Pencillings by the Way Part 18

The town of San Lorenzo is a handful of houses on the top of a hill which hangs over Lake Bolsena. You get the first view of the lake as you go out of the gate toward Rome, and descend immediately to its banks. There was a heavy mist upon the water, and we could not see across, but it looked like as quiet and pleasant a sh.o.r.e as might be found in the world--the woods wild, and of uncommonly rich foliage for Italy, and the slopes of the hills beautiful. Saving the road, and here and there a house with no sign of an inhabitant, there can scarcely be a lonelier wilderness in America. We stopped two hours at an inn on its banks, and whether it was the air, or the influence of the perfect stillness about us, my companions went to sleep, and I could scarce resist my own drowsiness.

The mist lifted a little from the lake after dinner, and we saw the two islands said by Pliny to have floated, in his time. They look like the tops of green hills rising from the water.

It is a beautiful country again as you approach Montefiascone. The scenery is finely broken up with glens formed by columns of basalt, giving it a look of great wildness. Montefiascone is built on the river of one of these ravines. We stopped here long enough to get a bottle of the wine for which the place is famous, drinking it to the memory of the "German prelate," who, as Madame Stark relates, "stopped here on his journey to Rome, and died of drinking it to excess." It has degenerated, probably, since his time, or we chanced upon a bad bottle.

The walls of _Viterbo_ are flanked with towers, and have a n.o.ble appearance from the hill-side on which the town stands. We arrived too late to see anything of the place. As we were taking coffee at the _cafe_ the next morning, a half hour before daylight, we heard music in the street, and looking out at the door, we saw a long procession of young girls, dressed with flowers in their hair, and each playing a kind of cymbal, and half dancing as she went along. Three or four at the head of the procession sung a kind of verse, and the rest joined in a short merry chorus at intervals. It was more like a train of Corybantes than anything I had seen. We inquired the object of it, and were told it was a procession _to the vintage_. They were going out to pluck the last grapes, and it was the custom to make it a festa. It was a striking scene in the otherwise perfect darkness of the streets, the torch-bearers at the sides waving their flambeaux regularly over their heads, and shouting with the rest in chorus. The measure was quick, and the step very fast. They were gone in an instant. The whole thing was poetical, and in keeping, for Italy. I have never seen it elsewhere.

We left Viterbo on a clear, mild autumnal morning; and I think I never felt the excitement of a delightful climate more thrillingly. The road was wild, and with the long ascent of the Monte-Cimino before us, I left the carriage to its slow pace and went ahead several miles on foot. The first rain of the season had fallen, and the road was moist, and all the spicy herbs of Italy perceptible in the air. Half way up the mountain, I overtook a fat, bald, middle-aged priest, slowly toiling up on his mule. I was pa.s.sing him with a "_buon giorno_," when he begged me for my own sake, as well as his, to keep him company. "It was the worst road for thieves," he said, "in all Italy," and he pointed at every short distance to little crosses erected at the road-side, to commemorate the finding of murdered men on the spot.

After he had told me several stories of the kind, he elevated his tone, and began to talk of other matters. I think I never heard so loud and long a laugh as his. I ventured to express a wonder at his finding himself so happy in a life of celibacy. He looked at me slily a moment or two as if he were hesitating whether to trust me with his opinions on the subject; but he suddenly seemed to remember his caution, and pointing off to the right, showed me a lake brought into view by the last turn of the road. It was _Lake Vico_. From the midst of it rose a round mountain covered to the top with luxuriant chestnuts--the lake forming a sort of trench about it, with the hill on which we stood rising directly from the other edge. It was one faultless mirror of green leaves. The two hill sides shadowed it completely. All the views from Monte-Cimino were among the richest in mere nature that I ever saw, and reminded me strongly of the country about the Seneca lake of America. I was on the Cayuga at about the same season three summers ago, and I could have believed myself back again, it was so like my recollection.

We stopped on the fourth night of our journey, seventeen miles from Rome, at a place called Baccano. A ridge of hills rose just before us, from the top of which we were told, we could see St. Peter's. The sun was just dipping under the horizon, and the ascent was three miles. We threw off our cloaks, determining to see Rome before we slept, ran unbreathed to the top of the hill, an effort which so nearly exhausted us, that we could scarce stand long enough upon our feet to search over the broad campagna for the dome.

