YALE
UNIVERSITY LIBRARY

COLLECTION OP

BRITISH AUTHORS

TAUCHNITZ EDITION.

•»•

VOL. 2164.
FOEEIGN PAETS BY HENEY JAMES.
IN ONE VOLUME. »

1.
LEIPZIG: BEKNHARD TAUCHNITZ.
PARIS ; C. KEINWALD,,. 15, BUE DES SAINTS, P^EBS.
PAKIS: THE QALIGNANI LIBBARr, 224, KUE DE RlVOLl,
AND AT NICE, 16, QtlAI .MA,SSElfA.

' :; This Collection
is published Tinth copyright for 'Cpntineiitctt circulation, but all
purchasers are earnestly requested not to introduce the Oolumes
into Mngland or into

COLLECTION OF
BRITISH AUTHORS
TAUCHNITZ EDITION.
VOL. 2164.
FOEEIGN PAETS BT HENEY JAMES.
IN ONE VOLUME.

TAUCHNITZ EDITION.
By the same Author,
THE AMERICAN  2 vols.
THE EUROPEANS  1 Tol.
DAISY MILLER, ETC. . ... 1 TOl.
RODERICK HUDSON . .  2 vols.
THE MADONNA OF THE FUTURE, ETC. . 1 vol.
EUGENE PICKERING, ETC  1 vol.
CONFIDENCE  1 vol.
"WASHINGTON SQUARE .  2 vols.
THE PORTRAIT OF A LADT  3 vols.

FOREIGN PARTS.

HENRY JAMES,
AUTHOR OF
'daisy MILLER," "THE PORTRAIT, OF A LADY," ETC.

AUTHORIZED EDITION,

LEIPZIG
BERNHARD TAUCHNITZ
1883.

NOTE.
The papers in this volume, reprinted from period
icals were collected and published in Boston in the
year 1875, under the name of Transatlaniic Sketches.
For this "Tauchnitz edition" the name has been
changed and the sketches have been revised.
1883. Henry James.

CONTENTS.

Page
CHESTER  ... 9
LICHFIELD AND -WAR-WICK  21
NORTH DEVON  33
-WELLS AND SALISBURY . . . . . 43
SWISS NOTES . . . . ... S3
FROM CHAMB:fiRY TO MILAN ...... 67
FROM VENICE TO STRASBURG . . .79
A ROMAN HOLIDAY  92
ROMAN RIDES . .  116
ROMAN NEIGHBORHOODS .... 13S
FROM A ROMAN NOTE-BOOK . . . . . 157
A CHAIN OF CITIES .  178
THE ST. GOTTHARD  19S
SIENA .... ... ... 217
FLORENTINE NOTES ... . 231
TUSCAN CITIES . . ... 251

CONTENTS.

Page 262

RAVENNA 
HOMBURG REFORMED  =7*
DARMSTADT  °^^
IN HOLLAND  "^^
IN BELGIUM  309

FOREIGN PARTS.

CHESTER.
Chester, May, 1872.
If the Atlantic voyage is counted, as it certainly
may be, even with the ocean in a fairly good humor,
an enormous zero in the sum of one's better ex
perience, the American traveller arriving at this vener
able town finds himself transposed, without a sensible
gradation, from the edge of the New World to the very
heart ofthe Old. It is almost a misfortune, perhaps,
that Chester lies so close to the threshold of England;
for it is so rare and complete a specimen of an antique
to-wn, that the later-coming wonders of its sisters in
renown — of Shrewsbury, Coventry, and York^ — suffer
a trifle by comparison, and the tourist's appetite for
the picturesque just loses its finer edge. Yet the first
impressions of an observant American in England —
of our old friend the sentimental tourist — stir up
within him such a cloud of sensibility that while the
charm is still unbroken he may perhaps as well dis
pose, mentally, of the greater as of the less>. I have
been playing at first impressions for the second time,

ID FOREIGN PARTS.
and have won the game against a cynical adversary.
I have been strolling and restrolling along the ancient
wall — so perfect in its antiquity- — which locks this
dense little city in its stony circle, with a certain friend
who has been treating me to a bitter lament on the
decay of his relish for the picturesque. "I have turned
the corner of youth," is his ceaseless plaint; "I sus
pected it, but now I know it — now that my heart
beats but once where it beat a dozen times before,
and that where I found sermons in stones and pictures
in meadows, delicious revelations and intimations in
effable, I find nothing but the stern, dark prose of
British civilization." But little by little I have grown
used to my friend's sad monody, and indeed feel half
indebted to it as a warning against cheap infatuations.
I defied him, at any rate, to spoil the walls of
Chester for me. There could be no better example of
that phenomenon so delightfully frequent in England —
an ancient monument or institution lovingly readopted
and consecrated to some modern amenity. The good
Cestrians may boast of their walls without a shadow
of that mental reservation on grounds of modern ease,
which is so often the tax paid by the picturesque; and
I can easily imagine that though most modern towns
contrive to get on comfortably without this stony girdle,
these people should have come to regard theirs as a
prime necessity. For through it, surely, they may know
their city more intimately than their uncinctured neigh
bors — survey it, feel it, rejoice in it as many times a
day as they please. The civic consciousness, sun
ning itself thus on the city's rim, and glancing at the
little, swarming, towered, and gabled town within,
and then at the blue undulations of the near Welsh

CHESTER. 1 1
border, may easily deepen to delicious complacency.
The wall encloses the town in a continuous ring, which,
passing through innumerable picturesque vicissitudes,
often threatens to snap, but never fairly breaks the
link; so that starting at any point, an hour's easy stroll
will bring you back to your station. I have quite lost
my heart to this charming wall, and there are so many
things to be said about it that I hardly know where to
begin. The great fact, I suppose, is that it contains a
Roman substructure and rests for much of its course
on foundations laid by that race of master-builders.
But in spite of this sturdy origin, much of which is
buried in the well-trodden soil of the ages, it is the
gentlest and least offensive of ramparts and completes
its long irregular curve without a frown or menace in
all its disembattled stretch. The earthy deposit of
time has indeed in some places climbed so high about
its base that it amounts to no more than a terrace of
modest proportions. It has everywhere, however, a
rugged outer parapet and a broad hollow flagging, wide
enough for two strollers abreast. Thus equipped, it
wanders through its adventurous circuit; now sloping,
now bending, now broadening into a terrace, now nar
ro-wing into an alley, now swelling into an arch, now
dipping into steps, now passing some thorn-screened
garden, and now reminding you that it was once a
more serious matter than all this, by the occurrence of
a rugged, i-vy-smothered tower. Its present mild inno
cence is increased, to your mind, by the facility with
which you can approach it from any point in the town.
Every few steps, as you go, you see some little court
or alley boring toward it through the close-pressed
houses. It is full of this delightful element of the

12 FOREIGN PARTS.
crooked, the accidental, the unforeseen, which, to
American eyes, accustomed to our eternal straight lines
and right angles, is the striking feature of European
street scenery. An American strolling in the Chester
streets finds a perfect feast of crookedness — of those
random corners, projections and recesses, odd domestic
interspaces charmingly saved or lost, those innumerable
architectural surprises and caprices and fantasies which
offer such a delicious holiday to a vision nourished
upon brown-stone fronts. An American is born to the
idea that on his walks abroad it is perpetual level wall
ahead of him, and such a revelation as he finds here
of infinite accident and infinite effect gives a wholly
novel zest to the use of his eyes. It produces, too,
the reflection — a superficial and fallacious one, perhaps
— that amid all this cunning chiaroscuro of its mise en
seine, life must have more of a certain homely enter
tainment. It is at least no fallacy to say that child
hood — or the later memory of childhood — must borrow
from such a background a kind of anecdotical wealth.
We all know how in the retrospect of later moods the
incidents of early youth "compose," visibly, each as an
individual picture, with a magic for which the greatest
painters have no corresponding art. There is a vivid
reflection of this magic in some of the early pages of
Dickens's "Copperfield" and of George Eliot's "Mill
on the Floss," the writers having had the happiness of
growing up among old, old things. Two or three of
the phases of this rambling wall belong especially to
the class of things fondly remembered. In one place
it skirts the edge of the cathedral churchyard, and
sweeps beneath the great square tower and behind the
sacred east window of the choir. Of the cathedral

CHESTER.

13

there is more to say; but just the spot I speak of is
the best stand-point for feeling how fine an influence
in the architectural line — where theoretically, at least,
influences are great — is the massive tower of an Eng
lish abbey, dominating the homes of men; and for
watching the eddying flight of swallows make vaster
still to the eye the large calm fields of stonework. At
another point, two battered and grumbling towers, de
caying in their winding-sheets of i-vy, make a prodigi
ously picturesque diversion. One inserted in the body
of the wall and the other connected with it by a short
crumbling ridge of masonry, they contribute to a posi
tive jumble of local color. A shaded mall wanders at
the foot of the rampart; beside this passes a narrow
canal, with locks and barges and burly watermen in
smocks and breeches; while the venerable pair of
towers, with their old red sandstone sides peeping
through the gaps in their green mantles, rest on the
soft grass of one of those odd fragments of public
garden, a crooked strip of ground turned to social
account, which one meets at every turn in England —
a tribute to the needs of the "masses." Stat magni
nominis umbra. The quotation is doubly pertinent here,
for this little garden-strip is adorned with mossy frag
ments of Roman stonework, bits of pavement, altars
and baths, disinterred in the local soil. England is
the land of small economies, and the present rarely
fails to find good use for the odds and ends of the
past. These two hoary shells of masonry are therefore
converted into "museums," receptacles for the dustiest
and shabbiest of tawdry back-parlor curiosities. Here
preside a couple of those grotesque creatures a la
Dickens, whom one finds squeezed into every cranny

14 FOREIGN PARTS.
of English civilization, scraping a thin subsistence,
like mites in a mouldy cheese.
Next after its wall — possibly even before it — Ches
ter values its Rows — an architectural idiosyncrasy
which must be seen to be appreciated. They are a sort
of Gothic edition of the blessed arcades of Italy, and
consist, roughly speaking, of a running public passage,
tunnelled through the second story of the houses. The
lo-w basement is thus directly on the drive-way, to
which a flight of steps descends, at frequent intervals,
from this superincumbent veranda. The upper portion
of the houses projects to the outer line of the arcade,
where they are propped with pillars and posts and
parapets. The shop-fronts face the arcade, and admit
you to little caverns of traffic, more or less dusky ac
cording to their opportunities for illumination in the
rear. If the picturesque is measured by its hostility to
our modern notions of convenience, Chester is probably
the most picturesque city in the world. This arrange
ment is endlessly rich in opportunities for effect. But
the full charm of the architecture of which it is so
essential a part must be observed from the street be
low. Chester is still an antique city, and mediseval
England sits bravely under her gables. Every third
house is a "specimen" — gabled and latticed, timbered
and carved, and wearing its years more or less lightly.
These ancient dwellings present every shade and de
gree of historical color and expression. Some' are dark
with neglect and deformity, and the horizontal slit ad
mitting light into the lurking Row seems to collapse on
its dislocated props like a pair of toothless old jaws.
Others stand there square-shouldered and sturdy, with
their beams painted and straightened, their plaster

CHESTER. 1 5
white-washed, their carvings polished, and the low
casement covering the breadth of the frontage adorned
with curtains and flower-pots. It is noticeable that the
actual townsfolk have bravely accepted the situation
bequeathed by the past, and the large number of rich
and intelligent restorations of the old fajades speaks
well both for their tastes and their means. These
elaborate and ingenious repairs attest a pious reverence
for the peculiar stamp of the city. I indeed suspect
many of these fresh antiques of being better royalists
than the king and of having been restored with interest.
About the genuine antiques there would be properly a
great deal to say, for they are really a theme for the
philosopher; but the theme is too hea-vy for my pen,
and I can give them but the passing tribute of a sigh.
They are fatally picturesque — horribly eloquent. Fix
one of them with your gaze and it seems fairly to reek
with mortality. Every stain and crevice seems to syl
lable some human record — a record of unillumined
lives. I have been trying hard to fancy them animated
by the children of "Merry England," but I am quite
unable to think of them save as peopled by the victims
of dismal old-world pains and fears. Human life,
surely, packed away behind those impenetrable lattices
of lead and bottle-glass, just above which the black
outer beam marks the suffocating nearness of the ceil
ing, can have expanded into but scanty freedom and
bloomed into little sweetness.
Nothing has struck me more in my strolls along
the Rows than the fact that the most zealous observa
tion can keep but uneven pace with the fine differences
in national manners. Some of the most sensible of
these differences are yet so subtle and indefinable

1 6 FOREIGN PARTS.
that one must give up the attempt to express them,
though the omission leave but a rough sketch. As you
pass with the bustling current from shop to shop, you
feel local custom and tradition — the foreign tone of
things — pressing on you from every side. The tone
of things is, somehow, heavier than with us; manners
and modes are more absolute and positive; they seem;
to swarm and to thicken the atmosphere about you.
Morally and physically it is a denser air than ours.
We Americans seem loosely hung together as compared
with the English, every man of whom is a tight fit in
his place. It is not an inferential but a palpable fact
that England is a crowded country. There is stillness ]
and space — grassy, oak-studded space — at Eaton Hall,
where the Marquis of Westminster dwells (or I believe
can afford to humor his notion of not dwelling), but
there is a crowd and a hubbub in Chester. AVherever
you go, the population has overflowed. You stroll on
the walls at eventide, and you hardly find elbow-room.
You haunt the cathedral shades, and a dozen saunter
ing mortals temper your solitude. You glance up an
alley or side street, and discover populous windows
and doorsteps. You roll along country roads, and find
countless humble pedestrians dotting the green way-;
sides. The English landscape is always a "landscape
with figures." And everywhere you go, you are accom
panied by a vague consciousness of the British child
hovering about your knees and coat-skirts, naked,
grimy, portentous. You reflect, with a sort of physical
relief, on Australia, Canada, India. Where there are
many men, of course there are many needs; which
helps to justify to the philosophic stranger the vast
number and the irresistible coquetry of the little shops

CHESTER. 1 7
which adorn these low-browed Rows. The shop-fronts
have always seemed to me the most sesthetic things
in England; and I waste more time than I should care
to confess to in covetous contemplation of those vast,
clear panes, behind which the nether integuments of
gentlemen are daintily suspended from glittering brass
rods. The manners of the dealers in these com
fortable wares seldom fail to confirm your agreeable
impressions. You are thanked with effusion for ex
pending twopence — a fact of deep significance to the
truly analytic mind, and which always seems to me a
vague reverberation from certain of Miss Edgeworth's
novels, perused in childhood. When you think of the
small profits, the small jealousies, the long waiting, and
the narrow margin for evil days, implied by this re
dundancy of shops and shopmen, you hear afresh the
steady rumble of that deep key-note of English man
ners, overscored so often, and with such sweet beguile
ment, by finer harmonies, but never extinguished, —
the "struggle for existence."
The Rows are picturesque and entertaining, and it
is a pity that, thirty years ago, when they must have
been more so, there was no English Balzac to intro
duce them into realistic romance, with a psychological
commentary. But the cathedral is better, modestly as
"it stands on the roll of English abbeys. It is of
moderate dimensions, and rather meagre in form and
ornament; but to an American it is a genuine cathedral,
and awakens all the proper emotions. Among these
is a certain irresistible regret that so much of its hoary
substance should give place to the fine, fresh-colored
masonry with which Mr. Gilbert Scott — that man of
many labors — is so remorselessly investing it. The
Foreign Parts. ^

1 8 FOREIGN PARTS.
red sandstone of the primitive structure, darkened and
devoured by time, survives in many places, in fro-wn-
ing mockery of all of this modern repair. The great
tower, however^ — completely restored — rises high enougl|
to seem to belong, as cathedral towers should, to the
far-off air that vibrates with the chimes and the swal
lows, and to square serenely, east and west and soutli
and north, its embossed and fluted sides. English
cathedrals, within, are apt at first to look pale and
naked; but after a while, if the proportions are fait
and the spaces largely distributed, when you perdeivei
the light beating softly down from the cold clerestory'
and your eye measures caressingly the tallness of
columns and the hollowness of arches, and lingers on
the old genteel inscriptions of mural marbles and|
brasses; and, above all, when you become conscious of
that sweet, cool mustiness in the air which seems to
haunt these places, like the very climate of Episcopacy,
you may grow to feel that they are less the emptj^
shells of a departed faith than the abodes of a faitij
which is still a solid institution and "establishment.!!
Catholicism has gone, but the massive respectability
of Anglicanism is a rich enough substitute. So at least
it seemed to me, a Sunday or two since, as I sat in
the choir at Chester, awaiting a discourse from Canon
Kingsley. The Anglican service had never seemed to^
my profane sense so much an affair of magnificent
intonations and cadences — of pompous effects of
resonance and melody. The vast oaken architecture
of the stalls among which we nestled — somewhat stiffly,
and with a due apprehension of wounded ribs and
knees — climbing vainly against the dizzier reach of
the columns — the beautiful English voices of certain

CHESTER. I g
officiating canons — the little rosy "king's scholars"
sitting ranged beneath the pulpit, in white-winged
surplices, which made their heads, above the pew-
edges, look like rows of sleepy cherubs — every element
in the scene gave it a great spectacular beauty. They
suggested, too, what is suggested in England at every
turn, that conservatism here has all the charm, and
leaves dissent and democracy and other vulgar varia
tions nothing but their bald logic. Conservatism has
the cathedrals, the colleges, the castles, the gardens,
the traditions, the associations, the fine names, the
better manners, the poetry; Dissent has the dusky
brick chapels in provincial by-streets, the names out
pf Dickens, the uncertain tenure of the h, and the poor
mens sibi con-':cia recti. Differences which in other
countries are slight and varying, almost metaphysical,
as one may say, are marked in England by a gulf
Nowhere else does the degree of one's respectability
involve such solid consequences, and I am sure I
don't wonder that the sacramental word which with
us (and in such correlatives as they possess, more or
less among the continental races) is pronounced lightly
and facetiously, and as a quotation from the Philistines,
is uttered here with a perfectly grave face. To have
the courage of one's opinions is in short to have a
prodigious deal of courage, and I think one must
need as much to be a Dissenter as one needs patience
not to be a duke. Perhaps the Dissenters (to limit
the question to them) manage to stay out of the
church by thinking exclusively of the sermon. Canon
Kingsley's discourse was one more example of the
familiar truth^ — not without its significance to minds
zealous for the good old fashion of "making an effort"

20 FOREIGN PARTS.
— that there is a mysterious affinity between large
accessories and slender essentials. The sermon, be
neath that triply consecrated vault, should have been
of as fine a quality as the church. It was not; and I
confess that a tender memory of ancient obligations to
the author of "Westward Ho!" and "Hypatia" forbids
my saying more of it. An American, I think, is not
incapable of taking a secret satisfaction in an incon
gruity of this kind. He finds with relief that mortals
reared amid all this rich aesthetic privilege are after all
but mortals. His constant sense of the beautiful scenic
properties of English life is apt to beget a habit of
melancholy reference to the dead-blank wall which
forms the background of our own life-drama; and from
doubting in this fantastic humor whether we have
even that modest value in the picturesque scale thati
he has sometimes fondly hoped, he lapses into a
moody scepticism as to our value in the intellectual,
and finds himself wondering vaguely whether this is
not a mightier race as well as a lovelier land. That
of course will never do; so that when after being
escorted- down the beautiful choir, in what, from the
American point of view, is an almost gorgeous ec-|
clesiastical march, by the Dean in a white robe trimmecj
with scarlet, and black-robed sacristans carrying silver'
wands, the officiating canon mounts into a splendid
canopied and pinnacled pulpit of Gothic stoneworl|
and proves — ^not a Jeremy Taylor in- ordinary, our
poor sentimental tourist begins to hold up his head
again and to reflect with complacency that opportunity
wasted is not our national reproach. I am not sure,.
indeed, that in the excess of his elation he is noti
tempted to accuse his English neighbors of being in-i

LICHFIELD AND WARWICK.

different, unperceptive, uninspired, and to affirm that
they do not half discern their good fortune, and that it
takes a poor disinherited Yankee to appreciate the
"points" of this admirable country.

LICHFIELD AND WARWICK.
Oxford, June ii, 1872.
To -write at Oxford of anything but Oxford re
quires, on the part of the sentimental tourist, no
small power of mental abstraction. Yet I have it at
heart to pay to three or four other scenes recently
visited the debt of an enjoyment hardly less pro
found than my relish for this scholastic paradise.
First among these is the cathedral city of Lichfield.
I say the city, because Lichfield has a character of
its own apart from its great ecclesiastical feature.
In the centre of its little market-place — dullest and
sleepiest of provincial market-places — rises a huge
effigy of Dr. Johnson, the genius loci, who was con
structed, humanly, with very nearly as large an archi
tecture as the great abbey. The Doctor's statue,
which is of some inexpensive composite, painted a
shiny brown, and of no great merit of design, fills
out the vacant dulness of the little square in much
the same way as his massive personality occupies — with
just a margin for Garrick — the record of his native
town. In one ofthe volumes of Croker's "Boswell"
is a steel plate of the old Johnsonian birth-house, by

2 2 FOREIGN PARTS.
the aid of a vague recollection of which I detected
the dwelhng beneath its modernized frontage. It
bears no mural inscription, and, save for a hint of
antiquity in the receding basement, with pillars sup
porting the floor above, seems in no especial harmony
with Johnson's time or fame. Lichfield in general
appeared to me, indeed, to have little to say about
her great son, beyond the fact that the dreary pro
vincial quality of the local atmosphere, in which it is
so easy to fancy a great intelle.ctual appetite turning
sick with inanition, may help to explain the Doctor's
subsequent almost ferocious fondness for London. I
walked about the silent streets, trying to repeoplej
them with wigs and short-clothes, and, while I lingered,
near the cathedral, endeavored to guess the message
of its Gothic graces to Johnson's ponderous classicism,
But I achieved but a colorless picture at the best,
and the most vivid image in my mind's eye was
that of the London coach facing toward Temple Bar, :
with the young author of "Rasselas" scowling near
sightedly from the cheapest seat. With him goes the;
interest of Lichfield town. The place is stale, without
being really antique. It is as if that prodigious tem-,
perament had absorbed and appropriated its original
vitality. If every dull provincial town, however, formed but
a girdle of quietude to a cathedral as rich as that of
Lichfield, one would thank it for its unimportunate
vacancy. Lichfield Cathedral is great among churches,
and bravely performs the prime duty of a cathedral
— that of seeming for the time (to minds unsophis
ticated by architectural culture) the finest on the
whole, of all cathedrals. This one is rather oddly

LICHFIELD AND WARWICK. 23
placed, on the slope of a hill, the particular spot hav
ing been chosen, I believe, because it was sanctified
by the sufferings of certain primitive martyrs; but it is
fine to see how its upper portions surmount any
crookedness of posture, and its great towers overtake
in mid-air the conditions of perfect symmetry.
The close is a singularly pleasant one. A long
sheet of water expands behind it, and, besides lead
ing the eye off into a sweet green landscape, renders
the inestimable service of reflecting the three spires
as they rise above the great trees which mask the
Palace and the Deanery. These august abodes edge
the northern side of the slope, and behind their huge
gate-posts and close-wrought gates the atmosphere of
the Georgian era seems to abide. Before them stretches
a row of huge elms, which must have been old when
Johnson was young; and between these and the long-
buttressed wall of the cathedral, you may stroll to and
fro among as pleasant a mixture of influences as any
in England. You can stand back here, too, from the
west front farther than in many cases, and examine at
your ease its lavish decoration. You are, perhaps, a
trifle too much at your ease; for you soon discover
what a more cursory glance might not betray, that the
immense fajade has been covered with stucco and
paint, that an effigy of Charles II., in wig and plumes
and trunk-hose, of almost Gothic grotesqueness, sur
mounts the middle window; that the various other
statues of saints and kings have but recently climbed
into their niches; and that the whole expanse, in
short, is an imposture. All this was done some fifty
years ago, in the taste of that day as to restoration,
and yet it but partially mitigates the impressiveness

,24 FOREIGN PARTS.
of the high fa9ade, with its brace of spires and its
great embossed and image-fretted surface, to which
the lowness of the portals (the too frequent reproach
of English abbeys) seems to give a loftier reach.
Passing beneath one of these low portals, however, I
found myself gazing down as noble a church--vista as
any I remember. The cathedral is of magnificent
length, and the screen between nave and choir has
been removed so that from stem to stern, as one may
say, of the great vessel of the church, it is all a
mighty avenue of multitudinous slender columns, ter
minating in what seems a great screen of ruby and
sapphire and topaz — one of the finest east windows in
England. The cathedral is narrow in proportion to
its length; it is the long-drawn aisle of the poet in
perfection, and there is something grandly elegant in
the unity of effect produced by this unobstructed per
spective. The charm is increased by a singular
architectural fantasy. Standing in the centre of the
doorway, you perceive that the eastern wall does not
directly face you, and that from the beginning of the
choir the receding aisle deflects slightly to the left, in
suggestion of the droop of the Saviour's head on the
cross. Here, as elsewhere, Mr. Gilbert Scott has
recently been at work; to excellent purpose, however,
from what the sacristan related of the barbarous en
croachments of the last century. This extraordinary
period expended an incalculable amount of imagina
tion in proving that it had none. Universal whitewash
was the least of its offences. But this has been
scraped away, and the solid stonework left to speak
for itself, the delicate capitals and cornices dis-
encrusted and discreetly rechiselled, and the whole

LICHFIELD AND WAR-WICK.

25

temple aesthetically rededicated. Its most beautiful
feature, happily, has needed no repair, for its perfect
beauty has been its safeguard. The great choir-win
dow of Lichfield is the noblest glass-work I remember
to have seen. I have met nowhere colors so chaste
and grave, and yet so rich and true, or a cluster of
designs so piously decorative and yet so pictorial.
Such a window as this seems to me the most sacred
ornament of a great church; to be, not like vault and
screen and altar, the dim, contingent promise of heaven,
but the very assurance and presence of it. This Lich
field glass is not the less interesting for being visibly
of foreign origin. Exceeding so obviously as it does
the range of English genius in this line, it indicates
at least the heavenly treasure stored up in continental
churches. It dates from the early sixteenth century,
and was transferred hither sixty years ago from a
decayed Belgian abbey. This, however, is not all of
Lichfield. You have not seen it till you have strolled
and restrolled along the close on every side, and
watched the three spires constantly change their rela
tion as you move and pause. Nothing can well be
finer than the combination of the two lesser ones soar
ing equally in front, and the third riding tremendously
the magnificently sustained line of the roof At a
certain distance against the sky, this long ridge seems
something infinite, and the great spire to sit astride of
it like a giant mounted on a mastodon. Your sense
of the huge mass of the building is deepened by the
fact that though the central steeple is of double the
elevation of the others, you see it, from some points,
borne back in a perspective which drops it to half
their stature and lifts them into immensity. But it

26 FOREIGN PARTS.
would take long to tell all that one sees and fancies
and thinks in a lingering walk about so great a church
as this. To walk in quest of any object that one has more
or less tenderly dreamed of, to find your way, to steal
upon it softly, to see at last if it be church or castle,
the tower-tops peeping above elms or beeches — to
push forward with a rush, and emerge, and pause, and
draw that first long breath which is the compromise
between so many sensations — this is a pleasure left
to the tourist even after the broad glare of photo
graphy has dissipated so many of the sweet mysteries
of travel — even in a season when he is fatally apt to
meet a dozen fellow-pilgrims returning from the shrine,
each Gros-Jeaji comine devant, or to overtake a dozen
more telegraphing their impressions down the line as
they arrive. Such a pleasure I lately enjoyed, quite
in its perfection, in a walk to Haddon Hall, along a
meadow-path by the Wye, in this interminable English
twilight, which I am never weary of admiring watch
in hand. Haddon Hall lies among Derbyshire hills,
in a region infested, I was about to write, by Ame
ricans. But I achieved my own sly pilgrimage in
perfect solitude; and as I descried the gray walls
among the rook-haunted elms I felt, not like a tourist
but like an adventurer. I have certainly had, as a
tourist, few more charming moments than some — such
as any one, I suppose, is free to have — that I passed
on a little ruined gray bridge which spans, with its
single narrow arch, a trickling stream at the base of
the eminence from which those walls and trees look
down. The twilight deepened, the rugged battlements
and the low, broad oriels glanced duskily from the

LICHFIELD AND WARWICK. 27
foliage, the rooks wheeled and clamored in the glowing
sky; and if there had been a ghost on the premises I
certainly ought to have seen it. In fact, I did see it,
as we see ghosts nowadays. I felt the uncommunicable
spirit of the scene with almost painful intensity. The
old life, the old manners, the old figures seemed present
again. The great coup de thidtre of the young woman
who shows you the Hall — it is rather languidly done
on her part — is to point out a little dusky door open
ing from a turret to a back terrace, as the aperture
through which Dorothy Vernon eloped with Lord John
Manners. I was ignorant of this episode, for I was
not to enter the Hall till the morrow; and I am still
unversed in the history of the actors. But as I stood
in the luminous dusk weaving the romance of the
spot, I divined a Dorothy Vernon and felt very much
like a Lord John. It was, of course, on just such an
evening that the delicious event came off, and, by
listening with the proper credulity I might surely hear
on the flags of the castle-court the ghostly footfall of a
daughter of the race. The only footfall I can con
scientiously swear to, however, is the by no means
ghostly tread of the damsel who led me through the
mansion in the prosier light of the next morning.
Haddon Hall, I believe, is one of the places in which
it is the fashion to be "disappointed"; a fact explained
in a great measure by the absence of a formal approach
to the house, which shows its low gray front to every
trudger on the high-road. But the charm of the place
is so much less that of grandeur than that of
melancholy, that it is rather deepened than diminished
by this attitude of obvious survival and decay. And
for that matter, when you have entered the steep little

29 FOREIGN PARTS.
outer court through the huge thickness of the low
gateway, the present seems effectually walled out and
the past walled in^ — like a dead man in a sepulchre.
It is very dead, of a fine June morning, the _genius of
Haddon Hall; and the silent courts and chambers,
with their hues of ashen gray and faded brown, seem
as time-bleached as the dry bones of any mouldering
organism. The comparison is odd; but Haddon Hall
reminded me perversely of the larger houses at Pompeii.
The private life of the past is - revealed in each case
with very much the same distinctness and on a small
enough scale not to stagger the imagination. This old
dwelling, indeed, has so little of the mass and expanse
of the classic feudal castle that it almost suggests one
of those miniature models of great buildings which
lurk in dusty corners of museums. But it is large
enough to be deliciously complete and to contain an
infinite store of the poetry of grasg-grown courts, looked
into by long, low mullioned windows, and climbed out of
by crooked stone stairways, mounting against the walls
to little high-placed doors. The "tone" of Haddon
Hall, of all its walls and towers and stonework, is the
gray of unpolished silver, and the reader who has
been in England need hardly be reminded of the sweet
accord — to eye and mind alike — existing between all
stony surfaces covered with the pale corrosions of time
and the deep living green of the strong ivy which
seems to feed on their slow decay. Of this effect and
of a hundred others — from those that belong to low
browed, stone-paved empty rooms, where countesses
used to trail their cloth-of-gold over rushes, to those
one may note where the dark tower-stairway emerges
at last, on a level with the highest beech-tops, against

LICHFIELD AND WARWICK. 2g
the cracked and sun-baked parapet which flaunted the
castle standard over the castle woods — of every form
of sad desuetude and picturesque decay Haddon Hall
contains some delightful example. Its finest point is
undoubtedly a certain court from which a stately flight
of steps ascends to the terrace where that daughter of
the Vernons whom I have mentioned proved that it
was useless to have baptized her so primly. These
steps, with the terrace, its balustrade topped with great
i-vy-muffled knobs of stone, and its vast background
of lordly beeches, form the ideal mise en seine for por
tions of Shakespeare's comedies. "It's Elizabethan,"
said my companion. Here the Countess Olivia may
have listened to the fantastic Malvolio, or Beatrix,
superbest of flirts, have come to summon Benedick to
dinner. The glories of Chatsworth, which lies but a few
miles from Haddon, serve as a counterpart to its more
delicate merits, just as they are supposed to gain, I
believe, in the tourist's eyes, by contrast with its
charming, its almost Italian shabbiness. But the glories
of Chatsworth, incontestable as they are, were so effec
tually eclipsed to my mind, a couple of days later,
that in future, ;when I think of an English mansion, I
shall think only of Warwick, and when I think of an
English park, only of Blenheim. Your run by train
through the gentle Warwickshire landscape does much
to prepare you for the great spectacle of the castle,
which seems hardly more than a sort of massive sym
bol and synthesis of the broad prosperity and peace
and leisure diffused over this great pastoral expanse.
The Warwickshire meadows are to common English
scenery what this is to that of the rest of the world.

30 FOREIGN PARTS.
For mile upon mile you can see nothing but broad
sloping pastures of velvet turf, overbrowsed by sheep
of the most fantastic shagginess, and garnished with
hedges shaggier still, out of which great i-vy-tangled
oaks and elms arise -with a kind of architectural re
gularity. The landscape, indeed, sins by excess of
nutritive suggestion; it savors of larder and manger; it
is too ovine, too bovine, it is almost asinine; and if you
were to believe what you see before you this rugged
globe would be a sort of boneless ball, neatly covered
with some such plush -like integument as might be
figured by the do-wn on the cheek of a peach. But
a great thought keeps you company as you go and
gives character to the scenery. Warwickshire was
Shakespeare's country. Those who think that a great
genius is something supremely ripe and healthy and
human may find comfort in the fact. It helps greatly
to enliven my own vague conception of Shakespeare's
temperament, with which I find it no great shock to
be obliged to associate ideas of mutton and beef
There is something as final, as disillusioned of the
romantic horrors of rock and forest, as deeply attuned
to human needs, in the Warwickshire pastures, as there
is in the underlying morality of the poet.
With human needs in general Warwick Castle may
be in no great accord, but few places are more gratify
ing to the sentimental tourist. It is the only great
residence that I ever coveted as a home. The fire that
we heard so much of last winter in America appears to
have consumed but an inconsiderable and easily spared
portion of the house, and the great towers rise over
the great trees and the town with the same grand air
as before. Picturesquely, Warwick gains from not be-

LICHFIELD AND WARWICK. 3 I
ing sequestered, after the common fashion, in acres of
park. The -village street winds about the garden walls,
though its hum expires before it has had time to scale
them. There can be no better example of the way in
which stone-walls, if they do not of necessity make a
prison, may on occasions make a palace, than the tre
mendous privacy maintained about a mansion of which
the windows and towers form the main feature of a
bustling to-wn. At Warwick the past join hands so
stoutly -with the present that you can hardly say where
one begins and the other ends, and you rather miss the
various crannies and gaps of what I just now called
the Italian shabbiness of Haddon. There is a Cesar's
tower and a Guy's tower and half a dozen more, but
they are so well-conditioned in their ponderous antiquity
that you are at a loss whether to consider them parts
of an old house revived or of a new house picturesquely
superannuated. Such as they are, however, plunging
into the grassed and gravelled courts from which their
battlements look really feudal, and into gardens large
enough for all delight and too small, as they should
be, to be amazing; and with ranges between them of
great apartments where, at hugely recessed windows,
you may turn from Vandyck and Rembrandt to glance
down the cliff-like pile into the Avon, washing the base
like a lordly moat, with its bridge, and its trees, and
its memories — -they mark the very model of a great
hereditary dwelling — one which amply satisfies the
imagination without irritating the democratic con
science. The pictures at Warwick reminded me afresh
of an old conclusion on this matter; that the best
fortune for good pictures is not to be crowded into
public collections — not even into the relative privacy

32 FOREIGN PARTS.
of Salons Carres and Tribunes — but to hang in largely
spaced half-dozens on the walls of fine houses. Here
the historical atmosphere, as one may call it, is almost
a compensation for the often imperfect light. If this
is true of most pictures, it is especially so of the works
of Vandyck, whom you think of, wherever you may
find him, as having, with that immense good-breeding
which is the stamp of his manner, taken account in his
painting of the local conditions, and predestined his
picture to just the spot where it hangs. This is, in
fact, an illusion as regards the Vandycks at Warwick,
for none of them represent members of the house.
The very finest, perhaps, after the great melancholy,
picturesque Charles I. — death, or at least the presenti
ment of death on the pale horse — is a portrait from
the Brignole palace at Genoa; a beautiful noble matron
in black, with her little son and heir. The last Van
dycks I had seen were the noble company this lady
had left behind her in the Genoese palace, and as I
looked at her I thought of her mighty change of cir
cumstance. Here she sits in the mild light of mid
most England; there you could almost fancy her blink
ing in the great glare sent up from the Mediterranean.

NORTH DEVON. 33

NORTH DEVON.
For those fanciful observers to whom broad Eng
land means chiefly the perfection of the rural picturesque,
Devonshire means the perfection of England. I, at
least, had so complacently taken it for granted that
all the characteristic graces of English scenery are here
to be found in especial exuberance, that before we
fairly crossed the border I had begun to look im
patiently from the carriage window for the veritable
landscape in water-colors. Devonshire meets you
promptly in all its purity. In the course of ten minutes
you have been able to glance down the green vista of
a dozen Devonshire lanes. On huge embankments of
moss and turf, smothered in wild flowers and em
broidered with the finest lace-work of trailing ground-
i-vy, rise solid walls of flowering thorn and glistening
holly and golden broom, and more strong, homely
shrubs than I can name, and toss their blooming tangle
to a sky which seems to look down between them, in
places, from but a dozen inches of blue. They are
overstrewn with lovely little flowers with names as
delicate as their petals of gold and silver and azure —
bird's-eye and king's-finger and wandering-sailor — and
their soil, a superb dark red, turns in spots so nearly to
crimson that you almost fancy it some fantastic com
pound purchased at the chemist's and scattered there
for ornament. The mingled reflection of this rich-hued
earth and the dim green light which filters through
Foreign Parts, 3

34 FOREIGN PARTS.
the hedge is a masterpiece of local color. A Devon
shire cottage is no less striking a local "institution."
Crushed beneath its burden of thatch, coated with a
rough white stucco, of a tone to delight a painter,
nestling in deep foliage and garnished at doorstep and
wayside with various forms of chubby infancy, it seems
to have been stationed there for no more obvious pur
pose than to keep a promise to your fancy, though it
covers, I suppose, not a little of the sordid misery
which the fancy loves to forget.
I rolled past lanes and cottages to Exeter, where I
found a cathedral. When one has fairly tasted of the
pleasure of cathedral-hunting, the approach to each
new shrine gives a peculiarly agreeable zest to one's
curiosity. You are making a collection of great im
pressions, and I think the process is in no case so de
lightful as applied to cathedrals. Going from one fine
picture to another is certainly good; but the fine '
pictures of the world are terribly numerous, and they
have a troublesome way of crowding and jostling each
other in the memory. The number of cathedrals is
small, and the mass and presence of each specimen is^
great, so that, as they rise in the mind in individual!
majesty, they dwarf all common impressions. They
form, indeed, but a gallery of vaster pictures; for, when
time has dulled the recollection of details, you retain
a single broad image of the vast gray edifice, with its
towers, its tone of color, and its still, green precinct.'^
All this is especially true, perhaps, of one's memory of
English cathedrals, which are almost alone in possess
ing, as pictures, the setting of a spacious and har
monious close. The cathedral stands supreme, but the
close makes the scene, Exeter is not one of the

NORTH DEVON. 35
grandest, but, in common with great and small, it has
certain points on which local science expatiates with
peculiar pride. Exeter, indeed, does itself injustice by
a low, dark front, which not only diminishes the ap
parent altitude of the nave, but conceals, as you look
eastward, two noble Norman towers. The front, how
ever, which has a gloomy picturesqueness, is redeemed
by two fine features : a magnificent rose-window, of which
the vast stone ribs (inclosing some very pallid last-century
glass) are disposed with the most charming intricacy;
and a long sculptured screen — a sort of stony band of
images — which traverses the fajade from side to side.
The little broken -visaged effigies of saints and kings
and bishops, niched in tiers along this hoary wall, are
prodigiously black and quaint and primitive in ex
pression; and as you look at them with whatever con
templative tenderness your trade of hard-working
tourist may have left at your disposal, you fancy that
somehow they are consciously historical — sensitive
-victims of time; that they feel the loss of their noses,
their toes, and their cro-wns; and that, when the long
June twilight turns at last to a deeper gray and the
quiet of the close to a deeper stillness, they begin to
peer sidewise out of their narrow recesses and to con
verse in some strange form of early English, as rigid,
yet as candid, as their features and postures, moaning,
like a company of ancient paupers round a hospital
fire, over their aches and infirmities and losses, and
the sadness of being so terribly old. The vast square
transeptal towers of the church seem to me to have
the same sort of personal melancholy. Nothing in all
architecture expresses better, to my imagination, the
sadness of survival, the resignation of dogged material

36 FOREIGN PARTS.
continuance, than a broad expanse of Norman stone
work, roughly adorned with its low relief of short
columns, and round arches, and almost barbarous
hatchet-work, and lifted high into that mild English
light which accords so well with its dull-gray surface.
The especial secret of the impressiveness of such a
Norman tower I cannot pretend to have discovered.
It lies largely in the look of having been proudly and
sturdily built — as if the masons had been urged by a
trumpet-blast, and the stones squared by a battle-axe
— contrasted with this mere idleness of antiquity and
passive lapse into quaintness. A Greek temple pre
serves a kind of fresh immortality in its concentrated
refinement, and a Gothic cathedral in its adventurous
exuberance; but a Norman tower stands up like some
simple strong man in his might, bending a melancholy
brow upon an age which demands that strength shall
be cunning. The North Devon coast, whither it was my design
on coming to Exeter to proceed, has the primary merit
of being, as yet, virgin soil as to railways. I went
accordingly from Barnstaple to Bfracombe on the top
of a coach, in the fashion of elder days; and, thanks
to my position, I managed to enjoy the landscape in
spite of the two worthy Englishmen before me who
were reading aloud together, with a natural glee which
might have passed for fiendish malice, the Daily
Telegraph's painfully vivid account of the defeat of the
Atalanta crew. It seemed to me, I remember, a sort
of pledge and token of the invincibility of English
muscle that a newspaper record of its prowess should
have power to divert my companions' eyes from the
bosky flanks of Devonshire combes. The little water-

NORTH DEVON. 37
ing-place of Ilfracombe is seated at the lower verge
of one of these seaward-plunging valleys, between a
couple of magnificent headlands which hold it in a
hollow slope and offer it securely to the caress of the
Bristol Channel. It is a very finished little specimen
of its genus, and I think that during my short stay
there I expended as much attention on its manners
and customs and its social physiognomy as on its cliffs
and beach and great coast-view. My chief conclusion,
perhaps, from all these things, was that the terrible
summer-question which works annual anguish in so
many American households would be vastly simplified
if we had a few Ilfracombes scattered along our Atlan
tic coast; and furthermore, that the English are masters
of the art of uniting the picturesque with the comfort
able — in such proportions, at least, as may claim the
applause of a race in which success has as yet been
confined to an ingenious combination of their opposites.
It is just possible that at Ilfracombe the comfortable
weighs down the scale; so very substantial is it, so
very officious and business-like. On the left of the
town (to give an example) one of the great cliffs I
have mentioned rises in a couple of massive peaks, and
presents to the sea an almost vertical face, all muffled
in tufts of golden gorse and mighty fern. You have
not walked fifty yards away from the hotel before you
encounter half a dozen little sign-boards, directing
your steps to a path up the cliff. You follow their
indications, and you arrive at a little gate-house, with
photographs and various local gimcracks exposed for
sale. A most respectable person appears, demands a
penny, and, on receiving it, admits you with great ci
vility to commune with nature. You detect, however.

