the small building which seems the provisional repository
of the archaeologist’s finds we saw skeletons
of the immemorial dead in the coffins of split trees
still shutting them imperfectly in. Mostly the
bones and bark were of the same indifferent interest,
but the eternal pathos of human grief appealed from
what mortal part remained of a little child, with beads
on her tattered tunic and an ivory bracelet on her
withered arm. History in the presence of such
world-old atomies seemed an infant babbling of yesterday,
in what it could say of the Rome of the Popes, the
Rome of the Emperors, the Rome of the Republicans,
the Rome of the Kings, the Rome of the Shepherds and
Cowherds, through which a shaft sunk in the Forum
would successively pierce in reaching those aboriginals
whose sepulchres alone witnessed that they had ever
lived.
It is the voluble sorrow common to all the emotional
visitors in Rome that the past of the different generations
has not been treated by the present with due tenderness,
and the Colosseum is a case notoriously in point.
But, if it was an Italian archaeologist who destroyed
the wilding growths in the Colosseum and scraped it
to a bareness which nature is again trying to clothe
with grass and weeds, it ought to be remembered that
it is another Italian archaeologist who has set laurels
all up and down the slopes of the Forum, and has invited
roses and honeysuckles to bloom wherever they shall
not interfere with science, but may best help repair
the wounds he must needs deal the soil in researches
which seem no mere dissections, but feats of a conservative,
almost a constructive surgery. It is said that
the German archaeologists objected to those laurels
where the birds sing so sweetly; perhaps they thought
them not strictly scientific; but when the German
Kaiser, who always knows so much better than all the
other Germans put together, visited the Forum, he
liked them, and he parted from the Genius Loci with
the imperial charge, “Laurels, laurels, evermore
laurels.” After that the emotional tourist
must be hard indeed to please who would begrudge his
laurels to Commendatore Boni, or would not wish him
a perpetual crown of them.
IV
THE ANGLO-AMERICAN NEIGHBORHOOD OF THE SPANISH STEPS
It is not every undeserving American who can have
the erudition and divination of the Genius Loci in
answer to his unuttered prayer during a visit to even
a small part of the Roman Forum. But failing the
company of the Commendatore Boni, which is without
price, there are to be had for a very little money
the guidance and philosophy, and, for all I know,
the friendship of several peripatetic historians who
lead people about the ruins in Rome, and instruct
them in the fable, and doubtless in the moral, of
the things they see. If I had profited by their
learning, so much greater, or at least securer, than
any the average American has about him, I should now
Copyrights
Roman Holidays, and Others from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.
