Part 18 (1/2)
The town of San Lorenzo is a handful of houses on the top of a hill which hangs over Lake Bolsena. You get the first view of the lake as you go out of the gate toward Rome, and descend immediately to its banks. There was a heavy mist upon the water, and we could not see across, but it looked like as quiet and pleasant a sh.o.r.e as might be found in the world--the woods wild, and of uncommonly rich foliage for Italy, and the slopes of the hills beautiful. Saving the road, and here and there a house with no sign of an inhabitant, there can scarcely be a lonelier wilderness in America. We stopped two hours at an inn on its banks, and whether it was the air, or the influence of the perfect stillness about us, my companions went to sleep, and I could scarce resist my own drowsiness.
The mist lifted a little from the lake after dinner, and we saw the two islands said by Pliny to have floated, in his time. They look like the tops of green hills rising from the water.
It is a beautiful country again as you approach Montefiascone. The scenery is finely broken up with glens formed by columns of basalt, giving it a look of great wildness. Montefiascone is built on the river of one of these ravines. We stopped here long enough to get a bottle of the wine for which the place is famous, drinking it to the memory of the ”German prelate,” who, as Madame Stark relates, ”stopped here on his journey to Rome, and died of drinking it to excess.” It has degenerated, probably, since his time, or we chanced upon a bad bottle.
The walls of _Viterbo_ are flanked with towers, and have a n.o.ble appearance from the hill-side on which the town stands. We arrived too late to see anything of the place. As we were taking coffee at the _cafe_ the next morning, a half hour before daylight, we heard music in the street, and looking out at the door, we saw a long procession of young girls, dressed with flowers in their hair, and each playing a kind of cymbal, and half dancing as she went along. Three or four at the head of the procession sung a kind of verse, and the rest joined in a short merry chorus at intervals. It was more like a train of Corybantes than anything I had seen. We inquired the object of it, and were told it was a procession _to the vintage_. They were going out to pluck the last grapes, and it was the custom to make it a festa. It was a striking scene in the otherwise perfect darkness of the streets, the torch-bearers at the sides waving their flambeaux regularly over their heads, and shouting with the rest in chorus. The measure was quick, and the step very fast. They were gone in an instant. The whole thing was poetical, and in keeping, for Italy. I have never seen it elsewhere.
We left Viterbo on a clear, mild autumnal morning; and I think I never felt the excitement of a delightful climate more thrillingly. The road was wild, and with the long ascent of the Monte-Cimino before us, I left the carriage to its slow pace and went ahead several miles on foot. The first rain of the season had fallen, and the road was moist, and all the spicy herbs of Italy perceptible in the air. Half way up the mountain, I overtook a fat, bald, middle-aged priest, slowly toiling up on his mule. I was pa.s.sing him with a ”_buon giorno_,” when he begged me for my own sake, as well as his, to keep him company. ”It was the worst road for thieves,” he said, ”in all Italy,” and he pointed at every short distance to little crosses erected at the road-side, to commemorate the finding of murdered men on the spot.
After he had told me several stories of the kind, he elevated his tone, and began to talk of other matters. I think I never heard so loud and long a laugh as his. I ventured to express a wonder at his finding himself so happy in a life of celibacy. He looked at me slily a moment or two as if he were hesitating whether to trust me with his opinions on the subject; but he suddenly seemed to remember his caution, and pointing off to the right, showed me a lake brought into view by the last turn of the road. It was _Lake Vico_. From the midst of it rose a round mountain covered to the top with luxuriant chestnuts--the lake forming a sort of trench about it, with the hill on which we stood rising directly from the other edge. It was one faultless mirror of green leaves. The two hill sides shadowed it completely. All the views from Monte-Cimino were among the richest in mere nature that I ever saw, and reminded me strongly of the country about the Seneca lake of America. I was on the Cayuga at about the same season three summers ago, and I could have believed myself back again, it was so like my recollection.