38 FOREIGN PARTS.
various little influences hostile to perfect communion.
You are greeted by another sign-board; threatening
legal pursuit if you attempt to evade the payment of
the sacramental penny. The path, winding in a hundred
ramifications over the cliff, is fastidiously solid and
neat, and furnished at intervals of a dozen yards with
excellent benches, inscribed by knife and pencil with
the names of such visitors as do not happen to have
been the elderly maiden ladies who now chiefly occupy
them. All this is prosaic, and you have to subtract it
in a lump from the total impression before the sense
of pure nature becomes distinct. Your subtraction
made, a great deal assuredly remains; quite enough,
I found, to give me an ample day's entertainment; for
English scenery, like everything else that England pro
duces, is of a quality that wears well. The cliffs are
superb, the play of light and shade upon them is a
perpetual study, and the air a delicious mixture of the
mountain-breeze and the sea-breeze. I was very glad,
at the end of my climb, to have a good bench to sit
upon — as one must think twice in England before
measuring one's length on the grassy earth; and to he
able, thanks to the smooth foot-path, to get back to
the hotel in a quarter of an hour. But it occurred to
me that if I were an Englishman of the period, and,
after ten months of a busy London life, my fancy were
turning to a holiday, to rest and change and oblivion
of the ponderous social burden, it might find rather
less inspiration than needful in a vision of the little
paths of Ilfracombe, of the sign-boards and the penny
fee and the solitude tempered by old ladies and sheep.
I wondered whether change perfect enough to be
salutary does not imply something more pathless, more

NORTH DEVON. 39
idle, more unreclaimed from that deep-bosomed Nature
to which the over-wrought mind reverts with passionate
longing; something, in short, which is attainable at a
moderate distance from New York and Boston. I must
add that I cannot find in my heart to object, even on
grounds the most aesthetic, to the very beautiful and
excellent hotel at Ilfracombe, where such of my readers
as are perchance actually wrestling with the summer-
question may be interested to learn that one may live
en pension at a cost of ten shillings a day. I made
the acquaintance at this establishment of that somewhat
anomalous institution, the British table d'hSte, but I
confess that, faithful to the duty of a sentimental tour
ist, I have retained a more vivid impression of the
talk and the faces than of our entries and releves. I
noticed here what I have often noticed before (the
fact perhaps has never been duly recognized), that no
people profit so eagerly as the English by the suspension
of a common social law. A table d'h6te, being some
thing abnormal and experimental, it produced appar
ently a complete reversal of the national characteristics.
Conversation was universal — uproarious, almost; and I
have met no vivacious Latin more confidential than a
certain neighbor of mine, no speculative Yankee more
inquisitive. These are meagre memories, however, compared
with those which cluster about that enchanting spot
which is known in vulgar prose as Lynton. I am
afraid I should seem an even more sentimental tourist
than I pretend to be if I were to declare how vulgar
all prose appears to me applied to Lynton with de
scriptive intent. The little village is perched on the
side of one of the massive cliffs with which this whole

40 FOREIGN PARTS.
coast is adorned, and on the edge of a lovely gorge
where a broad hill-torrent foams and tumbles from the
great moors, of which the heather-crested waves rise
purple along the inland sky. Below it, close beside
the beach, where the little torrent meets the sea, is the
sister village of Lynmouth. Here — as I stood on the
bridge that spans the stream and looked at the stony
backs and foundations and overclambering garden ver
dure of certain little gray old houses which plunge their
feet into it, and then up at the tender green of scrub-
oak and fern and the flaming yellow of golden broom,
climbing the sides of the hills and leaving them bare-
crowned to the sun, like miniature mountains — I could
have fancied the British Channel as blue as the Medi
terranean and the village about me one of the hundred
hamlets of the Riviera. The little Castle Hotel at Lyn
ton is a spot so consecrated to delicious repose — to sit- '
ting with a book in the terrace-garden, among blooming
plants of aristocratic magnitude and rarity, and watch
ing the finest piece of color in all nature — the glowing
red and green of the great cliffs beyond the little har
bor-mouth, as they shift and change and melt the live
long day from shade to shade and ineffable tone to
tone — that I feel as if in helping it to publicity I were
doing it rather a disfavor than a service. It is in fact
a very charming little abiding-place, and I have never
known one where purchased hospitality wore a more
disinterested smile. Lynton is of course a capital cen
tre for excursions, but two or three of which I had time
to make. None is more beautiful than a simple walk
along the running face of the cliff to a singular rocky
eminence, of which curious abutments and pinnacles of
stone have caused it to be named the " Castle." It has

NORTH DEVON. 4 1
a fantastic resemblance to some hoary feudal ruin, with
crumbling towers and gaping chambers, tenanted by
¦wild sea-birds. The late afternoon light had a way,
while I was at Lynton, of lingering on until within a
couple of hours of midnight; and I remember among
the charmed moments of English travel none of a more
vividly poetical tinge than a couple of evenings spent
on the summit of this all but legendary pile, in company
with the slow-coming darkness and the short, sharp
cry of the sea-mews. There are places of which the
very aspect is a story. This jagged and pinnacled
coast-wall, with the rock-strewn valley behind it, where,
into the shadow of the boulders in the foreground,
the glance wandered in search of the lurking signature
of Gustave Dore, belonged certainly if not to history
at least to legend. As I sat watching the sullen calm
ness of the unbroken tide at the dreadful base of the
cliffs (where they divide into low sea-caves, making
pillars and pedestals for the fantastic imagery of their
summits) I kept forever repeating, as if they contained
a spell, half a dozen words from Tennyson's "Idyls of
the King" — ' ' On wild Tintagil, by the Comish sea. "
False as they were to the scene geographically, they
seemed somehow to express its essence; and, at any
rate, I leave it to any one who has lingered there with
the lingering twilight to say whethei" you can respond
to the almost mystical picturesqueness of the place
better than by spouting some sonorous line from an
English poet.
The last stage in my visit to North Devon was the
long drive along the beautiful remnant of coast and

42 FOREIGN PARTS.
through the rich pastoral scenery of Somerset. The
whole broad spectacle that one dreams of viewing in a
foreign land to the homely music of a postboy's whip,
I beheld on this admirable drive — breezy highlands
clad in the warm blue-brown of heather-tufts, as if in
mantles of rusty velvet, little bays and caves curving
gently to the doors of clustered fishing-huts, deep pas
tures and broad forests, villages thatched and trellised
as if to take a prize for local color, manor-tops peep
ing over rook-haunted avenues. I ought to make
especial note of an hour I spent at midday at the
little village of Porlock, in Somerset. Here the thatch
seemed steeper and heavier, the yellow roses on the
cottage walls more cunningly mated with the crumbling
stucco, the dark interiors within the open doors more
quaintly pictorial, than elsewhere; and as I loitered,
while the horses rested, in the little cool old timber-
steepled, yew-shaded church, betwixt the high-backed
manorial pew and the battered tomb of a crusading
knight and his lady, and listened to the simple prattle
of a blue-eyed old sexton, who showed me where, as
a boy, in scantier corduroys, he had scratched his
name on the recumbent lady's breast, it seemed to me
that this at last was old England indeed and that in
a moment more I should see Sir Roger de Coverley
marching up the aisle; for certainly, to give a proper
account of it all, I should need nothing less than the
pen of Mr. Addison.
1872.

WELLS AND SALISBURY.

43

WELLS AND SALISBURY.

The pleasantest things in life, and perhaps the
rarest, are its agreeable surprises. Things are often
worse than we expect to find them; and when they
are better we may mark the day with a white stone.
These reflections are as pertinent to man as a tourist
as to any other phase of his destiny, and I recently
had occasion to make them in the ancient city of
Wells. I knew in a general way that it had a great
cathedral to show, but I was far from suspecting the
precious picturesqueness of the little town. The im
mense predominance of the Minster towers, as you see
them from the approaching train over the clustered
houses at their feet, gives you indeed an intimation of
it, and suggests that the city is nothing if not ecclesias
tical; but I can wish the traveller no better fortune
than to stroll forth in the early evening with as large
a reserve of ignorance as my own, and treat himself to
an hour of discoveries. I was lodged on the edge of
Cathedral Green, and I had only to pass beneath one
of the three crumbling Priory gates which enclose it,
and cross the vast grassy oval, to stand before a minster-
front which ranks among the first three or four in Eng
land. Wells Cathedral is extremely fortunate in being
approached by this wide green level, on which the
spectator may loiter and stroll to and fro, and shift his
stand-point to his heart's content. The spectator who
does not hesitate to avail himself of his privilege of

44 FOREIGN PARTS.
unlimited fastidiousness might indeed pronounce it too
isolated for perfect picturesqueness — too uncontrasted
with the profane architecture of the human homes for
which it pleads to the skies. But, in fact. Wells is not
a city with a cathedral for a central feature; but a cathe
dral with a little city gathered at its base and forming
hardly more than an extension of its spacious close.
You feel everywhere the presence of the beautiful
church; the place seems always to savor of a Sunday
afternoon; and you fancy that every house is tenanted
by a canon, a prebendary or a precentor.
The great fagade is remarkable not so much for its
expanse as for its elaborate elegance. It consists of
two great truncated towers, divided by a broad centre,
bearing beside its rich fretwork of statues three narrow
lancet windows. The statues on this vast front are the
great boast of the cathedral. They number, -with the
lateral figures of the towers, no less than three hun
dred; it seems densely embroidered by the chisel.
They are disposed in successive niches, along six main
vertical shafts; the central windows are framed and
divided by narrower shafts, and the wall above them
rises into a pinnacled screen, traversed by two superb
horizontal rows. Add to these a close-running cornice
of images along the line corresponding with the summit
of the aisles, and the tiers which complete the decora
tion of the towers on either side, and you have an
immense system of images, governed by a quaint
theological order and most impressive in its complete
ness. Many of the little high-lodged effigies are
mutilated, and not a few of the niches are empty, but
the injury of time is not sufficient to diminish the noble
serenity of the building. The injury of time is indeed

-WELLS AND SALISBURY. 45
being handsomely repaired, for the front is partly
masked by a slender scaffolding. The props and
platforms are of the most delicate structure, and look,
in fact, as if they were meant to facilitate no more
ponderous labor than a fitting-on of noses to disfeatured
bishops, and a re-arrangement of the mantle-folds of
straitlaced queens, discomposed by the centuries. The
main beauty of Wells Cathedral , to my mind , is not
its more or less visible wealth of detail, but its singu
larly charming tone of color. An even, sober, mouse-
colored gray covers it from summit to base, deepening
nowhere to the melancholy black of your truly romantic
Gothic, but showing, as yet, none of the spotty bright
ness of "restoration." It is a wonderful fact that the
great towers, from their lofty outlook, see never a fac
tory chimney — those cloud-compelling tubes which so
often break the charm of the softest English horizons;
and the general atmosphere of Wells seemed to me,
for some reason, peculiarly luminous and sweet. The
cathedral has never been discolored by the moral malaria
of a city with an independent secular life. As you
turn back from its portal and glance at the open lawn
before it, edged by the mild gray Elizabethan deanery,
and the other dwellings, hardly less stately, which
seem to reflect in their comfortable fronts the rich
respectability of the church, and then up again at the
beautiful clear-hued pile, you may fancy it less a temple
for man's needs than a monument of his pride — less a
fold for the flock than a retreat for the shepherds — a
visible sign that, besides the actual assortment of
heavenly thrones, there is constantly on hand a superior
stock of cushioned cathedral stalls. Within the cathe
dral this impression is not diminished. The interior

46 FOREIGN PARTS.
is vast and massive, but it lacks incident — the incident
of monuments, sepulchres, and chapels — and it is too
brilliantly lighted for pictorial, as distinguished from
strictly architectural, interest. Under this latter head
it has, I believe, great importance. For myself, I can
think of it only as I saw it from my place in the choir
during afternoon service of a hot Sunday. The Bishop
sat facing me, enthroned in a stately Gothic alcove, and
clad in his crimson band, his lawn sleeves, and his
lavender gloves; the canons, in their degree, with the
archdeacon, as I suppose, reclined comfortably in the
carven stalls, and the scanty congregation fringed the
broad-aisle. But though scanty, the congregation was
select; it was unexceptionably black-coated, bonneted
and gloved. It savored intensely, in short, of that in
exorable gentility which the English put on with their
Sunday bonnets and beavers, and which fills me — as a
purely sentimental tourist — with a sort of fond, re
actionary remembrance of those animated bundles of
rags which one sees kneeling in the churches of Italy.
But even here, as a purely sentimental tourist, I found
my account: one always does in some little corner in
England. Before me and beside me sat a row of the
comeliest young men, clad in black gowns and wearing
on their shoulders long hoods trimmed with white fur.
Who and what they were I know not, for I preferred
not to learn, lest by chance they should not be so
mediaeval as they looked.
My fancy found its account even better in the sin
gular quaintness of the little precinct known as the
Vicars' Close. It directly adjoins the Cathedral Green,
and you enter it beneath one of the solid old gate
houses which form so striking an element in the eccle-

WELLS AND SALISBURY. 47
siastical furniture of Wells. It consists of a narrow,
oblong court, bordered on each' side with thirteen small
dwellings, and terminating in a ruinous little chapel.
Here formerly dwelt a congregation of vicars, estab
lished in the thirteenth century to do curates' work
for the canons. The little houses are very much
modernized; but they retain their tall chimneys, with
carven tablets in the face, their antique compactness
and neatness, and a certain little sanctified air, as of
cells in a cloister. The place is delightfully picturesque;
and, approaching it as I did in the first dimness of
twilight, it looked to me, in its exaggerated perspective,
like one of those streets represented on the stage, down
the impossible vista of which the heroes and confidants
of romantic comedies come swaggering arm-in-arm, to
hold amorous converse with the heroines at second-
story windows. But though the Vicars' Close is a curious
affair enough, the great boast of Wells is its episcopal
Palace. The Palace loses nothing from being seen for
the first time in the kindly twilight, and from being
approached with an unexpectant mind. To reach it
(unless you go from within the cathedral by the clois
ters) you pass out of the Green by another ancient
gateway into the market-place, and thence back again
through its own peculiar portal. My own first glimpse
of it had all the felicity of a coup de thidtre. I saw
-within the dark archway an enclosure bedimmed at
once -with the shadows of trees and brightened with
the glitter of water. The picture was worthy of this
agreeable promise. Its main feature is the little gray-
walled island on which the Palace stands, rising in
feudal fashion out of a broad, clear moat, flanked with
round towers, and approached by a proper drawbridge.

48 FOREIGN PARTS.
Along the outer side of the moat is a short walk be
neath a row of picturesquely stunted elms; swans and
ducks disport themselves in the current and ripple the
bright shadows of the overclambering plants from the
episcopal gardens and of the masses of purple valerian
lodged on the hoary battlements. On the evening of
my -visit the haymakers were at work on a great slop
ing field in the rear of the Palace, and the sweet per
fume of the tumbled grass in the dusky air seemed all
that was wanting to fix the scene forever in the memory.
Beyond the moat, and within the gray walls dwells my
lord Bishop, in the finest palace in England. The
mansion dates from the thirteenth century; but, stately
dwelhng though it is, it occupies but a subordinate
place in its own grounds. Their great ornament, pic
turesquely speaking, is the massive ruin of a banquet-
ing-hall, erected by a free-living medieval bishop and
more or less demolished at the Reformation. With its
still perfect towers and beautiful shapely -windows, hung
with those green tapestries so stoutly woven by the
English climate, it is a relic worthy of being locked
away behind an embattled wall. I have among my
impressions of Wells, besides this picture of the moated
Palace, half a dozen memories of the pictorial sort,
which I lack space to transcribe. The clearest im
pression, perhaps, is that of the beautiful church of
St. Cuthbert, of the same date as the cathedral, and in
very much the same style of elegant, temperate Early
English. It wears one of the high-soaring towers for
which Somersetshire is justly celebrated, as you may
see from the window of the train as you roll past its
almost top-heavy hamlets. The beautiful old church,
surrounded with its green graveyard and large enough

WELLS AND SALISBURY. 49
to be impressive, without being too large (a great merit,
to my sense) to be easily compassed by a deplorably
unarchitectural eye, wore a native English expression
to which certain humble figures in the foreground gave
additional point. On the edge of the churchyard was
a low-gabled house, before which four old men were
gossiping in the eventide. Into the front of the house
was inserted an antique alcove in stone, divided into
three shallow little seats , two of which were occupied
by extraordinary specimens of decrepitude. One of
these ancient paupers had a huge protuberant fore
head, and sat with a pensive air, his head gathered
painfully upon his twisted shoulders and his legs rest
ing across his crutch. The other was rubicund, blear-
eyed, frightfully besmeared with snuff. Their voices
were so feeble and senile that I could scarcely under
stand them, and only just managed to make out the
answer to my inquiry of who and what they were —
"We're Still's Almshouse, sir."
One of the lions, almost, of Wells (whence it is but
five miles distant) is the ruin of the famous Abbey of
Glastonbury, on which Hemy Vm., in the language of
our day, came down so heavily. The ancient splen
dor of the architecture survives, but in scattered and
scanty fragments, among influences of a rather inhar
monious sort. It was cattle-market in the little town
as I passed up the main street, and a savor of hoofs
and hide seemed to accompany me through the easy
labyrinth of the old arches and piers. These occupy
a large back yard, close behind the street, to which
you are most prosaically admitted by a young woman
who keeps a wicket and sells tickets. The continuity
of tradition is not altogether broken, however, for the
Foreign Parts. 4

50 FOREIGN PARTS.
little street of Glastonbury has rather ah old-time as
pect, and one of the houses at least must have seen
the last of the abbots ride abroad on his mule. • The
little inn is a capital bit of picturesqueness, and as I
waited for the 'bus under its low dark archway (in
something of the mood, possibly, in which a train was
once waited for at Coventry), and watched the bar
maid flirting her way to and fro out of the heavy-
browed kitchen and among the lounging young ap
praisers of colts and steers and barmaids, I might
have imagined that the merry England of the Tudors
was not utterly dead. A beautiful England this must
have been as well, if it contained many such abbeys
as Glastonbury. Such of the ruined columns and
portals and windows as still remain are of admirable
design and finish. The doorways are rich in marginal
ornament — ornament within ornament, as it often is;
for the dainty weeds and wild-flowers overlace the
antique tracery with their bright arabesques, and
deepen the gray of the stone-work, as it brightens their
bloom. The thousand flowers which grow among
English ruins deserve a chapter to themselves. I owe
them, as an observer, a heavy debt of satisfaction, but
I am too little of a botanist to pay them in their own
coin. It has often seemed to me in England that the
purest enjoyment of architecture was to be had among
the ruins of great buildings. In the perfect building
one is rarely sure that the impression is simply
architectural: it is more or less pictorial and senti
mental; it depends partly upon association and partly
upon various accessories and details which, however
they may be wrought into harmony with the archi
tectural idea, are not part of its essence and spirit.

-WELLS AND SALISBURY. .51
But in so far as beauty of structure is beauty of line
and curve, balance and harmony of masses and dimen
sions, I have seldom relished it so deeply as in the
grassy nave of some crumbling church, before lonely
columns and empty windows, where the wild-flowers
were a cornice and the sailing clouds a roof The
arts certainly have a common element. These hoary
relics of Glastonbury reminded me in their broken
eloquence of one of the other great ruins of the world
— the Last Supper of Leonardo. A beautiful shadow,
in each case, is all that remains; but that shadow is
the artist's thought.
Salisbury Cathedral, to which I made a pilgrimage
on leaving Wells, is the very reverse of a ruin, and
you take your pleasure there on very different grounds
from those I have just attempted to define. It is per
haps the best known cathedral in the world, thanks to
its shapely spire; but the spire is so simply and obvi
ously fair that when you have respectfully made a note
of it you have summed up the matter. I had seen it
before and admired it heartily, and perhaps I should
have done as well to let my admiration rest. I con
fess that on repeated inspection it grew to seem to me
the least bit banal, as the French say, and I began to
consider whether it does not belong to the same range
of art as the Apollo Belvedere or the Venus de'
Medici. I am inclined to think that if I had to live
within sight of a cathedral, and encounter it in my
daily comings and goings, I should grow less weary of
the rugged black front of Exeter than of the sweet
perfection of Salisbury. There are people who be
come easily satiated with blonde beauties, and Salis
bury Cathedral belongs, if I may say so, to the order

52 FOREIGN PARTS.
of blondes. The other lions of Salisbury, Stonehenge
and Wilton House, I revisited with undiminished
interest. Stonehenge is rather a hackneyed shrine of
pilgrimage. At the time of my former visit a picnic-
party was making libations of beer on the dreadful
altar-sites. But the mighty mystery of the place has
not yet been stared out of countenance; and as on this
occasion there were no picknickers, we were left to
drink deep of the harmony of its solemn isolation and
its unrecorded past. It stands as lonely in history as
it does on the great plain, whose many-tinted green
waves, as they roll away from it, seem to symbolize
the ebb of the long centuries which have left it so pro
digiously unexplained. You may put a hundred ques
tions to these rough-hewn giants as they bend in grim
contemplation of their fallen companions; but your
curiosity falls dead in the vast sunny stillness that en
shrouds them, and the strange monument, with all its
unspoken memories, becomes simply a heart-stirring
picture in a land of pictures. It is indeed immensely
picturesque. At a distance, you see it standing in a
shallow dell of the plain, looking hardly larger than a
group of ten-pins on a bowling-green. I can fancy
sitting all a summer's day watching its shadows
shorten and lengthen again, and drawing a delicious
contrast between the world's duration and the feeble
span of individual experience. There is something in
Stonehenge almost reassuring; and if you are dis
posed to feel that life is rather a superficial matter,
and that we soon get to the bottom of things, the im
memorial gray pillars may serve to remind you of the
enormous background "of Time. Salisbury is indeed
rich in antiquities. Wilton House, a delightful old re-

SWISS NOTES. 53
sidence of the Earls of Pembroke, contains a noble
collection of Greek and Roman marbles. These are
ranged round a charming cloister, occupying the centre
of the house, which is exhibited in the most liberal
fashion. Out of the cloister opens a series of draw
ing-rooms hung with family portraits, chiefly by Van
dyck, all of superlative merit. Among them hangs
supreme, as the Vandyck par excellence, the famous
and magnificent group of the whole Pembroke family
of James I.'s time. This splendid work has every pic
torial merit — design, color, composition, force, and
finish, and I have been vainly wondering to this hour
what it needs, to be the finest piece of portraiture, as
it surely is one of the most ambitious, in the world.
What it lacks, characteristically, is a certain uncom
promising solidity it recovers in the beautiful dignity
of its position — unmoved from the stately house in
which its author sojourned and wrought, familiar to
the descendants of its noble originals.
1872.

SWISS NOTES.
Thusis, August, 1872.
I HAVE often thought it, intellectually speaking, in
different economy for the American tourist to devote
many of his precious summer days to Switzerland.
Switzerland represents, generally, nature in the rough,
and the American traveller in search of novelty enter
tains a rational preference for nature in the refined
State, If he have his European opportunities very

54 FOREIGN PARTS.
much at heart, he will be apt to chafe a little on lake
side and mountain-side with a sense of the beckoning,
unvisited cities of Germany, France and Italy. As to
the average American tourist, however, as one actually
meets him, it is hard to say whether he most neglect
or abuse opportunity. It is beside the mark, at any
rate, to talk to him about economy. He spends as he
listeth, and if he overfees the waiters he is frugal of
his hours. He has long since discovered the art of
comprehensive travel, and if you think he had better
not be in Switzerland — rassurez-vous — he will not he
there long. I am, perhaps, unduly solicitous for him
from a vague sense of having treated myself to an
overdose of Switzerland. I relish a human flavor in
-my pleasures, and I fancy that it is a more equal
intercourse between man and man than between man
and mountain. I have found myself grumbling at mo
ments because the large-hewn snow-peaks of the Ober-
land are not the marble pinnacles of a cathedral, and
the liquid sapphire and emerald of Leman and
Lucerne are not firm palace-floors of lapis and verd-
antique. But, after all, there is a foreground in
Switzerland as well as a background, and more than
once, when a mountain has stared me out of coun
tenance, I have recovered my self-respect in a sym
pathetic gaze at the object which here corresponds to
the Yankee town-pump. Swiss village fountains are
delightful; the homely village life centres about the
great stone basin (roughly inscribed, generally, with an
antique date), where the tinkling cattle drink, where
the lettuce and the linen are washed, where dusty
pedestrians, with their lips at the spout, need scarcely
devote their draught to the "health" of the brawny

SWISS NOTES. 55
beauties who lean, brown-armed, over the trough, and
the plash of the cool, hard water is heard at either
end of the village street. But I am surely not singular
in my impulse thus occasionally to weigh detail against
niass in Switzerland; and I apprehend that, unless
you are a regular climber, or an sesthetic Buddhist, as
it were, content with a purely contemplative enjoy
ment of natural beauty, you are pbliged eventually, in
self-defence, to lower, by an imaginative effort, the
sky-line of your horizon. You may sit for days before
the hotel at Grindelwald, looking at the superb snow-
crested granite of the Wetterhorn, if you have a slowly
ripening design of measuring your legs, your head, and
your wind against it; and a fortiori, the deed being
done, you may spend another week in the same posi
tion, sending up patronizing looks at those acres of ice
which the foolish cockneys at your side take to be
inches. But there is a limit to the satisfaction with
which you can sit staring at a mountain — even the
most beautiful — which you have neither ascended nor
are likely to ascend; and I know of nothing to which
I can better compare the effect on your nerves of what
comes to seem to you, at last, its inhuman want of
condescension than that of the expression of back of
certain persons whom you come as near detesting as
your characteristic amiability permits. I appeal on
this point to all poor mountaineers. They might
reply, however, that one should be either a good
climber or a good idler.
If there is truth in this retort, it may help to ex
plain an old-time kindness of mine for Geneva, to
which I was introduced years ago, in my school-days,
when I was as good an idler as the best. And I ought

56 FOREIGN PARTS.
in justice to say that, with Geneva for its principal
city, Switzerland may fairly pretend to possess some
thing more than nature in the rough. An ingenious
Swiss novelist has indeed written a tale expressly
to prove that frank nature is wofully out of favor there,
and his heroine dies of a broken heart because her
spontaneity passes for impropriety. I don't know
whether M. Cherbuliez's novel is as veracious as it is
clever; but the susceptible stranger certainly feels that
the Helvetic capital is a highly artificial compound.
It makes little difference that the individuality of the
place is a moral rather than an architectural one; for
the streets and houses express it as clearly as if it
were syllabled in their stones. The moral tone of
Geneva, as I imagine it, is epigrammatically, but on
the whole justly, indicated by the fact, recently related
to me by a discriminating friend, that, meeting one
day in the street a placard of the theatre, superscribed
Bouffes-Genevois, he burst into irrepressible laughter.
To appreciate the irony of the phrase one must have
lived long enough in Geneva to suffer from the want
of humor in the local atmosphere, and the absence,
as well, of that esthetic character which is begotten
of a generous view of life. There is no Genevese
architecture, nor museum, nor theatre, nor music, not
even a worthy promenade — all prime requisites of a
well-appointed foreign capital; and yet somehow Geneva
manages to assert herself powerfully without them, and
to leave the impression of a strongly-featured little
city, which, if you do not enjoy, you may at least
grudgingly respect. It was, perhaps, the absence of
these frivolous attributes which caused it to be thought
a proper place for the settlement of our solemn wrangle

S-WISS NOTES. 57
with England — though surely a community which could
make a joke would have afforded worthier spectators
to certain phases of the affair. But there is such a
thing, after all, as drawing too sober-colored a picture
of the Presbyterian mother-city, and I suddenly find
myself wondering whether, if it were not the most re
spectable of capitals, it would not still be the prettiest;
whether its main interest be not, possibly, the pic
turesque one — the admirable contrast of the dark,
homely-featured mass of the to-wn, relieved now, indeed,
at the water's edge by a shining rim of white-walled
hotels — and the incomparable vivacity of color of the
blue lake and Rhone. This divinely cool-hued gush
of the Rhone beneath the two elder bridges is one of
the loveliest things in Switzerland , and ought itself to
make the fortune of unnumbered generations of inn
keepers. As you linger and watch the shining tide,
you make a rather vain effort to connect it with the
two great human figures in the Genevese picture —
Calvin and Rousseau. It seems to have no great af
finity with either genius — one of which it might have
brightened and the other have cleansed. There is
indeed in Rousseau a strong limpidity of style which,
if we choose, we may fancy an influence from the
rushing stream he must so often have tarried in his
boyish breeches to peep at between the bridge^rails;
but I doubt whether we can twist the Rhone into a
channel for even the most diluted Calvinism. It must
have seemed to the grim Doctor one of the streams of
the paradise he was making it so hard to enter. For
ourselves, as it hurries undarkened past the gray theo
logical city, we may liken it to the inipetus of faith
shooting in deep indifference past the doctrine of elec-

58 FOREIGN PARTS.
tion. The genius that contains the clearest strain of
this anti-Calvinistic azure is decidedly that of Byron.
He has versified the lake in the finest Byronic manner,
and I have seen its color, of a bright day, as beauti
ful, as unreal, as romantic as the most classical pas
sages of "Childe Harold." Its shores have not yet
lost the echo of three other eminent names — those of
Voltaire, of Gibbon, and of Madame de Stael. These
great writers, however, were all such sturdy non-con
ductors of the modern tendency of landscape to make
its way into literature, that the tourist hardly feels
himself indebted to their works for a deeper relish of
the lake — though, indeed, they have bequeathed him
the opportunity for a charming threefold pilgrimage.
About Ferney and Coppet I might say a dozen things
which the want of space forbids. As for the author
of that great chronicle which never is but always to be
read, you may take your coffee of a morning in the
little garden in which he wrote finis to his immortal
-work — and if the coffee is good enough to administer
a fillip to your fancy, perhaps you may yet hear the
faint reverberation among the trees of the long, long
breath with which he must have laid down his pen.
It is, to my taste, quite the reverse of a profanation to
commemorate a classic site by a good inn; and the
excellent H6tel Gibbon at Lausanne, ministering to
that larger perception which is almost identical with
the aftertaste of a good cuisine, may fairly pretend to
propagate the exemplary force of a great human effort.
There is a charming Hotel Byron at Villeneuve, the
eastern end of the lake, of which I have retained a
kindlier memory than of any of my Swiss resting-
places. It has about it a kind of mellow gentility

SWISS NOTES. 59'
which is equally rare and delightful, and which per
haps rests partly on the fact that — owing, I suppose,
to the absence just thereabouts of what is technically
termed a "feature" — it is generally just thinly enough
populated to make you wonder how it can pay, and
whether the landlord is not possibly entertaining you
at a sacrifice. It has none of that look of heated
prosperity which has come of late years to intermingle
so sordid an element with the pure grandeur of Swiss
scenery. The crowd in Switzerland demands a chapter by
itself, and when I pause in the anxious struggle for
bed and board to take its prodigious measure — and,
in especial, to comprehend its huge main factor, the
terrible German element — mountains and men seem
to resolve themselves into a single monstrous mass,
darkening the clear heaven of rest and leisure. Cross
ing lately the lovely Scheideck pass, from Grindelwald
to Meyxingen, I needed to remember well that this is
the great thoroughfare of Swiss travel, and that I might
elsewhere find some lurking fragment of landscape
without figures — or with fewer — not to be dismayed
by its really grotesque appearance. It is hardly an
exaggeration to say that the road was black with way
farers. They darkened the slopes like the serried pine
forests, they dotted the crags and fretted the sky-line
like far-browsing goats, and their great collective hum
rose up to heaven like the uproar of a dozen torrents.
More recently, I strolled down from Andermatt, on the
St. Gotthard, to look at that masterpiece of sternly
romantic landscape, the Devil's Bridge. Huge walls
of black granite inclose the scene, the road spans a
tremendous yellow cataract which flings, an icy mist all

6o FOREIGN PARTS.
abroad, and a savage melancholy, in fine, marks the
spot for her own. But half a dozen carriages, jingling
cheerily up the ascent, had done their best to dispos
sess her. The parapet of the bridge was adorned with
as many gazers as that of the Pont-Neuf when one of
its classic anglers has proclaimed a bite, and I was
obliged to confess that I had missed the full force of
a sensation. If the reader's sympathies are touched
by my discomfiture, I may remind him that though, as
a fastidious few, we laugh at Mr. Cook, the great entre
preneur of travel, with his coupons and his caravans
of "personally-conducted" sight-seers, we have all
pretty well come to belong to his party in one way or
another. We complain of a hackneyed and cocknefied
Europe; but wherever, in desperate quest of the un
trodden, we carry our much-labelled luggage, our bad
French, our demand for a sitz-bath and pale ale, we
rub off the primal bloom of local color and establish
a precedent for unlimited intrusion. I have even
fancied that it is a sadly ineffectual pride that prevents
us from buying one of Mr. Cook's little bundles of
tickets, and saving our percentage, whatever it is, of
money and trouble; for I am sure that the poor be
wildered and superannuated genius of the old Grand
Tour as it was taken forty years ago, wherever she
may have buried her classic head, beyond hearing of
the eternal telegraphic click bespeaking "rooms" on
mountain-tops, confounds us all alike in one sweeping
reprobation. I might, perhaps, have purchased exemption from
her curse by idling the summer away in the garden of
the Hotel Byron, or by contenting myself with such
wanderings as you may enjoy on the neighboring hill-

SWISS NOTES. 6 1
sides. The great beauty of detail in this region seems
to me to have been insufficiently noted. People come
hither, indeed, in swarms, but they talk more of places
that are not half so lovely; and when, returning from a
walk over the slopes above Montreux, I have ventured
to hint at a few of the fine things I have seen, I have
been treated as if I were jealous, forsooth, of a pro
jected tour to Chamouny. These slopes climb the
great hills in almost park-like stretches of verdure,
studded with generous trees, among which the walnut
aboimds, and into which, as you look down, the lake
seems to fling up a blue reflection. This reflection, by
contrast, turns their green leaves to yellow. Here you
may wander through wood and dell, by stream and
meadow — streams that narrow as they wind ever up
ward, and meadows often so steep that the mowers, as
they swing their sc)rthes over them, remind you of
insects on a wall brandishing long antennae — and range
through every possible phase of sweet sub- Alpine
scenery. Nowhere, I imagine, can you better taste the
charm, as distinguished from the grandeur, of Swiss
landscape; and as in Switzerland the grandeur and
the charm are constantly interfused and harmonized,
you have only to ramble far enough and high enough
to get a hint of real mountain sternness — to overtake
the topmost edge of the woods and emerge upon the
cool, sunny places where the stillness is broken only
by cattle-bells and the plash of streams, and the snow-
patches, in the darker nooks, linger till midsummer.
If this does not satisfy you, you may do a little mild
mountaineering by clirabing the Rochers de Naye or
the Dent de Jaman — a miniature Matterhorn. But the
most profitable, paths, to my taste, are certain broad-

62 FOREIGN PARTS.
flagged, grass-gtown footways, which lead yoti throUgli
densely fruited orchards to -villages of a charming
quaintness, nestling often in so close a verdure that
from the road by the lake you hardly suspect them.
The picturesqueness of Vaudois village life ought surely
to have produced more sketchers and lyrists. The bit
of country between Montreux and Vevey, though dis
figured with an ugly fringe of vineyards near the lake,
is a perfect nest of these fantastic hamlets. The houses
are, for the most part, a delightfully irregular combina
tion of the chalet and the rustic maison bourgeoise;
and — with their rugged stony foundations, pierced by
a dusky stable-arch and topped by a random superr
structure of balconies, outer stairways, and gables,
weather-browned beams and sun-cracked stucco, their
steep red roofs and knob-cro-wned turrets, their little
cobble-paved courts, animated by the great stone foun
tain and its eternal plash — they are at once so plea
santly grotesque and yet so sturdily well-conditioned,
that their aspect seems a sort of influence from the
blue glitter of the lake as it plays through the trees in
a genial violation of probability. The little village of
Veytaux, above Chillon, where it lurks unperceived
among its foliage, is rich in this Vaudois character.
The little grassy main street of the village enters and
passes bodily through a house — converting it into a
vast dim, creaking, homely archway — with an audacity^
a frank self-abandonment to local color, which is one
of the finest strokes of the sort I ever encountered.
And yet three English sisters whom I used to meet
thereabouts had preferred one morning to station them
selves at the parapet of the road by the lake, and,
spreading their sketch-books there, to expend their

SWISS NOTES. 63
precious little tablets of Winsor & Newton on those
too, too familiar walls and towers where Byron's Boni-
vard languished. Even as I passed, the railway train
whizzed by beneath their noses, and the genius loci
seemed to flee howling in the shriek of its signal.
Temple Bar itself witnesses a scarcely busier coming
and going than, in these days, those hoary portals of
Chillon. My own imagination, on experiment, proved
too poor an alchemist, and such enjoyment as I got of
the castle was mainly my distant daily view of it from
the garden of the H6tel Byron — a little many-pinnacled
white promontory, shining against the blue lake. When
I went, Badeker in hand, to "do" the place, I found
a huge concourse of visitors awaiting the reflux of an
earlier wave. "Let us at least wait till there is no
one else," I said to my companion. She smiled in
compassion of my naivete, " There is never no one else"
she answered. "We must treat it as a crush or leave
it alone." Any truly graceful picturesqueness here is the more
carefully to be noted that the graceful in Switzerland
¦- — especially in the German cantons — is a very rare
commodity, and that everything that is not rigorously
a mountain or a valley is distinctly tainted with ugli
ness. The Swiss have, apparently, an insensibility to
comeliness or purity of form — a partiality to the clumsy,
coarse, and prosaic, which one might almost interpret
as a calculated offset to their great treasure of natural
beauty, or at least as an instinctive protest of the
national genius for frugality. Monte Rosa and the
Jungfrau fill their pockets; why should they give double
measure when single will serve? Even so solidly pic
turesque a to-wn as Berne — a town full of massive

64 FOREIGN PARTS.
Teutonic quaintness and sturdy individuality of feature
— nowhere by a single happy accident of architecture
even grazes the line of beauty. The place is so full
of entertaining detail that the fancy warms to it, and
you good-naturedly pronounce it charming. But when
the sense of novelty subsides, and you notice the
prosaic scoop of its arcades, the wanton angularity of
its grotesque, umbrella-shaped roofs, the general ple
beian stride and straddle of its architecture, you half
take back your kindness, and declare that nature in
Switzerland might surely afford to be a trifle less jealous
of art. But wherever the German tone of things pre
vails, a certain rich and delectable homeliness goes
with it, and I have of Berne this pleasant recollection:.
the vision of a long main street, looking dark, some
how, in spite of its breadth, and bordered with houses
supported on deep arcades, whereof the short, thick
pillars resemble queerly a succession of bandy legs,
and overshaded by high-piled pagoda roofs. The dusky
arcades are lined with duskier shops and bustling with
traffic; the windows of the houses are open and filled
with charming flowers. They are invariably adorned,
furthermore, with a bright red window-cushion, whicb
in its turn sustains a fair Bernese — a Bernese fair
enough, at least, to complete the not especially delicate
harmony of the turkey-red cushion and the vividly
blooming plants. These deep color-spots, scattered
along the gray stretch of the houses, help to make the
scene a picture; yet if it remains, somehow, at once so
pleasant and so plain, you may almost find the ex
planation in the row of ancient fountains along the
middle of the street — the peculiar glory of Berne—'
each a great stone basin with a pillar rising from the

SWISS NOTES. 65
centre and supporting a sculptured figure more or less
heraldic and legendary. This richly-wrought chain of
fountains is a precious civic possession, and has an
admirably picturesque effect; but each of the images
which presides at these sounding springs — sources of
sylvan music in the ancient street — appears, when you
examine it, a monster of awkwardness and ugliness.
I ought to add that I write these lines in a place
so charming that it seems pure perversity to remember
here anything but the perfect beauty of Switzerland.
From my window I look straight through the gray-blue
portals of the Via Mala. Gray-blue they are with an
element of melancholy red — like the rust on an an
cient sword; and they rise in magnificent rocky crags
on either side of this old-time evil way, in which the
waning afternoon is deepening the shadows against a
splendid background of sheer gray rock, muffled here
and there in clinging acres of pine-forest. The car
riage-road winds into it with an air of solemnity which
suggests some almost metaphysical simile — ^the advance
of a simple, credulous reader, say, into some dark
some romance. If you think me fantastic, come and
feel the influence of this lovely little town of Thusis.
I may weU be fantastic, however, for I have fresh in
my memory a journey in which the fancy finds as good
an account as in any you may treat it to in Switzer
land — a long two-days' drive through the western
Grisons and the beautiful valley of the Vorder-Rhein.
The scenery is, perhaps, less characteristically Swiss
than that of many other regions, but it can hardly fail
to deepen your admiration for a country which is able
so liberally to overheap the measure of great impres
sions. It is a landscape rather of ruin-crowned cliff
Foreign Parts. 5

66 FOREIGN PARTS.
and crag, than of more or less -virginal snow-peaks; but
in its own gentler fashion it is as vast and bold and
free as the Oberland. Coming down from the Oberalp,
which divides this valley from that of the St. Gotthard,
we entered a wondrous vista of graduated blue dis
tances, along which the interlapping mountain-spurs
grew to seem like the pillars — if one can imagine re
clining pillars — of a mighty avenue. The landscape
had more than picturesque accidents; it had a great
artistic intention. I had never seen in nature such a
wealth of blue — deep and rich in the large foreground,
and splendidly contrasted with the slopes of ripening
grain, blocked out without hedge or fence in yellow
parallelograms, and playing thence through shades of
color which were clear even in the vague distances.
Foreground and distance here have alike a strong his
toric tinge. The little towns which yet subsist as
almost formless agglomerations of rugged stone were
members of the great Gray League of resistance to the
baronial brigands whose crumbling towers and keeps
still make the mountain-sides romantic. These little
towns, Ilanz in especial, and Dissentis, overstared by
the great blank fagade of its useless monastery, are
hardly more than rather putrid masses of mouldy ma
sonry; but with their desolate air of having been and
ceased to be, their rugged solidity of structure, their
low black archways, surmounted with stiffly hewn ar
morial shields, their lingering treasures in window-
screen and gate of fantastically -wrought-iron, they are
among the things which make the sentimental tourist
lean forth eagerly from his carriage with an impulse
which may be called the prevision of retrospect.
1872.

