It is fearfully hot in Civita Vecchia. The streets
are made very narrow and the houses built very solid
and heavy and high, as a protection against the heat.
This is the first Italian town I have seen which does
not appear to have a patron saint. I suppose
no saint but the one that went up in the chariot of
fire could stand the climate.
There is nothing here to see. They have not
even a cathedral, with eleven tons of solid silver
archbishops in the back room; and they do not show
you any moldy buildings that are seven thousand years
old; nor any smoke-dried old fire-screens which are
chef d’oeuvres of Reubens or Simpson, or Titian
or Ferguson, or any of those parties; and they haven’t
any bottled fragments of saints, and not even a nail
from the true cross. We are going to Rome.
There is nothing to see here.
What is it that confers the noblest delight?
What is that which swells a man’s breast with
pride above that which any other experience can bring
to him? Discovery! To know that you are
walking where none others have walked; that you are
beholding what human eye has not seen before; that
you are breathing a virgin atmosphere. To give
birth to an idea—to discover a great thought—an
intellectual nugget, right under the dust of a field
that many a brain—plow had gone over before.
To find a new planet, to invent a new hinge, to find
the way to make the lightnings carry your messages.
To be the first—that is the idea.
To do something, say something, see something, before
any body else—these are the things that
confer a pleasure compared with which other pleasures
are tame and commonplace, other ecstasies cheap and
trivial. Morse, with his first message, brought
by his servant, the lightning; Fulton, in that long-drawn
century of suspense, when he placed his hand upon the
throttle-valve and lo, the steamboat moved; Jenner,
when his patient with the cow’s virus in his
blood, walked through the smallpox hospitals unscathed;
Howe, when the idea shot through his brain that for
a hundred and twenty generations the eye had been
bored through the wrong end of the needle; the nameless
lord of art who laid down his chisel in some old age
that is forgotten, now, and gloated upon the finished
Laocoon; Daguerre, when he commanded the sun, riding
in the zenith, to print the landscape upon his insignificant
silvered plate, and he obeyed; Columbus, in the Pinta’s
shrouds, when he swung his hat above a fabled sea and
gazed abroad upon an unknown world! These are
the men who have really lived—who have
actually comprehended what pleasure is—who
have crowded long lifetimes of ecstasy into a single
moment.
