One Fancies The Dying Hands Of Wealth That
Released Their Gift To The Sacred Use, The Knotted Hands Of Work That
Spared It From Their Need.
The giving continues in this latest Christian
age as in the earliest, and Rome is increasingly Rome in a world which
its thinkers think no longer believes.
From San Paolo we were going to another shrine, more hallowed to our
literary sense, and we drove through the sweet morning sunshine and
bird-singing, past pale-pink clouds of almond bloom on the garden
slopes, with snowy heights far beyond, to the simple graveyard where
Keats and Shelley lie. Our way to the Protestant cemetery held by some
shabby apartment-houses of that very modern Rome which was largely so
jerry-built, and which I would not leave out of the landscape if I
could, for I think their shabbi-ness rather heightens your sense of the
peaceful loveliness to which you come under the cypresses, among the
damp aisles, so thickly studded with the stones recording the death in
exile of the English strangers lying there far from home. In a faulty
perspective of memory, I had always seen the graves of the two poets
side by side; but the heart of Shelley rests in a prouder part of the
cemetery, where the paths between the finer tombs are carefully kept;
and the dust of Keats lies in an old, plain, almost neglected corner,
well off beyond a dividing trench. It seems an ungracious chance which
has so parted the two poets so inextricably united in their fame; it is
as if here, too, the world would have its way; but, of course, it is
only at the worst an ungracious chance.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 165 of 353
Words from 45227 to 45514
of 97259