FROM CHAMBERY TO MILAN. 67

FROM CHAMBERY TO MILAN.
Your truly sentimental tourist always recovers the
temper that he has lost, and it was at Chambery — but
four hours from Geneva — that I accepted the situation
and decided that there might be mysterious delights
in entering Italy whizzing through an eight-mile tunnel,
like some highly improved projectile. I found my
reward in the Savoyard landscape, which greets you
betimes with something of a southern smile. If it is
not as Italian as Italy, it is at least more Italian than
Switzerland — more Italian, too, I should think, than can
seem natural and proper to the swarming red-legged
soldiery who so ostentatiously assign it to the dominion
of M. Thiers. The light and coloring had, to my eyes,
not a little of that mollified depth which they had last
observed in Italy. It was simply, perhaps, that the
weather was hot and that the mountains were drowsing
in that iridescent haze which I have seen nearer home
than at Chambery. But the vegetation, assuredly, had
an all but Transalpine twist and curl, and the classic
wayside tangle of corn and vines left nothing to be
desired in the line of careless grace. Chambery as a
town, however, affords little premonition of Italy. There
is shabbiness and shabbiness, the discriminating tourist
will tell you; and that of the ancient capital of Savoy
lacks color. I found a better pastime, , however, than
strolling through the dark, dull streets in quest of
"effects" that were not forthcoming. The first urchin

p8 FOREIGN PARTS.
you meet will tell you the way to Les Charmettes and
the Maison Jean- Jacques. A very pleasant way it be
comes as soon as it leaves the town — a winding, climb
ing by-road, bordered with such a tall and sturdy
hedge as to give it the air of an English lane — if you
can fancy an English lane introducing you to the
haunts of a Madame de Warens! The house which
formerly sheltered this lady's singular menage stands
on a hillside above the road, which a rapid path con
nects with the little grass-grown terrace before it. It
is a small, shabby, homely dwelling, with a certain re
putable solidity, however, and more of internal spacious
ness than of outside promise. The place is shown by
an elderly Frenchwoman who points out the very few
surviving objects which you may touch with the reflec
tion — complacent in whatsoever degree suits you —
that Rousseau's hand has rested upon them. It was
presumably a meagrely appointed house, and I won
dered that in these scanty features so much expression
should linger. But the edifice has an ancient pon
derosity of structure, and the dust of the eighteenth
century seems to lie on its worm-eaten floors, to cling
to the faded old papier s d ramages on the walls, and
to lodge in the crevices of the brown wooden ceilings.
Madame de Warens's bed remains, with Rousseau's
own narrow couch, his little warped and cracked yellow
spinet, and a battered, turnip-shaped silver timepiece,
engraved with its master's name — its primitive tick as
extinct as his heart-beats. It cost me, I confess, a
soraewhat pitying acceleration of my own to see this
intimately personal relic of the genius loci — for it had
-dwelt in that abdominal fob than which there is hardly
-a material point in space nearer to a man's conscious-

FROM CHAMBERY TO MILAN. 6g
ness — tossed so irreverently upon the table on which
you deposited your fee, beside the dog's-eared visitors'
record — the livre de cuisine recently denounced by
Madame Sand. In fact, the place generally, in so far
as some faint ghostly presence of its famous inmates
seems to linger there, is by no means exhilarating.
Coppet and Ferney tell, if not of pure happiness, at
least of prosperity and honor, wealth and success. But
Les Charmettes is haunted by ghosts unclean and for
lorn. The place tells of poverty, trouble, impurity. A
good deal of clever modern talent in France has been
employed in touching up the episode of which it was
the scene, and tricking it out in idyllic love-knots.
But as I stood on the charming terrace I have men
tioned — a little jewel of a terrace, with grassy flags
and a mossy parapet, and an admirable view of great
swelling -violet hills — stood there reminded how much
sweeter Nature is than mafi, the story looked rather
wan and unlovely beneath these literary decorations,
and I could muster no keener relish for it than is im
plied in perfect pity. Hero and heroine were first-rate
subjects for psychology, but hardly for poetry. But,
not to moralize too sternly for a tourist between trains,
I should add that, as an illustration, to be inserted
mentally in the text of the "Confessions," a glimpse of
Les Charmettes is pleasant enough. It completes the
rare charm of good autobiography to behold with one's
eyes the faded and battered background of the story;
and Rousseau's narrative is so incomparably vivid and
forcible that the sordid little house at Chambery seems
of a hardly deeper shade of reality than the images
you contemplate in his pages.
If I spent an hour at Les Charmettes fumbling thus

70 FOREIGN PARTS.
helplessly with the past, I frankly recognized on the
morrow that the Mont Cenis Tunnel savors strongly of
the future. As I passed along the St. Gotthard, a couple
of months since, I perceived, half-way up the Swiss
ascent, a group of na-wies at work in a gorge beneath
the road. They had laid bare a broad surface of
granite , and had punched in the centre of it a round,
black cavity, of about the dimensions, as it seemed to
me, of a soup-plate. This was the embryonic form of
the dark mid-channel of the St. Gotthard Railway, which
is to attain its perfect development some eight years
hence. The Mont Cenis, therefore, may be held to
have set a fashion which will be followed till the high
est Himalaya is but the ornamental apex or snow
capped gable-tip of some resounding fuliginous cor
ridor. The tunnel differs but in length from other
tunnels; you spend half an hour in it. But you come
whizzing out of it into Transalpine Italy, and, as you
look back, may fancy it shrugging its mighty shoulders
over the track — a spasmodic protest of immobility
against speed. The tunnel is certainly not a poetic
object, but there is no perfection without its beauty;
and as you measure the long, rugged outline of the
pyramid of which it forms the base, you must admit
that it is the perfection of a short cut. Twenty-four
hours from Paris to Turin is speed for the times —
speed which may content us, at any rate, until ex
pansive Berlin has succeeded in placing itself at thirty-
six from Milan. I entered Turin on a lovely August
afternoon, and foimd a city of arcades,, of ptink and
yellow stucco, of innumerable caf6s, blue-legged officei's,
and ladies draped in the mantilla which depends
firom the head. An old friend of Italy, coming back

FROM CHAMBERY TO MILAN. 71
to her, finds an easy waking for sleeping memories.
Every object is a reminder. Half an hour after my
arrival, as I stood at my window, looking out on the
great square, it seemed to me that the scene within
and without was a rough epitome of every pleasure
and every impression I had formerly gathered in Ita!ly;
the balcony and the Venetian-blind, the cool floor of
speckled concrete, the lavish delusions of frescoed wall
and ceiling, the broad divan, framed for the noonday
siesta, the massive mediaeval Castello in mid-square,
with its shabby rear and its pompous Palladian front,
the brick campaniles beyond, the milder, yellower light,
the brighter colors and softer sounds. Later, beneath
the arcades, I found many an old acquaintance; beauti
ful officers, resplendent, slow-strolling, contemplative of
female beauty; civil and peaceful dandies, hardly less
gorgeous, with that religious faith in their moustaches
and shirt-fronts which distinguishes the belle jeunesse of
Italy; ladies artfully veiled and anointed, but with too
little art — or too much nature, at least — in the region
of the boddice; well-conditioned young abbati, with
neatly drawn stockings. These, indeed, are not objects
of first-rate interest, and with such Turin is rather
meagrely furnished. It has no architecture, no churches,
no monuments, no especially picturesque street-scenery.
It has, indeed, the great votive temple of the Superga,
which stands on a high hilltop above the city, gazing
across at Monte Rosa and lifting its own fine dome
against the sky with no contemptible art. But when
you have seen the Superga from the quay beside the
Po, as shrivelled and yellow in August as some classic
Spanish stream, and said to yourself that in archi
tecture position is half the battle, you have nothing

72 FOREIGN PARTS.
left to visit but the Museum of pictures. The museum
of Turin, which is large and well arranged, is the for
tunate owner of three or four masterpieces; a pair of
magnificent Vandycks and a couple of fine examples
of Paul Veronese; the latter a Queen of Sheba and a
Feast at the House of Levi — the usual splendid com
bination of brocades, grandees, and marble colonnades
dividing skies de turquoise malade, as Theophile Gau
tier says. The Veroneses are fine, but with Venice in
prospect the traveller feels at liberty to keep his best
attention in reserve. If, however, he have the proper
relish for Vandyck, let him linger long and fondly
here; for that admiration will never be more potently
stirred than by the enchanting picture of the three
little royal highnesses, the sons and the daughter of
Charles I. All the purity of childhood is here, and all
its soft solidity of structure, rounded tenderly beneath
the spangled satin, and contrasted charmingly with the
pompous rigidity of that fashion. Clad respectively in
crimson, white, and blue, the royal babies stand up in
their ruffs and fardingales, in dimpled serenity, squar
ing their infantine stomachers at the spectator with an
innocence, a dignity, a delightful grotesqueness, which
make the picture as real as it is skilful. You might
kiss their hands, but you certainly would think twice
before pinching their cheeks — provocative as they are
of this tribute of admiration — and would altogether
lack presumption to lift them off the ground — the royal
dais on which they stand so sturdily planted by right
of birth. There is something inimitable in the paternal
gallantry with which the painter has touched off the
young lady. She was a princess, yet she was a baby,
sind he has contrived to work into his picture an in-

FROM CHAMBERY TO MILAN. 73
timation that she was a creature whom in her teens,
the lucklessly smitten — even as he was prematurely —
must vaiifly sigh for. Although the work is a master
piece of execution, its merits under this head raay be
emulated — at a distance. The lovely modulations of
color in the three contrasted and harmonized little
satin petticoats — the solidity of the little heads, in
spite of all their prettiness — the happy, unexaggerated
squareness and maturity of pose — are, severally, points
to study, to imitate, and to reproduce with profit. But
the taste of the work is its great secret as well as its
great merit — a taste which seems one of the lost in
stincts of mankind. Go and enjoy this supreme ex
pression of Vandyck's fine sense, and admit that never
was a politer performance.
Milan is an older, richer, more historic city than
Turin; but its general aspect is no more distinctly Ita
lian. The long Austrian occupation, perhaps, did some
thing to Germanize its physiognomy; though, indeed
this is an indifferent explanation when one remembers
how well, as regards the aspect of things, Italy held
her own in Venetia. Far be it from me, moreover, to
accuse MUan of a want of character. I raean simply
that at certain points it seems rather like the last of
the Northern capitals than the first of the Southern.
The cathedral is before all things entertaining; it is
not interesting, it is not logical, it is not even, to some
minds, commandingly beautiful; but it is extraordinarily
curious and rich. I hope, for my own part, that I shall
never grow too fastidious to enjoy it. If it had no
other beauty it would have that of impressive, ira-
raeasurable achieveraent. As I strolled beside its vast
indented base one evening, and felt it above me, mass-

74 FOREIGN PARTS.
ing its gray mysteries in the starlight, while the rest
less human tide on which I floated rose no higher than
the first few layers of street-soiled marble, I was tempted
to believe that beauty, in great architecture, is almost
a secondary merit, and that the main point is raass —
mass huge enough to suggest a great effort and a great
success. Viewed in this way, a great building is the
greatest conceivable work of art. More than any other
it represents difficulties annulled, resources combined,
labor, courage, patience. And there are people who
tell us that art has nothing to do with morality! Little
enough, doubtless, when it is concerned, ever so little,
in painting the roof of Milan Cathedral within to re
present carved stone-work. Of this famous roof every
one has heard — how good it is, how bad, how perfect
a delusion, how transparent an artifice. It is the first
thing your cicerone shows you on entering the church.
The discriminating tourist may accept it philosophic
ally, I think; for the interior, though admirably effective,
has no very recondite beauties. It is splendidly vast
and dim; the altar-lamps twinkle afar, through the in
cense-thickened air, like fog-lights at sea, and the
great columns rise straight to the roof, which hardly
curves to meet them, with the girth and altitude of
oaks of a thousand years. But there is little refine
ment of design — few of those felicities of proportion
which the eye caresses, when it finds them, very rauch
as the memory retains and repeats some happy line of
poetry or some delightful musical phrase. Entertain
ing, however, as I say, is the whole vast scene, and
nothing more so than a certain exhibition which I pri
vately enjoyed of the relics of St. Charles Borromeus.
This holy raan lies at his eternal rest in a small but.

FROM CHAMBERY TO MILAN. 75
gorgeous sepulchral chapel, beneath the pavement of
the church, before the high altar; and for the modest
sum of five francs you raay have his shrivelled mortal
ity unveiled, and gaze at it in the double scepticism
of a Protestant and a tourist. The Catholic church, I
believe, has some doctrine that its ends justify at need
any means whatsoever; a fortiori, therefore, nothing it
does can be ridiculous. The performance in question,
of which the good San Carlo paid the cost, was im
pressive, certainly, but as great grotesqueness is im
pressive. The little sacristan, having secured his au
dience, whipped on a white tunic over his frock, lighted
a couple of extra candles, and proceeded to remove
from above the altar, by means of a crank, a sort of
sliding shutter, just as you raay see a shop-boy do of
a morning at his master's, window. In this case, too,
a large sheet of plate-glass was uncovered,, and, to
form an idea of the Halage, you must imagine that a
jeweller, for reasons of his own, has struck an un
natural partnership with an undertaker. The black,
mummified corpse of the saint is stretched out in a
glass coffin, clad in his mouldering canonicals, mitred,
crosiered and gloved, and glittering with votive jewels.
It is an extraordinary mixture of death and life; the
desiccated clay, the ashen rags, the hideous little black
mask and skull, and the living, glowing, twinkling
splendor of diamonds, emeralds and sapphires. The
collection is really fine, and various great historic
names are attached to the different offerings. Whatever
may be the better opinion as to whether the Church is
in a decline, I cannot help thinking that she will make
a tolerable figure in the world so long as she retains
this great stock of trinkets, scintillating throughout

76 FOREIGN PARTS.
Christendom at effectively scattered points. You see,
I am forced to agree after all, in spite of the sliding
shutter and the profane exhibitory arts of the sacristan,
that the majesty of the Church saved the situation, or
made it, at least, sublimely ridiculous. Yet it was
from a natural desire to breathe a sweeter air that I
immediately afterwards undertook the interminable
climb to the roof of the cathedral. This is a great
spectacle, and one of the best known; for every square
inch of wall on the winding stairways is bescribbled
with a traveller's name. There is a great glare from
the far-stretching slopes of marble, a confusion (like
the masts of a na-vy or the spears of an army) of
image-capped pinnacles, biting the impalpable blue,
and, better than either, a delightful view of level Lom
bardy, sleeping in its rich Transalpine light and look
ing, with its white-walled dwellings and the spires on
its horizon, like a vast green sea, spotted with ships.
After two months of Switzerland, the Lombard plain
is a delicious rest to the eye, and the yellow, liquid,
free-flowing light (as if on favored Italy the vessels of
heaven were raore widely opened) had for raine a
charm which made me think of a great opaque moun
tain as an impertinent invasion of the atmospheric spaces.
I have mentioned the cathedral first, but the prime
treasure of Milan at the present hour is the beautiful,
tragical Leonardo. The cathedral is good for another
thousand years, but I doubt whether our children will
find in the raost majestic and most luckless of frescos
much raore than the shadow of a shadow. Its farae for
many years now has been that, as one may say, of an
illustrious invalid whom people visit to see how he
lasts, with sighs , and lowered tones and death -bed

FROM Chambery To milaN. 77
speeches. The picture needs not another scar or stain,
now, to be the saddest work of art in the world; and
battered, defaced, ruined as it is, it remains one
of the greatest. It is really not amiss to compare its
decay to the slow extinction of a human organism.
The creation of the picture was a breath from the in
finite, and the painter's conception not immeasurably
less complex than that involved, say, in his own
structure. There has been rauch talk lately about
the irony of fate, but I suspect that fate was never
more ironical than when she led this most deeply cal
culating of artists to spend fifteen long years in build
ing his house upon the sand. And yet, after all, I can
fancy this apparent irony but a deeper wisdom, for if
the picture enjoyed the imraortal health and bloom of
a first-rate Titian we should have lost one of the most
pertinent lessons in the history of art. We know it as
hearsay, but here is the plain proof, that there is no
limit to the amount of intention an artist may put into
his work. Every painter ought once in his life to
stand before the Cenacolo and decipher its raorai.
Pour everything you mentally possess into your picture,
lest perchance your "prepared surface" should play
you a trick! Raphael was a happier genius; you can
not look at his lovely Marriage of the Virgin at the
Brera, beautiful as some first deep smile of conscious
inspiration, without feeling that he foresaw no com
plaint against fate, and that he looked at the world
with the vision of a graceful optimist. But I have left
no space to speak of the Brera, nor of that paradise of
bookworms with an eye for the picturesque — if such
creatures exist — the Ambrosian Library; nor of that
solid old basilica of St. Ambrose, with its spacious

78 FOREIGN PARTS.
atrium and its crudely solemn mosaics, in which it is
surely your own fault if you do not forget Dr. Strauss
and M. Renan and worship as simply as a Christian
of the ninth century.
It is part of the sordid prose of the Mont Cenis
road that, unlike those fine, old unimproved passes, the
Simplon, the Spltlgen, and — yet awhile longer — the
St. Gotthard, it denies you a glirapse of that paradise
adorned by the four lakes as that of uncommented
Scripture by the rivers of Eden. I made, however,
an excursion to the Lake of Como, which, though brief,
lasted long enough to make rae feel as if I too were a
hero of roraance, with leisure for a love-affair, and not
a hurrying tourist, with a Bradshaw in his pocket. The
Lake of Como has figured largely in novels with a ten;
dency to immorality — being commonly the spot to
which inflamed young gentlemen invite the wives of
other gentlemen to repair with them and ignore the
harshness of public opinion. But here is a chance for
the moralist to rejoice; the Lake of Como, too, has
been iraproved, and is now provided with a public
opinion. I should pay a poor compliment, at least, to
the swarming inmates of the hotels which alternate,
attractively, by the water-side, with villas old and
new, to think that it could not. But if it is lost to
wicked novels, the unsophisticated American tourist
may still do a little private romancing there. The
pretty hotel at Cadenabbia offers him, for instance, the
romance of what we call at home summer-board. It
is all so unreal, so fictitious, so elegant and idle, so
framed to undermine a rigid sense of the chief end of
man not being to float forever in an ornamental boat,
beneath an awning tasselled like a circus-horse, im-

FROM VENICE TO STRASBURG. 79
pelled by an affable Giovanni or Antonio from one
stately stretch of lake-laved villa steps to another, that
departure seeras as harsh and unnatural as the dream-
dispelling note of some punctual voice at your bedside
on a dusky winter morning. Yet I wondered, for my
own part, where I had seen it all before- — the pink-
waUed villas gleaming through their shrubberies of
orange and oleander, the mountains shimmering in the
hazy light like so many breasts of doves, the constant
presence of the melodious Italian voice. Where, in
deed, but at the Opera, when the manager has been
more than usually regardless of expense? Here, in
the foreground, was the palace of the nefarious bary
tone, with its banqueting-hall opening as freely on the
stage as a railway buffet on the platform; beyond, the
delightful back scene, with its operatic gamut of color
ing; in the raiddle, the scarlet-sashed barcaiuoli, grouped
like a chorus, hat in hand, awaiting the conductor's
signal. It was better even than being in a novel — this
being in a libretto!
1872.

FROM VENICE TO STRASBURG.
There would be rauch to say about that golden
chain of historic cities which stretches from Milan to
Venice, in which the very names — Brescia, Verona,
Mantua, Padua — are an ornament to one's phrase; but
I should have to draw upon recollections now three
years old, and to make ray short story a long one.

80 FOREIGN PARTS.
Of Verona and Venice only have I recent impressions,
and even to these I must do hasty justice. I came
into Venice, just as I had done before, toward the
end of a summer's day, when the shadows begin to
lengthen and the light begins to glow, and found that
the attendant sensations bore repetition remarkably
well. There was the same last intolerable delay at
Mestre, just before your first glimpse of the lagoon
confirms the already distinct sea- smell which has
added speed to the precursive flight of your imagina
tion; then the liquid level, edged far off by its band
of undiscriminated domes and spires, soon distinguished
and proclaimed, however, as excited and contentious
heads multiply at the windows of the train; then your
long rumble on the immense white railway bridge,
which, in spite of the invidious contrast drawn (very
properly) by Mr. Ruskin, between the old and the
new approach to Venice, does truly, in a manner,
shine across the green lap of the lagoon like a raighty
causeway of marble; then the plunge into the station,
which would be exactly similar to every other plunge,
save for one little fact — that the key-note of the great
medley of voices borne back from the exit is not
"Cab, sir!" but "Barca, signore!" I do not mean, how
ever, to follow the traveller through every phase of
his initiation, at the risk of stamping poor Venice
beyond repair as the supreme bugbear of literature;
though, for my own part, I hold that, to a fine healthy
appetite for the picturesque the subject cannot be too
diffusely treated. Meeting on the Piazza, on the even
ing of my arrival, a young American painter who told
me that he had been spending the summer at Venice,
I could have assaulted him, for very envy. He was

FROM VENICE TO STRASBURG. 8 I
painting, forsooth, the interior of St. Mark's! To be
a young American painter, unperplexed by the mock
ing, elusive soul of things and satisfied with their
wholesome, light-bathed surface and shape; keen of
eye; fond of color, of sea and sky, and anything that
may chance between them; of old lace and old brocade
and old furniture (even when made to order); of time-
meUowed harmonies on nameless canvases and happy
contours in cheap old engra-vings; to spend one's
mornings in still, productive analysis of the clustered
shadows ofthe Basilica, one's afternoons anywhere, in
church or campo, on canal or lagoon, and one's even
ings in starlit gossip at Florian's, feeling the sea-breeze
throb languidly between the two great pillars of the
Piazzetta and over the low, black domes of the church
— this, I consider, is to be as happy as one may
safely be.
The mere use of one's eyes, in Venice, is happiness
enough, and generous observers find it hard to keep
an account of their profits in this line. Everything
the eye rests on is effective, pictorial, harmonious —
thanks to some inscrutable flattery of the atmosphere.
Your brown-skinned, white-shirted gondolier, twisting
himself in the light, seems to you, as you lie staring
beneath your awning, a perpetual syrabol of Venetian
"effect." The light here is, in fact, a mighty magician,
and, with all respect to Titian, Veronese and Tintoret,
the greatest artist of them all. You should see, in
places, the material on which it works — slimy brick,
marble battered and befouled, rags, dirt, decay. Sea
and sky seem to meet half-way, to blend their tones
into a kind of soft iridescence, a lustrous compound
of wave and cloud and a hundred nameless local re-
Foreign Parts. o

82 FOREIGN PARTS.
flections, and then to fling the clear tissue against
every object of vision. You may see these elements
at work everywhere, but to see them in their intensity
you should choose the finest day in the month and
have yourself rowed far away across the lagoon to Tor-
cello. Without making this excursion, you can hardly
pretend to know Venice, or to sympathize with that
longing for pure raidiance which animated her great
colorists. It is a perfect bath of light, and I could
not get rid of a fancy that we were cleaving the upper
atraosphere on sorae hurrying cloud-skiff. At Torcello
there is nothing but the light to see — nothing, at least,
but a sort of blooming sand-bar, intersected by a
single narrow creek, which does duty as a canal, and
occupied by a meagre cluster of huts, the dwellings,
apparently, of market-gardeners and fishermen, and by
a ruinous church of the eleventh century. It is im
possible to imagine a more poignant embodiment of
unheeded extinction. Torcello was the mother-city of
Venice, and she lies there now, a mere mouldering
vestige, like a group of weather-bleached parental
bones left impiously unburied. I stopped my gondola
at the mouth of the shallow inlet, and walked along
the grass, beside a hedge, to the low-browed, crum
bling cathedral. The charm of certain vacant grassy
spaces, in Italy, over-frowned by masses of brickwork
that is honeycombed by the suns of centuries, is some
thing that I hereby renounce, once for all, the attempt to
express; but you may be sure, whenever I mention such
a spot, that it is something delicious. A delicious still
ness covered the little campo at Torcello; I remember
none so audible save that of the Roman Campagna.
There was no life there but the visible tremor of the

FROM VENICE TO STRASBURG. 83
brilliant air and the cries of half a dozen young
children, who dogged our steps and clamored for
coppers. These children, by the way, were the hand
somest little brats in the world, and each was fur
nished with a pair of eyes which seemed a sort of
protest of nature against the stinginess of fortune.
They were very nearly as naked as savages, and their
little bellies protruded like those of infant Abyssinians
in the illustrations of books of travel; but as they
scampered and sprawled in the soft, thick grass, grin
ning like suddenly translated cherubs, and showing,
their hungry little teeth, they suggested forcibly that
the best assurance of happiness in this world is to be
found in the maximum of innocence and the minimum
of wealth. One small urchin — framed, if ever a child
was, to be the joy of an aristocratic mamma — was the
most expressively beautiful little mortal I ever looked
upon. He had a smile to make Correggio sigh in his
grave; and yet here he was, running wild among these
sea-stunted bushes, on the lonely margin of a decaying
world, in prelude to how blank, or to how dark, a des
tiny? Verily, nature is still at odds with fortune;
though, indeed, if they ever really pull together, I am
afraid nature will lose her picturesqueness. An infant
citizen of our own republic, straight-haired, pale-eyed
and freckled, duly darned and catechised, marching
into a New England school-house, is an object often
seen and soon forgotten; but I think I shall always re
member, with infinite tender conjecture, as the years
roll by, this little unlettered Eros of the Adriatic strand.
Yet all youthful things at Torcello were not cheerful,
for the poor lad who brought us the key of the cathe
dral was shaking v/ith an ague, and his melancholy
6»

84 FOREIGN PARTS.
presence seemed to point the moral of forsaken nave
and choir. The church is admirably priraitive and
curious, and rerainded me of the two or three oldest
churches of Rome — St. Clement and St. Agnes. The
interior is rich in grimly mystical mosaics of the twelfth
century, and the patchwork of precious fragments in
the pavement is not inferior to that of St. Mark's. But
the terribly distinct Apostles are ranged against their
dead gold backgrounds as stiffly as grenadiers present
ing arms^intensely personal sentinels of a personal
Deity. Their stony stare seems to wait forever vainly
for some visible revival of primitive orthodoxy, and
one may well wonder whether it finds much beguile
ment in idly-gazing troops of Western heretics — passion
less even in their heresy.
I had been curious to see whether, in galleries and
churches of Venice, I should be disposed to transpose
my old estimates — to burn what I had adored and to
adore what I had burned. It is a sad truth that one
can stand in the Ducal Palace for the first time but
once, with the deliciously ponderous sense of that
particular half-hour being an era in one's mental his
tory; but I had the satisfaction of finding at least — a
great comfort in a short stay — that none of my early
memories were likely to change places, and that I could
take up my admirations where I had left them. I still
found Carpaccio delightful, Veronese magnificent, Titian
supremely beautiful, and Tintoret altogether unqualifi-
able. I repaired immediately to the little church of
San Cassano, which contains the smaller of Tintoret's
two great Crucifixions; and when I had looked at it
awhile I drew a long breath, feeling that I could con
template any other picture in Venice with proper self-

FROM -VENICE TO STRASBURG. 85
possession. It seemed to me that I had advanced to
the uttermost limit of painting; that beyond this an
other art — inspired poetry — begins, and that Bellini,
Veronese, Giorgione and Titian, all joining hands and
straining every muscle of their genius, reach forward
not so far but that they leave a visible space in which
Tintoret alone is master. I well remember the excite
ment into which he plunged me, when I first learned
to know him; but the glow of that comparatively
youthful amazement is dead, and with it, I fear, that
confident -vivacity of phrase, of which, in trying to utter
my impressions, I felt less the magniloquence than the
impotence. In his power there are many weak spots,
mysterious lapses and fitful intermissions; but, when
the list of his faults is complete, he still seems to me
to remain the most interesting of painters. His reputa
tion rests chiefly on a more superficial sort of merit —
his energy, his unsurpassed productivity, his being, as
Theophile Gautier says, le roi des fougueux. These
qualities are immense, but the great source of his im
pressiveness is that his indefatigable hand never drew
a line that was not, as one may say, a moral line. No
painter ever had such breadth and such depth; and
even Titian, beside him, has often seemed to me but a
great decorative artist. Mr. Ruskin, whose eloquence,
in dealing with the great Venetians, sometimes outruns
his discretion, is fond of speaking even of Veronese as
a painter of deep spiritual intentions. This, it seems
to rae, is pushing matters too far, and the author of the
"Rape of Europa" is, pictorially speaking, no greater
casuist than any other genius of supreme good taste.
Titian was, assuredly, a mighty poet, but Tintoret —
Tintoret was almost a prophet. Before his greatest

86 FOREIGN PARTS.
works you are conscious of a sudden evaporation of old
doubts and dilemmas, and the eternal problem of the
conflict between idealism and realism dies the most
natural of deaths. In Tintoret, the problem is practi
cally solved, and the alternatives are so harmoniously
interfused that I defy the keenest critic to say where
one begins and the other ends. The homeliest prose
melts into the most ethereal poetry; the literal and
imaginative fairly confound their identity. This, how
ever, is vague praise. Tintoret's great merit, to my
mind, was his unequalled distinctness of vision. When
once he had conceived the germ of a scene, it defined
itself to his imagination with an intensity, an amplitude,
an individuality of expression, which make one's obser
vation of his pictures seem less an operation of the
raind than a kind of supplementary experience of life.
Veronese and Titian are content with a much looser
specification, as their treatment of any subject which
Tintoret has also treated abundantly proves. There
are few raore suggestive contrasts than that between
the absence of a total character at all commensurate
with its scattered variety and brilliancy, in Veronese's
Marriage of Cana, in the Louvre, and the poignant,
almost startling, completeness of 'Tintoret's illustration
of the theme at the Salute Church. To compare his
Presentation of the Virgin, at the Madonna dell' Orto,
with Titian's at the Academy, or his Annunciation with
Titian's, close at hand, is to measure the essential
difference between observation and imagination. One
has certainly not said all that there is to say for Titian
when one has called him an observer. II y mettait du
sien, as the French say, and I use the term to desig
nate roughly the artist whose apprehension, infinitely

FROM VENICE TO STRASBURG. 87
deep and strong when applied to the single figure or
to easily balanced groups, spends itself vainly on great
dramatic combinations — or, rather, leaves them un-
gauged. It was the whole scene that Tintoret seemed
to have beheld, in a flash of inspiration intense enough
to stamp it ineffaceably on his perception; and it was
the whole scene, complete, peculiar, individual, unpre
cedented, which he committed to canvas with all the
vehemence of his talent. Compare his Last Supper,
at San Giorgio — its long, diagonally placed table, its
dusky spaciousness, its scattered lamp-light and halo-
light, its startled, gesticulating figures, its richly realistic
foreground — with the usual formal, almost mathe
matical, rendering of the subject, in which impressive
ness seems to have been sought in elimination rather
than comprehension. You get from Tintoret's work the
impression that he _/>//, pictorially, the great, beautiful,
terrible spectacle of human life very much as Shake
speare felt it poetically — -with a heart that never
ceased to beat a passionate accompaniment to every
stroke of his brush. Thanks to this fact, his works are
signally grave, and their almost universal and rapidly
increasing decay does not relieve their gloom. No
thing, indeed, can well be sadder than the great col
lection of Tintorets at San Rocco. Incurable black
ness is settling fast upon all of them, and they frown
at you across the sombre splendor of their great
chambers like gaunt, twilight phantoms of pictures.
To our children's children, Tintoret, as things are
going, can be hardly more than a name; and such of
them as shall miss the tragic beauty, already so diraraed
and stained, of the great Bearing of the Cross, at San
Rocco, will live and die without knowing the largest

88 FOREIGN PARTS.
eloquence of art. If you wish to add the last touch of
solemnity to the place, recall, as vividly as possible, ,
while you linger at San Rocco, the painter's singularly
interesting portrait of himself, at the Louvre. The old
man looks out of the canvas from beneath a brow as
sad as a sunless twilight, with just such a stoical hope
lessness as you might fancy him to wear if he stood at
your side gazing at his rotting canvases. It is not
whimsical to fancy this the face of a man who felt that
he had given the world more than the world was likely
to repay. Indeed, before every picture of Tintoret, you
may remember this tremendous portrait with profit.
On one side, the passion, the power, the illusion of his
art; on the other, the mortal fatigue of his spirit. The
world's knowledge of Tintoret is so small that the
portrait throws a doubly precious light on his person
ality; and when we wonder vainly what raanner of
raan he was, and what were his purpose, his faith, and
his method, we may find forcible assurance there that
they were, at any rate, his life.
Verona, which was my last Italian stopping-place,
is, under any circumstances, a delightfully interesting
city; but the kindness of my own memory of it is
deepened by a subsequent ten days' experience of
Germany. I rose one morning at Verona, and went to
bed at night atBotzen! The statement needs no com
ment, and the two places, though but fifty miles apart,
are as painfully dissimilar as their names. I had pre
pared myself for your delectation with a copious tirade
on German manners, German scenery, German art
and the Gerraan stage — on the lights and shadows of
Innsbruck, Munich, Nuremberg, and Heidelberg; but
just as I was about to put pen to paper, I glanced

FROM VENICE TO STRASBURG. 89
into a little volume on these very topics, lately published
by that famous novelist and moralist, M. Ernest Fey-
deau, the fruit of a summer's observation at Homburg.
This work produced a reaction; and if I chose to fol
low M. Feydeau's own example when he wishes to
qualify his approbation, I might call his treatise by
any vile name known to the speech of man. I content
myself, however, with pronouncing it — superficial. I
then reflect that my own opportunities for seeing and
judging were extremely limited, and I suppress my
tirade, lest some more enlightened critic should come
and pronounce me superficial. Its sum and substance
was to have been that — superficially — Germany is
ugly; that Munich is a nightmare, Heidelberg a dis
appointment (in spite of its charming castle) and even
Nuremberg not so complete a picture as I had hoped.
But comparisons are odious; and if Munich is ugly,
Verona is beautiful enough. You may laugh at my
logic, but you will probably assent to my meaning. I
carried away from Verona a certain mental image
upon which I cast an introspective glance whenever
between Botzen and Strasburg the oppression of ex
ternal circumstance became painful. It was a lovely
August afternoon in the Roman arena — a ruin in
which repair and restoration have been so gradually
and discreetly practised that it seeras all of one har
monious antiquity. The vast stony oval rose high
against the sky in a single, clear, continuous line,
broken here and there only by strolling and reclining
loungers. The massive tiers inclined in solid monotony
to the central circle, in which a small open-air theatre
was in active operation. A small section of the great
slope of masonry, facing the stage, was roped off into

go FOREIGN PARTS.
an auditorium, in which the narrow level space be
tween the foot-lights and the lowest step represented
the pit. Foot-lights are a figure of speech, for the per
formance was going on in the broad glow of the after
noon, with a delightful, and apparently by no means
misplaced, confidence in the good-will of the spectators.
What the piece was that was deemed so able to
shift for itself I know not — very possibly the same
drama that I remember seeing advertised during my
former visit to Verona; nothing less than La Tremenda
Giustizia di Dio. If titles are worth anything, this
product of the melodramatist's art might surely stand
upon its own legs. Along the tiers above the little
group of regular spectators was gathered a sort of free-
list of unauthorized observers, who, although beyond
ear-shot, must have been enabled by the" generous
breadth of Italian gesture to follow the tangled thread
of the play. It was all deliciously Italian — the mix
ture of old life and new, the mountebank's booth (it
was hardly more) grafted upon the antique circus, the
dominant presence of a mighty architecture, the loungers
and idlers beneath the kindly sky, upon the sun-
warmed stones. I never felt more keenly the difference
between the background to life in the Old World and
the New. There are other things in Verona to make
it a liberal education to be born there, though that it
is one for the contemporary Veronese I do not pretend
to say. The Tombs of the Scaligers, with their soar
ing pinnacles, their high-poised canopies, their ex
quisite refinement and concentration of the Gothic
idea, I cannot profess, even after much worshipful
gazing, completely to have comprehended and enjoyed.
They seemed to rae full of deep architectural mean-

FROM -VENICE TO STRASBURG. gi
ings, such as must drop gently into the mind one by
one, after infinite tranquil conteraplation. But even
to the hurried and preoccupied traveller the soleran
little chapel-yard in the city's heart, in which they
stand girdled by their great swaying curtain of linked
and twisted iron, is one of the most impressive spots
in Italy. Nowhere else is such a wealth of artistic
achievement crowded into so narrow a space; nowhere
else are the daily comings and goings of men blessed
by the presence of manlier art. Verona is rich, further
more, in beautiful churches — several with beautiful
names: San Fermo, Santa Anastasia, San Zenone.
This last is a structure of high antiquity, and of the
most impressive loveliness. The nave terrainates in a
double choir, that is, a sub-choir or crypt, into which
"you descend, to wander among primitive columns,
with variously grotesque capitals that rise hardly
higher than your head, and an upper choral level into
which you mount by broad stairways of the raost pic
turesque effect. I shall never forget the impression of
majestic chastity that I received from the great nave
of the building of my former visit. I decided to my
satisfaction then that every church is from the devo
tional point of -view a solecism, that has not some
thing of this purity of proportion; for strictly forraal
beauty seems best to express our conception of spiritual
beauty. The nobly serious effect of San Zenone is
deepened by its single picture — a masterpiece of
the most serious of painters, the severe and exquisite
Mantegna. 1872.

