Roman Rides - Page 2

Peter's overtopping all things and yet seeming small, and the
vast girdle of marsh and meadow receding on all sides to the
mountains and the sea--that you come to remember it at last as
hardly more than a respectable parenthesis in a great sweep of
generalisation. Within the walls, on the other hand, you think of
your intended ride as the most romantic of all your
possibilities; of the Campagna generally as an illimitable
experience. One's rides certainly give Rome an inordinate scope
for the reflective--by which I suppose I mean after all the
aesthetic and the "esoteric"--life. To dwell in a city which,
much as you grumble at it, is after all very fairly a modern
city; with crowds and shops and theatres and cafes and balls and
receptions and dinner-parties, and all the modern confusion of
social pleasures and pains; to have at your door the good and
evil of it all; and yet to be able in half an hour to gallop away
and leave it a hundred miles, a hundred years, behind, and to
look at the tufted broom glowing on a lonely tower-top in the
still blue air, and the pale pink asphodels trembling none the
less for the stillness, and the shaggy-legged shepherds leaning
on their sticks in motionless brotherhood with the heaps of ruin,
and the scrambling goats and staggering little kids treading out
wild desert smells from the top of hollow-sounding mounds; and
then to come back through one of the great gates and a couple of
hours later find yourself in the "world," dressed, introduced,
entertained, inquiring, talking about "Middlemarch" to a young
English lady or listening to Neapolitan songs from a gentleman in
a very low-cut shirt--all this is to lead in a manner a double
life and to gather from the hurrying hours more impressions than
a mind of modest capacity quite knows how to dispose of.

I touched lately upon this theme with a friend who, I fancied,
would understand me, and who immediately assured me that he had
just spent a day that this mingled diversity of sensation made to
the days one spends elsewhere what an uncommonly good novel may
be to the daily paper. "There was an air of idleness about it, if
you will," he said, "and it was certainly pleasant enough to have
been wrong. Perhaps, being after all unused to long stretches of
dissipation, this was why I had a half-feeling that I was reading
an odd chapter in the history of a person very much more of a
héros de roman than myself." Then he proceeded to relate
how he had taken a long ride with a lady whom he extremely
admired. "We turned off from the Tor di Quinto Road to that
castellated farm-house you know of--once a Ghibelline fortress--
whither Claude Lorraine used to come to