The Walls of Rome.

"I wonder whether it be the fault of mine own inattention, or the absence of good taste in others, that I have heard and read so little of the Walls of Rome! To me they rank among the few, out of all the Wonders of the Eternal City that have exceeded my expectations. Solitude, their peculiar characteristic, has great charms for a companionless enthusiast like myself: it is, moreover, a description of solitude, the very reverse of melancholy. Mile after mile have I repeatedly roamed along the outer Pomoerium of those solitary rampires, and encountered perhaps a goatherd and his pretty flock, the tinkle of whose bells formed the only accompaniment to the honey notes of the blackbird:—or, perhaps, in sonorous solemnity, some great Bell would suddenly boom upon the silence, and be taken up in various tones from a hundred quarters, no vestige, mean time, of Minster or Monastery being visible; nothing but that enormous Adamantine Circlet rearing itself into the sky on one side, and the gateways and walls of villas and vineyards occupying the other. You might fancy those tolling chimes belonging to some City hidden by Enchantment.

"Still, as I have proceeded in my mood, half enjoying, half moralizing the scene, those hundred towers, like Titan warders placed around the Seven Hills, would each after each look down upon me from their high and silent stations; till, as I came to know them, they seemed to meet my gaze with the sedate and pleasant welcome of a venerable friend. They were the incessant associates of my solitude, and I was never wearied of them. Of a surety their vast Circuit (fifteen miles) gives ample time and space enough for rumination!

"Their colossal cubits are the most perfect exemplar of Architectural sublimity. Their dismantled Battlements have no Watchman but Antiquity, no Herald but Tradition, and hear no clamour louder than the Church or Convent bells, or the dirge which the wind wails over them through the melancholy Cypress and the moaning Pine. The broad old belt of short flowery turf at the base, the Violet, the Gilliflower, and the vermilion spotted Mignonette, on their breast, and the chaplet of wilding shrubs upon their brows, give them a charm in the most common-place observation. With me, truant as I have been to the Classic page, it seemed a natural process of my desultory mind, to revert from a contemplation of such pensive dreamy realities of waking enjoyment as I have described, to visions, startling in their august grandeur, of the everlasting past,—visions of their great Architect, Aurelian; of their greater Restorer, Belisarius!

"These monstrous walls! I cannot divest myself of a certain awe and fascination, as if of a supernatural appearance, which attracts and detains me about them; not even the Colosseum more. There seems something so ghastly, so spectral, in the mockery of their unnecessary circuit, their impregnable strength, their countless towers, arrogating to themselves the circumference of a day's journey—and all for what? To guard a city, which, once dropsied with grandeur, has now shrunk with the disease into comparative atrophy; a city, which, having boastfully demanded their aid, has now abandoned them for miles. It is as though one should wrap a triumphal robe about a corpse, or place a giant's helmet upon a skeleton's skull. It is no poetical figure to look upon them as an eternal satire upon the great littleness of empire. The melancholy pride of their dimensions needs not the hollow wind, which howls around their towers, or the wondering sun, which lingers over their shrubby ramparts, to proclaim in the ears of thrones and senates the warning of Rome's ambition, the moral of Rome's downfall! It is but a poor recompense to their present unhonoured solitude, that their melancholy battlements are emblazed at intervals with the pontifical escutcheons. Those triple tiaras and cross keys, so perpetually recurring, do not half so much consecrate as they are themselves consecrated by the lonely bulwarks of this desolated city of the CÆsars!"

"With the exception of an ostentatious parade of paltry equipages, tarnished liveries, and wretched horses on the Corso, and a frantic attempt at an opera, Rome, in May, is a picturesque receptacle for monks, and goatherds, and nightingales, and bells. Like some haunted place, it appears to be beloved and frequented only by the apparitions of an obsolete race. Yet many minds will find it infinitely more congenial thus, than amidst all the popular splendours of its holy week.