We stopped on the fourth night of our journey, seventeen miles from Rome, at a place called Baccano. A ridge of hills rose just before us, from the top of which we were told, we could see St. Peter's. The sun was just dipping under the horizon, and the ascent was three miles. We threw off our cloaks, determining to see Rome before we slept, ran unbreathed to the top of the hill, an effort which so nearly exhausted us, that we could scarce stand long enough upon our feet to search over the broad campagna for the dome.
The sunset had lingered a great while--as it does in Italy. Four or five light feathery streaks of cloud glowed with intense crimson in the west, and on the brow of Mount Soracte, (which I recognised instantly from the graphic simile[2] of Childe Harold), and along on all the ridges of mountain in the east, still played a kind of vanis.h.i.+ng reflection, half purple, half gray. With a moment's glance around to catch the outline of the landscape, I felt instinctively where Rome _should_ stand, and my eye fell at once upon ”the mighty dome.” Jupiter had by this time appeared, and hung right over it, trembling in the sky with its peculiar glory, like a lump of molten spar, and as the color faded from the clouds, and the dark ma.s.s of ”the eternal city” itself mingled and was lost in the shadows of the campagna, the dome still seemed to catch light, and tower visibly, as if the radiance of the glowing star above fell more directly upon it.
We could see it till we could scarcely distinguish each other's features. The dead level of the campagna extended between and beyond for twenty miles, and it looked like a far-off beacon in a dim sea.
We sat an hour on the summit of the hill, gazing into the increasing darkness, till our eyes ached. The stars brightened one by one, the mountains grew indistinct, and we rose unwillingly to retrace our steps to Baccano.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] I remember hearing a friend receive a severe reproof from one of the most enlightened men in our country, for offering his daughter an annual, upon the cover of which was an engraving of these same ”Graces.”
[2]
----”A long swept wave about to break, And on the curl hangs pausing.”
LETTER XLII.
FIRST DAY IN ROME--SAINT PETER'S--A SOLITARY MONK--STRANGE MUSIC--MICHAEL ANGELO'S MASTERPIECE--THE MUSEUM--LIKENESS OF YOUNG AUGUSTUS--APOLLO BELVIDERE--THE MEDICEAN VENUS--RAPHAEL'S TRANSFIGURATION--THE PANTHEON--THE BURIAL-PLACE OF CARRACCI AND RAPHAEL--ROMAN FORUM--TEMPLE OF FORTUNE--THE ROSTRUM--PALACE OF THE CESARS--THE RUINS--THE COLISEUM, ETC.
To be rid of the dust of travel, and abroad in a strange and renowned city, is a sensation of no slight pleasure anywhere. To step into the street under these circ.u.mstances and inquire for the _Roman Forum_, was a sufficient advance upon the ordinary feeling to mark a bright day in one's calendar. I was hurrying up the Corso with this object before me a half hour after my arrival in Rome, when an old friend arrested my steps, and begging me to reserve the ”Ruins” for moonlight, took me off to St. Peter's.
The facade of the church appears alone, as you walk up the street from the castle of St. Angelo. It disappointed me. There is no portico, and it looks flat and bare. But approaching nearer, I stood at the base of the obelisk, and with those two magnificent fountains sending their musical waters, as if to the sky, and the two encircling wings of the church embracing the immense area with its triple colonnades, I felt the grandeur of St. Peter's. I felt it again in the gigantic and richly-wrought porches, and again with indescribable surprise and admiration at the first step on the pavement of the interior. There was not a figure on its immense floor from the door to the altar, and its far-off roof, its mighty pillars, its gold and marbles in such profusion that the eye shrinks from the examination, made their overpowering impression uninterrupted. You feel that it must be a glorious creature that could build such a temple to his Maker.
An organ was playing brokenly in one of the distant chapels, and, drawing insensibly to the music, we found the door half open, and a monk alone, running his fingers over the keys, and stopping sometimes as if to muse, till the echo died and the silence seemed to startle him anew. It was strange music; very irregular, but sweet, and in a less excited moment, I could have sat and listened to it till the sun set.
I strayed down the aisle, and stood before the ”Dead Christ” of Michael Angelo. The Saviour lies in the arms of Mary. The limbs hang lifelessly down, and, exquisitely beautiful as they are, express death with a wonderful power. It is the best work of the artist, I think, and the only one I was ever _moved_ in looking at.
