Roman Rides

I shall always remember the first I took: out of the Porta del
Popolo, to where the Ponte Molle, whose single arch sustains a
weight of historic tradition, compels the sallow Tiber to flow
between its four great-mannered ecclesiastical statues, over the
crest of the hill and along the old posting-road to Florence. It
was mild midwinter, the season peculiarly of colour on the Roman
Campagna; and the light was full of that mellow purple glow, that
tempered intensity, which haunts the after-visions of those who
have known Rome like the memory of some supremely irresponsible
pleasure. An hour away I pulled up and at the edge of a meadow
gazed away for some time into remoter distances. Then and there,
it seemed to me, I measured the deep delight of knowing the
Campagna. But I saw more things in it than I can easily tell. The
country rolled away around me into slopes and dells of long-drawn
grace, chequered with purple and blue and blooming brown. The
lights and shadows were at play on the Sabine Mountains--an
alternation of tones so exquisite as to be conveyed only by some
fantastic comparison to sapphire and amber. In the foreground a
contadino in his cloak and peaked hat jogged solitary on his ass;
and here and there in the distance, among blue undulations, some
white village, some grey tower, helped deliciously to make the
picture the typical "Italian landscape" of old-fashioned art. It
was so bright and yet so sad, so still and yet so charged, to the
supersensuous ear, with the murmur of an extinguished life, that
you could only say it was intensely and adorably strange, could
only impute to the whole overarched scene an unsurpassed secret
for bringing tears of appreciation to no matter how ignorant--
archaeologically ignorant--eyes. To ride once, in these
conditions, is of course to ride again and to allot to the
Campagna a generous share of the time one spends in Rome.

It is a pleasure that doubles one's horizon, and one can scarcely
say whether it enlarges or limits one's impression of the city
proper. It certainly makes St. Peter's seem a trifle smaller and
blunts the edge of one's curiosity in the Forum. It must be the
effect of the experience, at all extended, that when you think of
Rome afterwards you will think still respectfully and regretfully
enough of the Vatican and the Pincio, the streets and the
picture-making street life; but will even more wonder, with an
irrepressible contraction of the heart, when again you shall feel
yourself bounding over the flower-smothered turf, or pass from
one framed picture to another beside the open arches of the
crumbling aqueducts. You look back at the City so often from some
grassy hill-top--hugely compact within its walls, with St.