Roman Holidays, and Others eBook

host and friend.  I had visited it for the kind sake of the one and the dear sake of the others when I first visited Rome in 1864; and it was one of the earliest stations of my second pilgrimage.  It is now in form for any and all visitors, but the day I went it had not yet been put in its present simple and tasteful keeping.  A somewhat shrill and scraping-voiced matron inquired my pleasure when she followed me into the ground-floor entrance from somewhere without, and then, understanding, called hor young daughter, who led me up to the room where Keats mused his last verse and breathed his last sigh.  It is a very little room, looking down over the Spanish Steps, with their dike of bloom, across the piazza to the narrow stretch of the Via del Babuino.  I must have stood in it with Severn and heard him talk of Keats and his ultimate days and hours; for I remember some such talk, but not the details of it.  He was a very gentle old man and fondly proud of his goodness to the poor dying poet, as he well might be, and I was glad to be one of the many Americans who, he said, came to grieve with him for the dead poet.

Now, on my later visit, it was a cold, rainy day, and it was chill within the house and without, and I imputed my weather to the time of Keats’s sojourn, and thought of him sitting by his table there in that bare, narrow, stony room and coughing at the dismal outlook.  Afterward I saw the whole place put in order and warmed by a generous stove, for people who came to see the Keats and Shelley collections of books and pictures; but still the sense of that day remains.  The young girl sympathized with my sympathy, and wished to find a rose for me in the trellis through which the rain dripped.  She could not, and I suggested that there would be roses in the spring.  “No,” she persisted, “sometimes it makes them in the winter,” but I had to come away through the reeking streets without one.

When it rains, it rains easily in Rome.  But the weather was divine the evening I looked one of my latest looks down on the Spanish Steps.  The sun had sunk rather wanly beyond the city, but a cheerful light of electrics shone up at me from the Via dei Condotti.  I stood and thought of as much as I could summon from the past, and I was strongest, I do not know why, with the persecutions of the early Christians.  Presently a smell of dinner came from the hotels around and the houses below, and I was reminded to go home to my own table d’hote. My one-legged beggar seemed to have gone to his, and I escaped him; but I was intercepted by the sight of an old woman asleep over her store of matches.  She was not wakened by the fall of my ten-centime piece in her tray, but the boy drowsing beside her roused himself, and roused her to the dreamy expression of a gratitude quite out of scale with my alms.

V

AN EFFORT TO BE HONEST WITH ANTIQUITY