A Few Other Roman Neighbourhoods

If I find my old notes, in all these Roman connections,
inevitably bristle with the spirit of the postscript, so I give
way to this prompting to the extent of my scant space and with
the sense of other occasions awaiting me on which I shall have to
do no less. The impression of Rome was repeatedly to renew itself
for the author of these now rather antique and artless accents;
was to overlay itself again and again with almost heavy
thicknesses of experience, the last of which is, as I write,
quite fresh to memory; and he has thus felt almost ashamed to
drop his subject (though it be one that tends so easily to turn
to the infinite) as if the law of change had in all the years had
nothing to say to his case. It's of course but of his case alone
that he speaks--wondering little what he may make of it for the
profit of others by an attempt, however brief, to point the moral
of the matter, or in other words compare the musing mature
visitor's "feeling about Rome" with that of the extremely
agitated, even if though extremely inexpert, consciousness
reflected in the previous pages. The actual, the current Rome
affects him as a world governed by new conditions altogether and
ruefully pleading that sorry fact in the ear of the antique
wanderer wherever he may yet mournfully turn for some re-capture
of what he misses. The city of his first unpremeditated rapture
shines to memory, on the other hand, in the manner of a lost
paradise the rustle of whose gardens is still just audible enough
in the air to make him wonder if some sudden turn, some recovered
vista, mayn't lead him back to the thing itself. My genial, my
helpful tag, at this point, would doubtless properly resolve
itself, for the reader, into a clue toward some such successful
ingenuity of quest; a remark I make, I may add, even while
reflecting that the Paradise isn't apparently at all "lost" to
visitors not of my generation. It is the seekers of that
remote and romantic tradition who have seen it, from one period
of ten, or even of five, years to another, systematically and
remorselessly built out from their view. Their helpless plaint,
their sense of the generally irrecoverable and unspeakable, is
not, however, what I desire here most to express; I should like,
on the contrary, with ampler opportunity, positively to enumerate
the cases, the cases of contact, impression, experience, in which
the cold ashes of a long-chilled passion may fairly feel
themselves made to glow again. No one who has ever loved Rome as
Rome could be loved in youth and before her poised basketful of
the finer appeals to fond fancy was actually upset, wants to stop
loving her; so that our bleeding and wounded, though perhaps not
wholly moribund,