and spaciously than the other, would offer a suggestion
in miniature of what the Palatine seems to have been
like in its glory. But the ruined Mount Morris,
even allowing for the natural growth of the landscape
in two thousand years, could show no such prospect
twenty centuries hence as we got that morning from
a bit of wilding garden near the Convent of San Bonaventura,
on the brow of the Palatine. Some snowy tops
pillowed themselves on the utmost horizon, and across
the Campagna the broken aqueducts stalked and fell
down and stumbled to their legs again. The Baths
of Caracalla bulked up in rugged, monstrous fragments,
and then in the foreground, filling the whole eye,
the Colosseum rose and stood, and all Rome sank round
it. The Forum lay deep under us, vainly struggling
with the broken syllables of its demolition to impart
a sense of its past, and at our feet in that bit of
garden where the roses were blooming and the plum-trees
were blowing and the birds were singing, there stretched
itself in the grass a fallen pillar wreathed with
the folds of a marble serpent, the emblem of the oldest
worship under the sun, as I was proud to remember without
present help. It was the same immemorial, universal
faith which the Mound Builders of our own West symbolized
in the huge earthen serpents they shaped uncounted
ages before the red savages came to wonder at them,
and doubtless it had been welcomed by Rome in her large,
loose, cynical toleration, together with cults which,
like that of Isis and Osiris, were fads of yesterday
beside it. Somehow it gave the humanest touch
in the complex impression of the overhistoried scene.
It made one feel very old, yet very young—old
with the age and young with the youth of the world—and
very much at home.
PERSONAL RELATIONS WITH THE PAST
I was myself part of the antiquity with which I have
been trying to be honest; and, though my date was
no earlier than the seventh decade of the nineteenth
century, still so many and such cataclysmal changes
had passed over Rome since my time that I was, as
far as concerned my own consciousness, practically
of the period of the Pantheon, say. The Pantheon,
in fact, was among my first associations with Rome.
I lodged very near it, in the next piazza, so that,
if we were not contemporaries, we were companions,
and I could not go out of my hotel to look up a more
permanent sojourn without passing by it. Perhaps
I wished to pass by it, and might really have found
my way to the Corso without the Pantheon’s help.