The sunset had lingered a great while--as it does in Italy. Four or five light feathery streaks of cloud glowed with intense crimson in the west, and on the brow of Mount Soracte, (which I recognised instantly from the graphic simile[2] of Childe Harold), and along on all the ridges of mountain in the east, still played a kind of vanis.h.i.+ng reflection, half purple, half gray. With a moment's glance around to catch the outline of the landscape, I felt instinctively where Rome _should_ stand, and my eye fell at once upon "the mighty dome." Jupiter had by this time appeared, and hung right over it, trembling in the sky with its peculiar glory, like a lump of molten spar, and as the color faded from the clouds, and the dark ma.s.s of "the eternal city" itself mingled and was lost in the shadows of the campagna, the dome still seemed to catch light, and tower visibly, as if the radiance of the glowing star above fell more directly upon it.

We could see it till we could scarcely distinguish each other's features. The dead level of the campagna extended between and beyond for twenty miles, and it looked like a far-off beacon in a dim sea.

We sat an hour on the summit of the hill, gazing into the increasing darkness, till our eyes ached. The stars brightened one by one, the mountains grew indistinct, and we rose unwillingly to retrace our steps to Baccano.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] I remember hearing a friend receive a severe reproof from one of the most enlightened men in our country, for offering his daughter an annual, upon the cover of which was an engraving of these same "Graces."

[2]

----"A long swept wave about to break, And on the curl hangs pausing."

LETTER XLII.

FIRST DAY IN ROME--SAINT PETER'S--A SOLITARY MONK--STRANGE MUSIC--MICHAEL ANGELO'S MASTERPIECE--THE MUSEUM--LIKENESS OF YOUNG AUGUSTUS--APOLLO BELVIDERE--THE MEDICEAN VENUS--RAPHAEL'S TRANSFIGURATION--THE PANTHEON--THE BURIAL-PLACE OF CARRACCI AND RAPHAEL--ROMAN FORUM--TEMPLE OF FORTUNE--THE ROSTRUM--PALACE OF THE CESARS--THE RUINS--THE COLISEUM, ETC.

To be rid of the dust of travel, and abroad in a strange and renowned city, is a sensation of no slight pleasure anywhere. To step into the street under these circ.u.mstances and inquire for the _Roman Forum_, was a sufficient advance upon the ordinary feeling to mark a bright day in one's calendar. I was hurrying up the Corso with this object before me a half hour after my arrival in Rome, when an old friend arrested my steps, and begging me to reserve the "Ruins" for moonlight, took me off to St. Peter's.

The facade of the church appears alone, as you walk up the street from the castle of St. Angelo. It disappointed me. There is no portico, and it looks flat and bare. But approaching nearer, I stood at the base of the obelisk, and with those two magnificent fountains sending their musical waters, as if to the sky, and the two encircling wings of the church embracing the immense area with its triple colonnades, I felt the grandeur of St. Peter's. I felt it again in the gigantic and richly-wrought porches, and again with indescribable surprise and admiration at the first step on the pavement of the interior. There was not a figure on its immense floor from the door to the altar, and its far-off roof, its mighty pillars, its gold and marbles in such profusion that the eye shrinks from the examination, made their overpowering impression uninterrupted. You feel that it must be a glorious creature that could build such a temple to his Maker.

An organ was playing brokenly in one of the distant chapels, and, drawing insensibly to the music, we found the door half open, and a monk alone, running his fingers over the keys, and stopping sometimes as if to muse, till the echo died and the silence seemed to startle him anew. It was strange music; very irregular, but sweet, and in a less excited moment, I could have sat and listened to it till the sun set.

I strayed down the aisle, and stood before the "Dead Christ" of Michael Angelo. The Saviour lies in the arms of Mary. The limbs hang lifelessly down, and, exquisitely beautiful as they are, express death with a wonderful power. It is the best work of the artist, I think, and the only one I was ever _moved_ in looking at.