"Her tranquillity, nay, her very desolation, is enchanting. The summer's-day circuit of the Seven Hills seems all your own. You wander whither you will, meeting few, and disturbed by none. In short, the very antiquity of the place is one perpetual novelty, and its grave monotony a serene recreation. I write this in the Villa Borghese, beneath groves of acacias, redolent with odours, and booming with myriads of bees, the yellow hay in aromatic quiles, pitched like pavilions below the old red walls of Rome, and nightingales and blackbirds contending in gushes of ecstatic song!

"Though not new to me, I had little conception of the intrinsic loveliness of the Villa Borghese till to-day. Picture to yourself a large village of the most variegated and romantic character; Church, casino, albergo, and farm, scattered amidst the turfy glades of a forest; and that forest composed of such trees as the beech, the elm, the ilex, and, above all, the sovereign pinaster, whose enormous trunks seem to have condescended to arrange themselves into avenues; the most charmingly artificial glades of the glossiest verdure, and vistas haunted by legions of dim waning statues; hero or demigod, nymph or faun, for ever intermingling but never interfering with each other; their various places of rendezvous emblazed with flowers of a thousand colours, and flashing with fountains of the most graceful fancies possible; while every vista discloses some antique portico, or rotunda, or vestibule of those gems that men call temples! Picture these scenes on some such May-day as this,

'When God hath shower'd the earth;'

the dark evergreens rejoicing in the rain-drops, and the new-born leaves of silky green, transparent with the moisture, which had reluctantly ceased to shine on their delicate tapestries. Crown all this with a country palace, of lofty Italian magnificence, a treasure-house of antiquity, painting, and sculpture, disclosing the statues, frescoes, and gilding, of its noble faÇade and massive campaniles, at the extremity of its darkest grove of evergreens, glittering in this rainbow sunlight, and you may have some impression of the Villa Borghese.

"Such silence and solemnity, that you would never dream you were near the busy haunt of men, were it not, that a long linked diapason of bells, modulated by every possible inflection of their lofty language, convinced you that you were basking amidst all this voluptuous quiet, beneath the walls of a concealed city, and that city—Rome!"

"This afternoon we drove along the Via Appia Nova. The sun, rolling his chariot amidst a cavalcade of wild clouds, along the ruddy array of shattered arches, variegating the grassy plain with its uncouth palatial and sepulchral ruins, in ebony and gold, illuminated the purple and green recesses of the Sabine hills, and caressing with capricious fleetness their woody towers and towns, bequeathed to the north a calm blue vault, wherein, as in some regal hall of state, the dome of St Peter's, the rotunda of the Colosseum, the vast basilicas of Santa Maria Maggiore, and San Giovanni Laterana, that embattled sepulchre of Cecilia, and those lofty masses of the Pamfilipine, which hovered in the horizon like a feathery vapour, proclaim the illustrious domicile of Rome.

"The Temple of the Divus Rediculus (or whatever other title it may rejoice in) is one of those lovely little phantasies of architecture that one might imagine a London citizen would have coveted for a summer-house. The brilliant contrast between its vermilion pilasters and its pale yellow wall, the delicate moulding of its slender bricks and the elaborate elegance of its decoration, not to omit its pleasing, though diminutive proportions, arising from the wild green turf of this melancholy region, can scarcely fail of affecting with at least a spark of fancy, the flattest spirit of this work-day world. For my own part, I should be much less disposed to pronounce it a temple than a tomb; and, in fact, the whole appearance of this wide dull tract seems eminently adapted to sepulchral piles. It is most melancholy, most funereal; and even that glorious sun, and those majestic aqueducts, soaring, as they do, to salute his lustre, and to emulate his glory, cannot efface the feeling, that such a scene, and such memorials, should be visited only in the gloom of a sad and stormy sky; either amidst the sympathetic moans of an autumnal tempest, or the waning and mournful glimpses of an autumnal twilight."