92 FOREIGN PARTS.

A ROMAN HOLIDAY.
Rome,. February, 1873.
It is certainly sweet to be merry at the right mo
ment; but the right raoment hardly seems to me to
be the ten days of the Roraan Carnival. It was a
rather cynical suspicion of mine, perhaps, that they
would not keep to my imagination the brilliant pro
mise of tradition; but I have been justified by the
event, and have been decidedly less conscious of the
festal influences of the season than of the inalienable
gravity of the place. There was a time when the
Carnival was a serious matter, — that is, a heartily
joyous one; but in the striding march of progress which
Italy has- recently witnessed, the fashion of public
revelry has fallen wofully out of step. The state of
mind and manners under which the Carnival was kept
in generous good faith, I doubt if an American can
very exactly conceive : he can only say to himself that,
for a raonth in the year, it must have been com
fortable to forget! But now that Italy is made, the
Carnival is unmade; and we are not especially tempted
to en-vy the attitude of a population who have lost
their relish for play, and not yet acquired, to any
striking extent, an enthusiasm for work. The spectacle
on the Corso has seemed to me, on the whole, a sort
of measure of that great breach with the past of which
Catholic Christendom felt the somewhat muffled shock
in September, 1870. A traveller who had seen old

A ROMAN HOLIDAY. g3
Rome, coming back any time during the past winter,
must have immediately perceived that something mo
mentous had happened — something hostile to pic
turesqueness. My first warning was that, ten minutes
after my arrival, I found myself face to face with a
newspaper-stand. The impossibility in the other days
of having anything in the journalistic line but the
Osservatore Romano and the Voce della Veritd used to
seem to me to have much to do with the extra
ordinary leisure of thought and stillness of raind to
which Rome admitted you. But now the slender piping
of the Voice of Truth is stifled by the raucous note of
eventide venders of the Capitale, the Libertd, the Fan-
fulla; and Rome reading unexpurgated news is an
other Rome indeed. For every subscriber to the
Liber td., I incline to think there is an antique masker
and reveller less. As striking a sign of the new
regime seemed to me the extraordinary increase of
population. The Corso was always a well-filled street:
now it's a perpetual crush. I never cease to wonder
where the new-comers are lodged, and how such spot
less flowers of fashion as the gentlemen who stare at
the carriages can bloom in the atmosphere of those
camere mobiliate of which I have had glimpses. This,
however, is their own question; bravely they resolve it.
They seemed to proclaim, as I say, that by force of
numbers Rome had been secularized. An Italian
dandy is a very fine fellow; but I confess these goodly
throngs of them are to my sense an insufficient com
pensation for the absent monsignori, treading the
streets in their purple stockings and followed by their
solemn servants, returning on their behalf the bows
of the meaner sort; for the mourning gear of the car-

94

FOREIGN PARTS.

dinals' coaches that formerly glittered with scarlet and
swung with the weight of the footmen clinging be
hind; for the certainty that you will not, by the best
of traveller's luck, meet the Pope sitting deep in the
shadow of his great chariot with uplifted fingers, like
some inaccessible idol in his shrine. You may meet
the king, indeed, who is as ugly, as imposingly ugly,
as some idols, though not as inaccessible. The other
day, as I was passing the Quirinal, he drove up in a
low carriage, with a single attendant; and a group of
men and women, who had been waiting near the gate,
rushed at him with a number of folded papers. The
carriage slackened pace, and he pocketed their offerings
with a business-like air — that of a good-natured man
accepting hand-bills at a street-corner. Here was a
monarch at his palace gate receiving petitions from
his subjects — being adjured to right their wrongs. The
scene ought to have been dramatic, but, somehow, it
had no more color than a woodcut in an illustrated
newspaper. Comfortable I should call it at most; ad
mirably so, certainly, for there were lately few sover
eigns standing, I believe, with whom their people en
joyed these filial hand-to-hand relations. The king
this year, however, has had as little to do with the
Carnival as the Pope, and the inkeepers and Ameri
cans have marked it for their own.
It was advertised to begin at half past two o'clock
of a certain Saturday; and punctually, at the stroke of
the hour, from my room across a wide court, I heard
a sudden multiplication of sounds and confusion of
tongues. I was writing to a friend for whom I cared
more than for a Roman holiday; but as the minutes
elapsed and the hubbub deepened, curiosity got the

A ROMAN HOLIDAY. 95
better of affection, and I remembered that I was really
within eye-shot of a spectacle of which reputation had
ministered to the day-dreams of my infancy. I used
to have a scrap-book with a colored print of the start
ing of the bedizened wild horses, and the use of a
library rich in keepsakes and annuals in which the frontis
piece was commonly a masked lady in a balcony- —
the heroine of a delightful tale further on. Agitated
by these tender memories, I descended into the street;
but I confess that I looked in vain for a masked lady
who might serve as a frontispiece, or any object what
ever that might adorn a tale. Masked and muffled
ladies there were in abundance; but their masks were
of ugly -wire, and perfectly resembled the little covers
placed upon strong cheese in German hotels, and their
drapery was a shabby water-proof, with the hoods
pulled over their chignons. They were armed with
great tin scoops or funnels, with which they were
solemnly shovelling lime and flour out of bushel bas
kets down upon the heads of the people in the street.
They were packed into balconies all the way down the
long vista of the Corso, in which their calcareous
shower maintained a gritty, unpalatable fog. The
crowd was compact in the street, and the Americans
in it were tossing back confetti out of great satchels
hung around their necks. It was quite the "you're
another" sort of repartee, and less flavored than I had
hoped with the airy mockery which tradition associates
with this festival. The scene was striking, certainly;
but, somehow, not as I had dreamed of its being. I
stood contemplating it, I suppose, with a peculiarly
tempting blankness of visage, for in a moment I re
ceived half a bushel of flour on ray too-philosophic

g6 FOREIGN PARTS.
head. Decidedly it was an ignoble form of humor. I
shook my ears like an emergent diver, and had a sud
den vision of how still and sunny and solemn, how
peculiarly and undisturbedly themselves, how secure
from any intrusion less sympathetic than one's own,
certain outlying parts of Rome must be just now. The
Carnival had received its death-blow, in my imagina
tion; and it has been ever since but a thin and dusky
ghost of pleasure that flits at intervals in and out of
my consciousness. I turned my back on the Corso and
wandered away, and found the grass-grown quarters
delightfully free even from the possibility of a fellow-
countryman! And so, having set myself an example,
I have been keeping Carnival by strolling perversely
along the silent circumference of Rome. I have no
doubt I have lost a great deal. The Princess Mar
garet has occupied a balcony opposite the open space
which leads into the Via Condotti, and, I believe, like
the discreet princess that she is, has dealt in no mis
siles but bonbons, bouquets and white doves. I would
have waited half an hour any day to see the Princess
Margaret holding a dove on her forefinger; but I never
chanced to notice any preparations for this delightful
spectacle. And yet, do what you will, you cannot
really elude the Carnival. As the days elapse, it filters
down, as it were, into the manners of the common
people, and before the week is over the very beggars
at the church-doors seem to have gone to the expense
of a domino. When you meet these specimens of dingy
drollery capering about in dusky back streets at all
hours of the day and night, and flitting out of black
doorways between ' those greasy groups which cluster
about Roman thresholds, you feel that once upon a

A ROMAN HOLIDAY. 97
time the seeds of merriment raust have been implanted
in the Roraan temperament with a vigorous hand. An
unsophisticated American cannot but be struck with
the immense number of persons, of every age and
various conditions, to whom it costs nothing in the
nature of an ingenuous blush to walk up and down
the streets in the costurae of a theatrical supernumerary.
Fathers of families do it at the head of an admiring
progeniture; aunts and uncles and grandmothers do it;
all the family does it, with varying splendor, but the
same good conscience. "A pack of babies!" the phi
losophic American pronounces it for its pains, and
tries to imagine himself strutting along Broadway in a
battered tin helmet and a pair of yellow tights. Our
vices are certainly different; it takes those of the in
nocent sort to be ridiculous! Roman childishness seems
to me so intimately connected with Roman amenity,
urbanity, and general gracefulness, that, for myself, I
should be sorry to lay a tax on it, lest these other
commodities should also cease to come to market.
I was rewarded, when I had turned away with my
ears full of flour, by a glimpse of an intenser life than
the polyglot foolery of the Corso. I walked down by
the back streets to the steps which ascend to the
Capitol — that long inclined plane, rather, broken at
every two paces, which is the unfailing disappointment
of tourists primed for retrospective raptures. Certainly
the Capitol, seen from this side, is not commanding.
The hill is so low, the ascent so narrow, Michael
Angelo's architecture in the quadrangle at the top so
meagre, the whole place, somehow, so much more of a
mole-hill than a raountain, that for the first ten minutes
of your standing there Roman history seems suddenly
Foreign Parts. 7

g8 FOREIGN PARTS.
to have sunk through a trap-door. It emerges, how
ever, on the other side, in the Forum; and here,
meanwhile, if you get no sense of the sublime, you
get gradually a delightful sense of the picturesque.
Nowhere in Rome is there more color, more charm,
more sport for the eye. The gentle slope, during the
winter months, is always covered with lounging sun-
seekers, and especially with those more constantly ob
vious members of the Roman population — beggars,
soldiers, monks and tourists. The beggars and peas
ants lie kicking their heels along that grandest of
loafing-places , the great steps of the Ara Coeli. The
dwarfish look of the Capitol is greatly increased, I
think, by the neighborhood of this huge blank stair
case, mouldering away in disuse, with the weeds in its
crevices, and climbing to the rudely solemn facade of
the church. The sunshine glares on this great un
finished wall only to light up its featureless despair, its
expression of conscious, irremediable incompleteness.
Sometimes, massing its rusty screen against the deep
blue sky, with the little cross and the sculptured porch
casting a clear-cut shadow on the bricks, it seems to
have an even more than Roman desolation, and con
fusedly suggests Spain and Africa — lands with abso
lutely nothing but a past. The legendary wolf of
Rome has lately been accommodated with a little arti
ficial grotto, among the cacti and the palms, in the
fantastic triangular garden squeezed between the steps
of the church and the ascent to the Capitol, where she
holds a perpetual levee, and "draws," apparently, as
powerfully as the Pope himself Above, in the little
piazza before the stuccoed palace which rises so
jauntily on a basement of thrice its magnitude, are

A ROMAN HOLIDAY. gg
more loungers and knitters in the sun, seated round
the massively inscribed base of the statue of Marcus
Aurelius. Ha-wthorne has perfectly expressed the at
titude of this admirable figure in saying that it extends
its arm with " a command which is in itself a benedic
tion." I doubt if any statue of king or captain in the
public places of the world has more to commend it
to the popular heart. Irrecoverable simplicity has no
sturdier representative. Here is an impression that
the sculptors of the last three hundred years have
been laboriously trying to reproduce; but contrasted
with this mild old monarch their prancing horsemen
seem a company of riding-masters. The admirably
human character of the figure survives the rusty de
composition of the bronze and the archaic angularity
of the design; and one may call it singular that in the
capital of Christendom the portrait most suggestive of
9, Christian will is that of a pagan emperor.
You recover in some degree your stifled hopes of
sublimity as you pass beyond the palace and take your
choice of two curving slopes, to descend into the Forum.
Then you see that the little stuccoed edifice is but a
modern excrescence upon the mighty cliff of a primitive
construction where the great squares of porous tufa,
as they descend, seem to resolve themselves back into
the unhewn rock. There is a prodigious picturesque
ness in the union of this airy, fresh-faced superstructure
and these deep-plunging, hoary foundations; and few
things in Rome are raore entertaining to the eye than
to measure the long plumb-line which drops frora the
inhabited windows of the palace, with their little over-
peeping balconies, their muslin curtains, their bird
cages, down to the rugged handiwork of the Republic.

loo FOREIGN PARTS.
In the Forum proper the sublime is eclipsed again,
though the late extension of the excavations gives a
chance for it.
Nothing in Rome helps your fancy to a raore vigor
ous backward flight than to lounge on a sunny day
over the railing which guards the central hollow. It
gives one the oddest feeling to see the past, the ancient
world, as one stands there, bodily turned up -with the
spade, and transforraed from an immaterial, inacces
sible fact of time into a matter of soils and surfaces.
The pleasure is the same — in kind — as what you enjoy
at Pompeii, and the pain the same. It was not here, how
ever, that I found my compensation for forfeiting the
spectacle on the Corso, but in a little church at the end
of the narrow byway which wanders up the Palatine,
just beside the Arch of Titus. This b)rway leads you
between high walls, then takes a bend and introduces
you to a long row of rusty, dusty little pictures of the
stations of the cross. Beyond these stands a small
church, with a fagade so modest that you hardly re
cognize it until you see the leather curtain. I never
see a leather curtain without lifting it; it is sure to
cover a picture of some sort — good, bad, or indifferent.
The picture this tirae was poor — whitewash and tar
nished candlesticks and mouldy muslin flowers being
its principal features. I should not have remained if
I had not been stmck with the attitude of the single
worshipper — a young priest kneeling before one of the
side-altars, who, as I entered, lifted his head and gave
me a sidelong look — so charged with the languor of
devotion that he immediately became an object of
interest. He was visiting each of the altars in turn,
and kissing the balustrade beneath them. He was alone

A ROMAN HOLIDAY. lOI
in the church, and, indeed, in the whole neighborhood.
There were no beggars, even, at the door; they were
plying their trade on the skirts of the Carnival. In
the whole deserted place he alone knelt there for
religion, and, as I sat respectfully by, it seemed to me
that I could hear in the perfect silence the far-away
uproar of the maskers. It was my late impression of
these frivolous people, I suppose, joined with the ex
traordinary gravity of the young priest's face — his
pious fatigue, his droning prayer, and his isolation —
which gave me just then and there a supreme vision
of the religious passion — its privations and resigna
tions and exhaustions, and its terribly small share of
amusement. He was young and strong and evidently
of not too refined a fibre to enjoy the Carnival; but
planted there with his face pale with fasting and his
knees stiff with praying, he seemed so stern a satire on
it and on the crazy thousands who were preferring it
to his way, that I half expected to see some heavenly
portent out of a monastic legend come down and con
firm his choice. But, I confess, though I was not
enamored of the Carnival myself, that his seeraed a
grim preference, and this forswearing of the world a
terrible game — a gaining one only if your zeal never
falters; a hard fight when it does! In such an hour,
to a stout young fellow like the hero of my anecdote,
the smell of incense raust seera horribly stale, and the
muslin flowers and gilt candlesticks a very meagre
piece of splendor. And it would not have helped hira
much to think that not so very far away, just beyond
the Forum, in the Corso, there was sport for the mil
lion, for nothing. I doubt whether my young priest
had thought of this. He had made himself a temple

102 FOREIGN PARTS.
out of the very substance of his innocence, and his
prayers followed each other too fast for the tempter to
slip in a whisper. And so, as I say, I found a solider
fact of human nature than the love of coriandoli!
One never passes the Coliseum, of course, without
paying it one's respects — without going in under one
of the hundred portals and crossing the long oval and
sitting down awhile, generally at the foot of the cross
in the centre. I always feel, as I do so, as if I were
sitting in the depths of some Alpine valley. The
upper portions of the side toward the Esquiline seem
as remote and lonely as an Alpine ridge, and you look
up at their rugged sky-line, drinking in the sun and
silvered by the blue air, with much the same feeling
with which you would look at a gray cliff on which an
eagle might lodge. This roughly mountainous quality
of the great ruin is its chief interest; beauty of detail
has pretty well vanished, especially since the high-
growing wild-flowers have been plucked away by the
new government, whereof the emissaries, at certain
points of their task, must have felt as if they shared
the dreadful trade of those who gather samphire. Even
if you are on your way to the Lateran, you will not
grudge the twenty minutes it will take you, on leaving
the Coliseum, to turn away under the Arch of Constan
tine, whose noble, battered bas-reliefs, with the chain
of tragic statues — fettered, drooping barbarians — round
its sumrait, I assume you to have profoundly admired,
to the little piazza before the church of San Giovanni
e Paolo, on the slope of the Cslian. There is no more
charmingly picturesque spot in Rorae. The ancient
brick apse of the church peeps down into the trees of
the little wooded walk before the neighboring church

A ROMAN HOLIDAY. 103
of San Gregorio, intensely venerable beneath its exces
sive modernization; and a series of heavy brick but
tresses, flying across to an opposite wall, overarches the
short, steep, paved passage which leads you into the
piazza. This is bordered on one side by the long
mediseval portico of the church of the two saints,
sustained by eight time-blackened columns of granite
and marble; on another by the great scantily- windowed
walls of a Passionist convent; on a third by the gate
of a charming viUa, of which the tall porter, with his
cockade and silver-topped staff, standing sublime behind
his grating, seems a kind of mundane St. Peter, I sup
pose, to the beggars who sit at the church-door or lie
in the sun along the farther slope, which leads to the
gate of the convent. The place always seems to me
the perfection of an out-of-the-way corner — a place
you would think twice before telling people about, lest
you should find them there the next time you were to
go. It is such a group of objects, singly and in their
happy combination, as one must come to Rome to find
at the door of one's villa; but what makes it peculiarly a
picture is the beautiful dark red campanile of the
church, standing embedded in the mass of the convent.
It begins, as so many things in Rome begin, with a
stout foundation of antique travertine, and rises high,
in delicately quaint medieeval brickwork — little stories
and apertures, sustained on miniature columns and
adorned with little cracked slabs of green and yellow
marble, inserted almost at random. When there are
three or four brown-breasted contadini sleeping in the
sun before the convent doors, and a departing monk
leading his shadow down over them, I think you will
not find anything in Rome more sketchable.

104 FOREIGN PARTS.
If you stop, however, to observe everything worthy
of your water-colors, you will never reach the Lateran.
My business was much less with the interior of St.
John Lateran, which I have never found peculiarly
interesting, than with certain charming features of its
surrounding precinct — the crooked old court beside it,
which admits you to the Baptistery and to a delightful
rear-view of the queer architectural odds and ends
which in Rome may compose a florid ecclesiastical
facade. There are more of these, a stranger jumble of
promiscuous detail, of lurking recesses and wanton
projections and inexplicable windows, than I have
memory or phrases for; but the gem of the collection
is the oddly-perched peaked turret, with its yellow
travertine welded upon the rusty brickwork, which was
not meant to be suspected, and the brickwork retreat
ing beneath and leaving it in the odd position of a
tower under which you raay see the sky. As to the
great front of the church, overlooking the Porta San
Giovanni, you are not admitted behind the scenes; the
phrase is quite in keeping, for the architecture has a
vastly theatrical air. It is extremely imposing — that
of St. Peter's alone is more so; and when from far off
on the Campagna you see the colossal images of the
mitred saints along the top standing distinct against
the sky, you forget their coarse construction and their
inflated draperies. The view from the great space
which stretches from the church-steps to the city wall
is the very prince of views. Just beside you, beyond
the great alcove of mosaic, is the Scala Santa, the marble
staircase which (says the legend) Christ descended
under the weight of Pilate's judgment, and which all
Christians must forever ascend on their knees; before

A ROMAN HOLIDAY. IO5
you is the city gate which opens upon the Via Appia
Nuova, the long gaunt file of arches of the Claudian
aqueduct, their jagged ridge stretching away like the
vertebral coluran of some monstrous, mouldering skele
ton, and upon the blooming brown and purple flats and
dells of the Campagna and the glowing blue of the
Alban Mountains, spotted with their white, high-nestling
towns; and to your left is the great grassy space lined
with dwarfish mulberry-trees, which stretches across to
the damp little sister-basilica of Santa Croce in Gerusa
lemme. During a former visit to Rome I lost my
heart to this idle tract, and wasted much time in
sitting on the steps of the church and watching certain
white-cowled friars who were sure to be passing there
for the delight of my eyes. There are fewer friars
now, and there are a great many of the king's recruits,
who inhabit the ex-conventual barracks adjoining Santa
Croce, and are led forward to practise their goose-step
on the sunny turf Here, too, the poor old cardinals,
who are no longer to be seen on the Pincio, descend
from their mourning-coaches and relax their venerable
knees. These members alone still testify to the tradi
tional splendor of the princes of the Church; for as
they advance, the lifted black petticoat revea,ls a flash
of scarlet stockings and makes you groan at the victory
of civilization over color.
If St. John Lateran disappoints you internally, you
have an easy compensation in traversing the long lane
which connects it with Santa Maria Maggiore and
entering the singularly perfect nave of that most delight
ful of churches. The first day of my stay in Rome,
under the old dispensation, I spent in wandering at
random through the city, with accident for my valet-de-

I06 FOREIGN PARTS.
place. It served me to perfection and introduced me
to the best things; among others to Santa Maria Mag
giore. First impressions, memorable irapressions, are
generally irrecoverable; they often leave one the wiser,
but they rarely return in the same forra. I reraember,
of my coming uninformed and unprepared into Santa
Maria Maggiore, only that I sat for half an hour on fhe
edge of the base of one of the marble columns of the
beautiful nave and enjoyed a perfect feast of fancy.
The place seemed to me so endlessly suggestive that
perception became a sort of throbbing confusion of
images, and I departed with a sense of knowing a good
deal that is not set down in Murray. I have sat down
more than once at the base of the same column again;
but you live your life but once, the parts as well as
the whole. The obvious charm of the church is the
formal splendour of the nave — its perfect shapeliness
and rich simplicity, its long double row of white
marble columns and high flat roof, embossed with
intricate gildings and mouldings. It opens into a choir
of an extraordinary nobleness of effect, which I recom
mend you to visit of a fine afternoon. At such a time,
the glowing western light, entering the high windows
of the tribune, kindles the scattered masses of color
into sombre brightness, scintillates on the great soleran
mosaic of the vault, touches the porphyry columns of
the superb baldachino with ruby lights, and buries its
shining shafts in the deep-toned shadows which cluster
over frescos and sculptures and mouldings. The deeper
charm to rae, however, is the social atmosphere of the
church, as I must call it for want of a better terra —
the sense it gives you, in common with most of the
Roman churches, and raore than any of them, of having

A ROMAN HOLIDAY. I07
been for several centuries the resort of a singularly
complicated and picturesque society. It takes no great
shrewdness to perceive that the social rdle of the
Church in Italy is terribly shrunken nowadays; but
also as little, perhaps, to feel that, as they stand, these
deserted temples were produced by a society leavened
through and through by ecclesiastical manners, and
that they formed for ages the constant background of
the human drama. They are, as one may say, the
churchiest churches in Europe — the most worldly, the
most familiar, the most personal. There is not a figure
that I have read of in old-world social history ,that
I cannot iraagine in its proper place kneeling before
the lamp-decked Confession beneath the altar of Santa
Maria Maggiore. One sees after all, however, even
among the raost palpable realities, very much what
one's capricious intellect projects there; and I present
my remarks siraply as a reminder that one's constant
excursions into churches are not the least interesting
episodes of one's walks in Rome.
I had meant to give a simple specimen of these daily
strolls; but I have given it at such a length that I have
scanty space left to touch upon the innumerable topics
which occur to the pen that begins to scribble about
Rome. It is by the aimless fldnerie which leaves you
free to follow capriciously every hint of entertainment,
that you get to know Rome. The greater part of
Roman life goes on in the streets; and to a traveller
fresh from a country in which town-scenery is rather
wanting in variety, it is full of picturesque and curious
incident. If at tiraes you find it rather unsavory, you
may turn aside into the company of shining statues,
ranged in long vistas; into the duskily splendid gal-

I08 FOREIGN PARTS.
leries of the Doria and Colonna Palaces; into the sun-
checkered boskages of antique villas, or into ever-empty
churches, thankful even for a tourist's tribute of interest.
The squalor of Rome is certainly a stubborn fact, and
there is no denying that it is a dirty place. "Don't
talk to me of liking Rome," an old sojourner lately said
to me; "you don't really like it till you like the dirt."
This statement was a shock to my nascent passion;
but — I blush to write it — I am growing to think there
is something in it. The nameless uncleanness with
which all Roman things are oversmeared seems to one
at first a damning token of moral vileness. It fills
you with more even of contempt than pity for Roman
poverty, and you look with inexpressible irritation at
the grovelling creatures who complacently vegetate in
the midst of it. Soon after his arrival here, an inti
mate friend of mine had an illness which depressed
his spirits and made him unable to see the universal
"joke" of things. I found him one evening in his arm
chair, gazing grimly at his half-packed trunk. On my
asking him what he intended: "This horrible place,"
he cried, "is an insufferable weight on my soul, and it
seems to me monstrous to come here and feast on
human misery. You are very happy to be able to
take things easily; you have either much more philo
sophy than I, or much less. The squalor, the shabbi
ness, the provincialism, the barbarisra, of Rorae are
too much for me. I must go somewhere and drink
deep of modern civilization. This morning, as I came
up the Scalinata, I felt as if I could strangle every one
of those filthy models that loaf there in their shameless
degradation and sit staring at you with all the ignorance,
and none of the innocence, of childhood. Is it not an

A ROMAN HOLIDAY. lOg
abomination that our enjoyment here directly implies
their wretchedness; their knowing neither how to read
nor to write, their draping themselves in mouldy rags,
their doing never a stroke of honest work, their wear
ing those muraray-swathings round their legs from one
year's end to another? So they are kept, that Rome
may be picturesque, and the forestieri abound, and a
lot of profligate artists may paint wretchedly poor
pictures of them. What should I stay for? I know
the Vatican by heart; and, except St. Peter's and the
Pantheon, there's not a fine building in Rome. I am
sick of the Italian face — of black eyes and blue chins
and lying vowel sounds. I want to see people who
look as if they had a conscience and cared for some
thing else than fiocking to the Pincio to suck the knobs
on their canes and stare at fine ladies they will never
by any hazard speak to. The Duke of Sermoneta has
just been elected to — something or other — by a proper
majority. But what do you think of their mustering
but a hundred voters? I like the picturesque, but I
like the march of mind as well, and I long to see a
newspaper a little bigger than a play-bill. I shall leave
by the first train in the raorning, and if you have any
self-respect you will corae with rae!"
My friend's accent was raoving, and for some mo
ments I was inclined to follow his example; but deep
in my heart I felt the stir of certain gathered pledges
of future enjoyment, and after a rapid struggle I bade
him an affectionate farewell. He travelled due north,
and has been having a delightful winter at Munich,
where the march of mind advances to the accompani
ment of Wagner's music. Since his departure, to prove
to him that I have rather more than less philosophy, I

IIO FOREIGN PARTS.
have written to him that the love of Rome is, in its
last analysis, simply that perfectly honorable and le
gitimate instinct, the love of the status quo — the
preference of contemplative and slow-moving-minds
for the visible, palpable, measurable present — touched
here and there with the warm lights and shadows of
the past. "What you call dirt," an excellent authority
has affirmed, "I call color;" and it is certain that, if
cleanliness is next to godliness, it is a very distant
neighbor to chiaroscuro. That I have come to relish
dirt as dirt, I hesitate yet awhile to affirm; but I ad
mit that, as I walk about the streets and glance under
black archways into dim old courts and up mouldering
palace fajades at the colored rags that flap over the
twisted balustrades of balconies, I find I very much
enjoy their "tone;" and I remain vaguely conscious
that it would require a strong stomach to resolve this
tone into its component elements. I do not know that
my self-respect permanently suffers; it simply retires
for a moment to give place to an appreciation of pic
torial motive. As for the models on the Spanish Steps,
I have lately been going somewhat to the studios, and
the sight of the copies has filled me with compassionate
tenderness for the originals. I regard them as an in
jured and calumniated race, and I freely forgive them
their decomposing gaiters and their vowel sounds.
I owe the reader amends for writing either of Roman
churches or of Roman walks, without an allusion to St.
Peter's. I go there often on rainy days, with prosaic
intentions of "exercise," and carry them out, body and
mind. As a mere promenade, St. Peter's is unequalled.
It is better than the Boulevard, than Piccadilly or
Broadway, and if it were not the most beautiful place

A ROMAN HOLIDAY. Ill
in the world it would be the most entertaining. Few
great works of art last longer to one's curiosity. You
think you have taken its measure; but it expands
again, and leaves your vision shrunken. I never let
the ponderous leather curtain bang down behind me,
-without feeling as if all former visits were but a vague
prevision and this the first crossing of the threshold.
Tourists will never cease to be asked, I suppose, if they
have not been disappointed in the size of St. Peter's;
but a few modest spirits, here and there, I hope, will
never cease to confess that it is greater than their
imagination. It seemed to me from the first the
hugest thing conceivable — a real exaltation of one's
idea of- space; so that one's entrance, even from the
great empty square, glaring beneath- the deep blue
sky, or cool in the far-cast shadow of the iraraense
fagade, seems not so much a going in somewhere as a
going out. I should confidently recommend a first
glirapse of the interior to a raan of pleasure in quest
of new sensations, as one of the most direct the world
affords. There are days when the vast nave looks
vaster than at others, and the gorgeous canopy of the
altar a longer journey beyond the far-spreading tessel
lated plain of the pavement, when the light has a
quality which lets things look their largest, and the
scattered figures mark happily the scale of certain
details. Then you have only to stroll and stroll, and
gaze and gaze, and watch the baldachino lift its bronze
architecture, like a temple within a temple, and feel
yourself, at the bottom of the soaring rotunda, dwindle
to a crawling dot. Much of the beauty of St. Peter's
resides, I think, in the fact, that it is all general beauty,
that you are appealed to by no specific details, that the

I 1 2 FOREIGN PARTS.
details indeed, when you observe thera, are often poor
and soraetiraes ridiculous. The sculptures, with the
sole exception of Michael Angelo's admirable Pieta,
which lurks obscurely in a dusky chapel, are either
bad or indifferent; and the universal incrustation of
marble, though sumptuous enough, has a less brilliant
effect than much later work of the same sort — that,
for instance, of St. Paul's without the Walls. The
great beauty of the church is its brilliant simplicity.
It seems — as it is — a realization of the happiest mood
of a colossal imagination. The happiest raood, I say,
because this is the only one of Michael Angelo's works
in the presence of which you venture to be cheerful.
You raay smile in St. Peter's without a sense of
sacrilege, which you can hardly do, if you have a
tender conscience, in Westrainster Abbey or Notre
Dame. The abundance of enclosed light has much
to do with your smile. There are no shadows, to
speak of, no marked effects of shade; but effects of
light innumerable — points at which the light seems to
mass itself in airy density, and scatter itself in en
chanting gradations and cadences. It performs the
office of shadow in Gothic churches; hangs like a roll
ing mist along the gilded vault of the nave, melts into
bright interfusion the mosaic scintillations of the dome,
clings and clusters and lingers and vivifies the whole
vast atmosphere. A good Catholic, I suppose, is a
Catholic anywhere, in the grandest as well as in the
humblest churches; but to a traveller not especially
pledged to be devout, St. Peter's speaks raore of con
tentment than of aspiration. The mind seems to ex
pand there immensely, but on its own level, as we may
say. It marvels at the reach of the human imagination

A ROMAN HOLIDAY. 1 1 3
and¬the vastness of our earthly means. This is heaven
enough, we say; what it lacks in beauty it makes up
in certainty. And yet if one's half-hours at St. Peter's
are not actually spent on one's knees, the mind reverts
to its tremendous presence with an ardor deeply akin
to a passionate effusion of faith. When you are weary
of the swarming democracy of your fellow- tourists, of
the unremunerative aspects of human nature on the
Corso and Pincio, of the oppressively frequent combi
nation of coronets on carriage panels and stupid faces
in carriages, of addled brains and lacquered boots, of
ruin- and dirt and decay, of priests and beggars and
the myriad tokens of a halting civilization, the image
of the great temple depresses the balance of your
doubts, seems to refute the invasive vulgarity of things
and assure you that nothing great is impossible. It
is a comfort, in other words, to feel that there is at
the worst nothing but a cab-fare between your dis
content and one of the greatest of human achieve
ments. This might serve as a Lenten peroration to these
remarks of mine which have strayed so wofully from
their jovial text, but that I ought fairly to confess that
my last impression of the Carnival was altogether Car-
nivalesque. The merry-making on Shrove Tuesday
had an air of native vigor, and the dead letter of tra
dition seeraed at moments to be informed with a living
spirit. I relinquished my scepticism and spent a long
afternoon on the Corso. Almost every one was a
masker, but I had no need to conform; the pelting
rain of confetti effectually disguised me. I cannot say
I found it all very exhilarating; but here and there I
noticed a brighter episode — a capering clown inflamed
Foreign Paris. °

114 FOREIGN PARTS.
with contagious jollity, some finer humorist, forming a
circle every thirty yards to crow at his indefatigable
sallies. One clever performer especially pleased me,
and I should have been glad to catch a glimpse ofthe
natural man. I had a fancy that he was taking a great
intellectual holiday, and that his gaiety was in inverse
ratio to his daily mood. He was dressed like a needy
scholar, in an ancient evening-coat, with a rusty black
hat and gloves fantastically patched, and he carried a
little volume carefully under his arm. His humors
were in excellent taste, his whole raanner was the per
fection of genteel comedy. The crowd seemed to re
lish him vastly, and he immediately commanded a glee
fully attentive audience. Many of his sallies I lost;
those I caught were excellent. His trick was often to
begin by taking some one urbanely and caressingly by
the chin and complimenting him on the intelligenza
della sua fisionomia. I kept near him as long as I could;
for he seemed to me an artist, cherishing a disinterested
passion for the grotesque. But I should have liked to
see him the next morning, or when he unmasked that
night, over his hard-earned supper, in a smoky trattoria!
As the evening went on, the crowd thickened and be
came a motley press of shouting, pushing, scrambhng
— everything but squabbling — revellers. The rain
of missiles ceased at dusk; but the universal deposit
of chalk and flour was trampled into a cloud, made
lurid by the flaring pyramids of gas-lamps, replacing
for the occasion the stingy Roman luminaries. Early
in the evening came off the classic exhibition of the
moccoletti. which I but half saw, like a -languid reporter
resigned beforehand to be cashiered for want of enter
prise. Frora the mouth of a side-street, over a thousand

A. ROMAN HOLIDAY. II5
heads, I beheld a huge, slow-moving illuminated car,
from which blue-lights and rockets and Roman candles
were being discharged, to meet in a dim fuliginous
glare far above the house-tops. It was like a glirapse
of some pubhc orgy in ancient Babylon. In the small
hours of the morning, walking homeward frora a private
entertainment, I found Ash- Wednesday still kept at
bay. The Corso was flaring with light, and smelt like
a circus. Every one was taking friendly liberties with
every one else , and using up the dregs of his festive
energy in convulsive hootings and gymnastics. Here
and there certain indefatigable spirits, clad all in red,
as devils, were leaping furiously about with torches,
and being supposed to startle you. But they shared
the universal geniality, and bequeathed me no midnight
fears as a pretext for keeping Lent — the carnevale dei
preti, as I read in that profanely radical sheet, the
Capitale. Of this, too, I have been having glimpses.
Going lately into Santa Francesca Romana, the pic
turesque church near the Temple of Peace , I found a
feast for the eyes — a dim, crimson-toned light through
curtained windows, a great festoon of tapers round the
altar, a bulging girdle of lamps before the sunken shrine
beneath, and a dozen white-robed Dominicans scattered
in the happiest composition on the pavement. It was
better than the moccoletti.

1X6 FOREIGN PARTS.

ROMAN RIDES.

Rome, last of April 1873.
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, com
pels 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 color 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 stood for
some time at the edge of a meadow, gazing away 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 it is easy to repeat.
The country rolled away around rae into slopes and
dells of enchanting contour, checkered with purple and
blue . and blooming brown. The lights and shadows
were at play on the Sabine Mountains — an alternation
of tones so exquisite that you can indicate them only
by some fantastic comparison to sapphire and amber.
In the foreground a contadino, in his cloak and peaked
hat, was jogging solitary on his ass; and here and there
in the distance, among blue undulations, some white
village, some gray tower, helped deliciously to make
the scene the t)rpical "Italian landscape" of old-

, ROMAN RIDES. 1 1 7
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 deliciously strange, and
that the Roman Campagna is the most suggestive place
in the world. To ride once, under these circumstances,
is of course to ride again, and to allot to the Cam
pagna 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. If you have ridden much,
to think of Rome afterwards will be, I imagine, to think
still respectfully and regretfully enough of the Vatican
and the Pincio, the streets and the duskily picturesque
street-life; but it will be even more to wonder, with an
irrepressible contraction of the heart, when again you
shall feel yourself bounding over the flower-smothered
turf, or pass frora one fraraed picture to another beside
the open arches of the crumbling aqueducts. You look
at Rome so often from sorae grassy hill-top — hugely
compact within its walls, with St. 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 large detail in an ira
pressive landscape. And within the walls you think
of your intended ride as a sort of romantic possibility;
of the Campagna generally as an illiraitable experience.
One's rides certainly raake Rorae a richer place to live
in than raost others. To dwell in a city which ,- much

I 1 8 FOREIGN PARTS.
as you grumble at it, is, after all, very fairly a modem
city; with crowds, and shops, and theatres, and caf&,
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 railes, 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 listen
ing to Neapolitan songs from a gentleman in a very
low-cut shirt — -all this is to lead a sort of double life,
and to gather from the hurrying hours more irapressions
than a mind of modest capacity quite knows how to
dispose of I touched lately upon this therae with a
friend who, I fancied, would understand me, and who
immediately assured me that he had just spent a day
which this mingled diversity of sensation made to the
days one spends elsewhere what an uncommonly good
novel is to a newspaper. "There was an air of idle
ness about it, if you will," he said, "and it was cer
tainly 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

ROMAN RIDES. Iig
more of a heros de raman than myself" Then he pro
ceeded to relate how he had taken a long ride with a
lady whora he extreraely adraired. "We turned off
from the Tor di Quinto Road to that castellated farra-
hoilse you know of — once a Ghibelline fortress — whither
Claude Lorraine used to come to paint pictures of
which the surrounding landscape is still artistically
suggestive. We went into the inner court, a cloister
alraost, with jthe carven capitals of its loggia-columns,
and looked at a handsome chUd swinging shyly against
the half-opened door of a room whose irapenetrable
shadow, behind her, made her, as it were, a sketch in
bituminous water-colors. We talked with the farmer,
a handsorae, pale, fever-tainted fellow, with a well-to-
do air, which did'nt in the least prevent his affability
taking a turn which resulted in his acceptance of small
coin; and then we galloped away and away over the
meadows which stretch with hardly a break to Veji.
The day was strangely delicious, with a cool gray sky
and just a touch of moisture in the air, stirred by our
rapid motion. The Campagna, in the colorless, even
light, was more solemn and romantic than ever; and
a ragged shepherd, driving a meagre, straggling flock
whom we stopped to ask our way of, was a perfect
type of pastoral, weather-beaten, misery. He was pre
cisely the shepherd for the foreground of a scratchy
etching. There were faint odors of spring in the air,
and the grass here and there was streaked with great
patches of daisies; but it was spring with a foreknowledge
of autumn — a day to be enjoyed with a sober smile —
a day somehow to make one feel as if one had seen
and felt a great deal — quite, as I say, like a hSros de
roman. Apropos of such people, it was the illustrious

129 FOREIGN PARTS.
Pelham, I think, who, on being asked if he rode, re
plied that he left those -violent exercises to the ladies.
But under such a sky, in such an air, over acres of
daisied turf, a long, long gallop is certainly the gentlest,
the most refined of pleasures. The elastic bound of
your horse is the poetry of motion; and if you are so
happy as to add to it — not the JDrose of companion
ship, riding comes to seem to you really as an intellec
tual pursuit. "My gallop, at any rate," said my friend,
"threw me into a mood which gave an extraordinary
zest to the rest of the day." He was to go to a dinner
party at a villa on the edge of Rome, and Madame
X  , who was also going, called for him in her car
riage. "It was a long drive," he went on, "through
the Forum, past the Coliseum. She told rae a long
story about a most interesting person. Toward the
end I saw through the carriage window a slab of rugged
sculptures. We were passing under the Arch of Con
stantine. In the hall pavement of the villa is a rare
antique mosaic — one of the largest and most perfect;
the ladies, on their way to the drawing-room, trail over
it the flounces of Worth. We drove home late, and
there's my day."
On your exit from most of the gates of Rome you
have generally half an hour's riding through winding
lanes, many of which are hardly less charming than the
open meadows. On foot, the walls and high hedges
would vex you and spoil your walk; but in the saddle
you generally overtop them and see treasures of love
liness. Yet a Roman wall in the springtime is for
that matter as picturesque as anything it conceals.
Crumbling grain by grain, colored and mottled to a
hundred tones by sun and storm, with its rugged struc-

.ROMAN RIDES. 121
ture of brick extruding through its coarse complexion
of peeling stucco, its creeping lace-work of wandering
i-vy starred with miniature violets, and its wild fringe
of stouter flowers lifted against the sky — it is as little
as possible a blank partition; it is almost a piece of
landscape. At this moment, in mid- April, all the
ledges and cornices are wreathed with flaming poppies,
nodding there as if they knew so well what faded
grays and yellows were an offset to their scarlet. But
the best point in a dilapidated wall of vineyard or
villa is of course the gateway, lifting its great arch of
cheap rococo scroll-work, its balls and shields and
mossy dishcovers (as they always seem to me) and
flanked with its dusky cypresses. I never pass one
without taking out my mental sketch-book and jotting
it down as a -vignette in the insubstantial record of my
ride. They always look to me intensely sad and
dreary, as if they led to the moated grange where
Mariana waited in desperation for something to happen;
and I fancy the usual inscription over the porch to be
a recommendation to those who enter to renounce all
hope of anything but a glass of more or less agreeably
acrid vino romana. For what you chiefly see over the
walls and at the end of the straight, short avenue of
rusty cypresses are the appurtenances of a vigna — a
couple of acres of little upright sticks, blackening in
the sun, and a vast, sallow- faced, scantily- windowed
mansion, whose expression denotes little intellectual
life beyond what goes to the driving of a hard bargain
over the tasted hogsheads. If Mariana is there, she
certainly has no pile of old magazines to beguile her
leisure. Intellectual life, if the term be not too pompous,
seems to the contemplative tourist as he wanders about

122 FOREIGN PARTS.
Rome, to exist only as a thin deposit of the past.
Within the rococo gateway, which itself has a vague
literary suggestiveness, at the end of the cypress walk,
you will probably see a mythological group in rusty
marble — a Cupid and Psyche, a Venus and Paris, an
Apollo and Daphne — the relic of an age when a Roman
proprietor thought it fine to patronize the arts. But I
imagine you are safe in thinking that it constitutes the
only literary allusion that has been made on the pre
mises for three or four generations.
There is a franker cheerfulness — though certainly a
proper amount of that forlornness which lurks about
every object to which the Campagna forms a back
ground — in the primitive little taverns where, on the
homeward stretch, in the waning light, you are often
glad to rein up and demand a bottle of their best.
But their best and their worst are the same, though
with a shifting price, and plain vino bianco or vino
rosso (rarely both) is the sole article of refreshment in
which they deal. There is a ragged bush over the
door, and within, under a dusky vault, on crooked
cobble-stones, sit half a dozen contadini in their indigo
jackets and goatskin breeches, with their elbows on the
table. There is generally a rabble of infantile beggars
at the door, pretty enough in their dusty rags, with
their fine eyes and intense Italian smile, to make you
forget your private vow of doing your individual best
to make these people, whora you like so rauch, unlearn
their old vices. Was Porta Pia bombarded three years
ago that Peppino should still grow up to whine for a
copper? But the Italian shells had no direct raessage
for Peppino's storaach — and you are going to a dinner
party at a villa. So Peppino "points" an instant for

ROMAN RIDES. I 23
the copper in the dust and grows up a Roman beggar.
The whole little place is the raost priraitive forra of
hostelry; but along any of the roads leading out of the
city you may find establishments of a higher type, with
Garibaldi, superbly mounted and foreshortened, painted
on the wall, or a lady in a low-necked dress opening
a fictive lattice -with irresistible hospitality, and a yard
containing the classic pine-wreathed arbor which casts
thin shadows upon benches and tables draped and
cushioned with the white dust from which the high
ways from the gates borrow most of their local color.
But, as a rider, I say, you avoid the high-roads, and, if
you are a person of taste,- don't grumble at the occa
sional need of following the walls of the city. City-
walls, to a properly constituted American, can never
be an object of indifference; and there is certainly a
fine solemnity in pacing in the shadow of this massive
cincture of Rome. I have found myself, as I skirted
its base, talking of trivial things, but never without a
sudden reflection on the deplorable impermanence of
first impressions. A twelvemonth ago the raw plank
fences of a Boston suburb, inscribed with the virtues
of healing drugs, bristled along my horizon: now I
glance with idle eyes at this compacted antiquity, in
which a more learned sense may read portentous dates
and signs — Servius, Aurelian, Honorius. But even to
idle eyes the walls of Rome abound m suggestive epi
sodes. In some places, where the huge brickwork is
black with time, and certain strange square towers look
down at you with still blue eyes — the Roman sky
peering through -lidless loopholes — and there is nothing
but white dust in the road and solitude in the air, I
feel like a wandering Tartar touching on the confines

124 FOREIGN PARTS.
of the Celestial Empire. The wall of China must
have very much such a gaunt robustness. The color
of the Roman ramparts is everywhere fine, and their
rugged patchwork has been subdued by time and
weather to the mellow harmony that painters love.
On the northern side of the city, behind the Vatican,
St. Peter's, and the Trastevere, I have seen them glow
ing in the late afternoon with the tones of ancient bronze
and rusty gold. Here, at various points, they are em
bossed with the Papal insignia — the tiara with its fly
ing bands and crossed keys — for which the sentimental
tourist has possibly a greater kindness than of yore.
With the dome of St. Peter's resting on their cornice
and the hugely-clustered architecture of the Vatican
rising from them as from a terrace, they seem indeed
the valid bulwark of an ecclesiastical city. Vain bul
wark, alas ! sighs the sentimental tourist, fresh frora the
meagre entertainment of this latter Holy Week. But
he may find spectacular consolation in this neighbor
hood at a source where, as I pass, I never faU to apply
for it. At half an hour's walk beyond the Porta San
Pancrazio, beneath the wall of the Villa Doria, is a
delightfully pompous ecclesiastical gateway of the
seventeenth century, erected by Paul V. to com
memorate his restoration of the acqueducts through
which the stream bearing his name flows towards that
fine, florid porti<!o which covers its clear-sheeted out-
gush on the crest of the Janiculan. It arches across
the road in the most ornamental manner of the period,
and one can hardly pause before it without seeming to
assist at a ten minutes' revival of old Italy — without
feeling as if one were in a cocked hat and sword, and
were coming up to Rome in another mood than Luther's,

ROMAN RIDES. 125
with a letter of recoraraendation to the raistress of a
Cardinal. The Campagna differs greatly on the two sides of
the Tiber; and it is hard to say which, for the rider,
has the greater charm. The half-dozen rides you may
take frora the Porta San Giovanni possess the perfec
tion of traditional Roman interest, and lead you through
a far-strewn wilderness of ruins — a scattered maze of
torabs and towers and nameless fragraents of antique
masonry. The landscape here has two great features;
close before you on one side is the long, gentle swell
of the Alban Mountains, deeply, fantastically blue in
most weathers, and raarbled with the vague white
masses of their scattered towns and villas. It is hard
to fancy a softer curve than that with which the mountain
sweeps down frora Albano to the plain; it is a perfect
example of the classic beauty of line in the Italian
landscape- — that beauty which, when it fills the back
ground of a picture, raakes us look in the foreground
for a broken column couched upon flowers, and a
shepherd piping to dancing nymphs. At your side,
constantly, you have the broken line of the Claudian
aqueduct, carrying its broad arches far away into the
plain. The meadows over which it stretches are not
the smoothest in the world for a gallop, but there is
no pleasure greater than to wander among them. It
stands knee-deep in the flower-strewn grass, and its
rugged piers are hung with ivy, as the columns of a
church are draped for a festa. Every archway is a
picture, massively framed, of the distance beyond — of
the snow-tipped Sabines and lonely Soracte. As the
spring advances, the whole Campagna smiles and waves
with flowers; but I think they are nowhere more .rank

