say, The White Devil of Italy!

In that Campitelli quarter, the constant blind turnings behind the great giant palaces; places for cut-throats, for the sudden onslaught of bravos.

I feel very often that if one lived in all this picturesqueness, the horrors of the past, the vacuity of the present, would drive one I know not whither. I have had, more than ever this time, the sense of horror at the barbarism of Rome, of civilisation being encamped in all this human refuse, and doing nothing for it; and the feeling of horror at this absorbing Italy, and at one's liking it! They are impressions of the sort I had at Tangier. And the face of an idiot beggar—the odd, pleased smile above his filth—suddenly brought back to me that special feeling, I suppose of the East. We are wretched, transitional creatures to be so much moved by such things, by this dust-heap of time, and to be pacified in spirit by the sight of all this litter of ages; 'tis a Hamlet and the gravedigger's attitude; and the attitude of Whitman in the fertile field of This Compost is a deal better.

Sabato Santo.

POSTSCRIPT.

Yesterday morning, while looking through, with a view to copying out, my Roman notes of the last eighteen years, I felt, with odd vividness, the various myselfs who suffered and hoped while writing them. And, even more, I felt the presence of the beloved ones who, unmentioned, not even alluded to, had been present in those various successive Romes of mine. All of them have changed; some are dead, others were never really living. But while I turned over my note-books, there they were back. Back with their feeling of then; back with their presence (in one case the presence of a distant companion, to whom I could show these things only in thought); their complete realisation, or their half explicit charm, their still unshattered promise. Of all these I find not a word, barely a name; nothing telling of them to others. Only to me, in these sites, impersonal and almost eternal, on these walls which have stood two thousand years and may stand two thousand more, and these hillsides and roads full of the world's legend—there appear, visible, distinct, the shadows cast by my own life; the forms and faces of those changed, gone, dead ones; and my own.

Florence, April, 1905.