"It was the twilight, that brief, that exquisite interval, which flings its purporoseate veil between the palace gates of day and night. You might have fancied it the car of Diana rolling on to some Olympian festival, and preceded by Venus, the only other planet visible in the sky. What a canopy!—Not the gaudiest velabrum that the ostentatious munificence of her CÆsars extended above its gilded cordage, ever equalled the empyrean pomp of this soft sky. Never could the artificial rains of perfumed water surpass the dewy fragrance that steals around from evening's thousand urns.

"I say it was the twilight when we entered these gloomy corridors, whose solemn circuit uncoils its colonnades around the lordly pile; but before we had traversed half their extent night began her reign, and when we entered the arena it was difficult to say whether those faintly flushed skies, that single sparkling star, or the pallid hectic of the youthful moon produced the pathetic light that illuminated this enormous architecture.

"As it now stands, the Colosseum is indeed a wreck, rendered absolutely frightful by repair; and whether by sunlight or moonlight, compels you to lament the 'melancholy activity' which, utterly inadequate to the restoration of its pristine glory, has deprived it of all those adventitious ornaments, trees, and herbage, and a thousand beautiful flowers, which, if they could not conceal, at least served to soften its injuries, and which mitigated the desolation they were unable to repair.

"Of course a thousand imaginations and memories hunt each other through one's head and heart in such a place and at such an hour as this, but to-night there were realities, which, where they do not dispel, must always reinforce such phantasies.

"Before the steps of the great cross in the centre, garnished with all the emblems of the passion, knelt a respectably dressed group, apparently father, mother, and daughter, absorbed in a rapture of devotion. The lamps were lighted before the fourteen shrines, which Benedict the Fourteenth erected around the arena, and flung a dusky light upon the successive stagioni of our Saviour's sufferings, by which each is distinguished; and we saw a solitary peasant, in the dark costume of his country, evidently faint and toil-worn, rise from his oraisons at one shrine, only to sink upon his knees before another.

"Ah! it was at once a simple and sagacious stroke of that priestly sovereign, who, in these prophaned ruins, planted the Cross, and, by a mightier spell than the magician's wand, arrested the rapacity of its patrician plunderers!"

"The Canal Orfano, the Ponte di Sospiri! what a day to behold these long pictured images of darknes and terror, for the first time! Such a blaze of May sunshine, such a soothing repose broken by a few distant bells or the nearer laugh of the gay Gondoliers. I looked upon the narrow, immured waters under the Bridge of Sighs, then to the high arch that like the heavy embossed clasp of some old solemn book united its decorated Gothic Piles (those volumes of bloody Story) on either side, and instead of shuddering at inquisitions and racks, and Piombi and Pozzi, as in common decency I ought, away fled my intractable thoughts to merry England's old Sabbath Chimes, her village spires, village greens, village elm lanes, and decent peasantry.

"Yet those high and antique abodes of venerable crime, those wild barbaric piles, in which old age palliates and almost hallows infamy! giving it somewhat the same prescriptive sanctuary as Milton bestows on the Palace of his Pandemonium! That cruel slinking flood, the only firmament the stone vaulted pits below were conscious of! Each looked as malignant and dangerous as they could, beneath the triumph of such a glorious sun; that light to which their aspect once was hateful, and their deeds untold.

"My gondolier dipt his oar into the canal just under the Bridge of Sighs, and at half its length it was arrested by a hollow substance which he told me was the marble roof of the Pozzi, whose unfathomable tiers of dungeons stretched one under another beneath this dreadful water gallery. It was not here, however, that the secret midnight drownings took place, (as I had fancied,) but in that widest, deepest portion of the Canal Orfano, far out in the Lagoons situated between the towery Isola Servilio and the lovely groves and monastery of San Grazia. This murder-hole of the Adriatic is called Marani, and to this day it is forbidden to fish in its accursed depth. To-day it looks not only innocent, but gloriously bright.

