Part 24 (1/2)
SUMMER WEATHER IN MARCH--BATHS OF CARACALLA--BEGINNING OF THE APPIAN WAY--TOMB OF THE SCIPIOS--CATACOMBS--CHURCH OF SAN SEBASTIANO--YOUNG CAPUCHIN FRIAR--TOMBS OF THE EARLY CHRISTIAN MARTYRS--CHAMBER WHERE THE APOSTLES WORs.h.i.+PPED--TOMB OF CECILIA METELLA--THE CAMPAGNA--CIRCUS OF CARACALLA OR ROMULUS--TEMPLE DEDICATED TO RIDICULE--KEATS'S GRAVE--FOUNTAIN OF EGERIA--THE WOOD WHERE NUMA MET THE NYMPH--HOLY WEEK.
The last days of March have come, clothed in suns.h.i.+ne and summer. The gra.s.s is tall in the Campagna, the fruit-trees are in blossom, the roses and myrtles are in full flower, the shrubs are in full leaf, the whole country about breathes of June. We left Rome this morning on an excursion to the ”Fountain of Egeria.” A more heavenly day never broke. The gigantic baths of Caracalla turned us aside once more, and we stopped for an hour in the shade of their romantic arches, admiring the works, while we execrated the character of their ferocious builder.
This is the beginning of the ancient Appian Way, and, a little farther on, sunk in the side of a hill near the road, is the beautiful doric tomb of the Scipios. We alighted at the antique gate, a kind of portico, with seats of stone beneath, and reading the inscription, ”_Sepulchro degli Scipioni_” mounted by ruined steps to the tomb. A boy came out from the house, in the vineyard above, with candles, to show us the interior, but, having no curiosity to see the damp cave from which the sarcophagi have been removed (to the museum), we sat down upon a bank of gra.s.s opposite the chaste facade, and recalled to memory the early-learnt history of the family once entombed within.
The edifice (for it is more like a temple to a river-nymph or a dryad than a tomb) was built by an ancestor of the great Scipio Africa.n.u.s, and here was deposited the n.o.ble dust of his children. One feels, in these places, as if the improvisatore's inspiration was about him--the fancy draws, in such vivid colors, the scenes that have pa.s.sed where he is standing. The bringing of the dead body of the conqueror of Africa from Rome, the pa.s.sing of the funeral train beneath the portico, the n.o.ble mourners, the crowd of people, the eulogy of perhaps some poet or orator, whose name has descended to us--the air seems to speak, and the gray stones of the monument against which the mourners of the Scipios have leaned, seem to have had life and thought, like the ashes they have sheltered.
We drove on to the _Catacombs_. Here, the legend says, St. Sebastian was martyred and the modern church of St. Sebastiano stands over the spot. We entered the church, where we found a very handsome young capuchin friar, with his brown cowl and the white cord about his waist, who offered to conduct us to the catacombs. He took three wax-lights from the sacristy, and we entered a side door, behind the tomb of the saint, and commenced a descent of a long flight of stone steps. We reached the bottom and found ourselves upon damp ground, following a narrow pa.s.sage, so low that I was compelled constantly to stoop, in the sides of which were numerous small niches of the size of a human body. These were the tombs of the early Christian martyrs. We saw near a hundred of them. They were brought from Rome, the scene of their sufferings, and buried in these secret catacombs by the small church of, perhaps, the immediate converts of St. Paul and the apostles. What food for thought is here, for one who finds more interest in the humble traces of the personal followers of Christ, who knew his face and had heard his voice, to all the splendid ruins of the works of the persecuting emperors of his time! Most of the bones have been taken from their places, and are preserved at the museum, or enclosed in the rich sarcophagi raised to the memory of the martyrs in the Catholic churches. Of those that are left we saw one. The niche was closed by a thin slab of marble, through a crack of which the monk put his slender candle. We saw the skeleton as it had fallen from the flesh in decay, untouched, perhaps, since the time of Christ.
We crossed through several cross-pa.s.sages, and came to a small chamber, excavated simply in the earth, with an earthern altar, and an antique marble cross above. This was the scene of the forbidden wors.h.i.+p of the early Christians, and before this very cross, which was, perhaps, then newly selected as the emblem of their faith, met the few dismayed followers of Christ, hidden from their persecutors, while they breathed their forbidden prayers to their lately crucified Master.