The greatest statue and the first picture in the world are under the same roof, and we mounted to the Vatican. The museum is a wilderness of statuary. Old Romans, men and women, stand about you, copied, as you feel when you look on them, from the life; and conceptions of beauty in children, nymphs, and heroes, from minds that conceived beauty in a degree that has never been transcended, confuse and bewilder you with their number and wonderful workmans.h.i.+p. It is like seeing a vision of past ages. It is calling up from Athens and old cla.s.sic Rome, all that was distinguished and admired of the most polished ages of the world. On the right of the long gallery, as you enter, stands the bust of the "Young Augustus"--a kind of beautiful, angelic likeness of Napoleon, as Napoleon might have been in his youth. It is a boy, but with a serene dignity about the forehead and lips, that makes him visibly a boy-emperor--born for his throne, and conscious of his right to it. There is nothing in marble more perfect, and I never saw anything which made me realize that the Romans of history and poetry were _men_--nothing which brought them so familiarly to my mind, as the feeling for beauty shown in this infantine bust. I would rather have it than all the G.o.ds and heroes of the Vatican.

No cast gives you any idea worth having of the Apollo Belvidere. It is a G.o.d-like model of a man. The lightness and the elegance of the limbs; the free, fiery, confident energy of the att.i.tude; the breathing, indignant nostril and lips; the whole statue's mingled and equal grace and power, are, with all its truth to nature, beyond any conception I had formed of manly beauty. It spoils one's eye for common men to look at it. It stands there like a descended angel, with a splendor of form and an air of power, that makes one feel what he should have been, and mortifies him for what he is. Most women whom I have met in Europe, adore the Apollo as far the finest statue in the world, and most _men_ say as much of the Medicean Venus. But, to my eye, the Venus, lovely as she is, compares with the Apollo as a mortal with an angel of light. The latter is incomparably the finest statue. If it were only for its face, it would transcend the other infinitely. The beauty of the Venus is only in the limbs and body. It is a faultless, and withal, modest representation of the flesh and blood beauty of a woman. The Apollo is all this, and has a _soul_. I have seen women that approached the Venus in form, and had finer faces--I never saw a man that was a shadow of the Apollo in either. It stands as it should, in a room by itself, and is thronged at all hours by female wors.h.i.+ppers. They never tire of gazing at it; and I should believe, from the open-mouthed wonder of those whom I met at its pedestal, that the story of the girl who pined and died for love of it, was neither improbable nor singular.

Raphael's "Transfiguration" is agreed to be the finest picture in the world. I had made up my mind to the same opinion from the engravings of it, but was painfully disappointed in the picture. I looked at it from every corner of the room, and asked the _custode_ three times if he was sure this was the original. The color offended my eye, blind as Raphael's name should make it, and I left the room with a sigh, and an unsettled faith in my own taste, that made me seriously unhappy. My complacency was restored a few hours after on hearing that the wonder was entirely in the drawing--the colors having quite changed with time. I bought the engraving immediately, which you have seen too often, of course, to need my commentary. The aerial lightness with which he has hung the figures of the Saviour and the apostles in the air, is a triumph of the pencil over the laws of nature, that seem to have required the power of the miracle itself.

I lost myself in coming home, and following a priest's direction to the Corso, came unexpectedly upon the "Pantheon," which I recognised at once. This wonder of architecture has no questionable beauty. A dunce would not need to be told that it was perfect. Its Corinthian columns fall on the eye with that sense of fulness that seems to answer an instinct of beauty in the very organ. One feels a fault or an excellence in architecture long before he can give the feeling a name; and I can see why, by Childe Harold and others, this heathen temple is called "the pride of Rome," though I cannot venture on a description. The faultless interior is now used as a church, and there lie Annibal Carracci and the divine Raphael--two names worthy of the place, and the last, of a shrine in every bosom capable of a conception of beauty. Glorious Raphael! If there was no other relic in Rome, one would willingly become a pilgrim to his ashes.

With my countryman and friend, Mr. Cleveland, I stood in the Roman forum by the light of a clear half moon. The soft silver rays poured in through the ruined columns of the Temple of Fortune and threw our shadows upon the bases of the tall shafts near the capitol, the remains, I believe, of the temple erected by Augustus to Jupiter Tonans. Impressive things they are, even without their name, standing tall and alone, with their broken capitals wreathed with ivy, and neither roof nor wall to support them, where they were placed by hands that have mouldered for centuries. It is difficult to rally one's senses in such a place, and be awake coldly to the scene. We stood, as we supposed, in the Rostrum. The n.o.ble arch, still almost perfect, erected by the senate to Septimius Severus, stood up clear and lofty beside us, the three matchless and lonely columns of the supposed temple of Jupiter Stator threw their shadows across the Forum below, the great arch, built at the conquest of Jerusalem to t.i.tus, was visible in the distance, and above them all, on the gentle ascent of the Palatine, stood the ruined palace of the Cesars, the sharp edges of the demolished walls breaking up through vines and ivy, and the mellow moon of Italy softening rock and foliage into one silver-edged ma.s.s of shadow. It seems as if the very genius of the picturesque had arranged these immortal ruins. If the heaps of fresh excavation were but overgrown with gra.s.s, no poet nor painter could better image out the Rome of his dream. It surpa.s.ses fancy.