126 FOREIGN PARTS.
and lovely than in the shifting shadow of the aqueducts,
where they muffle the feet of the columns and smother
the half-dozen brooks which wander in and out like
silver meshes between the legs of a file of giants. They
raake a niche for theraselves, too, in every crevice and
tremble on the vault of the empty conduits. The ivy
hereabouts, in the springtime, is peculiarly brilliant
and delicate; and though it cloaks and muffles these
Roman fragments far less closely than the castles and
abbeys of England, it hangs with the light elegance of
' all Italian vegetation. It is partly, doubtless, because
their mighty outlines are stUl unsoftened that the aque
ducts are so impressive. They seem the very source
of the solitude in which they stand; they look like
architectural spectres, and loom through the light mists
of their grassy desert, as you recede along the line,
with the same insubstantial vastness as if they rose
out of Egyptian sands. It is a great neighborhood of
ruins, many of which, it must be confessed, you have
applauded in many an album. But station a peasant
with sheepskin coat and bandaged legs in the shadow
of the tomb or tower best known to drawing-room art,
and scatter a dozen goats on the mound above him,
and the picture has a charm which has not yet been
sketched away.
The other side of the Campagna has wider fields and
smoother turf and perhaps a greater number of delight
ful rides; the earth is sounder, and there are fewer
pitfalls and ditches. The land for the most part lies
higher and catches more breezes, and the grass, here
and there, is for great stretches as smooth and level as
a carpet. You have no Alban Mountains before you,
but you have in the distance the waving ridge of the

ROMAN RIDES. 127
nearer Apennines, and west of thera, along the course
of the Tiber, the long seaward level of deep-colored
fields, deepening as they recede to the blue and purple
of the sea itself Beyond thera, of a very clear day,
you may see the glitter of the Mediterranean. These
are the rides, perhaps, to remeraber most fondly, for
they lead you to enchanting nooks, and the landscape
has details of absorbing interest. Indeed, when my
sense reverts to the lingering impressions of these
blessed days, it seems a fool's errand to have attempted
to express them, and a waste of words to do more than
recommend the reader to go citywards at twilight, at
the end of March, toward Porta CavaUeggieri, and
note what he sees. At this hour the Campagna seems
peculiarly its melancholy self, and I remember road
side "effects" ofthe most telling sort. Certain mean,
mouldering villas, behind grass-grown courts, have an
indefinably sinister look; there was one in especial, of
which it was impossible not to fancy that a despairiug
creature had once committed suicide there, behind
bolted door and barred window, and that no one has
since had the pluck to go in and see why he never
came out. But, to my sense, every slight wayside de
taU in the country about Rome has a penetrating elo
quence, and I may possibly exaggerate the charms of
very common things. This is the more likely, because
the charms I touch on are so many notes in the scale
of melancholy. To delight in the evidence of barren
lives might seera to be a heartless pastirae, and the
pleasure, I confess, is a pensive one. Melancholy is as
common an influence from Southern things as gaiety,
I think; it rarely fails to strike a Northern observer
when he misses what he calls comfort. Bfeauty is no

128 FOREIGN PARTS.
compensation for the loss; it only raakes it more fatal.
Enough beauty of climate hangs over these Roman
cottages and farm-houses — beauty of light, of at
mosphere, and of vegetation; but their charm for
seekers of the picturesque is the way in which the lus
trous air seems to illuminate their intimate desolation.
Man lives more with Nature in Italy than in New
England; she does more work for him and gives him
more holidays than in our short-summered clime; and
his home is therefore much more destitute of devices
for helping him to do without her, forget her and for
give her. These reflections are, perhaps, the source of
the entertainment you find in a moss-coated stone
stairway climbing outside of a wall; in a queer inner
court, befouled with rubbish and drearily bare of con
venience; in an ancient, quaintly carven well, worked
with infinite labor from an overhanging window; in an
arbor of time-twisted vines, under which you may sit
with your feet in the dirt and remember as a dim fable
that there are races for which the type of domestic
allurement is the parlor hearth-rug. For reasons ap
parent or otherwise, these things amuse me beyond
expression, and I am never weary of staring into gate
ways, of lingering by dreary, shabby, half-barbaric
farm-yards, of feasting a foolish gaze on sun-cracked
plaster and unctuous indoor shadows.
I must not forget, however, that it is not for way
side effects that one rides away behind St. Peter's, but
for the enchanting sense of wandering over boundless
space, of seeing great classic lines of landscape, of
watching them dispose themselves into pictures so full
of "style" that you can think of no painter who de
serves to have you admit that they suggest him-^

ROMAN RIDES. I2g
hardly knowing whether it is better pleasure to gallop
far and drink deep of air and grassy distance and the
whole delicious opportunity, or to walk and pause and
linger, and try and grasp some ineffaceable memory of
sky and color and outline. Your pace can hardly help
falling into a contemplative measure at the time, every
where so wonderful, but in Rome so persuasively di
vine, when the winter begins palpably to soften and
quicken into spring. Far out on the Campagna, early
in February, you feel the first vague, earthly eraanations,
which in a few weeks come wandering into the heart of
the city and throbbing through the close, dark streets.
Springtime in Rome is an immensely poetic affair; but
you must stand often in the meadows, between grass
and sky, to measure its deep, full, steadily accelerated
rhythm. The winter has an incontestable beauty, and
is pre-eminently the time of color — the time when it is
no affectation, but homely verity, to talk about the
"purple" tone of the atmosphere. As February comes
and goes your purple is streaked with green, and the
rich dark bloom of the distance begins to lose its in
tensity. But your loss is made up by other gains; none
more precious than that inestimable gain to the ear —
the disembodied voice of the lark. It comes with the
early flowers, the white narcissus and the cyclamen, the
half-buried -violets and the pale anemones, and makes
the whole atmosphere ring like a vault of tinkling glass.
You never see the bird himself, and are utterly unable
to localize his note, which seeras to come from every
where at once, to be some hundred-throated voice of
the air. Sometimes you fancy you just distinguish
him, a mere vague spot against the blue, an intenser
throb in the universal pulsation of light. As the weeks
Foreign Parts. 9

130 FOREIGN PARTS.
go on, the flowers multiply and the deep blues and
purples of the hills turn to azure and violet, and creep
higher toward the narrowing snow-line of the Sabines.
The first hour of your ride becomes rather warm for
comfort, but you beguile it with brushing the hawthorn-
blossoms as you pass along the hedges, and catching
at the wild rose and honeysuckle; and when you get
into the meadows, there is stir enough in the air to
lighten the dead weight of the sun. The Roman air,
however, is not a tonic medicine, and it seldom allows
your rides to be absolutely exhilarating. It has always
seemed to me, indeed, part of their sweetness that
your keenest enjoyment is haunted with a vague languor.
Occasionally, when the sirocco blows, this amounts to
a sensation really worth having on moral and intel
lectual grounds. Then, under the gray sky, toward
the veiled distances which the sirocco generally brings
with it, you seem to ride forth into a world from
which all hope has departed, and in which, in spite
of the flowers that make your horse's footfalls sound
less, nothing is left save a possibility of calamity which
your imagination is unable to measure, but from which
it hardly shrinks. An occasional sense of depression
from this source may almost amount to exhUaration;
but a season of sirocco would be an overdose of morbid
pleasure. I almost think that you may best feel the
peculiar beauty of the Campagna on those mUd days
of winter when the brilliant air alone suffices to make
the whole landscape smUe, and you may pause on the
brown grass in the sunny stillness, and, by listening
long enough, almost fancy you hear the shriU of the
midsummer cricket. It is detaU and ornament that
vary from month to month, from week to week even.

ROMAN RIDES. I3I
and make your rides over familiar fields a constant
feast of unexpectedness; but the essential lines and
masses of the Campagna preserve throughout the year
the same impressive serenity. Soracte, in January and
April, rises from its blue horizon like an island from
the sea, with a finish of outline which no mood of the
year can deepen or diminish. You know it well; you
have seen it often in the mellow backgrounds of Claude;
and it has such an irresistibly classical, academical air
that, while you look at it, your saddle begins to feel
like a faded old arm-chair in a palace gallery. A
month's riding on the Campagna, indeed, will show
you a dozen prime Claudes. After I had seen them
all, I piously visited the Doria collection, to refresh
my raemory of its two famous specimens, and I vastly
enjoyed their delightful air of reference to something
which had become a part of my personal experience.
Delightful it certainly is to feel the comraon eleraent
in one's own impressions and those of a genius whom
it has helped to do great things. Claude raust have
wandered much on the Campagna, and interfused its
divine undulations with his exquisite conception of
nature. He was familiar -with a landscape in which
there was not a single uncompromising line. I saw,
a few days later, a small finished sketch from his hand,
in the possession of an American artist, which was al
most startling in its clear reflection of forms unaltered
by the two centuries that have dimmed and cracked
the paint and canvas.
This unbroken continuity of impressions which I
have tried to indicate is an excellent example of the
intellectual groundwork of all enjoyment in Rome. It
effectually prevents pleasure from becoming vulgar, for
9*

132 FOREIGN PARTS.
your sensation rarely begins and ends with itself; it
reverberates; it recalls, commemorates, resuscitates
something else. At least half the merit of everything
you enjoy must be that it suits you absolutely; but the
larger half, here, is generally that it has suited some
one else, and that you can never flatter yourself you
have discovered it. It is historic, literary, suggestive;
it has played some other part than it is just then
playing to your eyes. It was an admission of this
truth that my discriminating friend who showed me
the Claudes found it impossible to designate a certain
delightful region which you enter at the end of an
hour's riding from Porta CavaUeggieri as anything but
Arcadia. The exquisite correspondence of the term
in this case altogether revived its faded bloom; here
veritably the oaten pipe must have stirred the windless
air, and the satyrs have laughed among the brookside
reeds. Three or four long grassy dells stretch away in
a chain between low hills over which slender trees are
so directly scattered that each one is a resting-place
for a shepherd. The elements of the scene are simple
enough, but the composition has extraordinary refine
ment. By one of those happy chances which keep
observation, iu Italy, always in her best humor, a
shepherd had thrown himself down under one of the
trees in the very attitude of Meliboeus. He had been
washing his feet, I suppose, in the neighboring brook,
and had found it pleasant afterwards to roll his short
breeches well up on his thighs. Lying thus in the
shade, on his elbow, with his naked legs stretched out
on the turf, and his soft peaked hat, over his long hair,
crushed back like the veritable bonnet of Arcady, he
was exactly the figure of the background of this happy

¦ROMAN RIDES. I 33
valley. The poor fellow, lying there in rustic weariness
and ignorance, little fancied that he was a symbol of
old-world meanings to new-world eyes. Such eyes
may find as. great a store of romantic reference in the
cork-woods of Monte Mario, tenderly loved of all
equestrians. These are less severely pastoral than our
Arcadia, and you might more properly lodge there a
damosel of Ariosto than a nymph of Theocritus. Among
them is strewn a lovely wilderness of flowers and
shrubs, and the whole place has such a charming
woodland air, that, casting about me the other day for
a compliment, I declared that it reminded me of New
Hampshire. My compliment had a double edge, and I
had no sooner uttered it than I smUed — or sighed —
to perceive in all the undiscriminated botany about me
the wealth of detaU, the idle elegance and grace of
Italy alone — the natural stamp of the land which has
the singular privUege of making one love her unsancti-
fied beauty even better than those features of one's
own country toward which nature's small allowance
doubles that of one's own affection. No rides are
richer in this historic quality than those you take in
the Villa Doria or the Villa Borghese; or do not take,
possibly, if you prefer to reserve these particular
regions (the latter in especial) for your walking hours.
People do ride, however, in both villas, which deserve
honorable mention in this regard. The Villa Doria,
with its noble site, its lovely views, its great groups
of stone-pines, so clustered and yet so individual, its
lawns and flowers and fountains, its altogether princely
disposition, is a place where one may pace, well
mounted, of a brilliant day, with an agreeable sense of
its being raore congruous to balance in one's stirrups

134 FOREIGN PARTS.
than to trudge on even the smoothest gravel. But at
the Villa Borghese the walkers have the best of it; for
they are free of those delicious, outlying corners and
bosky by-ways which the rumble of barouches never
reaches. Early in March it becomes a perfect epitome
of the spring. You cease to care much for the melan
choly greenness of the disfeatured statues which has
been your chief winter's intimation of verdure; and
before you are quite conscious of the tender streaks
and patches in the great quaint grassy arena round
which the Propaganda students, in their long skirts,
wander slowly, like dusky seraphs revolving the gossip
of Paradise, you spy the brave little violets making
eyes at you beneath the high-stemmed pines. One's
walks, here, would take us too far, and one's pauses
detain us too long, when, in the quiet parts, under the
wall, one comes across a group of little collegians,
in full-dress suits and white cravats, shouting over
their play in clear Italian, while a grave young priest,"
under a tree, watches them over the top of his book.
I have wished only to say a word for one's Rides — to
suggest that they give one, not only exercise, but me
mories.

ROMAN NEIGHBORHOODS. 1 35

ROMAN NEIGHBORHOODS.
I MADE a note after my first stroll at Albano to the
effect that I had been talking of the picturesque all
my life, but that now for a change I beheld it. I had
been looking all winter across the Campagna at the
free-flowing outline of the Alban Mount, with its half-
dozen towns shining on its purple side, like vague sun-
spots in the shadow of a cloud, and thinking it simply
an agreeable incident in the varied background of
Rome. But now that during the last few days I have
been treating it as a foreground, and suffering St. Peter's
to play the part of a small mountain on the horizon,
with the Campagna swimming mistily in a thousand
ambiguous lights and shadows in the interval, I find as
good entertainment as any in the Roman streets. The
walk I speak of was just out of the village, to the
south, toward the neighboring town of Lariccia, —
neighboring these twenty years, since the Pope (the
late Pope, I was on the point of calling him) threw his
superb viaduct across the deep ravine which divides
it from Albano. At the risk of being thought fantastic,
I confess that the Pope's having built the viaduct — in
this very recent antiquity — made me linger there in
a pensive posture and marvel at the march of history
and at the fact that Pius the Ninth begins already to
profit by the sentimental allowances we make to van
ished powers. An ardent nero then would have had
his own way with me, and obtained an easy admission

136 FOREIGN PARTS.
that the Pope was indeed a father to his people. Far
down into the charming valley which slopes out the
ancestral woods of the Chigis into the level Campagna
winds the steep, stone-paved road, at the bottom of
which, in the good old days, tourists in no great hurry
saw the mules and oxen tackled to their carriage for
the opposite ascent. And, indeed, even an impatient
tourist might have been content to lounge back in his
jolting chaise and look out at the mouldy foundations
of the little city, plunging into the verdurous flank of
the gorge. If I were asked what is the most delect
able piece of oddity hereabouts, I should certainly say
the way in which the crumbling black houses of these
ponderous villages plant their weary feet on the flowery
edges of all the steepest chasms. Before you enter
one of them you invariably find yourself lingering out
side of its pretentious old gateway, to see it clutched
and stitched, as it were, to the stony hill-side, by this
rank embroidery of wild weeds and flowers. Just at
this moment nothing is prettier than the contrast be
tween their dusky ruggedness and this tender fringe of
yellow and pink and violet. All this you may observe
from the viaduct at Lariccia; but you must wander
below to feel the full force of the eloquence of our
imaginary papalino. The pillars and arches of pale
gray peperino arise in huge tiers, with a magnificent
spring and solidity. The older Romans built no better;
and the work has a deceptive air of being one of
their sturdy bequests, which helps one to drop a sigh
over Italy's long, long yesterday. In Lariccia I found a
little square with a couple of mossy fountains, occupied
on one side by a vast, dusky-faced Palazzo Chigi, and
on the other by a goodly church with an imposing

ROMAN NEIGHBORHOODS. 137
dome. The dome, within, covers the whole edifice, and
is adorned with some extremely elegant stucco-work of
the seventeenth century. It gave a great value to this
fine old decoration, that preparations were going for
ward for a local festival, and that the village carpenter
was hanging certain mouldy strips of crimson damask
against the piers of the vaults. The damask might
have been of the seventeenth century, too, and a group
of peasant women were seeing it unfurled with evident
awe. I regarded it myself with interest; it seemed to
me to be the tattered remnant of a fashion that had
gone out. I thought again of the poor, disinherited
Pope, and wondered whether, when that venerable
frippery will no longer bear the carpenter's nails, any
more will be provided. It was hard to fancy anything
but shreds and patches in that musty tabernacle.
Wherever you go in Italy, you receive some such in
timation as this of the shrunken proportions of Catholi
cism, and every church I have glanced into on my
walks hereabouts has given me an almost pitying sense
of it. One finds one's self at last (without fatuity, I
hope) feeling sorry for the loneliness of the remaining
faithful. The churches seem to have been made so
for the world, in its social sense, and the world seems
so irrevocably away from them. They are, in size, out
of all modern proportion to the local needs, and the
only thing that seems really to occupy their melan
choly vacancy is the smell of stale incense. There are
pictures on all the altars by respectable third-rate
painters; pictures which I suppose once were ordered
and paid for and criticised by worshippers who united
taste with piety. At Genzano, beyond Lariccia, rises on
the gray village street a pompous Renaissance temple.

138 FOREIGN PARTS.
whose imposing nave and aisles would contain the
population of a metropolis. But where is the taste of
Lariccia and Genzano? Where are the choice spirits
for whom Antonio Raggi modelled the garlands of his
dome, and a hundred clever craftsraen imitated Guido
and Caravaggio? Here and there, from the pavement,
as you pass, a dusky crone interlards her devotions
with more profane importunities; or a grizzled peasant
on rusty-jointed knees, tilted forward with his elbows
on a bench, reveals the dimensions of the patch in his
blue breeches. But where is the connecting link be
tween Guido and Caravaggio and those poor souls for
whom an undoubted original is only a something be
hind a row of candlesticks, of no very clear meaning
save that you must bow to it? You find a vague
memory of it at best in the useless grandeurs about
you, and you seem to be looking at a structure of
which the stubborn earth-scented foundations alone
remain, with the carved and painted shell that bends
above them, while the central substance has utterly
crumbled away.
I shall seem to have adopted a more meditative
pace than befits a brisk constitutional, if I say that I
also fell a-thinking before the shabby fagade of the
old Chigi Palace. But it seemed somehow, in its gray
forlornness, to respond to the sadly superannuated ex
pression of the opposite church; and indeed, under
any circumstances, what contemplative mind can for
bear to do a little romancing in the shadow of a pro
vincial palazzo? On the face of the matter, I know,
there is often no very salient peg to hang a romance
on. A sort of dusky blankness invests the establish
ment, which has often a rather imbecile old age. But

ROMAN NEIGHBORHOODS. I3g
a hundred brooding secrets lurk in this inexpressive
mask, and the Chigi Palace seeraed to rae in the sug
gestive twilight a very pretty specimen of a haunted
house. Its basement walls sloped outward like the be
ginning of a pyramid, and its lower windows were
covered with raassive iron cages. Within the door
way, across the court, I saw the pale gliraraer of flowers
on a terrace, and on the roof I beheld a great covered
loggia, or belvedere, with a dozen window-panes raiss
ing, or mended with paper. Nothing gives one a
stronger impression of old manners than an ancestral
palace towering in this haughty fashion over a shabby
little town; you hardly stretch a point when you call it
an impression of feudalism. The scene raay pass for
feudal to American eyes, for which a hundred windows
on a fagade mean nothing more exclusive than a hotel
kept (at the worst) on the European plan. The mouldy
gray houses on the steep, crooked street, with their
black, cavernous archways filled with evU smells, with
the braying of asses, and with human intonations hardly
more musical, the haggard and tattered peasantry
staring at you with hungry-heavy eyes, the brutish-
looking monks (there are still enough to be effective),
the soldiers, the raounted constables, the dirt, the
dreariness, the misery, and the dark, overgrown palace
frowning over it all from barred window and guarded
gateway — what more than all this do we dimly descry
in a mental image of the dark ages? With the
strongest desire to content himself with the picturesque
ness of things, the tourist can hardly help wondering
whether the picture is not half spoiled for pleasure by
all that it suggests of. the hardness of human life. At
Genzano, out of the very midst of the village squalor.

140 FOREIGN PARTS.
rises the Palazzo Cesarini, separated from its gardens
by a dirty lane. Between peasant and prince the con
tact is unbroken, and one would say that Italian good
nature must be sorely taxed by their mutual aUow-
ances; that the prince in especial must be trained not
to be too sensitive. There are no comfortable towns
folk about him to remind him of the blessings of a
happy mediocrity of fortune. When he looks out of
his window he sees a battered old peasant against a
sunny wall, sawing off his dinner from a hunch of black
bread. I must confess, however, that "feudal" as it amused
me to find the little piazza of Lariccia, it displayed no
especial symptoms of a rising of the people. On the
contrary, the afternoon being cool, many of the viUagers
were contentedly muffled in those ancient cloaks, lined
with green baize, which, when tossed over the shoulder
and surmounted with a peaked hat, form one of the
few lingering remnants of "costume" in Italy; others
were tossing wooden balls, light-heartedly enough, on
the grass outside the town. The egress, on this side,
is under a great stone archway, thrown out from the
palace and surmounted with the family arms. Nothing
could better confirm your fancy that the townsfolk are
groaning serfs. The road leads away through the
woods, like raany of the roads hereabouts, among trees
less remarkable for their size than for their graceful
contortions and posturings. The woods, at the moment
at which I write, are full of the raw green light of
early spring, and I find it vastly becoming to the
various complexions of the wUd flowers which cover the
waysides. I have never seen these untended parterres
in such lovely exuberance; the sturdiest pedestrian be-

ROMAN NEIGHBORHOODS. I4I
comes a lingering idler if he allows them to catch his
eye. The pale purple cyclamen, with its hood thrown
back, stands up in masses as dense as tulip-beds; and
here and there, in the duskier places, great sheets of
forget-me-not seem to exhale a faint blue mist. These
are the commonest plants; there are dozens more I
know no name for — a rich profusion, in especial, of a
beautiful, five-petalled flower with its white texture
pencilled with hair-strokes which certain fair copyists
I know of would have to hold their breath to imitate.
An Italian oak has neither the girth nor the height of
its Anglo-Saxon brothers, but it contrives, in propor
tion, to be perhaps even more effective. It crooks its
back and twists its arms and clinches its hundred fists
with the most fantastic extravagance, and wrinkles its
bark into strange rugosities, from which its first scat
tered sprouts of yellow green seem to break out like a
morbid fungus. But the tree which has the greatest
charm to Northern eyes is the cold gray-green ilex,
whose clear, crepuscular shade is a delicious provision
against a Southern sun. The ilex has even less color
than the cypress, but it is much less funereal, and a
landscape full of ilexes may still be said to smUe —
soberly. It abounds in old Italian gardens, where the
boughs are trimmed and interlocked into vaulted cor
ridors, in which, from point to point, as in the niches
of some dimly frescoed hall, you encounter mildewed
busts, staring at you with a solemnity which the even
gray light makes strangely intense. A humbler relative
of the ilex, though it does better things than help
broken-nosed emperors to look dignified, is the olive,
which covers many of the neighboring hUlsides with
its little smoky puffs of foliage. A spectacle I never

142 FOREIGN PARTS.
weary of is the long blue stretch of the Campagna,
making a high horizon and resting on this vaporous
base of olive-tops. A tourist intent upon a metaphor
might liken it to the ocean seen above the smoke of
watch-fires kindled on the strand.
To do perfect justice to the wood-walk away from
Lariccia, I ought to touch upon the birds that were
singing vespers as I passed. But the reader would
find my rhapsody as poor entertainment as the pro
gramme of a concert he had been unable to attend. I
have no more learning about bird-music than would
help me to guess that a dull, dissyllabic refrain in the
heart of the wood came from the cuckoo; and when at
moments I heard a twitter of fuller tone, with a more
suggestive modulation, I could only hope it was the
nightingale. I have listened for the nightingale more
than once, in places so charming that his song would
have seeraed but the articulate expression of their
beauty; but I have never heard anything but a pro
voking snatch or two — a prelude that came to nothing.
Yet in spite of a natural grudge, I generously believe
him a great artist, or at least a great genius — a
creature who despises any prompting short of absolute
inspiration. For the rich, the multitudinous melody
around me seemed but the offering to ray ear of the
prodigal spirit of association. The wood was ring
ing with sound because it was twilight, spring, and
Italy. It was also because of these good things and
various others beside, that I relished so keenly my visit
to the Capuchin convent, upon which I emerged after
half an hour in the wood. It stands above the to-wn,
on the slope of the Alban Mount, and its wUd garden
climbs away behind it and extends its melancholy in-

ROMAN NEIGHBORHOODS. 1 43
fluence. Before it is a stiff little avenue of trimmed
ilexes which conducts you to a grotesque little shrine
beneath the staircase ascending to the church. Just
here, if you are apt to grow timorous at twilight, you
may take a very pretty fright; for as you draw near
you behold, behind the grating of the shrine, the start
ling semblance of a gaunt and livid monk. A sickly
lamplight plays down upon his face, and he stares at
you from cavernous eyes with a dreadful air of death
in life. Horror of horrors, you murmur; is this a
Capuchin penance? You discover of course in a mo
raent that it is only a Capuchin joke, that the monk is
a pious dummy, and his spectral -visage a matter of the
paint-brush. You resent his intrusion on the surround
ing loveliness; and as you proceed to demand enter
tainment at their convent, you declare that the Capu
chins are very vulgar fellows. This declaration, as I
made it, was supported by the conduct of the simple
brother who opened the door of the cloister in obedi
ence to my knock, and, on learning ray errand, demurred
about admitting me at so late an hour. If I would re
turn on the morrow morning he would be most happy.
He broke into a blank grin when I assured him that this
was the very hour of my desire, and that the garish
morning light would do no justice to the view. These
were mysteries beyond his ken, and it was only his
good -nature (of which he had plenty) and not his
imagination that was moved. So that when, passing
through the narrow cloister and out upon the grassy
terrace, I saw another cowled brother standing with
folded hands profiled against the sky, in admirable
harmony with the scene, I ventured to doubt that he
knew he was picturesque amid picturesqueness. This,

144 FOREIGN PARTS.
however, was surely too much to ask of him, and it
was cause enough for gratitude that, though he was
there before me, he was not a fellow-tourist with an
opera-glass slung over his shoulder. There was reason
in my fancy for seeing the convent in the expiring
light, for the scene was supremely enchanting. Directly
below the terrace lay the deep-set circle of the Alban
Lake, shining softly through the mists of evening. This
beautiful pool — it is hardly more — occupies the crater
of a prehistoric volcano — a perfect cup, moulded and
smelted by furnace-fires. The rira of the cup rises
high and densely wooded around the placid, stone-blue
water, with a sort of natural artificiality. The sweep
and contour of the long circle are admirable; never
was a lake so charmingly lodged. It is said to be
of extraordinary depth; and though stone-blue water
seems at first a very innocent substitute for boUing,
lava, it has a sinister look which betrays its dangerous
antecedents. The winds never reach it, and its surface
is never ruffled; but its deep-bosomed placidity seems
to cover guilty secrets, and you fancy it in communica
tion with the capricious and treacherous forces of
nature. Its very color has a kind of joyless beauty — a
blue as cold and opaque as a solidified sheet of lava.
Streaked and wrinkled by a mysterious motion of its
own, it seemed the very type of a legendary pool, and
I could easily have believed that I had only to sit long
enough into the evening to see the ghosts of classic
nymphs and naiads cleave its sullen flood and beckon
to me with irresistible arms. Is it because its shores
are haunted with these vague Pagan influences, that
two convents have risen there to purge the atmosphere?
From the Capuchin terrace you look across at the gray

ROMAN NEIGHBORHOODS. I45
Franciscan monastery of Palazzuola, which is not less
felicitous certainly than the most obstinate myth it
may have exorcised. The Capuchin garden is a wild
tangle of great trees and shrubs and clinging, trembling
vines, which in these hard days are left to take care
of themselves; a weedy garden, if there ever was one,
but none the less charming for that, in the deepening
dusk, with its steep, grassy vistas straggling away into
impenetrable shadow. I braved the shadow for the
sake of climbing into certain little flat-roofed, crumbling
pavilions, which rise from the corners of the farther
wall, and give you a wider and lovelier view of the
lake and hUls and sky.
I have perhaps justified to the reader the declara
tion with which I started, and helped him to fancy —
and possibly to remember — that one's walks at Albano
are entertaining. They may be various, too, and have
little in common but the merit of keeping in the shade.
"Galleries" the roads are prettily called, and with a
great deal of justice; for they are vaulted and draped
overhead and hung -with an immense succession of
pictures. As you follow the long road from Genzano
to Frascati, you have perpetual views of the Campagna,
framed by clusters of trees; and its vast, iridescent
expanse completes the charm and comfort of your
verdurous dusk. I compared it just now to the sea,
and with a good deal of truth, for it has the same
fantastic lights and shades, the same confusion of glitter
and gloom. But I have seen it at moments — chiefly
in the misty twilight — when it seemed less like the
positive ocean than like something more portentous — ¦
the land in a state of dissolution. I could fancy that
the fields were dimly surging and tossing, and melt-
Foreign Parts. 10

146 FOREIGN PARTS.
ing away into quicksands, and that the last "effect"
was being presented to the eyes of imaginative tourists.
A view, however, which has the merit of being really
as interesting as it seems, is that of the Lake of Nemi,
which the enterprising traveller hastens to compare
with its sister sheet of Albano. Comparison in this
case is particularly odious; for in order to prefer one
lake to the other, you have to discover faults where
there are none. Nemi is a smaller circle, but she lies
in a deeper cup; and if she has no gray Franciscan
convent to guard her woody shores, she has, in quite
the same position, the little high-perched, black town
to which she gives her name, and which looks across
at Genzano on the opposite shore, as Palazzuola con
templates Castel Gandolfo. The walk from Lariccia to
Genzano is charming, most of all when it reaches a
certain grassy piazza from which three public avenues
stretch away under a double row of stunted and
twisted elms. The Duke Cesarini has a -villa at Gen
zano — I mentioned it just now — whose gardens over
hang the lake; but he has also a porter, in a faded,
rakish-looking livery, who shakes his head at your
proffered franc, unless you can reinforce it with a
permit countersigned at Rome. For this annoying com
plication of dignities he is justly to be denounced; but
I forgive him for the sake of that ancestor who in the
seventeenth century planted this shady walk. Never
was a prettier approach to a town than by these low-
roofed, light-checkered corridors. Their only defect is
that they prepare you for a town with a little more
rustic coquetry than Genzano possesses. It seemed to
me to have more than the usual portion of mouldering
disrepair; to look dismaUy as if its best famUies had

ROMAN NEIGHBORHOODS. 1 47
all fallen into penury together and lost the means of
keeping anything better than donkeys in their great,
dark, vaulted basements, as well as of mending their
broken window-panes. It was d propos of this drear
Genzano that I had a difference of opinion with a
friend, who raaintained that there was nothing in the
same line so pretty in Europe as a pretty New Eng
land village. The proposition, to a sentimental tourist,
seemed at first inacceptable; but, calmly considered, it
has a raeasure of truth. I am not fond of white clap
boards, certainly; I vastly prefer the dusky tones of
ancient stucco and peperino; but I confess I ara sen
sible of the charms of a porch muffled in creepers, of
tulips and dahlias glowing in the shade of high-arching
elms, of hea-vy-scented lilacs bending over a white pal
ing to brush your cheek.
"I prefer Siena to LoweU," said my friend; "but I
prefer Northampton to Genzano." In fact, an Italian
vUlage is simply a miniature Italian city, and its
various parts imply a town of fifty times the size. At
Genzano there are neither dahlias nor lilacs, and no
odors but foul ones. Flowers and perfumes are all
confined to the high-walled precincts of Duke Cesarini,
to which you must obtain admission twenty miles
away. The houses, on the other hand, would generally
lodge a New England cottage, porch and garden and
high-arching elms included, in one of their cavernous
basements. These vast gray dwellings are all of a
fashion denoting more generous social needs than any
they serve nowadays. They seem to speak of better
days, and of a fabulous time when Italy was not
shabby. For what follies are they doing penance?
Through what melancholy stages have their fortunes

148 FOREIGN PARTS.
ebbed? You ask these questions as you choose the
shady side of the long blank street, and watch the hot
sun glaring upon the dust-colored walls and pausing
before the fetid gloom of open doors.
I should like to spare a word for mouldy little
Nemi, perched upon a cliff high above the lake, on
the opposite side; but after all, when I had climbed
up into it from the water-side, and passed beneath a
great arch which, I suppose, once topped a gateway,
and counted its twenty or thirty apparent inhabitants
peeping at rae from black doorways, and looked at the
old round tower at whose base the village clusters, and
declared that it was all queer, queer, desperately queer,
I had said all that is worth saying about it. Nemi
has much better appreciation of its lovely position
than Genzano, where your only view of the lake is
from a dunghill behind one of the houses. At the foot
of the round tower is an overhanging terrace, from
which you raay feast your eyes on the only freshness
they find in these dusky human hives — the blooming
seam, as one may call it, of strong wild-flowers which
binds the crumbling walls to the face of the cliff. Of
Rocca di Papa I must say as little. It kept generally
what I had fancied the picturesque promise of its
name; but the only object I made a note of as I passed
through it on my way to Monte Cavo, which rises
directly above it, was a little black house with a tablet
in its face setting forth that Massimo d'Azeglio had
dwelt there. The story of his sojourn is not the least
entertaining episode in his delightful Memoirs. From
the summit of Monte Cavo is a prodigious view, which
you may enjoy with whatever good-nature is left you
by the reflection that the modern Passionist convent

ROMAN NEIGHBORHOODS. 1 49
which occupies this admirable site was erected by
Cardinal York (grandson of James II.) on the de
molished ruins of an immemorial temple of Jupiter:
the last foolish act of a foolish race. For me, I con
fess, this folly spoiled the convent, and the convent all
but spoiled the view; for I kept thinking how fine it
would have been to emerge upon the old pillars and
sculptures from the lava pavement of the Via Triumph
alis, which wanders grass-grown and untrodden through
the woods. A convent, however, which nothing spoils
is that of Palazzuola, to which I paid my respects on
this same occasion. It rises on a lower spur of Monte
Cavo, on the edge of the Alban Lake, and though it
occupies a classic site — that of early Alba Longa — it
displaced nothing more precious than memories and
legends so dim that the antiquarians are still quarrel
ling about them. It has a meagre little church and
the usual impossible Perugino, with a couple of tinsel
crowns for the Madonna and the Infant inserted into
the canvas; and it has also a musty old room hung
about with faded portraits and charts and queer ec
clesiastical knick-knacks, which borrowed a mysterious
interest from the sudden assurance of the simple
Franciscan brother who accompanied me, that it was
the room of the Son of the King of Portugal ! But ray
peculiar pleasure was the little thick-shaded garden
which adjoins the convent and commands from its
massive artificial foundations an enchanting view of the
lake. Part of it is laid out in cabbages and lettuce,
over which a rubicund brother, with his frock tucked
up, was bending with a solicitude which he interrupted
to remove his skull-cap and greet me with the un
sophisticated, sweet-humored smile which every now

150 FOREIGN PARTS.
and then in Italy does so much to make you forget
the uncleanness of monachism. The rest is occupied
by cypresses and other funeral umbrage, making a
dank circle round an old cracked fountain, black with
water-moss. The parapet of the terrace is furnished
with good stone seats, where you may lean on your
elbows and gaze away a sunny half-hour, and, feeling
the general charm of the scene, declare that the best
mission of Italy in the world has been to produce this
sort of thing. If I wished a single word for the whole
place and its suggestions, I should talk of their exqui
site mildness. Mild it all seemed to me as a dream,
as resignation, as one's thoughts of another life.
From Albano you may take your way through
several ancient little cities to Frascati, a rival centre
of villeggiatura, the road following the hillside for a
long morning's walk and passing through alternations
of denser and clearer shade — the dark, vaulted alleys
of ilex and the brilliant corridors of fresh-sprouting
oak. The Campagna lies beneath you continually,
with the sea beyond Ostia receiving the silver arrows
of the sun upon its chased and burnished shield, and
mighty Rorae, to the north, lying at no great length in
the idle iraraensity around it. The highway passes
below Castel Gandolfo, which stands perched on an...
eminence behind a pair of gateways surmounted with
the Papal tiara and twisted cordon; and I confess that
I have raore than once chosen the roundabout road
for the sake of passing beneath these porapous insignia,
Castel Gandolfo is indeed an ecclesiastical village and
under the peculiar protection of the Popes, whose huge
summer-palace rises in the midst of it like a sort of
rural Vatican. In speaking of the road to Frascati, I

ROMAN NEIGHBORHOODS. I5I
necessarUy revert to my first impressions, gathered on
the occasion of the feast of the Annunziata, which faUs
on the 25th of March, and is celebrated by a peasants'
fair. As Murray strongly recomraends you to visit
this spectacle, at which you are promised a brilliant
exhibition of all the costumes of modern Latium, I took
an early train to Frascati and measured, in company
with a prodigious stream of humble pedestrians, the
half-hour's interval to Grotta Ferrata, where the fair is
held. The road winds along the hillside, among the
sUver-sprinkled olives, and through a charming wood
where the i-vy seemed tacked upon the oaks by women's
fingers and the birds were singing to the late anemones.
It was covered with a very jolly crowd of -vulgar pleasure-
takers, and the only creatures who were not in a state
of manifest hUarity were the pitiful little overladen,
over-beaten donkeys (who surely deserve a chapter to
themselves in any description of these neighborhoods)
and the horrible beggars who were thrusting their
sores and sturaps at you from under every tree. Every
one was shouting, singing, scrambling, making light of
dust and distance, and fiUing the air with that child
like jollity which the blessed Italian teraperaraent never
goes roundabout to conceal. There is no crowd, surely,
at once so jovial and so gentle as an Italian crowd, and
I doubt if in any other country the tightly packed
third-class car in which I went out from Rome would
have introduced me to so much smiling and so little
swearing. Grotta Ferrata is a very dirty little village,
with a number of raw new houses baking on the hot
hUlside, and nothing to charm the tourist but its situa
tion and its old fortified abbey. After pushing about
among the shabby little booths and declining a number

152 FOREIGN PARTS.
of fabulous bargains in tinware, shoes and pork, I was
glad to retire to a comparatively uninvaded corner of
the abbey and divert myself with the view. This gray
ecclesiastical citadel is a very picturesque affair, hang
ing over the hillside on plunging foundations which
bury theraselves among the olive-trees. It has massive
round towers at the corners, and a grass-grown moat,
enclosing a church and monastery. The outer court,
within the abbatial gateway, now serves as the public
square ofthe village, and in fair-time, of course, wit
nessed the best of the fun. The best of the fun was to
be found in certain great vaults and cellars of the
abbey, where wine was being freely dispensed from
gigantic hogsheads. At the exit of these trickling
grottos, shady trellises of bamboo and gathered twigs
had been improvised, under which a prodigious guz
zling went forward. All this was very curious, and I
was roughly reminded of the wedding- feast ofGamacho.
The banquet was far less substantial, of course, but it
had an air of old-world revelry which could not fail to
suggest romantic analogies to an ascetic American.
There was a feast of reason close at hand, however,
and I was careful to visit the famous frescos of Do
menichino in the adjoining church. It sounds rather
brutal perhaps to say that, when I came back into the
clamorous little piazza, I found the peasants swilling
down their sour wine more pictorial than the master
pieces (Murray calls thera so) of the famous Bolognese.
It amounts, after all, to saying that I prefer Teniers to
Domenichino; which I am willing to let pass for the
truth. The scene under the rickety trellises was the
more suggestive of Teniers that there were no costumes
to make it too Itahan. Murray's attractive statement

ROMAN NEIGHBORHOODS. 153
on this point was, like many of his statements, much
truer twenty years ago than to-day. Costume is gone
or fast going; I saw among the women not a single
crimson bodice and not more than a pair of the classic
head-cloths. The poorer sort are dressed in vulgar
rags of no fashion and color, and the smarter ones
adorned with calico gowns and printed shawls of the
¦vilest modern fabric, with their dusky tresses garnished
with nothing more sesthetic than the lustrous pomatum.
The men are still in jackets and breeches, and, with
their slouched and pointed hats and open-breasted
shirts and rattling leather leggings, may remind one
sufficiently of the Italian peasant as he figured in the
woodcuts familiar to our infancy. After coming out
of the church I found a delightful nook — a queer little
terrace before a more retired and tranquil drinking-
shop — where I called for a bottle of wine to help me
to guess why I liked Domenichino no better.
This little terrace was a capricious excrescence at
the end of the piazza, which was itself simply a great
terrace; and one reached it, felicitously, by ascending
a short inclined plane of grass-grown cobble-stones
and passing across a little dusky kitchen, through
whose narrow windows the light of the mighty land
scape beyond was twinkling on old earthen pots. The
terrace was oblong, and so narrow that it held but a
single small table, placed lengthwise; but nothing
could be pleasanter than to place one's bottle on the
polished parapet. Here, by the time you had emptied
it, you seemed to be swinging forward into immensity
— hanging poised above the Campagna. A beautiful
gorge with a twinkling streara wandered down the
hUl far below you, beyond which Marino and Castel

154 FOREIGN PARTS.
Gandolfo peeped above the trees. In front you could
count the towers of Rorae and the tombs of the Appian
Way. I don't know that I came to any very distinct
conclusion about Domenichino; but it was perhaps
because the view was perfection that he seemed to
me more than ever to be mediocrity. And yet I don't
think it was my bottle of wine, either, that raade me
feel half sentimental about him; it was the sense of
there being soraething cruelly feeble in his tenure of
fame, soraething derisive in his exaggerated honors.
It is surely an unkind stroke of fate for hira to have
Murray assuring ten thousand Britons every winter in
the most emphatic maimer that his Communion of
St. Jerome is the "second finest picture in the world."
If this were so, I should certainly, here in Rome, where
such institutions are convenient, retire into the very
nearest convent; with such a world I should have a
standing quarrel. And yet Domenichino is an inter
esting painter, and I would take a moderate walk, in
most moods', to see one of his pictures. He is so
supremely good an example of effort detached from
inspiration, and school-merit divorced from spontaneity,
that one of his fine frigid performances ought to hang
in a conspicuous place in every academy of design.
Few pictures contain more urgent lessons or point a
raore precious raorai; and I would have the head
master in the drawing-school take each ingenuous
pupil by the hand and lead him up to the Triumph
of David or the Chase of Diana or the red-nosed
Persian Sibyl, and make him some such little speech
as this. "This great picture, my son, was hung here
to show you how you raust never paint; to give you a
perfect specimen of that which in its boundless gener-

ROMAN NEIGHBORHOODS. 155
osity the providence of nature created for our fuller
knowledge — an artist whose development was a nega
tion. The great thing in art is charm, and the great
thing in charm is spontaneity. Domenichino had great
talent, and here and there he is an excellent model;
he was devoted, conscientious, observant, industrious;
but now that we have seen pretty well the limits of
what can simply be learned, these things help him
little with us, because his iraagination was cold. It
loved nothing, it lost itself in nothing, its efforts never
gave it the heart-ache. It went about trying this and
that, concocting cold pictures after cold receipts, deal
ing in the second-hand and the ready-made, and
putting into its performances a little of ever)rthing but
itself When you see so many things in a picture
you might fancy that araong them all some charra
might be born; but they are really but the hundred
mouths through which you may hear the picture mur
mur, 'I am dead!' It is in the simplest thing it has
that a pictures lives — in its temper! Look at all the
great talents, at Doraenichino as well as at Titian; but
think less of dogma than of plain nature, and I can
almost promise you that yours will remain true." This
is very little to what the aesthetic sage I have imagined
might say; and after all we are all unwilling to let
our last verdict be an unkind one upon any work of
good intention. The faded frescos in the chapel at
Grotta Ferrata leave one a memory the more of what
man has done for man, and raingle harmoniously
enough with one's multifold impressions of Italy. It
was, perhaps, an ungracious thing to be critical, among
all the appealing old Italianisms round rae, and to
treat poor exploded Domenichino more harshly than.

