Out of what unfathomable opulence, out of what pitiable penury, out of
what fear, out of what love?
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. Keats, at least, has the
companionship of the painter Severn, the friend on whose "fond breast
his parting soul relied," and who has here followed him into the dust.
A few withered daisies had been scattered in the thin grass over the
poet, and one hardly dared lift one's eyes from them to the
heartbreaking epitaph which one could not spell for tears.
VIII
A FEW VILLAS
It was but a few minutes' walk from the hotel to the Porta Pinciana,
and, if you took this short walk, you found yourself almost before you
knew it in the Villa Borghese. You might then, on your first Sunday in
Rome, have fancied yourself in Central Park, for all difference in the
easily satisfied Sunday-afternoon crowd. But with me a difference began
in the grove of stone-pines, and their desultory stretch toward the
Casino, where in the simple young times which are now the old we had
hurried, with our Kugler in our hands and other reading in our heads, to
see Titian's Sacred and Profane Love (it has got another name now) and
Canova's Pauline Bonaparte, who was also the Princess Borghese, and all
the rest of the precious gallery.
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