"I was out in the Lagoons this evening, for the purpose of visiting by twilight that solitary Isle of St Clements, where Monks exchange the voluntary seclusion for penal dungeons, (l'un vaut bien l'autre!) the sky glowing with its last light, lingered over its tall belfry and few old trees, and a sea as smooth as a crystal pavement slept at the base of its grim walls, all in vain; Campanile, Convent, Grove, and that pyramidal Powder Magazine, looked obdurately sullen enough to tell their own uses, had I not known their chronicle."

"I thence directed my gondolier to row under the Bridge of Sighs, through the intricacies of the interior canals; and if ever a man wished to be fed to the full with solemn, ay, appalling gloom, he may be gratified by following my example. From the weltering surface of a labyrinth of channels, let him look up till it wearies him, to the awful roofs of the mansions, whose walls of immeasurable height, and scarfed with black masses of shadow and glaring moonlight, seem to close over his head and to barricade his path, as they interlace and confound each other in endless circuits; and he will have quite enough to kindle the torch of his darker imagination, even if he did not know those tremendous gulfs of masonry to be Venice, and those heart-sinking portals and windows of barbaric sculpture, the homes of her inexorable oligarchy. Yes, you may anticipate Naples, you may picture to yourself Rome, and Florence may have fulfilled much of your previous fancies; but no conception can prepare you for Venice.

"What enchantment lingers still about every stone of this mourning city! My affection for her dismantled palaces is almost morbid.

'Like an unrighteous and an unburied ghost,'

do I nightly haunt that Tartarus of antique masonry, the interior canals of Venice, uniformly entering or departing from them by the Bridge of Sighs. To me their hideous height, their appalling gloom, (for the meridian cannot touch their waters, and the moon glides like a spectre over their huge parapets,) their bewildering intricacies, their joyless weltering floods, the countless bridges, each with its sculptured monster-heads yawning as if to swallow up the silently sweeping gondola in its arch of shadow; their deep dead silence only broken by the sullen plash of the oar, the dreary word of warning uttered by the gondoliers before turning a sharp angle, or the shrill rattling creak of innumerable crickets; but principally those old Gothic posterns with deep-ribbed archways, like rat-holes in proportion to the enormous piles, and their thresholds level with the water, some blockaded with ponderous doors, others developing their long withdrawn passage by a lamp, that not only makes darkness visible, but frightful; while others (as in the Martinengo palace to-night) disclose wide pillared halls, and stately staircases, and moonlight courts —to me, I say, all these attributes of the interior of Venice are irresistible. Were you to see these old porticos by a summer's daylight, you would not fail to find an old fig tree in broad leaf and full of fruit, or a lattice-work of vine, most pleasantly green in its deep court, where sun and shadow hold divided reign; while the hundred shaped windows of those gloomy walls are variegated with geranium and carnation, and perhaps a sweet dark eye fairer than either.

"They are so obviously the symbols of her hollow oligarchy itself, which to the world and to the sun in heaven, (like the brave palaces on her chief canal,) displayed a gallant guise, at once sublime, glittering, and august; while, within, its tortuous policy was twisted into murky and inextricable labyrinths, of which Necessity, Secresy, and Suspicion, formed the keystone; where Danger lurked at every winding, and whose darkling portals were watched by Mystery, and Stratagem, and Disgrace, and Fate!

"It is impossible to scrutinize these dread abysms of mansions, without experiencing that strange mixture of repugnance and attraction which certain spectacles are wont to call forth in animated nature. It is impossible to mark their melancholy and downfallen, yet portentous aspect, without deeming them at once the theatre and monument of those 'secret, black, and midnight crimes,' which history and tradition ascribe to the domestic, as well as to the state policy, of this Gehenna of fourteen centuries dominion.

'Visendus Ater flumine languido
Cocytus errans.'