156 FOREIGN PARTS.
when I walked back to FraScati, I treated the charming
old water-works of the Villa Aldobrandini. I should
like to confound these various products of antiquated
art in a genial absolution; and I should like especially
to tell how fine it was to watch this prodigious foun
tain come tumbling down its channel of mouldy rock-
work, through its magnificent vista of ilex, to the fan
tastic old hemicycle where a dozen tritons and naiads
sit posturing to receive it. The sky above the ilexes
was incredibly blue, and the ilexes themselves in
credibly black; and to see the young white moon peep
ing above the trees, you could easily have fancied it
was midnight. I should like furthermore, to expatiate
on the Villa Mondragone, the most impressive of all
Italian villas. The great Casino is as big as the Vati
can, which it strikingly resembles, and it stands perched
on a terrace as vast as the parvise of St. Peter's,
looking straight away over black cypress-tops into the
shining vastness of the Campagna. Everything, some
how, seemed immense and solemn; there was nothing
small but certain little nestling blue shadows on the
Sabine Mountains, to which the terrace seems to carry
you wonderfully near. The place has been for some
time lost to private uses, for it figures fantastically in
a novel of Madame Sand {La Daniella) and now — in
quite another way-^as a Jesuit college for boys. The
afternoon was perfect, and as it waned it filled the
dark alleys with a wonderful golden haze. Into this
came leaping and shouting a herd of little collegians,
with a couple of long-skirted Jesuits striding at their
heels. We all know the monstrous practices of these
people; yet as I watched the group I verily believe I
declared that if I had a little son he should go to

FROM A ROMAN NOTE-BOOK. 1 57
Mondragone and receive their crooked teachings, for
the sake of the other memories — the avenues of cy
press and ilex, the view of the Campagna-, the atmo
sphere of antiquity. But, doubtless, when a sense of
the picturesque has brought one to this, it is time one
should pause.
1873-

FROM A ROMAN NOTE-BOOK.
December 28, 1872. — In Rome again for the last
three days — that second visit, which, if the first is not
followed by a fatal illness in Florence, the story goes
that one is doomed to pay. I didn't drink of the
Fountain of Trevi when I was here before; but I feel
as if I had drunk of the Tiber itself Nevertheless,
as I drove frora the station in the evening, I wondered
what I should think of Rome at this first glimpse if I
didn't know it. All manner of evil, I am afraid. Paris,
as I passed along the Boulevards three evenings be
fore, to take the train, was swarming and glittering as
befits a great capital. Here, in the black, narrow,
crooked, empty streets, I saw nothing for a city to
build an eternity upon. But there were new gas-lamps
round the spouting Triton in the Piazza Barberini and
a newspaper stall on the corner of the Condotti and
the Corso — salient signs that Rome had really becorae
a capital. An hour later I walked up to Via Gregoriana
by the Piazza di Spagna. It was all silent and deserted,
and the great flight of steps looked surprisingly small.

158 FOREIGN PARTS.
Everything seeraed meagre, dusky, provincial. Could
Rorae, after all, be such an entertaining place? That
queer old rococo garden gateway at the top of Via
Gregoriana stirred an old memory; it awoke into a
consciousness of the delicious mildness of the air, and
very soon, in a little crimson drawing-room, I concluded
that Rome was pleasant enough  Everything is
dear (in the way of lodgings) but it hardly matters, as
everything is taken and some one else is paying for it.
I must make up ray mind to be but half comfortable.
But it seems a shame here to care for one's corafort
or to be perplexed by the economical side of life. The
intellectual side is so palpable that you feel as if you
might live without bread — on the perpetual feast of
association. Literally, what an atmosphere it is! The
weather is perfect, the sky as blue as its reputation,
the whole air glowing and throbbing with lovely color.
.... Paris glitters with gaslight! And oh, the mono
tonous mUes of rain-washed asphalte ! ,
December 2,0th. — I have had nothing to do with the
"ceremonies." In fact, I believe there have hardly
been any — no midnight mass at the Sistine chapel, no
silver trumpets at St. Peter's. Everything is remorse
lessly clipped and curtailed — the Vatican in raourning.
Fortunately I saw it in its superbest scarlet in '6g 
I went yesterday with Mrs. W. to the Colonna gardens
— an adventure which would have reconverted me to
Rome if the thing were not already done. It's a rare
old place — rising in mouldy, bosky terraces and mossy
stairways, and winding walks frora the back of the
palace to the top of the Quirinal. It is the grand
style of gardening, and resembles the present natural
manner as a chapter of Johnsonian rhetoric reserables

FROM A ROMAN NOTE-BOOK. 159
a piece of clever contemporary prose. But it is 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 checkers among the golden-
fruited leaves. Or perhaps the best thing is the broad
terrace with its mossy balustrade, and its benches, and
its ruin of the great naked Torre di Nerone (I think)
which might look stupid if its rosy brick-work didn't
take such a color in the blue air. It's a very pleasant
thing, at any rate, to stroll and talk there in the after
noon sunshine.
fanuary 2d, 1 87 3. — Two or three drives with A.M.
To St. Paul's out of the Walls and back by a couple
of old churches on the Aventine. I was freshly struck
with the sweetness 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 seems intensely
funereal. I don't know whether it should make one
in love with death to lie there; it certainly makes death
seem terribly irrevocable. The weight of a tremendous
past appears to press upon the flowery sod, and the
sleeper's raortality feels the contact of all the raortality
with which the brilliant air is tainted. . . . The restored
Basilica is splendid enough. 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 Emanuel in the Quirinal, the Rome of

l6o FOREIGN PARTS.
abortive councUs and unheeded anathemas. It rises
there, gorgeous and useless, on its miasmatic site, with
an air of conscious bravado, like a florid advertisement
of the superabundance of faith. Within, it is magni
ficent, and its magnificence has no shabby spots — a
rare thing in Rorae. Marble and raosaic, alabaster and
malachite, lapis and porphyry, incrust it from pave
ment to cornice, and flash back their polished lights
at each other with such a splendor 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 display of them I saw at Venice — at the
Scalzi and the Gesuiti. Color has in no other form
so cool and unfading a purity and lustre. Softness of
tone and hardness of substance — is not that the sum
ofthe artist's, desire? G., with his beautiful, caressing,
open-lipped Roman utterance, which is so easy to under
stand and so finely suggestive of Latin, urged upon us
the charras of a return by the Aventine, to see a couple-
of old churches. The best is Santa Sabina, a valuable
structure of the fifth century, mouldering in its dusky
solitude and consuming its own antiquity. What a
multitude of memories Christianity and Catholicism
will have ended by leaving here! What a substantial
fact, in all its decay, is this memorial Christian temple,;
outliving its uses among the sunny gardens and vinei
yards! It has a noble nave, fiUed with a stale smell
which (like that of the onion) brought tears to my eyes,
and bordered with twenty-four fluted marble columns,;
of Pagan origin. The crudely primitive little mosaics
on the entablature are extremely curious. A Dominican
monk, StiU young, who showed us the church, seemed

FROM A ROMAN NOTE-BOOK. l6l
a creature generated from its musty shadows and odors.
His physiognoray was wonderfully de I'emploi, and his
voice, which was most agreeable, had a kind of jaded
humility. His lugubrious salute and sanctimonious
impersonal appropriation of my departing franc would
have been a master-touch on the stage. While we were
still in the church a bell rang which he had to go and
answer, and as he came back and approached us along
the nave, he made with his white gown and hood and
his cadaverous face, against the dark background, one
of those pictures which, thank the Muses, have not yet
been reformed out of Italy. We got back into the
carriage and talked of profane things, and went home
to dinner — drifting recklessly, it seemed to me, from
aesthetic luxury to social.
On the 31st we went to the musical vesper-service
at the Gesu — hitherto done so splendidly before the
Pope and the cardinals. The manner of it was signi
ficant of change — no Pope, no cardinals, and indifferent
music; but a great picturesqueness, nevertheless. The
church is gorgeous; late Renaissance, of great propor
tions, and full, like so raany others, but in a pre
eminent degree, of the Romanism of the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries. It does not impress the
imagination, but it keenly irritates the curiosity; sug
gests no legends, but innumerable anecdotes i la
Stendhal. There is a vast dome, filled with a florid
concave fresco of tumbling, foreshortened angels, and
all over the ceilings and cornices there is a wonderful
ouUay of dusky gildings and mouldings. There are
various Bernini saints and seraphs in stucco-sculpture,
astride of the tablets and door-tops, backing against
Foreign Paris. ' ^

l62 FOREIGN PARTS.
their rusty machinery of coppery nimbi and egg-shaped
cloudlets. Marble, damask and tapers in gorgeous
profusion. The high altar a great screen of twinkling
chandeliers. The choir perched in a little loft high
up in the right transept, like a balcony in a side-scene
at the opera, and indulging in surprising roulades and
flourishes  Near me sat a handsome, opulent-
looking nun — possibly an abbess or prioress of noble
lineage. Can a gentle prioress listen to a fine operatic
barytone in such a sumptuous temple, and receive
none but ascetic impressions? What a cross-fire of in
fluences does Catholicism provide!
fanuary \th. — A drive with A. M. out of the Porta
San Giovanni, along the Via Appia Nuova. More and
raore beautiful as you get well away frora the walls,
and the great view opens out before you— the rolling
green-brown dells and flats of the Campagna, the long,
disjointed arcade of the aqueducts, the deep-shadowed
blue ofthe Alban Mountains, touched into pale lights
by their scattered towns. We stopped at the ruined
basilica of San Stefano, an affair of the fifth century,
rather meaningless without a learned companion. But
the perfect little sepulchral charabers of the Pancratii,
disinterred beneath the church, tell their own tale — in
their hardly diraraed frescos, their beautiful sculptured
coffin and great sepulchral slab. Better still is the
tomb of the Valerii adjoining it — a single chamber
with an arched roof, covered with stucco mouldings,
perfectly intact, exquisite figures and arabesques, as
sharp and delicate as if the plasterer's scaffold had
just been taken from under them. Strange enough to
think of these things — so many of them as there are
^surviving their long earthly obscuration in this per-

FROM y\. ROMAN NOTE-BOOK. 1 63
feet shape, and coming up like long-lost divers from
the sea of time.
\bth. — A delightful walk last Sunday with L. B. to
Monte Mario. We drove to the Porta Angelica, the
little gate hidden behind the right wing of Bernini's
colonnade, and strolled thence up the winding road to
the VUla Mellini, where one of the greasy peasants
huddled under the waU in the sun admits you for half
a franc into the finest old ilex-walk in Italy. It is
all vaulted gray-green shade, with blue Campagna
stretches in the interstices. The day was perfect.
The still sunshine, as we sat at the twisted base of
the old trees, seemed to have the drowsy hum of mid
summer. The charm of Italian vegetation is something
indefinable. In a certain cheapness and thinness of
substance (as compared with the English) it reminds
me of our own, and it is relatively dry enough and
pale enough to explain the contempt of many un
imaginative Britons. But it has a kind of idle abun
dance and wantonness, a romantic shabbiness and di-
shevelment, which appeal to one's tenderest perceptions.
At the Villa Mellini is the famous lonely pine which
"tells" so in the landscape from other points, bought
off from destruction by (I believe) Lord Beaumont.
He, at least, was not an unimaginative Briton. As
you stand under it, its far-away shallow dome, sup
ported on a single coluran almost white enough to be
marble, seeras to dwell in the dizziest depths of the
blue. Its pale gray-blue boughs and its silvery stera
make a wonderful harraony with the ambient air.
The VUla MeUini is fuU of the elder Italy of one's
imagination — the Italy of Boccaccio. There are twenty
places where his story-tellers might have sat upon the

164 FOREIGN PARTS.
grass. Outside the viUa-walls, beneath the over
crowding orange-boughs, straggled old Italy as well,
but not in Boccaccio's velvet. A row of ragged and
livid contadini; sorae simply stupid in their squalor,
but some good definite brigands of roraance (or of
reality) with matted locks and terribly sullen eyes.
A couple of days later I walked for old acquaint
ance' sake over to San Onofrio. The approach is one
of the dirtiest adventures in Rome, and though the
view is fine frora the little terrace, the church and
convent are of a raeagre and musty pattern. Yet
here — almost like pearls in a dunghill — are hidden
mementos of two of the most exquisite of Italian minds.
Torquato Tasso spent the last months of his life here,
and I saw his room and various warped and faded
relics. The most interesting is a cast of his face, taken
after death — looking, like all such casts, very gallant
and distinguished. But who should look so if not
he? In a little shabby, chilly corridor adjoining is a
fresco of Leonardo, a Virgin and Child, with the
donatorio. It is very small, simple, and faded, but it
has all the artist's magic. It has that mocking,
illusive refinement, that hint of a vague arriire-pensie,
which marks every stroke of Leonardo's brush. Is it
the perfection of irony or the perfection of tenderness?
What does he mean, what does he affirm, what does
he deny? Magic would not be magic if we could ex
plain it. As I glanced from the picture to the poor
stupid little red-faced brother at my side, I fancied it
might pass for an elegant epigram on monasticism.
Certainly, at any rate, there is more intelligence in it
than under aU the monkish tonsures it has seen com
ing and going these three hundred years.

FROM A ROMAN NOTE-BOOK. 1 65
21,?/. — The last three or four days I have regularly
spent a couple of hours baking myself in the sun, on
the Pincio, to get rid of a cold. The weather perfect
and the crowd (especially to-day) amazing. Such a
staring, lounging, dandified, amiable crowd! Who
does the vulgar stay-at-home work of Rome? All the
grandees and half the foreigners are there in their
carriages; the bourgeoisie on foot, staring at them,
and the beggars lining all the approaches. The great
difference between public places in America and Europe
is in the number of unoccupied people, of every age
and condition, sitting about, early and late, on benches,
and gazing at you, from your hat to your boots, as
you pass. Europe is certainly the continent of staring.
The ladies on the Pincio have to run the gauntlet;
but they seem to do so complacently enough. The
European woman is brought up to the sense of having
a definite part (in the way of manners) to play in
public. To lie back in a barouche alone, balancing
a parasol, and seeming to ignore the extremely im
mediate gaze of two serried ranks of male creatures on
each side of her path, save here and there to recognize
one of them with an imperceptible nod, is one of her
daily duties. The number of young men here who
lead a purely contemplative life is enormous. They
muster in especial force on the Pincio, but the Corso
all day is thronged with them. They are well dressed,
good-humored, good-looking, polite; but they seera
never to do a harder stroke of work than to stroll
from the Piazza Colonna to the H6tel de Rome, or
vice versd. Some of thera don't even stroll, but stand
leaning by the hour against the doorways, sucking the
knobs of their canes, feeling their back-hair, and

1 66 FOREIGN PARTS.
settling their shirt-cuffs. At my cafe, in the moming,
several stroll in, already (at nine o'clock) in light gloves.
But they order nothing, turn on their heels, glance at
the mirrors, and stroll out again. When it rains they
herd under the portes-coch^res and in the smaller
cafes  Yesterday Prince Humbert's little primo-
genito was on the Pincio in an open landau, with his
governess. He is a sturdy, fair little fellow, and the
image of the King. They had stopped to listen to the
rausic, and the crowd was planted about the carriage-
wheels, staring and criticising under the chUd's snub
little nose. It seeraed to be bold, cynical curiosity,
without the slightest manifestation of "loyalty", and it
gave me a singular sense of the vulgarization of Rome
under the new regime. When the Pope drove abroad
it was a solemn spectacle; even if you neither kneeled
nor uncovered, you were irresistibly irapressed. But
the Pope never stopped to listen to opera-tunes, and
he had no little popelings, under the charge of
superior nurse-maids, whom you might take liberties
with. The family at the Quirinal make something of
a merit, I believe, of their modest and inexpensive
way of life. The merit is great; but, picturesquely,
what a change for the worse from a dispensation which
proclaimed stateliness as a part of its essence! The
divinity that doth hedge a king is pretty well on the
wane apparently. But how many more fine old tradi
tions will the extremely sentimental traveller miss in
the Italians over whom that little jostled prince in the
landau will have come into his kinghood? .... The
Pincio has a great charm; it is a great resource. I
am forever being rerainded of the "assthetic luxury",
as I called it above, of living in Rome. To be able

FROM A ROMAN NOTE-BOOK. I 67
to choose of an afternoon for a lounge (respectfully
speaking) between St. Peter's and the Pincio (counting
nothing else) is a proof that if in Rome you may
suffer from ennui, at least your ennui has a throbbing
soul in it. It is something to say for the Pincio that
you don't always choose St. Peter's. Sometimes I
lose patience with its air of eternal idleness; but at
others this very idleness is balm to one's conscience.
Life on just these terms seems so easy, so monotonously
sweet, that you feel as if it would be unwise, really
unsafe, to change. The Roman atraosphere is distinctly
demoralizing. ztth. — With Mrs. W. to the Villa Medici — perhaps
on the whole the most enchanting place in Rorae. The
part of the garden called the Boschetto has a kind of
incredible, impossible charm; an upper terrace, behind
locked gates, covered with a little dusky forest of
evergreen oaks. Such a deliciously dim light — such a
soft suffusion of tender, gray-green tones — such a
company of gnarled and twisted little rainiature trunks
— dwarfs playing with each other at being giants —
and such a shower of golden sparkles playing in from
the glowing west! At the end of the wood is a steep,
circular mound, up which the little trees scramble
amain, with a long, mossy staircase climbing up to a
belvedere. This staircase, rising suddenly out of the
leafy dusk, to you don't see where, is delightfully
fantastic. You expect to see an old woraan in a
crimson petticoat, with a distaff, come hobbling down
and turn into a fairy, and offer you three wishes. I
should wish one was not obliged to be a Frenchman
to come and live and dream and work at the Academie
de France. Can there be for a while a happier destiny

1 68 FOREIGN PARTS.
than that of a young artist, conscious of talent, with
no errand but to educate, polish and perfect it, trans
planted to these sacred shades? One has fancied
Plato's Academy — his gleaming colonnades, his bloom
ing gardens and Athenian sky; but was it as good as
this one, where Monsieur  does the Platonic?
The blessing in Rome is not that this or that or the
other isolated object is so very unsurpassable; but
that the general atmosphere is so rich and pictorial.
And from the general atmosphere the Villa Medici has
distilled an essence of its own — walled it in and made
it delightfully private. The great fagade on the
gardens is like an enormous rococo clock-face, all in
crusted with images and arabesques and tablets. What
mornings and afternoons one might spend there, brush
in hand, unpreoccupied, untormented, pensioned, satis
fied, resolving the picturesque into pictures.
At a later date — middle of Marcii. — A ride with Mrs.
W. out of the Porta Pia to the meadows beyond the Ponte
Nomentana — close to the site of Phaon's -villa where
Nero, in hiding, had himself stabbed. It was deeply
delightful — more so than now one can really know or
say. For these are predestined memories and the stuff
that regrets are made of; the mild divine efflorescence
of spring, the wonderful landscape, the talk suspended
for another gallop  Returning, we dismounted at
the gate of the Villa Medici and walked through the
twilight of the vaguely perfumed, bird-haunted aUeys
to H.'s studio, hidden in the wood like a cottage in a
fairy tale. I spent there a charming half-hour in the
fading light, looking at the pictures while my companion
discoursed of her errand. The studio is smaU and
raore like^^a little salon; the painting^refined, imagina-

FROM A ROMAN NOTE-BOOK. l6g
tive, somewhat morbid, full of French ability. A por
trait, idealized and etherealized, but a likeness of Mme.
de  (from last year's Salon) in white satin, quan
tities of lace, a coronet, diamonds and pearls — a wonder
ful combination of brilliant silvery tones. A "Femme
Sauvage," a naked dusky girl in a wood with a pair
of shy, passionate eyes  H. is different enough
from the American artists. They may be producers,
but he is a product as well — a product of influences
that do not touch us. One of them is his spending
his days, his years, working away in that unprofessional-
looking little studio, with his enchanted wood on one
side and the plunging wall of Rome on the other.
fanuary 30/A. — A drive the other day with Mrs. W.
to the ViUa Madama, on the side of Monte Mario; a place
like a page out of Browning, wonderful in its haunting
melancholy. What a grim commentary such a place
is on history — what an irony of the past! The road up
to it through the outer enclosure is almost impassable
with mud and stones. At the end, on a terrace, rises
the once elegant Casino, with hardly a whole pane of
glass in its fagade, gloomy with its sallow stucco and
degraded ornaments. The front away from Rome has
in the basement a great loggia, now walled in from
the weather, preceded by a grassy, belittered platform,
-with an immense sweeping view of the Campagna; the
sad-looking — more than sad-looking, evil-looking — Tiber
beneath (the color of gold, the sentimentalists say; the
color of mustard, the realists); a great vague stretch
beyond, of various complexions and uses; and on the
horizon the lovely iridescent mountains. The place is
turned into a very shabby farm-house, with rauddy
water in the old ornaraental basins and dunghills on

170 FOREIGN PARTS.
the old parterres. The "feature" is the contents of
the loggia: a vaulted roof and walls decorated by Giulio
Romano; exquisite stucco-work and still brilliant frescos;
arabesques and fanciful figures; nymphs and fauns;
animals and flowers; gracefully lavish designs of every
sort. Much of the color — especially the blues — is still
almost vivid, and all the work is wonderfully ingenious
and charming. Apartments so decorated can have been
raeant only for the recreation of great people — people
for whom life was impudent ease and success. MaVgaret
Farnese was the lady of the house, but where she
trailed her cloth of gold the chickens now scamper
between your legs over rotten straw. It is all inex
pressibly dreary. A stupid peasant scratching his head,
a couple of critical Americans picking their steps, the
walls tattered and befouled breast-high, dampness and
decay striking in on your heart, and the scene over-
bowed by these heavenly frescos, mouldering there in
their airy artistry! It's tragic; it provokes tears; it tells
so of the waste of effort. Something human seems to
pant beneath the gray pall of time and to implore you
to do something to save it. But you leave it to its
lingering death without compunction, almost with plea
sure; for the place seems vaguely crime-haunted — pay
ing at least the penalty of sorae great immorality. The
end of a Renaissance casino! The didactic observer
may take it as a symbol of the eventual destiny of the
House of Pleasure.
February i zth. — Yesterday with Mrs. W. to the ViUa
Albani. Over-formal and (as my companion says) too
much like a tea-garden; but with beautiful stairs and
splendid geometrical lines of immense box-hedge, inter
sected with long pedestals supporting little antique busts.

FROM A ROMAN NOTE-BOOK. I7I
The light to-day was magnificent; the Alban Mountains of
an intenser broken purple than I have ever seen them
— their white towns blooming upon it like vague pro
jected lights. It was like a piece of very modern
painting, and a good example of how Nature has at
times a sort of mannerism which ought to make us
careful how we condemn out of hand the more refined
and affected artists. The collection of marbles in the
Casino (Winckelmann's) admirable, and to be seen
again. The famous Antinous crowned with lotus, a
strangely beautiful and impressive thing. One sees
something every now and then which makes one de
clare that the Greek manner, even for purely romantic
and imaginative effects, surpasses any that has since
been invented. If there be not imagination in the
baleful beauty of that perfect young profile, there is
none in Hamlet or in Lycidas. There is a great deal
more than in the "Transfiguration." At any rate, with
this to point to, it is not for sculpture to confess to an
inability to produce any emotion that painting can pro
duce. There are nurabers of small and delicate frag
ments of bas-reliefs, of exquisite beauty, and a huge
piece (two combatants — one, on horseback, beating
down another — murder raade eternal and beautiful)
attributed to the Parthenon, and certainly as impressive
as anything in the Elgin marbles. Mrs. W. suggested
again the Roman villas as a "subject." Excellent, if
one could find plenty of facts, a la Stendhal. A lot of
vague picturesque talk would not at all pay. There
has been too much already. Enough facts are re
corded, I suppose; one should discover them and soak
in them for a twelvemonth. And yet a Roman villa,
in spite of statues, ideas and atmosphere, seems to me

172 FOREIGN PARTS.
to have less of human and social suggestiveness, a
shorter, lighter reverberation, than an old English
country-house, round which experience seems piled so
thick. But this perhaps is hair-splitting.
March i^th. — The Vatican is stiU deadly cold; a
couple of hours there yesterday with Mr. E. Yet he,
enviable raan, fresh from the East, had no overcoat
and wanted none. Perfect bliss, I think, would be to
live in Rome without thinking of overcoats. The Va
tican seems very familiar, but strangely smaller than of
old. I never lost the -sense before of confusing vast
ness. Sancta simplicitas ! But all my old friends stand
there in undimmed radiance, keeping, most of them,
their old pledges. I ara perhaps more struck now with
the enormous amount of padding — the nuraber of third
and fourth rate statues which weary the eye that would
fain approach freshly the twenty or thirty best. In
spite of the padding, there are dozens of things that
one passes regretfully; but the impression of the whole
place is the great thing — the feeling that through these
solemn -vistas flows the source of an incalculable part
of our present conception of beauty.
April 10th. — I went last night, in the rain, to the
VaUe, to see a comedy of Goldoni, in Venetian dialect
— "I Quattro Rustighi." I could not half follow it;
enough, however, to suspect that, with all its fun, it
was not so good as Moliere. The acting was capital
— broad, free, natural; the dialogue more conversational
even than life itself; but, like all the Italian acting I
have seen, it was wanting in finesse and taste. I con
trasted the affair with the evening in December last
that I walked over (also in the rain) to the Odeon and
saw the "Plaideurs" and the "Malade Imaginaire."

FROM A ROMAN NOTE-BOOK. I 73
There, too, was hardly more than a handful of specta
tors; but what rich, ripe, picturesque, intellectual
comedy! and what polished, educated playing! These
Itahans, however, have a raarvellous "go"; they seem
even less than the French to recite. Sorae of the
women — ugly, with red hands and shabby dresses —
have an extraordinary faculty of natural utterance — of
seeming to invent joyously as they go.
Later. — Last evening in  's box at the Apollo
to hear Ernesto Rossi in Othello. He shares supreraacy
with Sal-vini in Italian tragedy. Beautiful great theatre,
with boxes you can walk about in; brilliant audience.
The Princess Margaret was there (I have never been
to the theatre that she was not), and a number of other
princesses in neighboring boxes.  came in and
instructed us that they were the M., the L., the P., etc.
Rossi is both very bad and very good; bad where
anything like taste and discretion is required, but quite
tremendous in violent passion. The last act was really
moving — as it could not well help being. The interest
ing thing to me' was to observe the Italian conception
of the part — to see how crude it was, how little it ex
pressed the hero's moral side, his depth, his dignity —
an)rthing more than his being a creature capable of
being terrible in a rage. The great point was his
seizing lago's head and whacking it half a dozen times
on the floor, and then flinging him twenty yards away.
It was wonderfuUy done, but in the doing of it and in
the evident relish for it in the house there seemed to
me something unappreciative, irreflective.
April 2'jth. — A morning with L. B., at the ViUa
Ludovisi, which we agreed that we should not soon
forget. The villa now belongs to the King, who has

174 FOREIGN PARTS.
lodged his morganatic wife there. There is surely no
thing better in Rome; nothing perhaps exactly so
good. The grounds and gardens are immense, and the
great rusty-red city wall stretches away behind them.
and makes Rome seera vast without making them seem
small. There is everything — dusky avenues, trimmed
by the clippings of centuries, groves and dells and
glades and glowing pastures and reedy fountains and
great flowering meadows, studded with enorraous slant
ing pines. The day was delicious, the trees were all
one melody, the whole place seemed a revelation of
what Italy and hereditary grandeur can do together.
Nothing could well be more picturesque than this
garden view of the city-ramparts, lifting their fantastic
battlements above the trees and flowers. They are ah
tapestried with creeping plants, and made to serve as
sunny fruit-walls — grim old defence as they once were;
now gi-ving nothing but a kind of magnificent privacy.
The sculptures in the little Casino are few, but there
are two great ones — the beautiful sitting Mars and the
head of the great Juno, thrust into a corner behind a
shutter. These things it is almost impossible to
praise; we can only mark them well and be the wiser.
.... If I don't praise Guercino's Aurora in the greater
Casino, it is for another reason; it is certainly a very
muddy masterpiece. It figures on the ceiling of a
small low hall; the painting is coarse, and the ceUing
too near. Besides, it is unfair to pass straight from
the Athenian mythology to the Bolognese. We were
left to roam at will through the house; the custode
shut us in, and went to walk in the park. The apart
ments were all open, and I had an opportunity to re
construct, from its milieu at least, the character of a

FROM A ROMAN NOTE-BOOK. I 75
morganatic queen. I saw nothing to indicate that it
was not amiable; but I should have thought more
highly of the lady's discrimination if she had had the
Juno removed from behind her shutter. In such a
house, girdled about with such a park, methinks I
could be amiable — and perhaps discriminating too.
The Ludovisi Casino is small, but it seeras to rae that
the perfection of a life of leisure might be led there.
In an English house you are subject to the many sraall
needs and observances — to say nothing of a red-faced
butler, dropping his h's. You are oppressed with com
fort. Here, the billiard-table is old-fashioned — per
haps a trifle crooked; but you have Guercino above
your head, and Guercino, after all, is almost as good
as Guido. The rooms, I noticed, all please by their
shape, by a lovely proportion, by a mass of delicate
ornamentation on the high concave ceilings. It seeras
as if one raight live over again here some gently hos
pitable life of a forgotten type. It would be pleasant,
if one had the means, to buy, for mere fancy's sake,
an Italian -villa (I am told there are very good ones
StUl to be had) with graceful old rooms, and im
mensely thick walls, and a winding stone staircase,
and a view from the loggia on the top as nearly as
possible like that from the Villa Ludovisi — a view
with twisted parasol-pines balanced high above a
wooded horizon against a sky of faded sapphire.
May llth. — It was wonderful yesterday at St. John
Lateran. The spring now has turned to perfect
summer; there are cascades of verdure over all the
walls; the early flowers are a fading memory, and the
new grass is knee-deep in the Villa Borghese. The
winter aspect of the region about the Lateran is one

176 FOREIGN PARTS.
of the best things in Rome; the sunshine seems no
where so yellow, and the lean shadows look nowhere
so purple as on the long grassy walk to Santa Croce.
But yesterday I seemed to see nothing but green and
blue. The expanse before Santa Croce was vivid
green; the Campagna rolled away in great biUows,
which seeraed to break high about the gaunt aque
ducts; and the Alban Hills, which in January and
February keep shifting and melting along the whole
scale of azure, were almost monotonously green, and
had lost some of the fine drawing of their contours.
But the sky was superbly blue; everything was radiant
with light and warmth — warmth which a soft, steady
breeze kept from being fierce. I strolled some time
about the church, which has a grand air enough,
though I don't seize the point of view of Miss  ,
who told me the other day that she thought it vastly
finer than St. Peter's. But on Miss  's lips this
seemed a very pretty paradox. The choir and tran
septs have a certain sombre splendor, and I like the
old vaulted passage, with its slabs and monuments,
behind the choir. The charm of charms at St. John
Lateran is the admirable twelfth-century cloister, which
was never more charming than yesterday. The shrubs
and flowers around the ancient well were blooming
away in the dazzling light, and the t-wisted pillars and
chiselled capitals of the perfect little colonnade seemed
to enclose them like the sculptured rim of a precious
vase. Standing out among the flowers, you may look
up and see a part of the summit of the great fagade
of the church. The robed and mitred apostles,
bleached and rain- washed by the ages, rose into the
blue air like huge figures of snow. I spent some time

FROM A ROMAN NOTE-BOOK. 177
afterwards at the museum of the Lateran, pleasantly
enough, and had it quite to myself It is rather
scantily stocked, but the great cool halls open out im
pressively, one after the other, and the wide spaces
between the statues seera to suggest, at first, that each
is a masterpiece. I was in the loving mood of one's
last days in Rorae, and when I had nothing else to
admire I admired the raagnificent thickness of the
embrasures of the doors and windows. If there were
no statues at all in the Lateran, the palace would be
worth walking through every now and then, to keep
up one's ideal of solid architecture. I went over to
the Scala Santa, where there was no one but a very
shabby priest, sitting like a ticket-taker at the door.
But he let me pass, and I ascended one of the pro
fane lateral stairways, and treated myself to a glimpse
of the Sanctum Sanctorum. Its threshold is crossed
but once or twice a year, I believe, by three or four
of the most exalted divines, but you may look into it
freely enough through a couple of gilded lattices. It
is very sombre and splendid, and looks indeed like a
very holy place. And yet, somehow, it suggested
irreverent thoughts; it had, to my fancy — perhaps on
account ofthe lattices — a kind of Oriental, of Mahometan
air. I expected every raoment to see a sultana corae
in, in a silver veil, and sit down in her silken trousers
on the crimson carpet.
Later. — Farewells, packing, etc  One would
like, after five months in Rorae, to be able to make
some general statement of one's experience, one's
gains. It is not easy. One has the sense of a kind
of passion for the place, and of a large number of
gathered impressions. Many of these have been in-
Foreign Parts. ^-^

178 FOREIGN PARTS.
tense, momentous, but one has trodden on the other,
and one can hardly say what has become of them.
They store themselves noiselessly away, I suppose, in
the dira but safe places of memory, and we live in an
insistent faith that they wUl emerge into vivid relief if
life or art should demand them. As for the passion,
we needn't trouble ourselves about that. Sooner or
later it will be sure to bring us back!

A CHAIN OF CITIES.
One day in midwinter, some years since, during a
transit from Rorae to Florence too rapid to admit of
much wayside dalliance with the picturesque, I waited
for the train at Narni. There was time to stroll far
enough from the station to have a look at the famous
old bridge of Augustus, broken short in mid-Tiber.
While I stood observing, the measure of enjoyment
was filled up by the unbargained spectacle of a white-
cowled monk trudging up a road which wound into
the gate of the town. The little town stood on a hill,
a good space away, boxed in behind its perfect gray
wall, and the monk crept slowly along and disappeared
within the aperture. Everything was distinct in the
clear air, and the view was like the background in a
Perugino. The winter is bare and brown enough in
Southern Italy, and the earth has even a shabbier as
pect than with ourselves, with whom the dark side of
the year has a robust self-assurance which enables one

A CHAIN OF CITIES. I 79
to regard it very much as a fine nude statue. But
the winter atmosphere in these regions has often an
extraordinary charm; it seeras to smile with a tender
sense of being sole heir to the duty of cheering man's
heart. It gave such an interest to the broken bridge,
the little walled town and the trudging friar, that I
turned away with an impatient vow that in sorae
blessed springtirae of the future I would take the
journey again and pause to my heart's content at
Narni, at Spoleto, at Assisi, at Perugia, at Cortona, at
Arezzo. But we have generally to diminish our vows
a little when we come to fulfil them; and so it befell
that when my blessed springtime arrived, I had to
begin resignedly at Assisi.
I suppose enjoyment would have a simple zest which
it often lacks, if we always did things when we want
to; for we can answer too little for future moods.
Winter, at least, seemed to me to have put something
into these medieval cities which the May sun had
melted away — a certain grossness of local color, an
excess of duskiness and decay. Assisi, in the January
twilight, looked like a -vignette out of some brown old
missal. But you wUl have to be a fearless explorer
now to find of a fine spring day a quaint Italian town
which does not primarily seem to exist in order that
Mr. Baedeker may describe it. This great man was
at Assisi in force, and a brand-new inn for his ac
commodation has just been opened cheek by jowl with
the church of Saint Francis. I don't know that even
its dire discomfort makes it seem less impertinent;
but I confess I stayed there, and the great view
seemed hardly less beautiful from my window than
from the gaUery of the convent, It embraces the whole

l8o FOREIGN PARTS,
plain of Umbria, which, as twilight deepens, becomes
an enchanting counterfeit of the misty sea. The
traveller's first errand is with the church; and it is fair,
furthermore, to admit that when he has crossed the
threshold, the position and the quality of his inn cease
for the time to be matters of moment. This double
teraple of Saint Francis is one of the very sacred
places of Italy, and it is hard to conceive of a church
with a greater look of sanctity. It seems especially
solemn if you have just come from Rome, where every
thing ecclesiastical is, in aspect, so very much of this
world- — so florid, so elegant, so profane. Its position
is superb, and they were brave builders who laid
its foundation-stones. It rises straight from a steep
mountain-side and plunges forward on its great sub
structure of arches, like a headland frowning over the
sea. Before it stretches a long grassy piazza, at the
end of which you look along a little gray street, and
see it climb a little way the rest of the hill, and then
pause and leave a broad green slope, crowned, high in
the air, with a ruined castle. When I say before it, I
mean before the upper church; for by way of doing
something supremely handsome and impressive, the
sturdy architects of the thirteenth century piled temple
upon temple and executed a double version of their
idea. One raay suppose them to have intended an
architectural image of the relation between huraan
heart and head. Entering the lower church at the
bottom of the great flight of steps which leads from
the upper door, you seem to penetrate at last into the
very heart of Catholicism. For the first few minutes
after leaving the hot daylight, you see nothing but a
vista of low, black colurans, closed by the great

A CHAIN OF CITIES. l8l
fantastic cage which surrounds the altar; the place
looks like a sort of gorgeous cavern. With time you
distinguish details, and become accustomed to the
penetrating chill, and even manage to make out a few
frescos; but the general effect remains magnificently
sombre and subterranean. The vaulted roof is very
low and the pillars dwarfish, though immense in girth
— as befits pillars with a small cathedral on top of
them. The tone of the place is superb — the richest
harmony of lurking shadows and dusky corners, relieved
by scattered iraages and scintillations. There was little
light but what came through the windows of the choir,
over which the red curtains had been dropped and
were beginning to glow with the declining sun. The
choir was guarded by a screen, behind which half a
dozen venerable voices were droning vespers; but over
the top of the screen came the hea-vy radiance, and
played among the ornaments of the high fence around
the shrine, and cast the shadow of the whole elaborate
mass forward into the dusky nave. The gloom of the
vault and the side-chapels is overwrought with vague
frescos, most of them of Giotto and his school, out of
which the terribly distinct little faces which these
artists loved to draw stare at you with a solemn
formalism. Some of thera are faded and injured, and
many so ill-lighted and ill-placed that you can only
glance at them with reverential conjecture; the great
group, however — four paintings by Giotto on the ceiling
above the altar — may be examined with some success.
Like everything of Giotto's, they deserve examination;,
but I hesitate to say that they repay it by raising
one's spirits. He was an admirably expressive genius,
and in the art of raaking an attitude unmistakable I

1 82 FOREIGN PARTS.
think he has hardly been surpassed; it is perhaps this
rigid exactness of posture that gives his personages
their forraidable grimness.^ Meagre, primitive, un
developed as he is, he seems immeasurably strong, and
suggests that if he had lived a hundred and fifty years
later, Michael Angelo might have found a rival. Not
that Giotto is fond of imaginative contortions. The
something strange that troubles and haunts in his works
dwells in their intense reality.
It is part of the wealth of the lower church that it
contains an admirable primitive fresco by an artist of
genius rarely encountered — a certain Pietro Cavallini,
pupil of Giotto. It represents the Crucifixion; the
three crosses rising into a sky spotted with the winged
heads of angels, with a dense crowd pressing below.
I have never seen anything more direfuUy lugubrious;
it comes near being as impressive as Tintoretto's great
renderings of the scene in Venice. The abject anguish
of the crucified, and the straddling authority and
brutality of the mounted guards in the foreground, are
contrasted in a fashion worthy of a great draraatist.
But the most poignant touch is the tragic grimaces of
the little angelic heads, as they fall like hailstones
through the dark air. It is genuine, realistic weeping
that the painter has depicted, and the effect is a sin
gular mixture of the grotesque and the pitiful. There
are a great many more frescos beside; all the chapels
on one side are lined with them; but they are chiefly
interesting in their general effect — as they people the
dim recesses with startling shadows and dwarfish
phantoms. Before leaving the church, I lingered a long
time near the door, for it seemed to me I should not
soon again enjoy such a feast of chiaroscuro. The

A CHAIN OF CITIES. 1 83
opposite end glowed with subdued color; the middle
portion was vague and brown, with two or three scat
tered worshippers looming through the dusk; and all
the way down, the polished pavement with its uneven
slabs, glittering dimly in the obstructed light, seemed
to me the most fascinating thing in the world. It is
certainly desirable, if one takes the lower church of
Saint Francis to represent the human heart, that one
should find a few bright places in it. But if the
general effect is gloomy, is the symbol less valid?
For the contracted, passionate, prejudiced heart let it
stand! One thing, at aU events, I can say: that I would
give a great deal to possess as capacious, symmetrical
and weU-ordered a head as the upper sanctuary.
Thanks to these merits, in spite of a great array of
frescos of Giotto which have the advantage of being
easUy seen, it lacks the impressiveness of its counter
part. The frescos, which are admirable, represent
certain leading events in the life of Saint Francis, and
suddenly remind you, by one of those anomalies which
form part of the entertainraent of Catholicism, that
the apostle of beggary — the saint whose only tenement
in life was the ragged robe which barely covered him
— is the hero of this massive structure. Church upon
church — nothing less will adequately shroud his con
secrated clay. The great reality of Giotto's designs
increases the helpless wonderment with which we look
at the passionate pluck of Saint Francis — the sense of
being separated from it by an impassable gulf — the
reflection on all that has come and gone to make us
forgive ourselves for not being capable of such high-
strung virtue. An observant friend, who has lived

184 FOREIGN PARTS.
long in Italy, lately declared to me that she detested
the name of Saint Francis — she deemed him the chief
propagator of that Italian vice which is raost trying to
those who have a kindness for the Italian character —
the want of personal self-respect. There is a solidarity
in cleanliness, and every cringing beggar, idler, liar
and pilferer seemed to her to flourish under the shadow
of this great man's unwashed sanctity. She was pos
sibly right; at Rorae, at Naples, at least, I would have
admitted that she was right; but at Assisi, face to face
¦with Giotto's vivid chronicle, it is impossible to refuse
to the painter's ascetic hero that compassionate respect
which we feel for all men whose idea and life have
been identical, whose doctrine was an unflinching per
sonal example.
I should find it hard to give a very definite account
of my subsequent adventures at Assisi; for there is
incontestably such a thing as being too good-humored
to discriminate, too genial to be critical. One need not
be ashamed to confess that the ultimate result of one's
meditations at the shrine of Saint Francis was a great
charity. My charity led me slowly up and down for a
couple of hours through the steep little streets, and
finally stretched itself on the grass beside rae in the
shadow of the great ruined castle which decorates so
raagnificently the erainence above the town. I re
raember edging along against the sunless side of the
mouldy little houses, and pausing very often to look at
nothing very particular. It was all very hot, very stUl,
very palpably old. A wheeled vehicle at Assisi is a
rarity, and the foreigner's interrogative tread in the
blank, sonorous lanes has the pri-vilege of bringing the
inhabitants to their doorways. Some of the better

A CHAIN OF CITIES. I 85
houses, however, have an air of sombre stillness which
seems a protest against all curiosity as to what may
happen in the nineteenth century. You may wonder,
as you pass, what lingering old-world social types are
vegetating there, but you will not find out. Yet in
one very silent little street I had a glimpse of an open
door which I have not forgotten. A long-haired pedler,
•with a tray of mass-books and rosaries, was offering
his wares to a stout old priest. The priest had opened
the door rather stingily, and seemed to be half
heartedly disraissing him. But the pedler held up
something which I could not see; the priest wavered,
with an air of timorous concession to profane curiosity,
and then furtively pulled the pedler into the house.
I should have liked to go in with the pedler. I saw
later sorae gentlemen of Assisi who also seeraed bored
enough to have found entertainment in a pedler's tray.
They were at the door of the cafe, on the Piazza, and
were so thankful to me for asking them the way to
the cathedral that they all answered in chorus, smiling
as if I had done them a favor. The Piazza has a fine
old portico of an ancient Temple of Minerva — six
fluted columns and a pediment, of beautiful proportions,
but sadly battered and decayed. Goethe, I believe,
found it much more interesting than the mighty mediseval
church, and Goethe, as a cicerone, doubtless could have
persuaded you that it was so; but in the humble
society of Murray we shall most of us find deeper
meaning in the church. I found some very quaint ones
in the dark yellow fagade of the small cathedral, as I
sat on a stone bench beside the oblong green which lies
before it. It is a very pretty piece of Italian Gothic,
and, like several of its companions at Assisi, it has an

1 86 FOREIGN PARTS.
elegant wheel window and a number of grotesque little
sculptures of creatures human and bestial. If, with
Goethe, I were inclined to balance something against
the attractions of the great church, I should choose
the ruined castle on the hill above the town. I had
been ha-ving glimpses of it all the afternoon at the end
of steep street-vistas, and promising myself half an
hour beside its gray walls at sunset. The sun was
very long setting, and my half-hour became a long
lounge in the lee of an alDutment which arrested the
gentle uproar of the wind. The castle is a magnificent
piece of ruin, perched upon the summit of the mountain
to the slope of which Assisi clings, and dropping a pair
of stony arms to enclose the little town in its erabrace.
The city-wall, in other words, straggles up the steep
green slope and meets the crumbling skeleton of the
castle. On the side away from the town the mountain
plunges into a deep ravine, on the other side of which
rises the powerful undraped shoulder of Monte Subasio
— a fierce reflector of the sun. Gorge and mountain
are wild enough, but their frown expires in the teem
ing softness of the vale of Umbria. To lie aloft there
on the grass, with a silver-gray castle at one's back
and the warm rushing wind in one's ears, and watch
the beautiful plain mellowing into twilight, was as
exquisite a form of repose as ever fell to a tired
tourist's lot.
At Perugia is an ancient castle; but unhappily one
must speak of it in earnest as that unconscious humor
ist, the American abroad, is found to speak of the
Coliseum: it will be a very handsome building when
it is finished. Even Perugia is going the way of all
Italy — straightening out her streets, repairing her ruins.