We reascended to the light of day by the rough stone steps, worn deep by the feet of those who, for ages, for so many different reasons, have pa.s.sed up and down; and, taking leave of our capuchin conductor, drove on to the next object upon the road--the _tomb of Cecilia Metella_. It stands upon a slight elevation, in the Appian Way, a ”stern round tower,” with the ivy dropping over its turrets and waving from the embrasures, looking more like a castle than a tomb. Here was buried ”the wealthiest Roman's wife,” or, according to Corinne, his unmarried daughter. It was turned into a fortress by the marauding n.o.bles of the thirteenth century, who sallied from this and the tomb of Adrian, plundering the ill-defended subjects of Pope Innocent IV.
till they were taken and hanged from the walls by Brancaleone, the Roman senator. It is built with prodigious strength. We stooped in pa.s.sing under the low archway, and emerged into the round chamber within, a lofty room, open to the sky, in the circular wall of which there is a niche for a single body. Nothing could exceed the delicacy and fancy with which Childe Harold muses on this spot.
The lofty turrets command a wide view of the Campagna, the long aqueducts stretching past at a short distance, and forming a chain of n.o.ble arches from Rome to the mountains of Albano. Cole's picture of the Roman Campagna, as seen from one of these elevations, is, I think, one of the finest landscapes ever painted.
Just below the tomb of Metella, in a flat valley, lie the extensive ruins of what is called the ”circus of Caracalla” by some, and the ”circus of Romulus” by others--a scarcely distinguishable heap of walls and marble, half buried in the earth and moss; and not far off stands a beautiful ruin of a small temple dedicated (as some say) to _Ridicule_. One smiles to look at it. If the embodying of that which is powerful, however, should make a deity, the dedication of a temple to _ridicule_ is far from amiss. In our age particularly, one would think, the lamp should be relit, and the reviewers should repair the temple. Poor Keats sleeps in his grave scarce a mile from the spot, a human victim sacrificed, not long ago, upon its highest altar.
In the same valley almost hidden with the luxuriant ivy waving before the entrance, flows the lovely _Fountain of Egeria_, trickling as clear and musical into its pebbly bed as when visited by the enamored successor of Romulus twenty-five centuries ago! The hill above leans upon the single arch of the small temple which embosoms it, and the green soft meadow spreads away from the floor, with the brightest verdure conceivable. We wound around by a half-worn path in descending the hill, and, putting aside the long branches of ivy, entered an antique chamber, sprinkled with quivering spots of suns.h.i.+ne, at the extremity of which, upon a kind of altar, lay the broken and defaced statue of the nymph. The fountain poured from beneath in two streams as clear as crystal. In the sides of the temple were six empty niches, through one of which stole, from a cleft in the wall, a little stream, which wandered from its way. Flowers, pale with growing in the shade, sprang from the edges of the rivulet as it found its way out, the small creepers, dripping with moisture, hung out from between the diamond-shaped stones of the roof, the air was refres.h.i.+ngly cool, and the leafy door at the entrance, seen against the sky, looked of a transparent green, as vivid as emerald. No fancy could create a sweeter spot. The fountain and the inspiration it breathed into Childe Harold are worthy of each other.
Just above the fountain, on the crest of a hill, stands a thick grove, supposed to occupy the place of the consecrated wood, in which Numa met the nymph. It is dark with shadow, and full of birds, and might afford a fitting retreat for meditation to another king and lawgiver.
The fields about it are so thickly studded with flowers, that you cannot step without crus.h.i.+ng them, and the whole neighborhood seems a favorite of nature. The rich banker, Torlonia, has bought this and several other cla.s.sic spots about Rome--possessions for which he is more to be envied than for his purchased dukedom.
All the travelling world a.s.sembles at Rome for the ceremonies of the holy week. Naples, Florence, and Pisa, send their hundreds of annual visitors, and the hotels and palaces are crowded with strangers of every nation and rank. It would be difficult to imagine a gayer or busier place than this usually sombre city has become within a few days.
LETTER LVIII.
PALM SUNDAY--SISTINE CHAPEL--ENTRANCE OF THE POPE--THE CHOIR--THE POPE ON HIS THRONE--PRESENTING THE PALMS--PROCESSION--BISHOP ENGLAND'S LECTURE--HOLY TUESDAY--THE MISERERE--ACCIDENTS IN THE CROWD--TENEBRae--THE EMBLEMATIC CANDLES--HOLY THURSDAY--FRESCOES OF MICHAEL ANGELO--”CREATION OF EVE”--”LOT INTOXICATED”--DELPHIC SYBIL--POPE WAs.h.i.+NG PILGRIMS' FEET--STRIKING RESEMBLANCE OF ONE TO JUDAS--POPE AND CARDINALS WAITING UPON PILGRIMS AT DINNER.
