The After-Season in Rome - Page 2

motley excess, and now physically, morally,
æesthetically there was elbow-room. In the afternoon I went to
the Pincio, and the Pincio was almost dull. The band was playing
to a dozen ladies who lay in landaus poising their lace-fringed
parasols; but they had scarce more than a light-gloved dandy
apiece hanging over their carriage doors. By the parapet to the
great terrace that sweeps the city stood but three or four
interlopers looking at the sunset and with their Baedekers only
just showing in their pockets--the sunsets not being down among
the tariffed articles in these precious volumes. I went so far as
to hope for them that, like myself, they were, under every
precaution, taking some amorous intellectual liberty with the
scene.

Practically I violate thus the instinct of monopoly, since it's a
shame not to publish that Rome in May is indeed exquisitely worth
your patience. I have just been so gratified at finding myself in
undisturbed possession for a couple of hours of the Museum of the
Lateran that I can afford to be magnanimous. It's almost as if
the old all-papal paradise had come back. The weather for a month
has been perfect, the sky an extravagance of blue, the air lively
enough, the nights cool, nippingly cool. and the whole ancient
greyness lighted with an irresistible smile. Rome, which in some
moods, especially to new-comers, seems a place of almost sinister
gloom, has an occasional art, as one knows her better, of
brushing away care by the grand gesture with which some splendid
impatient mourning matron--just the Niobe of Nations, surviving,
emerging and looking about her again--might pull off and cast
aside an oppression of muffling crape. This admirable power still
temperamentally to react and take notice lurks in all her
darkness and dirt and decay--a something more careless and
hopeless than our thrifty northern cheer, and yet more genial and
urbane than the Parisian spirit of blague. The collective
Roman nature is a healthy and hearty one, and you feel it abroad
in the streets even when the sirocco blows and the medium of life
seems to proceed more or less from the mouth of a furnace. But
who shall analyse even the simplest Roman impression? It is
compounded of so many things, it says so much, it involves so
much, it so quickens the intelligence and so flatters the heart,
that before we fairly grasp the case the imagination has marked
it for her own and exposed us to a perilous likelihood of talking
nonsense about it.

The smile of Rome, as I have called it, and its insidious message
to those who incline to ramble irresponsibly and take things as
they come, is ushered in with the first breath of spring, and
then grows and grows with the advancing