From A Roman Note-Book - Page 2

gardening, and resembles the present natural manner as a
chapter of Johnsonian rhetoric resembles a piece of clever
contemporary journalism. But it's a better style in horticulture
than in literature; I prefer one of the long-drawn blue-green
Colonna vistas, with a maimed and mossy-coated garden goddess at
the end, to the finest possible quotation from a last-century
classic. Perhaps the best thing there is the old orangery with
its trees in fantastic terra-cotta tubs. The late afternoon light
was gilding the monstrous jars and suspending golden chequers
among the golden-fruited leaves. Or perhaps the best thing is the
broad terrace with its mossy balustrade and its benches; also its
view of the great naked Torre di Nerone (I think), which might
look stupid if the rosy brickwork didn't take such a colour in
the blue air. Delightful, at any rate, to stroll and talk there
in the afternoon sunshine.

January 2nd, 1873. --Two or three drives with A.--one to
St. Paul's without the Walls and back by a couple of old churches
on the Aventine. I was freshly struck with the rare distinction
of the little Protestant cemetery at the Gate, lying in the
shadow of the black sepulchral Pyramid and the thick-growing
black cypresses. Bathed in the clear Roman light the place is
heartbreaking for what it asks you--in such a world as
this--to renounce. If it should "make one in love with
death to lie there," that's only if death should be conscious. As
the case stands, the weight of a tremendous past presses upon the
flowery sod, and the sleeper's mortality feels the contact of all
the mortality with which the brilliant air is tainted.... The
restored Basilica is incredibly splendid. It seems a last pompous
effort of formal Catholicism, and there are few more striking
emblems of later Rome--the Rome foredoomed to see Victor
Emmanuel in the Quirinal, the Rome of abortive councils and
unheeded anathemas. It rises there, gorgeous and useless, on its
miasmatic site, with an air of conscious bravado--a florid
advertisement of the superabundance of faith. Within it's
magnificent, and its magnificence has no shabby spots--a rare
thing in Rome. Marble and mosaic, alabaster and malachite, lapis
and porphyry, incrust it from pavement to cornice and flash back
their polished lights at each other with such a splendour of
effect that you seem to stand at the heart of some immense
prismatic crystal. One has to come to Italy to know marbles and
love them. I remember the fascination of the first great show of
them I met in Venice--at the Scalzi and Gesuiti. Colour has in no
other form so cool and unfading a purity and lustre. Softness of
tone and hardness of substance--isn't that the sum of the
artist's