We walked on, over fragments of marble columns turned up from the mould, and leaving the majestic arches of the Temple of Peace on our left, pa.s.sed under the arch of t.i.tus (so dreaded by the Jews), to the Coliseum. This too is magnificently ruined--broken in every part, and yet showing still the brave skeleton of what it was--its gigantic and triple walls, half encircling the silent area, and its rocky seats lifting one above the other amid weeds and ivy, and darkening the dens beneath, whence issued the gladiators, beasts, and Christian martyrs, to be sacrificed for the amus.e.m.e.nt of Rome. A sentinel paced at the gigantic archway, a capuchin monk, whose duty is to attend the small chapels built around the arena, walked up and down in his russet cowl and sandals, the moon broke through the clefts in the wall, and the whole place was buried in the silence of a wilderness. I have given you the features of the scene--I leave you to people it with your own thoughts. I dare not trust mine to a colder medium than poetry.

LETTER XLIII.

TIVOLI--RUINS OF THE BATHS OF DIOCLETIAN--FALLS OF TIVOLI--CASCATELLI--SUBJECT OF ONE OF COLE'S LANDSCAPES--RUINS OF THE VILLAGE OF MECaeNAS--RUINED VILLA OF ADRIAN--THE FORUM--TEMPLE OF VESTA--THE CLOACA MAXIMA--THE RIVER JUTURNA, ETC.

I have spent a day at Tivoli with Messrs. Auchmuty and Bissell, of our navy, and one or two others, forming quite an American party. We pa.s.sed the ruins of the baths of Diocletian, with a heavy cloud over our heads; but we were scarce through the gate, when the sun broke through, the rain swept off over Soracte, and the sky was clear till sunset.

I have seen many finer falls than Tivoli; that is, more water, and falling farther; but I do not think there is so pretty a place in the world. A very dirty village, a dirtier hotel, and a cicerone all rags and ruffianism, are somewhat dampers to antic.i.p.ation. We pa.s.sed through a broken gate, and with a step, were in a glen of fairy-land; the lightest and loveliest of antique temples on a crag above, a snowy waterfall of some hundred and fifty feet below, grottoes mossed to the mouth at the river's outlet, and all up and down the cleft valley vines twisted in the crevices of rock, and shrubbery hanging on every ledge, with a felicity of taste or nature, or both, that is uncommon even in Italy. The fall itself comes rus.h.i.+ng down through a grotto to the face of the precipice, over which it leaps, and looks like a subterranean river just coming to light. Its bed is rough above, and it bursts forth from its cavern in dazzling foam, and falls in one sparry sheet to the gulf. The falls of Montmorenci are not unlike it.

We descended to the bottom, and from the little terrace, wet by the spray, and dark with overhanging rocks, looked up the "cavern of Neptune," a deep pa.s.sage, through which the divided river rushes to meet the fall in the gulf. Then remounting to the top, we took mules to make the three miles' circuit of the glen, and see what are called the _Cascatelli_.

No fairy-work could exceed the beauty of the little antique Sybil's temple perched on the top of the crag above the fall. As we rode round the other edge of the glen, it stood opposite us in all the beauty of its light and airy architecture; a thing that might be borne, "like Loretto's chapel, through the air," and seem no miracle.

A mile farther on I began to recognize the features of the scene, at a most lovely point of view. It was the subject of one of Cole's landscapes, which I had seen in Florence; and I need not say to any one who knows the works of this admirable artist, that it was done with truth and taste.[3] The little town of Tivoli hangs on a jutting lap of a mountain, on the side of the ravine opposite to your point of view. From beneath its walls, as if its foundations were laid upon a river's fountains, bursts foaming water in some thirty different falls; and it seems to you as if the long declivities were that moment for the first time overflowed, for the currents go das.h.i.+ng under trees, and overleaping vines and shrubs, appearing and disappearing continually, till they all meet in the quiet bed of the river below.