"Perhaps it would be difficult to conceive any thing more abhorrent to the soul and body of man, than the time, manner, and place, of death, distinguishing those executions which have rendered the gulfs of the Canal Orfano immemorably infamous.

"To me, the element, in its most serene and smiling state, wears a look of furtive menace; and I am free to confess, that even when gliding on a mid-summer night over that sweetest Lake of Derwentwater, beneath the shadows of its moonlit isles and fair pavilions, I have not been without a certain sensation of uncomfortable awe. But what must have been the feelings of the victim, whether criminal or innocent, who, from this accurst Maranna, cast around him his last straining look of agony, and uttered his last cry of supplication or despair! The conviction that his family, parent, wife, or son, were at that hour of horror in profound ignorance sometimes of his very absence, often of its cause, or at least, only perplexed with conjecture, and always unconscious of its horrible event, must have constituted no trifling pang in that mortal hour. Then that old familiar, though melancholy, water, more terrible to his feelings than the dreariest wilderness of ocean! For, girdling the dusky horizon, could he not see the domes and campaniles of Venice, perhaps the very lamps in his own palace windows, from whose festal saloons he had just been decoyed; just distant enough to be beyond the reach of help? but too, too near for that despairing gaze that recognized and bade adieu for ever at the same glance? There too were not those nestling lovely islands, each with its convent tower gleaming to the moon, and from which the sonorous bells were tolling, the sacred Anthems swelling for the last time on his ear! Alas! those chaunted masses were not for his conflicting soul; yea, it would have a strange comfort to feel that passing bell was proclaiming to the world that his spirit was parting from its scarcely worn weeds! But no! even that miserable solace was prohibited to him; he was to be obliterated from society, and his inexorable judges had decreed that society was not to know that he was gone. No grave for his dust; no monument for his name, to palliate his faults and perpetuate his virtues. The ghastly element that moaned and shuddered under the Gondola, as if remorseful for its own involuntary cruelties, was to spread its weltering pall over his hearseless bones."

"The islands constituting the Venetian Archipelago are about fifty in number, of various size and extremely picturesque. They were each of them the seat of a monastery or nunnery, till Napoleon came, who overthrew these saintly receptacles, converting them into forts, mills, public gardens, &c. In short, these islands are among the most beautiful contingents of this magic scene. Each has its graceful campanile, and its various structures of castle, convent, mill, or summer-house; each its due girdle of blue sea, fenced by walls that rise round its margent, and embroidered with groves and arbours of the most delightful green.

"This evening I cruised past many of them in my gondola after sunset; and was particularly struck with the beauty of the large Isle of Murano, and its attendant San Michaele (the latter one entire cemetery,) whose thin tall campaniles throw up their slender figures in fine relief against the long wavy purple of the Acharnean Hills in the west, at the head of the Adriatic.

"Night gathered round, as we floated under that prodigious monument of the departed majesty of the Republic, the arsenal, whose ramparts high and endless, and as ugly as either, lay weltering many a rood upon their wooden piles. Every bell in the city was tolling for Nones, and sang aloud to the surrounding islands, whose campaniles replied with sympathetic thunder, a solemn diapason of Corybantine brass, to my taste, wonderfully in unison with the funeral mole of the defunct Arsenal, the repose of the purple mountains, and the fainting splendour of that twinned vault and pavement, the opal sea and sky, smooth, soft, and bright enough for Juno and Amphitrite to hold a gossip, each from her own imperial element.

"Probably it is to the peculiarity of its situation, that one may attribute the sweetly solemn melodies produced by the bells of Venice. Flinging their prolonged notes down those immense hollows of architecture, sweeping round their narrow streets, and floating over their liquid pavement, they derive every advantage from that element which always so fondly detains and dallies with music, in addition to the depth and power with which they are endowed, by those pillared and winding concaves, that, like the tubes of some vast organ, receive and redouble the airy strain.

"Whatever be the case, I never felt any thing so fully coming up to my idea, of 'most musical, most melancholy.'"