A CHAIN OF CITIES. 1 87
laying her venerable ghosts. The castle is being com
pletely remis d neuf — a Massachusetts school-house
could not suggest a greater absence of antecedents.
There are shops in the basement and fresh putty on
all the -windows. The only thing proper to a castle
that it has kept is its magnificent position and view,
which you may enjoy from the broad platform where
the Perugini assemble at eventide. Perugia is chiefly
known to fame as the city of Raphael's master; but it
has an even higher claim to' renown, and ought to be
set down in one's sentimental gazetteer as the City
with the Views. The little dusky, crooked town is
fuU of character; but the view, somehow, is ever pre
sent, even when your back is turned to it, or fifty
house-waUs conceal it, and you are forever rushing up
by-streets and peeping round corners in the hope of
catching another glimpse of it. As it stretches away
before you in all its lovely immensity, it is altogether
too vast and too fair to be described. You can only
say, and rest upon it, that you prefer it to any other
in the world. For it is such a wondrous mixture of
blooming plain and gleaming river and waving multi
tudinous mountain, vaguely dotted with pale gray
cities, that, placed as you are, roughly speaking, in
the centre of Italy, your glance seeras to compass the
lovely land from sea to sea. Up the long vista of the
Tiber you look — almost to Rome; past Assisi, Spello,
Foligno, Spoleto, all perched on their respective moun
tains and shining through the blue haze. To the
north, to the east, to the west, you see a hundred
variations of the prospect, of which I have kept no
record. Two notes only I have made: one (I have
made it over and over again) on the perfect delicacy

I 88 FOREIGN PARTS.
of mountain forms and lines in Italy; — it is exactly
as if there were a sex in mountains, and their contours
and curves and coraplexions were here all of the
ferainine gender: second, on the fact that the posses
sion of such an outlook on the world really goes far
to raake a modest little city like Perugia a kind- of
sesthetic raetropolis. It raust deepen the civic con
sciousness aud take off the edge of ennui. It performs
this kindly office, at any rate, for the traveller who is
overstaying his curiosity as to Perugino and the Etrus
can relics. It continually solicits his eyes and his
imagination; it doubles his entertainment. I spent a
week in the place, and when it was gone, I had had
enough of Perugino, but I had not had enough of the
view. I should perhaps do the reader a service by telling
him just how a week at Perugia may be spent. His
first care must be not to be in a hurry — to walk every
where, very slowly and very much at random, and
gaze good-naturedly at anything his eye may happen
to encounter. Alraost everything that raeets the eye
has an ancient oddity which ekes out the general
picturesqueness. He must look a great deal at the
huge Palazzo Pubblico, which indeed is very well
worth looking at. It masses itself gloomily above the
narrow street to an immense elevation, and leads the
eye along a cliff-like surface of rugged wall, mottled
with old scars and new repairs, to the loggia dizzUy
perched upon its cornice. He must repeat his visit
to the Etruscan Gate, whose extreme antiquity he wUl
need more than one visit to appreciate. He must
entertain himself with the curious statue of Pope
Julius in., before the cathedral, remembering that

A CHAIN OF CITIES. l8g
Hawthorne fabled his Miriam to have given rendez
vous to Kenyon at its base. Its material is a vivid
green bronze, and the mantle and tiara are covered
with an embroidery worthy of a sUversmith. He
must bestow on Perugino's frescos in the Exchange,
and his pictures in the University, all the placid con
teraplation they deserve. He must go to the theatre
every evening, in an orchestra chair at twenty-two
soldi, and enjoy the curious didacticism of Amore
senza Stima, Sever it d. e Debolezza, La Societ d Equivoca,
and other popular specimens of contemporaneous
Italian comedy. I shall be very much surprised if, at
the end of a week of this varied entertainment, he do
not confess to a sentimental attachment to Perugia.
His strolls will abound in small pretexts for stopping
to look, of which a dozen pencil-strokes would be a
better memorandum than this vague word-sketching.
From the hill on which the town is planted radiate a
dozen ravines, down whose sides the houses slide and
scramble with an alarming indifference to the cohesion
of their little rugged blocks of fiinty red stone. You
cannot ramble far without emerging upon some little
court or terrace from which you may look across a
gulf of tangled gardens or vineyards at a cluster of
serried black dwellings, which seem to be hollowing
in their backs to keep their balance on its opposite
edge. On archways and street -staircases and dark
aUeys boring through a chain of massive basements,
and curving and climbing and plunging as they go, on
the soundest mediaeval principles, you may feast your
fill. These are the architectural comraonplaces of
Perugia. Some of the little streets in out-of-the-way
corners always suggested to me a singular iraage.

I go FOREIGN PARTS.
They were so rugged, so brown, so silent, that you
would have fancied them passages long since hewn by
the pickaxe in some deserted stone -quarry. The
battered brown houses looked like sections of natural
rock — none the less so when, across some narrow gap,
I saw the glittering azure of the great surrounding
landscape. But I ought not to talk of mouldy alleys or even
of azure landscapes as if they were the chief delight
of the eyes in this accomplished little city. In the
Sala del Cambio, where in ancient days the money
changers rattled their sculptured florins and figured up
their profits, you may enjoy one of the serenest artistic
pleasures which the golden age of art has bequeathed
to us. Bank-parlors, I believe, are always luxuriously
furnished, but I doubt whether even those of Messrs.
RothschUd are decorated in as fine a taste as this
little counting-house of a bygone fashion. Perugino
was the artist chosen, and he did his best. He covered
the four low walls and ceiling with Scriptural and
mythological figures of extraordinary beauty. They
are ranged in artless attitudes around the upper half
of the room — the sibyls, the prophets, the philosophers,
the Greek and Roman heroes — looking down with
broad, serene faces, with their small mild eyes, their
small sweet mouths, at the incongruous proceedings
of a Board of Brokers. Had finance a very high tone
in those days, or was genius simply very convenient,
as the Irish say? The great charm of the Sala del
Cambio is that it seems to murmur a yes to both
these questions. There was a rigid probity, it seems
to intimate; there was an abundant inspiration 
About the artist there would be much to note — more

A CHAIN OF CITIES.

igi

than I can attempt; for he was not, I think, to an
attentive observer, the very simple genius that he
seems. He has that about him which leads one to
remark to one's self that, after all, he plays a proper
part enough here as the patron ofthe money-changers.
He is the delight of a million of young ladies; but I
suspect that if his works could be exactly analyzed,
we should find in them a trifle more of manner than
of conviction — of skill than of sentiment. His por
trait, painted on the wall of the Sala (you may see it
also at Rome and Florence) might serve for the like
ness of Mr. Worldly- Wiseman, in Bunyan's allegory.
He was fond of his glass, I believe, and he made his
art lucrative. This tradition is not refuted by his por
trait, and after some experience of his pictures, you
may find an echo of it in their monotonous grace,
their somewhat conscious purity. But I confess that
Perugino, so interpreted, seems to me hardly less
interesting. If he was the inventor of what the French
call la facture, he applied his system with masterly
skill; he was the forerunner of a mighty race. After
you have seen a certain number of his pictures, you
have taken his measure. They are all unerring re
productions of a single primary type which had the
good fortune to be adorably fair — to look as if it had
freshly dawned upon a -vision unsullied by the shadows
of earth. As painter and draughtsman Perugino is
delightful; one takes a singular pleasure in being
able to count confidently on his unswerving beauty of
line, and untroubled harmony of color. Scepticism
much raore highly developed than Perugino's would
be easy to forgive, if it were as careful to replace one
conscience by another. The spiritual conscience — the

ig2 FOREIGN PARTS.
conscience of Giotto and Fra Angelico — must have
lurked in a corner of his genius even after the trick
of the trade had been mastered. In the sacristy of
the charming church of San Pietro — a museum of
pictures and carvings — is a row of small heads of
saints, which formerly ornamented the frame of the
artist's Ascension, carried off by the French. It is
almost miniature work, and as candidly devout in ex
pression as it is delicious in touch. Two of the holy
raen are reading their breviaries, but with an air of
infantine innocence which makes you feel sure that
they are holding the book upside down.
Between Perugia and Cortona lies Lake Thrasymene,
where Hannibal treated the Romans to unaccustomed
sensations. The reflections it suggests are a proper
preparation for Cortona itself, which is one of the most
remotely ancient of Italian towns. It raust indeed '
have been a hoary old city when Hannibal and Fla
minius came to the shock of battle, and Jhave looked
down afar from its gray ramparts, on the contending
swarm, with soraething of the philosophic composure
befitting a survivor of Pelasgian and Etruscan revolu
tions. These gray ramparts are in great part stUl vis
ible, and form the chief attraction of Cortona. It is
perched on the very pinnacle of a mountain, and I
wound and doubled interminably over the face of the
great hill, while still the jumbled roofs and towers of
the arrogant little city seemed nearer to the sky than
to the railway station. "Rather rough," Murray pro
nounces the local hotel; and rough indeed it was; it
fairly bristled with discomfort. But the landlord was
the best feUow in the world, and took me up into a
rickety belvedere on the summit of his establishment

A CHAIN OF CITIES. lg3
and played showraan to the wonderful panorama. I
don't know whether ray loss or my gain was greater
that I saw Cortona through the mediura of a feast-day.
On the one hand the museum was closed (and in a
certain sense the smaUer and obscurer the town, the
more I like the museum), the churches were impene
trably crowded, and there was not an empty stool nor
the edge of a table at the cafe. I was unable there
fore to see the famous Muse — the most precious relic
of Greek pictorial art. On the other I saw — but this
is what I saw. A part of the mountain-top is occupied
by the church of Saint Margaret, and this was Saint
Margaret's Day. The houses pause and leave a grassy
slope, planted here and there with lean black cypresses.
The peasantry of the place and of the neighboring
country had congregated in force, and were crowding
into the church or winding up the slope. When I ar
rived, they were all kneeling or uncovered; a bedizened
procession, with banners and censers, bearing abroad,
I believe, the relics of the saint, was re-entering the
church. It was wonderfully pompous. The day was
superb, and the sky blazing overhead like a vault of
deepest sapphire. The brown contadini, in no great
costume, but decked in various small fineries of scarlet
and yellow, made a raass of raotley color in the high
wind-stirred light. The procession chanted in the pious
hush, and the boundless prospect raelted away beneath
us in tones of azure hardly less brilliant than the sky.
Behind the church was an empty, crumbling citadel,
with half a dozen old women keeping the gate for
coppers. Here were -views and breezes and sun and
shade and grassy corners, to one's heart's content. I
chose a spot which fairly combined all these advan-
Foreign Parts. 13

ig4 FOREIGN PARTS.
tages, and spent a good part of my day at Cortona
lying there at my length and observing the situation
over the top of a novel of Balzac. In the afternoon, I
came down and hustled awhile through the crowded
little streets, and then stroUed forth under a scorching
sun, and made the outer circuit of the walls. I saw
sorae tremendous uncemented blocks; they were glar
ing and twinkling in the powerful light, and I had to
put on a blue eye-glass, to throw the vague Etruscan
past into its proper perspective.
I spent the next day at Arezzo, in very much the
same uninvestigating fashion. At Arezzo, you are far
frora Rome, you are well within genial Tuscany, and
you encounter the romantic in a milder form. The ruined
castle on the hill, for instance (like Assisi and Cortona,
Arezzo is furnished with this agreeable feature), has
been converted into a blooming market-garden. But
I lounged away the hot hours there, under a perfect
summer-day spell. I had seen Santa Maria della Pieve
and its campanile of quaint colonnades, the stately,
dusky cathedral and John of Pisa's elaborate marble
shrine, the museum and its Etruscan vases and majolica
platters. The old pacified citadel was raore delicious.
There were lovely hills all around it, cypresses cast
ing straight shadows on the grassy bastions at its
angles, and in the middle, a wondrous Italian tangle
of growing wheat and corn, vines and figs, peaches
and cabbages.
1873-

THE ST. GOTTHARD. ig5

THE ST. GOTTHARD.
LEAVES FROM A NOTE-BOOK.
Berne, September if^th, 1873. — In Berne again,
some eleven weeks after having left it in July, I have
never been in Switzerland so late, and I came hither
innocently supposing that the last Cook's tourist would
have paid out his last coupon and departed. But I
was lucky, it seems, to discover an empty cot in an
attic and a very tight place at a table d'hote. People
are all flocking out of Switzerland, as in July they were
flocking in, and the main channels of egress are ter
ribly choked. I have been here several days, watch
ing them come and go; it is like the march-past of an
army. It gives one a lively impression of the quantity
of luxury now diffused through the world. Here is
little Switzerland disgorging its tens of thousands of
honest folks, chiefly English and rarely, to judge by
their faces and talk, children of light, in any eminent
degree; for whom snow-peaks, and glaciers, and passes,
and lakes, and chalets, and sunsets, and a cafi complet,
"including honey," as the coupon says, have becorae
prime necessities for six weeks every year. It's not so
long ago that lords and nabobs monopolized these
pleasures; but nowadays a month's tour in Switzerland
is no more a jeu de prince than a Sunday excursion.
To watch this huge Anglo-Saxon wave ebbing through
Berne raakes one believe that the common lot of man
kind is after all not so very hard and that the masses
13'

Ig6 FOREIGN PARTS.
have reached a rather high standard of corafort. The
view of the Oberland chain, as you see it frora the
garden of the hotel, really butters one's bread very
handsomely; and here are I don't know how raany
hundred Cook's tourists a day, looking at it through
the smoke of their pipes. Is it really the "masses" I
see every day at the table d'hote? They have rather
too few h's to the dozen, as one may say, but their
good-nature is great. Some people complain that they
"-vulgarize" Switzerland; but as far as I am concerned,
I freely give it up to them, and take a peculiar satis
faction in seeing them here. Switzerland is a "show
country" — I think so more and more every time I
come here; and its use in the world is to reassure
persons of a benevolent imagination when they begin
to wish the majority of mankind had only a little more
elevating amusement. Here is amusement for a thou
sand years, and as elevating, certainly, as mountains
five miles high can make it. I expect to live to see
the summit of Monte Rosa heated by steam-tubes and
adorned with an hotel setting three dinners a day.
I have been walking about the arcades, which used
to bestow a grateful shade in July, but which seem
rather dusky and chilly in these shortening autumn
days. I am struck with the way the English always
speak of them — with a shudder, as gloomy, as dirty,
as evil-smelling, as suffocating, as freezing (as it may
be) — -as anything and everything but amusing. I be
lieve we Americans are the only people who, in travel
ling, judge things on the first impulse — when we do
judge them at all — not from the stand-point of simple
comfort. Most Americans, strolling forth into these
bustling cloisters, are, I imagine, too much entertained,

THE ST. GOTTHARD. ig7
too much diverted from their sense of an unalienable
right to be comfortable, to be conscious of heat or
cold, of thick air, or even of the universal smell of
cheese and lard. If the picturesque were banished
from the face of the earth, I think the idea would sur-
-vive in some typical American heart  I have per
haps spent too many days here to call Berne interest
ing, but the Sturdy little town has certainly a powerful
indi-viduality. I ought before this to have raade a few
memoranda. It stands on a high proraontory, with the swift,
green Aar girding it about and making it almost an
island. The sides plunge down to the banks of the
river, in some places steeply terraced (those, for in
stance, overlooked by the goodly houses of the grave
old Junkerngasse) — gardens which brown, skinny old
women are always raking and scraping and watering,
nosing and fumbling among the cabbages like goats
on the edge of a precipice; in others, as beneath the
cathedral terrace, cemented by an immense precipice
of buttressed masonry. Within, it is homely, ugly,
almost grotesque, but full of character. Indeed, I do
not know why it should have so much when there are
cities which have played twice the part in the world
which wear a much less striking costume. The town
is almost all in length, and lies chiefly upon a single
street, stretching away, under various names, from the
old city gate, with its deserted grassy bear-pit, where
little chamois now are kept — tender little chamois,
which must create an appetite, one would think, in
the lurking ursine ghosts, if they stUl haunt the place
— to the great single-arched bridge over the Aar and
the new bear-pit, where tourists hang over the rail and

ig8 FOREIGN PARTS.
fling turnips to the shaggy monsters. This street, like
most of its neighbors, is built on arcades — great, mas
sive, low-browed, straddling arcades — in the manner
of Chester and Bologna (but far more solidly). The
houses are gray and uneven, and mostly capped with
great pent-house red roofs, surmounted with quaint
little knobs and steeples and turrets. They have
flower-pots in the windows and red cushions on the
sills, on which, toward evening, there are generally
planted a pair of solid Bernese elbows. If the elbows
belong to a raan, he is smoking a big-bowled pipe; if
they belong to one of the softer sex, the color in her
cheeks is generally a fair match to the red in the
cushion. The arcades are wonderful in their huge,
awkward solidity; there is superfluous stone and mor
tar enough stowed away in the piers to build a large
American city. Some of these are of really fabulous
thickness; I should think those in the Theater-Platz
might measure laterally, from edge to edge, some ten
feet. The little shops in the arcades are very dusky
and unventilated; few of them can have known a good
fresh air-current these twenty years. There is always
a sort of public extension of the household life on the
deep green benches which occupy the depths of the
piers. Here the women sit nursing their babies and
patching their husbands' breeches. One, who is young
and most exceptionally pretty, sits all day plying her
sewing-machine, with her head on one side and an up
ward glance at observant passers — a something that
one may call the coquetry of industry. Another, a per
fect mountain of a woman, is brought forth every
raorning, lowered, with the proper precautions, into her
bench, and left there tiU night. She is always knitting

THE ST. GOTTHARD. igg
a stocking; I have an idea that she is iht fournisseuse
of the little Swiss army. She ought to wear one of
those castellated crowns which form the coiffure of
ladies on raonuraents, and sit there before all men's
eyes as the embodied genius of the city — the patroness
of Berne. Like the piers of the arcades, she has a
most fantastic thickness, and out of her superfluous
fleshly substance a dozen American sylphs might be
made. I suppose she is forty years old, but her tre
mendous bulk is surmounted by a face of the most
infantine freshness and na'ivete. She is evidently not
a fool; on the contrary, she looks very sensible and
amiable; but her immense circumference has kept ex
perience at bay, and she is perfectly innocent because
nothing has ever dared to happen to her. This wonder
ful woraan is only a larger specimen of the general
Bernese type — the heaviest, grossest, stolidest, certainly,
that I have ever seen. Every one here is ugly (except
the little woman with the sewing-machine); every one
is awkward, dogged, boorish, and bearish. F. B  ¦
called my attention to the shape of the men; it is
precisely the shape of the bears in the pit when they
stand up on their hind paws to beg for turnips — the
short, thick neck, the big, sturdy trunk, the flat, meagre
hips — the total absence of hips, in fact — the shrunken
legs and long flat feet. Since making this discovery
I see the ursine eleraent, humanly and socially, at
every turn, and begin to regard it as a kind of bearish
cynicism that the townsfolk should hug the likeness as
they do, and thrust the ugly monsters at you, in the
flesh or in effigy — carved on gate-posts and emblazoned
on shields — wherever you glance.
All down the middle of the long gray street are

2GO FOREIGN PARTS.
posted antique fountains — sculptured and emblazoned
columns rising out of a great stone trough, and sup
porting some grotesque symbolic figure. These figures
are frankly ugly, like the people and the architecture,
but they have a rude humor which seems to have
passed out of the local manners. If you make a joke,
your interlocutor stares at you as if you were a placard
in a foreign tongue. Doubtless the joke is not broad
enough; the joke of one of the fountains is to show
you an ogre gobbling down a handful, of little children.
.... There are broad jokes made, I imagine, at the
abbay es or headquarters of the old guilds, of which
sorae half-a-dozen present a wide antique fagade to the
main street, ornamented with some immense heraldic
device, hung out like the sign of an inn. They serve,
in a measure, the purpose of inns, though whether they
entertain persons not members of their respective crafts,
I am unable to say. All crafts at any rate are repre
sented — the marchands, the marichaux , the tisserands,
the charpentiers ; there is even an abbaye des gentils-
hommes, with a great genteel device of plumes and
crossed swords. They all look as if they had a deal
of heavy plate on their sideboards — as if a great many
Schoppen were emptied by the smokers in the deep
red-cushioned window-seats. The landlord of the Fau
eon showed rae a quantity of ancient silver in his
keeping, which figures at those copious civic banquets
at which the burghers of Berne warm themselves up,
not infrequently, I believe, during their long winters.
It was very' quaint and handsome, and seemed to teU
of a great deal of savory in-door abundance behind
the thick walls of the gray houses.
The cathedral, indeed, indicates an opulent city,

THE ST. GOTTHARD. 201
and is a building of some consequence. It is fifteenth-
century Gothic, of a rather artificial and, as Mr. Ruskin
would say, insincere kind; a long nave, without tran
septs; a truncated tower, capped with a little wooden
coiffure which adds to its expression, especially as I
see it from my window at sunrise, when it lifts its
odd silhouette against the faintly flushing sky, like
some fantastic cluster of spires in a drawing of Dore's;
a number of short flying buttresses — ^jumping buttresses,
they might be called, as they perform the feat rather
clumsily; a great raany crocketed pinnacles, and a
wealth of beautiful balustrade-work around the roof
of the nave and aisles. The great doorway is covered
¦with quaint theological sculptures — the wise and foolish
-virgins, the former with a good deal of awkward mil
linery in the shape of celestial crowns, and the usual
bas-relief of the blessed ascending to heaven, and the
damned tumbling into the pit. But in the middle
of the portal, dividing the two doors, stands a tall,
slim figure of a lady with a sword and scales, so light
and graceful that she casts the angular sisterhood
about her into ignominious shadow. This seraphic
Justitia, and the running lace-work of stone I have
just mentioned, around the high parts of the church,
seem to me to contain all the good grace that is to
be found in Berne. This, however, sounds like an
unthankful speech when I remember that every even
ing, in this very cathedral, one may hear sorae very
fine music. The organ is famous, like those of Fri-
bourg and Luceriie, and people adjourn from the table
d'hote to listen to it, at a franc a head. The church
is lighted only by a few glimmering tapers, and as I
have never been into it but at this hour, I know no-

202 FOREIGN PARTS.
thing of its interior aspect. I believe that, thanks to
Swiss Protestantism, though of fine proportions, it is
as bare and bleak as a Methodist conventicle. While
the organ plays, however, it is filled with a presence
which affects the imagination in very much the same
way as gorgeous colors and vistas receding through
mists of incense. The tremendous tones of the in
strument resound in the darkness with an energy and
variety which even an unmusical man- — reclining
irreverently in the impenetrable gloom of the deep
choir — may greatly enjoy. The organist, I believe, is
rather unskilled, and addicted, according to his light,
to musical clap-trap. I don't know whether his won
derful performances on the vox humana stops are clap-
tra^p; to my poor ear they seem the romance of har
mony. He gives you a thunder-storm complete, with
shattering bolts and wind and rain; then a lull and a
sound of dripping water and sobbing trees; and then,
softly, a wonderful solemn choir of rejoicing voices.
The voices are intensely real, but the charm of the
thing is their strangely unlocalized whereabouts. From
a myriad miles away they seem to come; from elysian
spaces to which no Cook's coupon will help to con
vey us.
The terrace beside the cathedral was the bishop's
garden, I believe, in the Catholic days, and a stately
many-windowed house (which must have been a good
deal modernized a hundred and fifty years ago) was
the bishop's palace. Now the terrace is planted with the
dense cool shade of clipped horse-chestnut trees, with
a capacious wooden bench under each; and you may
sit there of a fine day as if you were in the balcony
of a theatre, and look off at the great spectacle —

THE ST. GOTTHARD. 2O3
the view of the Oberland Alps. The foundations of
the terrace plunge down to the bank of the Aar, a
prodigious distance below, and the swift green river
sends up a constant uproar as it shoots foaming over
its dam. Across the river lie blooming slopes and
woods and hUls; never was a city more in the fields
than Berne. No shabby suburbs, no dusty walks be
tween walls; the cornfields ripen at its gates; the
smell of the mown grass, when I was here before, came
wandering across into the streets. It is a place of three
elements — the straddling black arcades, the rapid green
river, flung in a loop, as it were, around its base, the
goodly green country at five minutes' walk. Of the
Oberland chain, on the two or three days out of the
seven when it glitters its brightest, what is one to say ?
During the clear hot days that I spent here in July it
was constantly visible, and yet somehow I never came
quite to accept it as a natural ornament of the horizon.
It seemed, in its fantastic beauty, a kind of spasmodic
effort of Nature toward soraething in a higher key than
her coraraon performances, an attempt to please herself
— not man with his meagre fancy. Man is certainly
pleased, though, as he sits at his ease forty miles off,
and caresses with idle eyes the glittering bosom of
the Jungfrau and the hoary forehead of the Monk.
Hour after hour the vision lingers — a mosaic of marble
on a groundwork of lapis. Here at Berne we have
the -vision; nearer, in the clouds, on the ice, on the
edge of a chasm, with a rope round your waist and
twenty pounds of nails in your shoes, you may have
the reality. Every sumraer a couple of thousand Eng
lishmen and others find the supreme beauty in that.
There are plenty of delightful walks hereabouts, for

204 FOREIGN PARTS.
which you need neither rope nor nails. All the main
roads leading from the to-wn are bordered with great
trees, rising frora grassy margins and meeting overhead;
and sooner or later these verdurous vistas conduct you,
in any direction, to a genuine Alpine fir-forest. Beside
the road the grain-bearing fields stretch away without
hedge or ditch or wall. In July the crops were yel
lowing under a great sun; but now there is nothing
but stubble, with enormous ravens jumping about in
it. The way the fields lie side by side for miles, with
out any prosaic property-marks, makes them seem a
part of some landscape of picture or fable; they seem
all to belong to the Marquis of Carabas. I have heard
painters complain of the want of color — of certain
colors at least — ^in the Swiss summer landscape; of
the greens all being blue, the browns all being cold.
Perhaps they are right; autumn has fairly begun, but
the foliage simply shrivels and rusts, and promises
none of our October yellows and crimsons. But there
is an indefinable, poignant charm in any auturan,
under a long avenue of great trees, where you walk
kicking the fallen leaves and looking at an old peasant-
woman in the hazy distance, as she trudges under her
faggot. Lucerne, Septernber 2(^th. — Berne, I find, has been
filling with tourists at the expense of Lucerne , which
I have been having almost to myself. There are six
people at the table d'hote; the excellent dinner de
notes, on the part of the chef, the easy leisure in which
true artists love to work. The waiters have nothing
to do but lounge about the hall and chink in their
pockets the fees of the past season. The day has
been most lovely in itself, and pervaded, to my sense.

THE ST. GOTTHARD. 205
by the gentle glow of a natural satisfaction at finding
myself on the threshold of Italy again, I am lodged
en prince, in a room with a balcony hanging over the
lake — a balcony on which I spent a long tirae this
morning at dawn, thanking the raountain-tops, from
the depths of a tourist's heart, for their promise of fair
weather. There were a great many mountain-tops to
thank, for the crags and peaks and pinnacles tumbled
away through the morning mist in an endless confu
sion of grandeur. I have been all day in better humor
with Lucerne than ever before — a forecast reflection
of Italian moods. If Switzerland, as I wrote the other
day, is a show-place. Lucerne is certainly one of the
biggest booths at the fair. The little quay, under the
trees, squeezed in between the decks of the steamboats
andthe doors ofthe hotels, is a terrible raedley of Saxon
dialects — a jumble of pilgrims in all the phases of de
votion, equipped with book and staff — Alpenstock and
Baedeker. There are so many hotels and trinket-shops,
so many omnibuses and steamers, so many St. Gotthard
vetturini, so many ragged urchins thrusting photo
graphs, minerals and Lucernese English at you, that
you feel as if lake and mountains theraselves, in all
their loveliness, were but a part of the "enterprise" of
landlords and pedlers, and half expect to see the Righi
and PUatus and the fine weather figure as items on
your hotel-bill, between the bougie and the siphon.
Nature herself assists you in this fancy; for there is
something extremely operatic, suggestive of foot-lights
and scene-shifters, in the view on which Lucerne looks
out. You are one of five thousand — fifty thousand — "ac
commodated" spectators; you have taken your season-
ticket, and there is a responsible impresario somewhere

206 FOREIGN PARTS.
behind the scenes. There is such a luxury of beauty
in the prospect- — such a redundancy of composition
and effect — so many more peaks and pinnacles than
are needed to make one heart happy or regale the
vision of one quiet observer, that you finally accept the
little Babel on the quay and the looming masses in the
clouds as equal parts of a perfect system, and feel as
if the mountains had been waiting so many ages for
the hotels to come and balance the colossal group,
that they have a right, after all, to have them big and
numerous. The scene-shifters have been at work all
day long, composing and discomposing the beautiful
background of the prospect — massing the clouds and
scattering the light, effacing and reviving, making play
with their wonderful machinery of mist and haze. The
mountains rise one behind the other, in an enchanting
gradation of distances and of melting blues and grays;
you think each successive tone the loveliest and haziest
possible, till you see another looming dimly behind it,
I couldn't enjoy even the Swiss Times, over my break
fast, until I had marched forth to the office oif the St.
Gotthard diligences and demanded the banquette for
to-raorrow. The one place at the disposal of the office
was taken, but I might possibly m' entendre with the con
ductor for his own seat- — the conductor being generally
visible, in the intervals of business, at the post-office.
To the post-office, after breakfast, I repaired, over the
fine new bridge which now spans the green Reuss,
and gives such a woful air of country-cousinship to
the crooked old wooden causeway which did sole
service when I was here four years ago. The old
bridge is covered with a hood of shingles, and adorned
with a series of very quaint and vivid little paintings

THE ST. GOTTHARD. 207
of the Dance of Death, quite in the Holbein manner;
the new bridge sends up a painful glare from its white
limestone, and is ornamented with candelabra in a
meretricious imitation of platinum. As a pure-minded
tourist, I ought to have chosen to return at least by the
dark and narrow way; but mark how luxury unmans
us! I was already demoralized. I crossed the threshold
of the timbered portal, took a few steps, and retreated.
It smelt badly! So I marched back, counting the
lamps in their mendacious platinum. But it smelt
very badly indeed; and no good American is without
a fund of accumulated sensibility to the odor of stale
timber. Meanwhile I had spent an hour in the great yard
of the post-office, waiting for my conductor to turn up,
and watching the yellow mail-coaches being pushed to
and fro. At last, being told my man was at my ser
vice, I was brought to speech of a huge, jovial, bearded,
delightful Italian, clad in the blue coat and waistcoat,
with close, round silver buttons, which are a heritage
of the old postilions. No, it was not he; it was a
friend of his; and finally the friend was produced, en
costume de ville, but equally jovial, and Italian enough
— a brave Lucernese, who had spent half of his life
between Bellinzona and Camerlata. For ten francs
this worthy man's perch behind the luggage was made
mine as far as Bellinzona, and we separated with re
ciprocal wishes for good weather on the morrow. To
morrow is so manifestly determined to be as fine as
any other 30th of September since the weather be
came, on this planet, a topic of conversation, that I
have had nothing to do but stroU about Lucerne, star
ing, loafing, and vaguely intent upon regarding the

208 FOREIGN PARTS.
fact that, whatever happens, ray place is paid to Milan,
as the raost comfortable fact in this uncertain world.
I loafed into the immense new Hotel National, and
read the New York Tribune on a blue satin divan,
and was rather surprised, on coming out, to find my
self staring at a green Swiss lake, and not at the
Broadway omnibuses. The H6tel National is adorned
with a perfectly appointed Broadway bar — one of
the "prohibited" ones, seeking hospitality in foreign
lands, like an old-fashioned French or Italian refugee.
Milan, October \th. — My journey hither was such a
pleasant piece of traveller's luck that it seems alraost
indelicate to take it to pieces to see what it was made
of But do what we will, there reraains in all deeply
agreeable impressions a charming element we cannot
analyze. I found it agreeable even, under the circum
stances, to turn out of bed, at Lucerne, at four o'clock,
into the cold auturan darkness. The thick-starred sky
was cloudless, and there was as yet no flush of dawn;
but the lake was wrapped in a ghostly white mist,
which crept half-way up the raountains, and raade
them look as if they too had been lying down for the
night, and were casting away the vaporous tissues of
their bedclothes. Into this fantastic fog the little
stearaer went creaking away, and I hung about the
deck with the two or three travellers who had known
better than to believe it would save them francs or
midnight sighs — over those debts you "pay with your
person" — to go and wait for the diligence at the Poste
at FlUelen, or yet at the Guillaume Tell. The dawn
came sailing up over the mountain-tops, flushed but
unperturbed, and blew out the little stars and then the
big ones, as a thrifty matron, after a party, blows out

THE ST. GOTTHARD. 2O9
her candles and lamps; the mist went melting and
wandering away into the duskier hollows and recesses
of the mountains, and the summits defined their pro
files against the cool soft light.
At Fluelen, before the landing, the big yellow
coaches were actively making themselves bigger, and
piling up boxes and bags on their roofs in a way to
make nervous people think of the short turns on the
downward zigzags of the St. Gotthard. I climbed into
my own banquette, and stood eating peaches (half a
dozen women were hawking them about under the
horses' legs) with an air of security which might have
been offensive to the people scrambling and protesting
below between coup6 and interieur. They were all
English, and they all had false alarms about some one
else being in their place — the place for which they
produced their tickets, whUe they proclaimed in three
or four languages that British gold had been dis
bursed. They were all serenely confuted by the stout,
purple-faced, many-buttoned conductors, patted on the
back, assured that their bath-tubs had every advantage
of position on the top, and stowed away according to
their dues. When once one has fairly started on a
journey and has but to go and go, by the impetus re
ceived, it is surprising what entertainment one finds
in very small things. The traveller's humor falls upon
us, and surely it is not the unwisest the heart knows.
I do not en-vy people, at any rate, who have outlived
or outworn the simple entertainraent of feeling settled
to go somewhere, with bag and umbreUa. If we are
settled on the top of a coach, and the "somewhere"
contains an element of the new and strange, the case
is at its best. In this matter wise people are content
Foreign Parts. 14

2IO FOREIGN PARTS.
to becorae children again. We do not tum about on
our knees to look out of the omnibus-window, but we
indulge in very rauch the sarae round-eyed contempla
tion of accessible objects. Responsibility is left at
home, or, at the worst, packed away in the valise, in
quite another part of the diligence, with the clean
shirts and the writing-case. I imbibed the traveller's
humour, for this occasion, with the somewhat acrid
juice of my indifferent peaches; it made rae think
them very good. This was the first of a series of
kindly services it rendered me. It made rae agree
next, as we started, that the gentleman at the booking-
office at Lucerne had played but a harraless joke when
he told rae the regular seat in the banquette was taken.
No one appeared to claim it; so the conductor and I
reversed positions, and I found him quite as profitable
a neighbor as the usual Anglo-Saxon. He was trolling
snatches of melody, and showing his great yellow teeth
in a jovial grin all the way to Bellinzona — and this
in the face of the sombre fact that the St. Gotthard
tunnel is scraping away into the mountain, all the
while, under his nose, and numbering the days of the
many-buttoned brotherhood. But he hopes, for long
service' sake, to be taken into the employ of the rail
way; he has no esthetic prejudices. I found the rail
way coming on, however, in a manner very shocking
to mine. About one hour before Andermatt they have
pierced a huge black cavity in the mountain, and
around this dusky aperture there has grown up a
swarming, digging, hammering, smoke- comp elling colony.
There are great barracks, with tall chimneys, down in
the romantic gorge, and a wonderful increase of wine
shops in the little vUlage of Goschenen above. Along

THE ST. GOTTHARD. 211
the breast of the raountain, beside the road, corae
wandering several miles of very handsome iron pipes,
of a stupendous girth — a conduit for the water-power
¦with which sorae of the raachinery is worked. It lies
at its mighty length among the rocks like an immense
black serpent, and serves, as a mere detail, to give
one the measure of the central enterprise. When at
the end of our long day's journey, well down in warm
Italy, we came upon the other aperture of the tunnel,
I felt really as if I ought to remove my hat, in re
cognition of so awful a phenomenon, with a kind of
reverence. Truly, Nature is, great, but she seeras to
me to stand in very rauch the same shoes as my poor
friend the conductor. She is being superseded at her
strongest points, successively, and nothing remains but
for her to take humble service with her master. If
she can hear herself think, araid that din of blasting
and hammering, she must be reckoning up the years
which may elapse before the cleverest of Ober-
Ingenieurs decides that mountains are altogether super
fluous, and has the Jungfrau melted do-wn and the
residuum carried away in balloons and dumped upon
another planet.
The Devil's Bridge, apparently, has the same fail
ing as the good Homer. It was decidedly nodding.
The volume of water in the torrent was shrunken, and
there was none of that thunderous uproar and far-
leaping spray which have kept up a miniature tempest
in the neighborhood when I have passed before. It
suddenly occurs to me that the fault is not in the good
Homer's inspiration, but simply in the big black pipes
I just mentioned. They dip into the mshing stream
higher up, apparently, and pervert its fine frenzy to

2 I 2 FOREIGN PARTS.
their prosaic uses. There could hardly be a raore vivid
reminder of the standing quarrel between use and
beauty, and the hard time poor beauty is having. I
looked wistfully, as we rattled into dreary Andermatt,
at the great white zigzags of the Oberalp road, clirab
ing away to the left. Even on one's way to Italy one
raay spare a pulsation of desire for that beautiful
journey through the castled Grisons. I shall always
reraember my day's drive last summer through this
long blue avenue of mountains, to queer little moulder
ing Ilanz, visited before supper in the ghostly dusk, as
an episode with color in it. At Andermatt a sign over
a little black doorway, flanked by two dunghiUs,
seemed to rae tolerably comical: Miniraux, Quadru-
pides, Oiseaux, CEufs, Tableaux Antiques. We bundled
in to dinner, and the American gentleman in the
banquette raade the acquaintance of the Irish lady in
the coupe, who talked of the weather as foine, and
wore a Persian scarf twisted about her head. At the
other end of the table sat an EngUshraan out of the
interieur, who bore a most extraordinary resemblance
to the portraits of Edward VI.'s and Mary's reigns. He
was a walking Holbein. It was fascinating, and he
must have wondered why I stared at him. It was
not him I was staring at, but sorae handsome Seymour,
or Dudley, or Digby, with a ruff and a round cap and
plume. From Andermatt, through its high, cold, sunny
valley, into rugged little Hospenthal, and then up the
last stages of the ascent. From here the road was all
new to me. Among the summits of the various Alpine
passes there is little to choose. You wind and double
slowly into keener cold and deeper stUlness; you put
on your overcoat and turn up the collar; you count

