But Now, Possibly Because The Years Had
Moderated All My Expectations In Life, I Thought The Tarpeian Rock Very
Respectably
Steep and quite impressively lofty; either the houses at its
foot had sunk with their chimneys and balconies, or the
Rock had risen,
so that one could no longer be hurled from it with impunity. We looked
at it from an arbor of the lovely little garden which we were let into
beyond the top of the rock, and which was the pleasance of some sort of
hospital. I think there were probably flowers there, since it was a
garden, but what was best was the almond-tree covering the whole space
with a roof of bloom, and in this roof a score of birds that sang
divinely.
I am aware of bringing a great many birds into these papers; but really
Rome would not be Rome without them; and I could not exaggerate their
number or the sweetness of their song. They particularly abounded in the
cloistered and gardened close of the Cistercian Convent, which three
hundred years ago ensconsed itself within the ruinous Baths of
Diocletian. I have no fable at hand to explain what seems the special
preference of the birds for this garden; it is possibly an idiosyncrasy,
something like that of the cats which make Trajan's Forum their favorite
resort. All that I can positively say is that if I were a bird I would
ask nothing better than to frequent the cypresses of that garden and
tune my numbers for the entertainment of the audience of extraordinary
monsters in the aisles below, which bea'in plinths of clipped privet and
end marble heads of horses, bulls, elephants, rhinoceroses, and their
like. I do not pretend to be exact in their nomination; they may be
other animals; but I am sure of their attention to the birds. I am not
quite so sure of the attention of the antique shapes in the rooms of the
Ludovisi collection looking into the close. I fancy them preoccupied
with the in-doors cold, so great in all Italian galleries, and scarcely
tempered for them by the remote and solitary brazier over which the
custodians take turns in stifling themselves. They cannot come down
into the sun and song of the garden, to which the American tourist may
return from visiting them, to thaw out his love of the beautiful.
They are not so many or so famous as their marble brothers and sisters
in the Vatican Museum, but the tourist should not miss seeing them.
Neither should he miss any accessible detail of the environing ruins of
the Diocletian Baths. Let him not think because they are so handy, and
so next door, as it were, to the railway station where he arrives, and
to Cook's office where he goes for his letters next morning, that they
are of less merit than other monuments of imperial Rome. They are not
only colossally vast, but they are singularly noble, as well as so
admirably convenient.
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