The Chapel Which
Enshrines The Table Is One Of Three, Quaint In Form And Rich In Art,
Standing In The Garden Called St. Silvia's, After The Mother Of St.
Gregory.
As we came out through it the westering sun poured the narrow
court before the chapel full of golden light and threw the black shadow
of a cypress across the way that a file of Comaldolese monks were taking
to the adjoining convent.
They were talking cheerily together, and swung
unheeding by in their white robes so near that I could almost feel the
waft of them across the centuries that parted their faith and mine.
We had come to St. Gregory's from the Baths of Caracalla, which we had
set out to see on the first of our Roman holidays, and, after turning
aside for the Coloseum, had now visited on next to the last of them. The
stupendous ruin could scarcely have been growing in the ten or twelve
weeks that had passed, but a bewildering notion of something like this
obsessed me as I saw it bulking aloof in overhanging cliffs and
precipices, through the cool and bright April air, against a sky of
absolute blue. As if it had been cast up out of the earth in some
convulsive throe of nature, it floundered over its vast area in
shapeless masses which seemed to have capriciously received the effect
of human design in the coping of the inaccessible steeps, in the arches
flinging themselves across the spaces between the beetling crags, in the
monstrous spring and sweep of the vaults, in the gloom of the cavernous
apertures of its Titanic walls. For the moment its immensity dwarfed the
image of all the other fragments of the Roman world and set definite
bounds to their hugeness in the mind. It seemed to have been not so much
a single edifice as a whole city, the dwelling instead of the resort of
the multitudes that once thronged it. The traces of the ornamentation
which had enriched it everywhere and which it had taken ages of ravage
to strip from it, accented its savage majesty, and again the sentiment
of spring in the fresh afternoon breeze and sunshine, and the innocent
beauty of the blooming peach and cherry in the orchards around, imparted
to it a pathos in which one's mere brute wonder was lost. But it was a
purely adventitious pathos, and it must be owned here, at the end, that
none of the relics of ancient Rome stir a soft emotion in the beholder,
and, as for beauty, there is more of it in some ivy-netted fragment of
some English abbey which Henry's Cromwell "hammered down" than in the
ruin of all the palaces and temples and theatres and circuses and baths
of that imperial Rome which the world is so well rid of.
VII
A WEEK AT LEGHORN
We left Rome with such a nostalgic pang in our hearts that we tried to
find relief in a name for it, and we called ourselves Romesick.
Afterward, when we practised the name with such friends as we could get
to listen, they thought we said homesick.
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