"_It was made by Bernini_," said the guide, as we stood gazing at it; and, odd as this information sounded, while wondering at a spectacle worthy of the happiest accident of nature, it will explain the phenomena of the place to you--the artist having turned a mountain river from its course, and leading it under the town of Tivoli, threw it over the sides of the precipitous hill upon which it stands. One of the streams appears from beneath the ruins of the "Villa of Mecaenas,"

which topples over a precipice just below the town, looking over the campagna toward Rome--a situation worthy of the patron of the poets.

We rode through the immense subterranean arches, which formed its court, in ascending the mountain again to the town.

Near Tivoli is the ruined villa of Adrian, where was found the Venus de Medicis, and some other of the wonders of antique art. The sun had set, however, and the long campagna of twenty miles lay between us and Rome. We were compelled to leave it unseen. We entered the gates at nine o'clock, _unrobbed_--rather an unusual good fortune, we were told, for travellers after dark on that lonely waste. Perhaps our number deprived us of the romance.

I left a crowded ball-room at midnight, wearied with a day at Tivoli, and oppressed with an atmosphere breathed by two hundred, dancing and card-playing, Romans and foreigners; and with a step from the portico of the n.o.ble palace of our host, came into a broad beam of moonlight, that with the stillness and coolness of the night refreshed me at once, and banished all disposition for sleep. A friend was with me, and I proposed a ramble among the ruins.

The sentinel challenged us as we entered the Forum. The frequent robberies of romantic strangers in this lonely place have made a guard necessary, and they are now stationed from the Arch of Severus to the Coliseum. We pa.s.sed an hour rambling among the ruins of the temples.

Not a footstep was to be heard, nor a sound even from the near city; and the tall columns, with their broken friezes and capitals, and the grand imperishable arches, stood up in the bright light of the moon, looking indeed like monuments of Rome. I am told they are less majestic by daylight. The rubbish and fresh earth injure the effect.

But I have as yet seen them in the garb of moonlight only, and I shall carry this impression away. It is to me, now, all that my fancy hoped to find it--its temples and columns just enough in ruin to be affecting and beautiful.

We went thence to the Temple of Vesta. It is shut up in the modern streets, ten or fifteen minutes walk from the Forum. The picture of this perfect temple, and the beautiful purpose of its consecration, have been always prominent in my imaginary Rome. It is worthy of its a.s.sociation--an exquisite round temple, with its simple circle of columns from the base to the roof, a faultless thing in proportion, and as light and floating to the eye as if the wind might lift it. It was no common place to stand beside, and recall the poetical truth and fiction of which it has been the scene--the vestal lamp cherished or neglected by its high-born votaries, their honors if pure, and their dreadful death if faithless. It needed not the heavenly moonlight that broke across its columns to make it a very shrine of fancy.

My companion proposed a visit next to the Cloaca Maxima. A _common sewer_, after the Temple of Vesta, sounds like an abrupt transition; but the arches beneath which we descended were touched by moonlight, and the vines and ivy crossed our path, and instead of a drain of filth, which the fame of its imperial builder would scarce have sweetened, a rapid stream leaped to the right, and disappeared again beneath the solid masonry, more like a wild brook plunging into a grotto than the thing one expects to find it. The clear little river _Juturna_ (on the banks of which Castor and Pollux watered their foaming horses, when bringing the news of victory to Rome), dashes now through the Cloaca Maxima; and a fresher or purer spot, or waters with a more musical murmur, it has not been my fortune to see. We stopped over a broken column for a drink, and went home, refreshed, to bed.

FOOTNOTE:

[3] On my way to Rome (near Radicofani, I think), we pa.s.sed an old man, whose picturesque figure, enveloped in his brown cloak and slouched hat, arrested the attention of all my companions. I had seen him before. From a five minutes' sketch in pa.s.sing, Mr. Cole had made one of the most spirited heads I ever saw, admirably like, and worthy of Caravaggio for force and expression.

LETTER XLIV.

Ma.s.s IN THE SISTINE CHAPEL--THE CARDINALS--THE "LAST JUDGMENT"--THE POPE OF ROME--THE "ADAM AND EVE" CHANTING OF THE PRIESTS--FESTA AT THE CHURCH OF SAN CARLOS--GREGORY THE SIXTEENTH, HIS EQUIPAGE, TRAIN, ETC.