The greatest statue and the first picture in the world are under the same roof, and we mounted to the Vatican. The museum is a wilderness of statuary. Old Romans, men and women, stand about you, copied, as you feel when you look on them, from the life; and conceptions of beauty in children, nymphs, and heroes, from minds that conceived beauty in a degree that has never been transcended, confuse and bewilder you with their number and wonderful workmans.h.i.+p. It is like seeing a vision of past ages. It is calling up from Athens and old cla.s.sic Rome, all that was distinguished and admired of the most polished ages of the world. On the right of the long gallery, as you enter, stands the bust of the ”Young Augustus”--a kind of beautiful, angelic likeness of Napoleon, as Napoleon might have been in his youth. It is a boy, but with a serene dignity about the forehead and lips, that makes him visibly a boy-emperor--born for his throne, and conscious of his right to it. There is nothing in marble more perfect, and I never saw anything which made me realize that the Romans of history and poetry were _men_--nothing which brought them so familiarly to my mind, as the feeling for beauty shown in this infantine bust. I would rather have it than all the G.o.ds and heroes of the Vatican.
No cast gives you any idea worth having of the Apollo Belvidere. It is a G.o.d-like model of a man. The lightness and the elegance of the limbs; the free, fiery, confident energy of the att.i.tude; the breathing, indignant nostril and lips; the whole statue's mingled and equal grace and power, are, with all its truth to nature, beyond any conception I had formed of manly beauty. It spoils one's eye for common men to look at it. It stands there like a descended angel, with a splendor of form and an air of power, that makes one feel what he should have been, and mortifies him for what he is. Most women whom I have met in Europe, adore the Apollo as far the finest statue in the world, and most _men_ say as much of the Medicean Venus. But, to my eye, the Venus, lovely as she is, compares with the Apollo as a mortal with an angel of light. The latter is incomparably the finest statue. If it were only for its face, it would transcend the other infinitely. The beauty of the Venus is only in the limbs and body. It is a faultless, and withal, modest representation of the flesh and blood beauty of a woman. The Apollo is all this, and has a _soul_. I have seen women that approached the Venus in form, and had finer faces--I never saw a man that was a shadow of the Apollo in either. It stands as it should, in a room by itself, and is thronged at all hours by female wors.h.i.+ppers. They never tire of gazing at it; and I should believe, from the open-mouthed wonder of those whom I met at its pedestal, that the story of the girl who pined and died for love of it, was neither improbable nor singular.
Raphael's ”Transfiguration” is agreed to be the finest picture in the world. I had made up my mind to the same opinion from the engravings of it, but was painfully disappointed in the picture. I looked at it from every corner of the room, and asked the _custode_ three times if he was sure this was the original. The color offended my eye, blind as Raphael's name should make it, and I left the room with a sigh, and an unsettled faith in my own taste, that made me seriously unhappy. My complacency was restored a few hours after on hearing that the wonder was entirely in the drawing--the colors having quite changed with time. I bought the engraving immediately, which you have seen too often, of course, to need my commentary. The aerial lightness with which he has hung the figures of the Saviour and the apostles in the air, is a triumph of the pencil over the laws of nature, that seem to have required the power of the miracle itself.
I lost myself in coming home, and following a priest's direction to the Corso, came unexpectedly upon the ”Pantheon,” which I recognised at once. This wonder of architecture has no questionable beauty. A dunce would not need to be told that it was perfect. Its Corinthian columns fall on the eye with that sense of fulness that seems to answer an instinct of beauty in the very organ. One feels a fault or an excellence in architecture long before he can give the feeling a name; and I can see why, by Childe Harold and others, this heathen temple is called ”the pride of Rome,” though I cannot venture on a description. The faultless interior is now used as a church, and there lie Annibal Carracci and the divine Raphael--two names worthy of the place, and the last, of a shrine in every bosom capable of a conception of beauty. Glorious Raphael! If there was no other relic in Rome, one would willingly become a pilgrim to his ashes.