Palm Sunday opens the ceremonies. We drove to the Vatican this morning, at nine, and, after waiting a half hour in the crush, kept back, at the point of the spear, by the Pope's Swiss guard, I succeeded in getting an entrance into the Sistine chapel. Leaving the ladies of the party behind the grate, I pa.s.sed two more guards, and obtained a seat among the cowled and bearded dignitaries of the church and state within, where I could observe the ceremony with ease.
The Pope entered, borne in his gilded chair by twelve men, and, at the same moment, the chanting from the Sistine choir commenced with one long, piercing note, by a single voice, producing the most impressive effect. He mounted his throne as high as the altar opposite him, and the cardinals went through their obeisances, one by one, their trains supported by their servants, who knelt on the lower steps behind them.
The palms stood in a tall heap beside the altar. They were beautifully woven in wands of perhaps six feet in length, with a cross at the top.
The cardinal nearest the papal chair mounted first, and a palm was handed him. He laid it across the knees of the Pope, and, as his holiness signed the cross upon it, he stooped, and kissed the embroidered cross upon his foot, then kissed the palm, and taking it in his two hands, descended with it to his seat. The other forty or fifty cardinals did the same, until each was provided with a palm.
Some twenty other persons, monks of apparent clerical rank of every order, military men, and members of the Catholic emba.s.sies, followed and took palms. A procession was then formed, the cardinals going first with their palms held before them, and the Pope following, in his chair, with a small frame of palmwork in his hands, in which was woven the initial of the Virgin. They pa.s.sed out of the Sistine chapel, the choir chanting most delightfully, and, having made a tour around the vestibule, returned in the same order.
The ceremony is intended to represent the entrance of the Saviour into Jerusalem. Bishop England, of Charleston, South Carolina, delivered a lecture at the house of the English cardinal Weld, a day or two ago, explanatory of the ceremonies of the Holy week. It was princ.i.p.ally an apology for them. He confessed that, to the educated, they appeared empty, and even absurd rites, but they were intended not for the refined, but the vulgar, whom it was necessary to instruct and impress through their outward senses. As nearly all these rites, however, take place in the Sistine chapel, which no person is permitted to enter who is not furnished with a ticket, and in full dress, his argument rather fell to the ground.
With all the vast crowd of strangers in Rome, I went to the Sistine chapel on _Holy Tuesday_, to hear the far-famed _Miserere_. It is sung several times during the holy week, by the Pope's choir, and has been described by travellers, of all nations, in the most rapturous terms.
The vestibule was a scene of shocking confusion, for an hour, a constant struggle going on between the crowd and the Swiss guard, amounting occasionally to a fight, in which ladies fainted, children screamed, men swore, and, unless by force of contrast, the minds of the audience seemed likely to be little in tune for the music. The chamberlains at last arrived, and two thousand people attempted to get into a small chapel which scarce holds four hundred. Coat-skirts, torn ca.s.socks, hats, gloves, and fragments of ladies' dresses, were thrown up by the suffocating throng, and, in the midst of a confusion beyond description, the mournful notes of the _tenebrae_ (or lamentations of Jeremiah) poured in full volume from the choir. Thirteen candles burned in a small pyramid within the paling of the altar, and twelve of these, representing the apostles, were extinguished, one by one (to signify their desertion at the cross), during the singing of the _tenebrae_. The last, which was left burning, represented the mother of Christ. As the last before this was extinguished, the music ceased.
The crowd had, by this time, become quiet. The twilight had deepened through the dimly-lit chapel, and the one solitary lamp looked lost at the distance of the altar. Suddenly the _miserere_ commenced with one high prolonged note, that sounded like a wail; another joined it, and another and another, and all the different parts came in, with a gradual swell of plaintive and most thrilling harmony, to the full power of the choir. It continued for perhaps half an hour. The music was simple, running upon a few notes, like a dirge, but there were voices in the choir that seemed of a really supernatural sweetness. No instrument could be so clear. The crowd, even in their uncomfortable positions, were breathless with attention, and the effect was universal. It is really extraordinary music, and if but half the rites of the Catholic church had its power over the mind, a visit to Rome would have quite another influence.
The candles were lit, and the motley troop of cardinals and red-legged servitors pa.s.sed out. The harlequin-looking Swiss guard stood to their tall halberds, the chamberlains and mace-bearers, in their ca.s.sock and frills, took care that the males and females should not mix until they reached the door, the Pope disappeared in the sacristy, and the gay world, kept an hour beyond their time, went home to cold dinners.