Roman Holidays, and Others eBook

every possible relic of the original fabric, to render the immense temple venerable; and as it is still in process of construction, with a colonnaded porch in scale and keeping with the body of the basilica, it offers to the eye of wonder the actual spectacle of that unstinted outlay of riches which has filled Rome with its multitudes of pious monuments—­monuments mainly ugly, but potent with the imagination even in their ugliness through the piety of their origin.  Where did all that riches come from?

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