THE ST. GOTTHARD. 213
the nestling snow-patches, and then you cease to count
them; you pause, as you trudge before the lumbering
coach, and listen to the last-heard cow-bell tinkling
away below you, in kindlier herbage. The sky was
tremendously blue, and the little stunted bushes, on
the snow-streaked slopes, were all dyed with autumnal
purples and crimsons. It was a great piece of color.
Purple and crimson, too, though not so fine, were the
faces thrust out at us from the greasy little double
casements of a barrack beside the road, where the
horses paused before the last pull. There was one
little girl in particular, beginning to lisser her hair,
as civilization approached, in a manner not to be
described, -with her poor little blue-black hands. At
the summit there are the two usual grim little stone
tavems, the steel-blue tarn, the snow-white peaks, the
pause in the cold sunshine. Then we began to rattle
down, with two horses. In five minutes we were
s-winging along the famous zigzags. Engineer, driver,
horses — it is very handsomely done by all of them.
The road curves and curls, and twists and plunges,
Hke the tail of a kite; sitting perched in the banquette,
you see it making below you, in mid-air, certain bold
gyrations, which bring you as near as possible, short
of the actual experience, to the philosophy of that im
mortal Irishman who wished that his fall frora the
house-top would only last. But the zigzags last no
more than Paddy's fall, and in due time we were all
coming to our senses over cafe-au-lait in the little inn
at Faido. After Faido, the valley, plunging deeper,
began to take thick afternoon shadows from the hUls,
and at Airolo we were fairly in the twUight. But the
pink and yellow houses shimmered through the gentle

214 FOREIGN PARTS.
gloom, and Italy began in broken syllables to whisper
that she was at hand. For the rest of the way to
Bellinzona her voice was muffled in the gray of even
ing, and I was half vexed to lose the charraing sight
of the changing vegetation. But only half vexed, for
the moon was climbing all the while nearer the edge
of the crags which overshadowed us, and a thin,
magical light came trickling down into the winding,
murrauring gorges. It was a most enchanting drive.
The chestnut-trees loomed up with double their day
light stature; the vines began to swing their low
festoons, like nets to trip up the fairies. At last the
ruined towers of Bellinzona stood gleaming in the
moonshine, and we rattled into the great post-yard. It
was eleven o'clock, and I had risen at four; moonshine
apart, I was not sorry.
All that wd:s very well; but the drive next day from
Bellinzona to Corao is to my mind what gives its
supreme beauty to the St. Gotthard road. One cannot
describe the beauty of the Italian lakes, nor would one
try, if one could; the floweriest rhetoric can recall it
only as a picture on a fireboard recalls a Claude. But
it lay spread before me for a whole perfect day — in
the long gleam of Lago Maggiore, from whose head
the diligence swerves away, and begins to climb the
bosky hills which divide it from Lugano; in the shim
mering, raelting azure of the Italian Alps; in the luxu
rious tangle of nature and the farailiar picturesqueness
of man; in the lawn-like slopes, where the great grouped
chestnuts make so cool a shadow in so warm a light;
in the rusty vineyards, the littered cornfields, and the
tawdry wayside shrines. But most of all, it is the deep
yellow light which enchants you and tells you where

THE ST. GOTTHARD. 215
you are. See it corae filtering down through a vine-
covered trellis on the red handkerchief with which a
ragged contadina has bound her hair; and all the magic
of Italy, to the eye, seems to make an aureole about
the poor girl's head. Look at a brown-breasted reaper
eating his chunk of black bread under a spreading
chestnut; nowhere is shadow so charming, nowhere is
color so charged, nowhere is accident so picturesque.
The whole drive to Lugano was one long loveliness,
and the town itself is admirably Italian. TThere was a
great unlading of the coach, during which I wandered
under certain brown old arcades, and bought for six
sous, from a young woraan in a gold necklace, a hatful
of peaches and figs. When I came back, I found a
young raan holding open the door of the second
diligence, which had lately come up, and beckoning
to me with a despairing smile. The young man, I
must note, was the most amiable of Ticinese; though
he wore no buttons, he was attached to the diligence
in some amateurish capacity, and had an eye to the
maU-bags and other valuables in the boot. I grumbled,
at Berne, over the want of soft curves in the Swiss
temperament; but the chUdren of the tangled Tessin
are cast in the Italian raould. My friend had as raany
quips and cranks as a Neapolitan; we walked together
for an hour under the chestnuts, while the coach was
plodding up from Bellinzona, and he never stopped
singing till we reached a little wine-house, where he
got his mouth full of bread and cheese  I looked
into the open door and saw the young woman sitting
rigid and grira, staring over his head, with a great pUe
of bread and butter in her lap. He had only inforraed
her, most politely, that she was to be transferred to

21 6 FOREIGN PARTS.
another diligence, and must do him the favor to de
scend; but she evidently thought there was but one
way for a respectable British young woman, dropping
her h's, to receive the politeness of a foreign young
man with a moustache and much latent pleasantry in
his eye. Heaven only knew what he was saying!' I
told her, and she gathered up her parcels and emerged.
A part of the day's great pleasure, perhaps, was my
grave sense of being an instrument in the hands of
Providence toward the safe consignment of this young
woraan and her boxes. She was a lady's maid, whose
mistress had gone on a mule over the mountains to
Cadennabbia, and she was coming up with the ward
robe, in two big boxes and a bath-tub. I had played
my part, under Providence, at Bellinzona, and had
interposed between the poor girl's frightened English
and the dreadful Ticinese French of the functionaries
in the post-yard. At the custom-house, on the Italian
frontier, I was of peculiar ser-vice; there was a kind of
fateful fascination in it. The wardrobe was volurainous;
I exchanged a paternal glance with my charge as the
douanier plunged his brown fists into it. Who was the
lady at Cadennabbia? What was she to me or I to
her? She would never know, when she rustled down
to dinner next day, that it was / who had guided the
frail skiff of her millinery to port. So, unseen, but not
unfelt, do we cross each other's orbits. The skiff, how
ever, raay have foundered that evening, in sight of
land. I disengaged the young woraan from among her
fellow-travellers, and placed her boxes on a hand-cart,
in the picturesque streets of Como, -within a stone's
throw of that lovely cathedral, -with its fagade of cameos.
I could only make the facchino swear to take her to

SIENA. 217
the steamboat. He too was a jovial dog, and I hope
he was polite — but not too polite.

SIENA.

Siena, October, 1873.
Florence being oppressively hot and delivered
over to the mosquitoes, the occasion seemed excellent
to pay that visit to Siena which I had more than once
planned and missed. I arrived late in the evening,
by the light of a magnificent moon; and while a pair
of benignantly mumbling old crones were raaking up
my bed at the inn, I strolled forth in quest of a first
impression. Five minutes brought me to where I might
gather it unhindered, as it,bloomed in the white moon
shine. The Piazza at Siena is famous, and though in
this day of photographs none of the world's wonders
can pretend like Wordsworth's phantom of delight,
reaUy "to startle and waylay,'' yet as I suddenly stepped
into this great square from under a dark archway, it
seemed a vivid enough revelation of the picturesque.
To call it a square is a figure of speech, for it has the
shape of a shallow horseshoe, the untravelled reader
who has turned over his travelled friend's portfolio
wiU remeraber; or, better, of a bow, in which the high
fagade of the Palazzo Pubblico forms the chord and
ever3rthing else the arc. It was void of any human
presence which could recall me to the current year,
and, the moonshine assisting, I had half an hour's

2l8 FOREIGN PARTS.
fantastic vision of medieval Italy. The Piazza being
built on the side of a hill — or rather, as I believe
science affirms, in the cup of a volcanic crater — the
vast pavement converges downward in slanting radia
tions of stone, like the spokes of a great wheel, to a
point directly in front of the Palazzo, which may figure
the hub, though it is nothing more ornamental than
the mouth of a drain. The Palazzo stands on the lower
side and might seem, in spite of its goodly mass and
its embattled cornice, to be rather defiantly out-coun
tenanced by the huge private dwellings which occupy
the opposite eminence. This might be — if it were not
that the Palazzo asserts itself with an architectural
gesture, as one may say, of extraordinary dignity.
On the firm edge of the edifice, from bracketed
base to gray-capped summit, against the sky, there
grows a slender tower, which soars and soars tUl it
has given notice of the city's distinction over the blue
raountains which define the. horizon. It rises straight
and slim as a pennoned lance, planted on the steel-
shod toe of a mounted knight. This beautiful tower
is the raost mediaeval thing in Siena. As it stood
silvered by the moonlight during my traveller's revery,
it seemed to say with peculiar distinctness that it sur
vived frora an order of things which had gone cora
pletely out of fashion, but which had had an epoch of
intense vitality. The gigantic houses enclosing the rest
of the Piazza took up the tale, and seeraed to raurraur,
" We are very old and a trifle weary, but we were buUt
strong and pUed high, and we shall last for many a
year. The present is cold and heedless, but we keep
ourselves in heart by brooding over our treasure of
raeraories and traditions. We are haunted houses, in

SIENA. 2 1 9
every creaking timber and crambling stone." In the
moonshine, one may fancy a group of Sienese ^a/azzz'
dropping a few dusky hints, in this manner, to a well-
disposed American traveller.
Since that night I have been having a week's day
light knowledge of this ancient city, and I do not know
that I can present it as anything more than a deeper
impression than ever that Italy is the land for the
artist. Siena has kept, to the eye, her historic phy
siognomy raost unchanged. Other places, perhaps, may
treat you to as drowsy a fragrance of antiquity, but
few of thera exhale it frora so large a surface. Lying
massed within her walls upon a dozen clustered hill
tops, Siena still looks like a place which once lived in
a large way; and if much of her old life is extinct, her
smouldering ashes form a very goodly pile. This in
delible stamp is the main thing that she has to offer
the casual observer. The casual observer is generally
not very learned nor much of an historical specialist;
his impression is necessarily vague, and many of the
chords of his imagination respond with a rather muffled
sound. But such as it is, his impression keeps him
faithful company and reminds him from tirae to time
that even the lore of German doctors is but the shadow
of satisfied curiosity. I have been living at the inn
and walking about the streets; these are the plain con
ditions of my experience. But inns and streets in
Italy are the vehicles of half one's knowledge; if one
has no fancy for their lessons, one may burn one's
note-book. In Siena everything is Sienese. The inn
has an English sign over the door — a little battered
plate, with a rusty representation of the lion and the
unicorn; but advance hopefully into the mouldy stone

2 20 FOREIGN PARTS.
alley which serves as vestibule, and you will find local
color enough. The landlord, I was told, had been
servant in an English family, and I was curious to see
how he met the frown of the casual Anglo-Saxon after
the latter's first twelve hours in his establishment. As
he failed to appear, I asked the waiter if he were not
at horae. "O," said the latter, "he's a piccolo vecchiotto
grasso who doesn't like to move." I am afraid this
little fat old man has simply a bad conscience. It is
no sraall burden for one who likes the Italians — as
who doesn't, under this restriction? — to have this raatter
of the neglected, the proscribed scrubbing-brush to dis
pose of What is the real philosophy of dirty habits,
and are foul surfaces merely superficial? If unclean
manners have in truth the moral raeaning which I
suspect in them, we must love Italy better than con
sistency. This a nuraber of us are prepared to do,
but while we are making the sacrifice it is as well we
should know it.
We raay plead, moreover, for these impecunious
heirs of the past, that even if it were easy to be clean
in the midst of their raould ering heritage, it would be
difficult to appear so. At the risk of seeming a shame
fully sordid Yankee, I feel terapted to say that the
prirae result of my contemplative strolls in the dusky
alleys of Siena is an ineffable sense of disrepair.
Everything is cracking, peeling, fading, crumbling,
rotting. No young Sienese eyes rest upon anything
youthful; they open into a world battered and befouled
with long use. Everything has passed its meridian
except the brilliant fagade of the cathedral, which is
being diligently retouched and restored, and a few
private palaces whose broad fronts seem to have been

SIENA. 221
lately furbished and polished. Siena was long ago
mellowed to the pictorial tone; the operation of time,
now, is to deposit shabbiness upon shabbiness. But it
is for the most part a patient, sturdy, sympathetic
shabbiness, which soothes rather than irritates the
nerves, and has in most cases, doubtless, as long a
career to run as most of our brittle new-world fresh
ness. It projects at all events a deeper shadow into
the constant twilight of the narrow streets — that vague,
historic dusk, as I raay call it, in which one walks
and wonders. These streets are hardly raore than
sinuous flagged alleys, into which the huge black
houses between their almost raeeting cornices, suffer a
meagre light to filter down over rough-hewn stone,
past windows often of graceful Gothic forra, great pen
dent iron rings and twisted sockets for torches. Scat
tered over their many-headed hill, they are often quite
grotesquely steep, and so impracticable for carriages
that the sound of wheels is only a trifle less anomalous
than it would be in Venice. But all day long there
comes up to my window an incessant shuffling of feet
and clangor of voices. The weather is very warm for
the season, all the world is out of doors, and the Tus
can tongue (which in Siena is reputed to have a classic
purity) is wagging in every imaginable key. It does
not rest even at night, and I ara often an uninvited
guest at concerts and conversazioni at two o'clock in
the raorning. The concerts are soraetiraes charming.
I not only do not curse miy wakefulness, but I go to
my window to listen. Three men come carolling by,
trolling and quavering with voices of delightful sweet
ness, or a lonely troubadour in his shirt-sleeves draws
such artful love-notes frora his clear, fresh tenor, that

222 FOREIGN PARTS.
I seem for the moment to be behind the scenes at the
opera, watching some Rubini or Mario go "on," and
waiting for the round of applause. In the intervals, a
couple of friends or enemies stop — Italians always
make their points in conversation by stopping, letting
you walk on a few paces, to turn and find them stand
ing with finger on nose, and engaging your inter
rogative eye — they pause, by a happy instinct, directly
under my window, to dispute their point or tell their
story or make their confidence. I can hardly tell which
it is, everything has such an explosive promptness,
such a redundancy of inflection and action. Whatever
it is, it is a story, compared with our meagre Anglo-
Saxon colloquies, or rather it is a drama, impro-vised
and raimicked. The speaker seems actually to stand
before the footlights; he gives a representation, I ob
served the other evening a striking instance of the
spontaneity of Italian gesture, in the person of a little
Sienese of I hardly know what exact age — the age of
inarticulate sounds and the experimental use of a
spoon. It was a Sunday evening, and this little man
had accompanied his parents to the cafe. The Caffi
Greco at Siena is a raost delightful institution; you
get a capital demi-tasse for three sous, and an excellent
ice for eight, and while you consume these easy
luxuries you may buy from a little hunchback the
local weekly periodical, the Vita Nuova, for three
centimes (the two centimes left from your sou, if you
are under the speU of this magical frugality, will do
to give the waiter). My young friend was sitting on
his father's knee, and helping himself to the half of a
strawberry-ice, with which his mamma had presented
him. He had so many misadventures with his spoon

SIENA. 223
that this lady at length corifiscated it, there being
nothing left of his ice but a little crimson liquid which
he might dispose of as other little boys had done be
fore him. But he was no friend, it appeared, to such
irregular methods; he was a perfect little gentleman,
and he resented the imputation of indelicacy. He
protested, therefore, and it was the manner of his pro
test that struck me. He did not cry audibly, though
he made a very -wry face. It was no stupid squall,
and yet he was too young to speak. It was a pene
trating concord of inarticulably pleading, accusing
sounds, accompanied with the most exquisitely modu
lated .gestures. The gestures were perfectly mature;
he did everything that a man of forty would have
done if he had been pouring out a flood of sonorous
eloquence. He shrugged his shoulders and -wrinkled
his eyebrows, tossed out his hands and folded his
arms, obtruded his chin and bobbed about his head —
and at last, I am happy to say, recovered his spoon.
If I had possessed a little silver one I would have pre
sented it to him, as a testimonial to a perfect, though
as yet unconscious, artist.
My artistic infant, however, has diverted me from
what I had in mind — a much weightier raatter- — the
great private palaces which are so powerful a feature
in the physiognomy of the town. They are extra
ordinarily spacious and numerous, and one wonders
what part they can play in the meagre economy of the
Siena of to-day. The Siena of to-day is a raere
shranken serablance of the vigorous little republic
which in the thirteenth century waged triumphant war
with Florence, cultivated the arts with splendor, planned
a cathedral (though it had ultimately to curtail the

224 FOREIGN PARTS.
design) of proportions almost unequalled, and contained
a population of two hundred thousand souls. Many
of these dusky piles still bear the names of the old
mediaeval magnates, whose descendants occupy them
in a much more contracted fashion. Half a dozen of
them are as high as the Strozzi and Riccardi palaces
in Florence; they could not well be higher. There is
to an American something artificial and scenic, as
it were, in the way these colossal dwellings are packed
together in their steep streets, in the depths of their
little enclosed, agglomerated city. When we, in our
day and country, raise a structure of half the mass and
stateliness, we leave a great space about it in the man
ner of a pause after an effective piece of talking. But
when a Sienese countess, as things are here, is doing
her hair near the window, she is a wonderfully near
neighbor to the cavaliere opposite, who is being shaved
by his valet. Possibly the countess does not object to
a certain chosen publicity at her toilet; an Italian gen
tleman tells me the aristocracy are very "corrupt."
Some of the palaces are shown, but only when the
occupants are at home, and now they are in vUlegia-
tura. Their villeggiatura lasts eight months of the
year, the waiter at the inn inforras me, and they spend
little more than the carnival in the city. The gossip
of an inn-waiter ought, perhaps, to be beneath the
dignity of even such meagre history as this; but I con
fess that when I have come in from ray strolls with a
kind of irritated sense of the dumbness of stones and
mortar, I have listened with a certain avidity, over my
dinner, to the proffered confidences of the worthy man
who stands by with a napkin. His talk is really very
fine, and he prides himself greatly on his cultivated

SIENA. 225
tone. He called my attention to it. He has very little
good to say about the Sienese nobUity. They are
"proprio d'origine egoista" — whatever that may be—
and there are many who cannot write their names.
This may be calumny; but I doubt whether the biggest
coronet of them all could have spoken raore delicately
of a lady of peculiar personal appearance, who had
been dining near rae. "She is too fat," I said grossly,
when she had left the roora. The waiter shook his
head, -with a little sniff. "E troppo materiale." This
lady and her corapanion were the party whom, thinking
I should relish a little corapany (I had been dining
alone for a week), he gleefully announced to me as
newly arrived Araericans. They were Americans, I
found, who wore black mantillas pinned on their heads,
conveyed their beans to their mouths with a knife, and
spoke a strange raucous Spanish. They were Americans
from Monte-video. The genius of old Siena, however,
would be certainly rather amused at the stress I lay
on the distinction, for one American is about as rauch
in order as another as he stands before the great
loggia of the Casino dei Nobili. The nobility, which
is very numerous and very rich, is still, said the Italian
gentleman whom I just now quoted, perfectly feudal.
MoraUy, intellectually, behind the walls of its palaces,
you will find the fourteenth century. There is no
bourgeoisie to speak of, immediately after the aristo
cracy come the poor people, who are very poor indeed.
My friend's account of this domiciliary mediaevalisra
made me wish more than ever, as a lover of strange
things, that your really appreciative tourist was not
reduced to simply staring at black stones and peeping
up stately staircases; but that when he has examined
Foreign Parts. ^5

226 FOREIGN PARTS.
the fagade of the palace, Murray in hand, he might
march up to the great drawing-room, make his bow to
the master and mistress, the old abbate and the young
count, and invite them to favor him with a little sketch
of their social philosophy or a few first-rate family
anecdotes. The dusky labyrinth of the streets of Siena is in
terrupted by two great sunny spaces: the fan-shaped
Piazza, of which I just now said a word, and the little
square in which the cathedral erects its shining walls
of marble. Of course, since paying the great Piazza
ray compliments by moonlight, I have strolled through
it often both at sunnier and shadier hours. The mar
ket is held there, and where Italians are buying and
selling you may count upon lively entertainment. It
has been held there, I suppose, for the last five hun
dred years, and during that time the cost of eggs and
earthen pots has been gradually but inexorably increas
ing. The buyers, nevertheless, wrestle over their pur
chases as lustily as if they were fourteenth-century
burghers suddenly waking up in horror to current
prices. You have but to walk aside, however, into the
Palazzo Pubblico, to feel yourself very much like a
thrifty mediaevalist. The state-affairs of the republic
were formerly transacted here, but it now gives shelter
to modern law-courts and other prosy business. I was
marched through a number of vaulted halls and cham
bers, which, in the intervals of the administrative
sessions held in thera, are peopled only with the pre
sence of the great mouldering archaic frescos on the
walls and ceihngs. The chief painters of the Sienese
school lent a hand in decorating them, and you may
complete here the connoisseurship in which, possibly.

SIENA. 227
mi erabarked at the Academy. I say "possibly", in
o^r to be very judicial, for my own observation has
led me no great length. I have been taking an idle
satisfaction in the thought that the Sienese school has
suffered my enthusiasm peacefully to slumber, and
benignantly abstained from adding to my intellectual
responsibilities. "A formidable rival to the Florentine ",
says some book — I forget which — into which I recently
glanced. Not a bit of it, say I; the Florentines may
rest upon their laurels. The early painters of the two
groups have indeed much in common; but the Floren
tines had the good fortune of seeing their efforts
¦ gathered up and applied by a few pre-eminent spirits
such as never came to the rescue of the groping
Sienese. Fra Angelico and Ghirlandaio said all their
feebler companions dreamt of, and a great deal more
beside, but the inspiration of Simone Memmi and Am-
brogio Lorenzetti and Sano di Pietro has a painful air
of never coming to a point. Sodoma and Beccafurai
are to my taste a rather low point. But one should
speak of them all gently — and I do, from my heart;
for their earnest labors have enriched the echoing cham
bers of their old ci-vic fortress. The faded frescos cover
the waUs like storied tapestries; in one way or another,
they please. If one owes a large debt of pleasure to
painting, one thinks at last of the whole history of art
tenderly, as the conscious experience of a single
mysterious spirit, and one shrinks from saying rude
things about any particular phase of it, just as one
would from touching brusquely upon an erratic episode
in the life of an amiable person. You don't care to
remind a grizzled veteran of his defeats, and why
should we linger in Siena to talk about Beccafurai? I
IS*

228 FOREIGN PARTS.
by no means go so far as to say, with an amateur with
whom I have just been discussing the raatter, that
"Sodoraa is poor and Beccafurai is nothing"; but
opportunity being limited, I ara willing to let the re
mark about Beccafumi pass for true. With regard to
Sodoma, of course, I cannot help reraerabering the St.
Sebastian at Florence, and the strange and exquisite
Sacrifice of Isaac, at Pisa. One rarely raeets him in
general collections; he was not prolific, apparently;
but he had distinction, and his rarity is a part of it.
Here in Siena are a couple of dozen scattered fres
cos, and three or four canvases; his masterpiece, among
others, a very impressive Descent from the Cross. I
would not give a fig for the equilibrium of the figures
or the ladders; but while it lasts the scene is all in
tensely solemn and graceful and sweet — too sweet for
so bitter a subject. Sodoma's women are strangely
sweet; an imaginative sense of morbid, appealing atti
tude seems to me the author's finest accomplishment.
His frescos have all the same vague softness, and a
kind of mild raelancholy which I ara inclined to think
the sincerest part of thera, for it strikes rae as being
simply the artist's depressed suspicion of his own want
of force. Once he determined, however, that if he
could not be strong, he would make capital of his
weakness, and painted the Christ bound to the Column,
of the Academy. It is resolutely pathetic, and I have
no doubt the painter mixed his colors with his tears;
but I cannot describe it better than by saying that it
is, pictorially, the first ofthe modern Christs. Unfor
tunately, it is not the last.
The main strength of Sienese art went, possibly, into
the erection of the cathedral, and yet even here the

SIENA. 229
s||ngth is not of the greatest strain. If, however,
there are more interesting churches in Italy, there are
few ^•inore completely decorated; the coraparative
meagreness of the architectural idea is overlaid by a
marvellous wealth of ingenious detaU. Opposite the
church — with the dull old archbishop's palace on one
side and a dismantled residence of the late Grand
Duke of Tuscany on the other — is an ancient hospital
with a big stone bench attached to its front. Here I
have sat awhile every raorning for a week, like a
philosophic convalescent, watching the florid fagade
of the cathedral glitter against the deep blue sky. It
has been la-vishly restored of late years , and the fresh
white marble of the densely clustered pinnacles and
statues and beasts and flowers seems to flash in the
sunshine like a mosaic of jewels. There is more of
this goldsmith's work in stone than I can remeraber or
describe; it is pUed up over three great doors with
immense margins of exquisite decorative sculpture —
StiU in the ancient cream-colored marble — and beneath
three sharp pediments embossed with images relieved
against red marble and tipped with golden mosaics.
It is in the highest degree fantastic and luxuriant,
and, on the whole, very lovely. As an affair of color
it prepares you for the interior, which is rich in com
posite hues. The greater part of its surface is wrought
in alternate courses of black and white marble; but as
the latter has been dimmed by the centuries to a fine
mUd brown, the place seems all a rich harmony of
grave colors. Except certain charming frescos by Pin
turicchio in the sacristy, there are no pictures to
speak of; but the pavement is covered with many
elaborate designs in black and white raosaic, after

230 FOREIGN PARTS.
cartoons by Beccafumi. The patient skill of these
compositions makes them a really superb piece of' or
naraent; but even here the friend whom I lately quoted
refused to relish this over-ripe fruit of the Sienese
school. The designs are nonsensical, he declares, and
all his admiration is for the cunning artisans who have
imitated the hatchings and shadings and hair-strokes
of the pencil by the finest curves of inserted black
stone. But the true romance of handiwork at Siena
is to be seen in the superb stalls of the choir, under
the colored light of the great wheel-window. Wood-
carving is an historic specialty of the city, and the
best masters of the art during the fifteenth century
bestowed their skill on this exquisite enterprise. It is
like the frost-work on one's window-panes interpreted
in polished oak. I have rarely seen a more touching
embodiment of the peculiar patience of mediaeval crafts
manship. Into such labor as this the author seems
to put more of his personal substance than into any
other; he has not only to wrestle with his subject, but
with his material. He is richly fortunate when his
subject is charming — when his devices, inventions and
fantasies spring lightly to his hand; for in the material
itself, when age and use have ripened and polished
and darkened it to the richness of ebony and to a
greater warmth, there is something surpassingly de
lectable and venerable. Wander behind the altar at
Siena when the chanting is over and the incense has
faded, and look at the stalls of the Barili.

FLORENTINE NOTES. 23 1

FLORENTINE NOTES.
February — April, 1874.
I.
Yesterday that languid organism known as the
Florentine Carnival put on a momentary semblance of
vigor, and decreed a general corso through the town.
The spectacle was not brilliant, but it suggested some
natural reflections. I encountered the line of carriages
in the square before Santa Croce, of which they were
making ¦ the circuit. They rolled soleranly by, with
their inmates frowning forth at each other in apparent
wrath at not finding each other more amusing. There
were no raasks, no costumes, no decorations, no throw
ing of flowers or sweetmeats. It was as if each car-
riageful had privately resolved to be inexpensive, and
was rather discomfited at finding that it was getting
no better entertainment than it gave. The middle of
the piazza was filled with little tables, with shouting
mountebanks, mostly disguised in battered bonnets and
crinolines, offering chances in raffles for plucked fowls
and kerosene laraps. I have never thought the huge
marble statue of Dante, which overlooks the scene, a
work of the last refinement; but, as it stood there on
its high pedestal, chin in hand, frowning down on all
this cheap foolery, it seemed to have a great moral in
tention. The carriages followed a prescribed course —
through the Via Ghibellina, the Proconsolo, past the
Badia and the Bargello, beneath the great tessellated

232 FOREIGN PARTS.
cliffs of the Cathedral, through Via Tornabuoni, a;hd
out into ten minutes' sunshine beside the Arno. Much
of all this is the gravest and stateliest part of Florence;
and there was an almost ludicrous incongruity in see
ing Pleasure leading her train through these dusky
historic streets. It was raost uncorafortably cold, and,
in' the abserice of masks, many a fair nose was fantas
tically tipped with purple. But, as the carriages crept
soleranly along, they seeraed to me to be keeping a
funeral march- — to be following an antique custom,
an exploded faith, to its tomb. The Carnival is dead,
and these good people who had corae abroad to make
merry were to an observant sense no better than funeral
mutes and grave-diggers. Last winter in Rome it seemed
to rae to have but a galvanized life; but, compared
with this humble exhibition, it was quite operatic. At
Rome, indeed, it was too operatic. The knights on
horseback were a be-vy of circus-riders, and I am sure
that half the mad revellers repaired every night to the
Capitol for their twelve sous a day.
I have just been reading over the letters of the
President de Brosses. A hundred years ago, in Venice,
the Carnival lasted six months; and at Rorae for raany
weeks each year one was free to perpetrate the raost
fantastic follies and cultivate the most remunerative
vices under cover of a raask. It is very well to read
the President's anecdotes, which are capitally told; but
I do not see, certainly, why we should expect the
Italians to perpetuate a style of manners which we
ourselves, if we had any responsibUities in the matter,
should find intolerable. At any rate, the Florentines
spend no more money nor faith on the carnivalesque.
And yet this is not strictly true; for what struck me in

FLORENTINE NOTES. 233
|the whole spectacle yesterday, and prompted these
observations, was not at all the raore or less of costume
of., the people in the carriages, but the obstinate sur
vival of the merrymaking instinct in the Florentine
population. There could be no better example of it
than that so dim a shadow of entertainment should
keep all Florence standing and strolling, densely
packed, for hours in the cold streets. There was no
thing to see that might not be seen on the Cascine
any fine day in the year — nothing but a name, a tradi
tion, a pretext for sweet, staring idleness. The faculty
of making much of common things and converting
small occasions into great pleasures is to an American
traveller the raost salient characteristic of the so-called
Latin civilizations. It charms him and vexes him, ac
cording to his raood; and for the raost part it seeras
to represent a raorai gulf between his own national
temperament and that of Frenchmen and Italians, far
wider than the watery leagues which a stearaer may
traverse. But I think his mood is wisest when he ac
cepts it as the sign of an unconscious philosophy of
life, instilled by the experience of centuries — the phi
losophy of people who have lived long and rauch,
who have discovered no short cuts to happiness and
no effective circumvention of effort, and so have come
to regard the average lot as a ponderous fact, which
may be lightened by a liberal infusion of sensuous
diversion. All Florence yesterday was taking its holi
day in a natural, placid fashion, which seeraed to
make its own teraper an affair quite independent of
the splendor of the compensation decreed on a higher
line to the weariness of its legs. That the corso was
stupid or lively was its own glory or shame. Comraon

234 FOREIGN PARTS.
Florence, on the narrow footways, pressed against the'
houses, obeyed a natural need in looking about com
placently, patiently, gently, and never pushing, nor
trampling, nor swearing, nor staggering. This liberal
margin for festivals in Italy gives the masses a sort of
man-of-the-world urbanity in taking their pleasure.
Meanwhile it occurs to me that by a remote New
England fireside an unsophisticated young person of
either sex is reading in an old volume of travels or an
old roraantic tale an account of that glittering festival
called the Carnival, celebrated in old Catholic lands.
Across the page swims a vision of sculptured palace-
fronts, draped in crimson and gold and shining in a
southern sun; of a motley train of maskers, sweeping
on in voluptuous confusion and pelting each other
with nosegays and love-letters. Into the quiet room,
quenching the rhythm ofthe Yankee pendulum, there
floats an uproar of delighted voices, a medley of stir
ring foreign sounds, an echo of far-heard music of a
strangely alien cadence. But the dusk is falling, and
the unsophisticated young person closes the book
wearily and wanders to the window. The dusk is
falling on the beaten snow. Down the road is a white
wooden meeting-house, looking gray among the drifts.
The young person surveys the prospect awhile, and
then wanders back and stares at the fire. The Carnival
of Venice, of Florence, of Rome; color and costume,
romance and rapture! The young person gazes in the
firelight at the flickering chiaroscuro of the future,
discerns at last the glowing phantasm of opportunity,
and deterraines, with a heart-beat, td go and see it all
— twenty years hence!

FLORENTINE NOTES. 235

,11.
One may call the collection of pictures at the Pitti
Palace splendid rather than interesting. After walking
through it once or twice, you catch the key in which
it is pitched — you know what you are likely to find
on closer examination. You feel that you will find
none of the works of the uncoraproraising period, as
one may say; nothing from the half-groping geniuses
of the early time, whose coloring was sometimes harsh
and their outlines sometimes angular. I am ignorant
of the principle on which the pictures were originally
gathered and of the aesthetic creed of the princes who
chiefly selected them. A princely creed I should
roughly caU it — the creed of people who believed in
things presenting a fine face to society; who esteemed
briUiant results, rather than curious processes, and
would have hardly cared more to admit into their
collection a work by one of the laborious precursors
of the full efflorescence than to see a bucket and broom
left standing in a state saloon. The gallery contains
in literal fact some eight or ten paintings of the early
Tuscan School — notably two admirable specimens of
FUippo Lippi and one of the frequent circular pictures
of the great Botticelli — a Madonna, chilled with tragic
prescience, laying a pale cheek against that of a
blighted Infant. Such a raelancholy mother as this of
Botticelli would have strangled her baby in its cradle
to rescue it from the future. But of BotticeUi there
is much to say. One of the Filippo Lippis is perhaps
his masterpiece — a Madonna in a small rose-garden
(such a "flowery close" as Mr. WUliam Morris writes

236 FOREIGN PARTS.
of), leaning over an Infant, who kicks his little human
heels on the grass, while half a dozen curly-pated
cherubs gather about him, looking back over their
shoulders with the naivete of children in tableaux
vivants, and one of them drops an armful of gathered
roses one by one upon the baby. The delightful earthly
innocence of these winged youngsters is quite inex
pressible. Their heads are twisted about toward the
spectator, as if they were playing at leap-frog and
were expecting a corapanion to come and take a jump.
Never did intellectual simplicity attempt with greater
success to depict simplicity. But these three fine works
are hung over the tops of doors, in a dark back room
— the bucket and broora are thrust behind a curtain.
It seeras to me, nevertheless, that a fine Filippo Lippi
is good enough company for an AUori or a Cigoli,
and that that too deeply sentient Virgin of Botticelli
might happily balance the flower-like irresponsibility
of Raphael's Madonna of the Chair.
Taking the Pitti collection, however, simply for what
it pretends to be, how impressive it is, how sumptuous,
how truly grand-ducal ! It is chiefly official art, as one
may say; but it presents the fine side of the type —
the brilliancy, the facility, the amplitude, the sover
eignty of good taste. I agree, on the whole, with X  ,
and with what he recently said about his o-wn humor
on these raatters; that, having been, on his first ac
quaintance with pictures, nothing if not critical, and
thought the lesson was incoraplete and the opportunity
slighted if he left a gaUery without a headache, he had
come, as he grew older, to regard them more as an
entertainraent and less as a soleranity, and to remind
himself that, after all, it is the privilege of art to

FLORENTINE NOTES. 237
jmake us enjoy the huraan mind, and not to make us
l^tronize it. We do, in fact, as we grow older, un
string the critical bow a little and strike a trace with
invidious comparisons. We work off the juvenile im
pulse to heated partisanship, and discover that one
spontaneous producer is not different enough frora
another to keep the all-knowing Fates frora srailing
over our loves and aversions. We perceive a certain
human solidarity in all cultivated effort, and are con
scious of a growing urbanity in our judgments — a sort
of man-of-the-world disposition to take the joke for
what it is worth, as it passes. We have, in short, less
of a quarrel with the raasters we do not delight in,
and less of an irapulse to renew the oath of eternal
friendship with those in whom, in raore zealous days,
we fancied that we discovered peculiar meanings. The
meanings no longer seem quite so peculiar.
And yet it raust be added that all this depends
vastly upon one's mood — as a traveller's impressions
do, generally, to a degree which those who give thera
to the world would do well generally to remind their
readers. We have our raoraents of expansion and our
moments of contraction, and yet while we follow the
traveller's trade we go about gazing and judging with
unadjusted confidence. We cannot suspend judgment;
we must take our notes, and the notes are rich or
poor, as the case may be. A short time ago I spent a
week in an ancient city on a hill-top, in the humor,
for which I was not to blarae, which produces poor
notes. I knew it at the tirae; but I could not help it.
I went through all the raovements of appreciation; I
planted myself in all the churches, and on the crum
bling ramparts stared all the views fairly out of coun-

238 FOREIGN PARTS.
tenance; but ray iraagination, which I suppose at bottotn
had very good reasons of its own and knew perfectly
what it was about, refused to project into the dark old
town and upon the yellow hUls that sympathetic glow
which forms half the substance of our genial im
pressions. So it is that in museums and palaces we
are alternate radicals and conservatives. On some days
we ask to be entertained; on others, Ruskin-haunted,
to be edified. After a long absence frora the Pitti
Palace, I went back there the other morning, and trans
ferred myself from chair to chair in the great golden-
roofed saloons (the chairs are all gilded and covered
with faded silk), with the intention of being diverted
at any price. I need not mention the things that
diverted me. I yawn now when I think of some of
them. But an artist, for instance, to whom my kindlier
judgment has made permanent concessions is that
charming Andrea del Sarto. When I first knew him,
in my cold youth, I used to say without mincing that
I didn't like him. Get dge est sans pitiL The fine,
harmonious, melancholy, pleasing painter! He has a
dozen faults, and if you insist upon your rights, the
conclusive word you use about him will be the word
weak. But if you are a generous soul you will utter it
low — low as the mild, grave tone of his own impressive
coloring. He is monotonous, narrow, incomplete; he
has but a dozen different figures, and but two or three
ways of distributing thera; he seems able to utter but
half his thought, and his pictures lack, apparently, some
final working- over, which would have made thera
stronger — sorae process which his impulse failed him
before he could bestow. And yet, in spite of these
limitations, his genius is both itself of the great pattern

FLORENTINE NOTES. 239
aiid lighted by the atmosphere of a great period. Three
gifts he had largely: an instinctive, unaffected, un
erring grace; an admirable color (in a limited range);
and, best of all, the look of moral agitation. Whether
he had the thing or not, or in what measure, I cannot
say; but he certainly communicates the tendency. Be
fore his handsome, vague-browed Madonnas; the mUd,
robust young saints who kneel in his foregrounds and
look round at you with a rich simplicity which seems
to say that, though in the picture, they are not of it,
but of your own sentient and disappointed life; the
stately apostles, with comely heads and harraonious
draperies, who gaze up at the high-seated Virgin like
early astronomers at a newly seen star — there comes
to you a kind of dusky reflection of the painter's moral
experience. Morality, perhaps, is too pedantic a name
for Andrea del Sarto's luxurious gravity. I should be
careful how I bestow the word, among all these zealous
votaries of the serene delight of the eyes; but his idea
seems always somehow to cast a vague shadow, and
in the shadow you feel the chill of moral suffering.
Did the Lippis suffer, father or son? Did Raphael
suffer? Did Titian? Did Rubens suffer? I doubt it.
And I note that our poor second-rate Andrea del Sarto
has an element of interest absent from a number of
stronger talents.
Interspaced with him at the Pitti hang the stronger
and the weaker talents in splendid abundance. Raphael
is there, strong in portraiture — easy, various, bountiful
genius that he was — and (strong here is not the word,
but) happy beyond the common dream in his beauti
ful Madonna of the Chair. The general instinct of
posterity seems to have been to treat this lovely picture

240 FOREIGN PARTS.
as a kind of semi-sacred, an almost miraculous, raaiai-
festation. People stand in a worshipful silence before it,
as they would before a taper-studded shrine. Suspend,
in iraagination, on one side of it the solid, realistic,
unidealized portrait of Leo the Tenth (which hangs in
another roora), and transport to the other the fresco of
the School of Athens from the Vatican, and then re
flect that these were three diverse fancies of a single
youthful, amiable genius and you will admit that that
genius was one of the rarest in the world. X  has
a phrase that he "doesn't care for Raphael"; but he
confesses, when pressed, that he was a most remark
able young man.
Titian has a dozen portraits, of unequal interest. I
never particularly noticed till lately (it is very ill-hung)
that portentous image of the Emperor Charles the
Fifth. He was a burlier, more imposing personage
than I supposed, and in his great puffed sleeves and
gold chains and full-skirted overdress he looks like
a raonarch whose tread might sometimes have been
inconveniently resonant. But the purpose to have his
way and work his will is there — the great stomach for
divine right, the old monarchical temperament. The
great Titian, in portraiture, however, remains that for
midable young man in black, with the small, compact
head, the delicate nose, and the irascible blue eye.
AVho was he? What was he? "Ritratto virile" is all
the catalogue is able to call the picture. "Virile!" I
should think it was. You may weave what romance
you please about it; but a romance your conjecture
must be. Handsome, clever, defiant, passionate, danger
ous, it was not his own fault if he had no adventures.
He was a gentleraan and a warrior, and his adventures

FLORENTINE NOTES. 24 1
bal^iced between camp and court. I imagine him the -
young orphan of a noble house, about to come into
mortg&,ged estates. I should not have cared to be his
guardian! The Pitti Gallery contains none of Titian's golden-
toned groups; but it boasts a lovely composition by
Paul. Veronese, the dealer in silver hues — a Baptism
of Christ. W  • said the other day, that it was the
picture he most enjoyed, and surely painting seems
here to be frankly an interpreter and ministrant of joy.
The picture bedims and enfeebles its neighbors. I
doubt whether painting, as such, can go further. It is
simply that here at last the art stands complete. The
early Tuscans, as well as Leonardo, as Raphael, as
Michael, saw the great spectacle in beautiful, sharp-
edged elements and parts. The great Venetians felt
its indissoluble unity and perceived that form and
color and earth and .air were equal members of every
possible subject; and beneath their magical touch the
hard outlines melted together and the blank intervals
bloomed with meaning. In this beautiful Paul Veronese
everything is part of the charm — the atraosphere as
well as the figures, the look of radiant raorning in the
white- streaked sky as well,- as the beautiful human
limbs, the cloth of Venetian purple about the loins of
the .Christ as well as the eloquent humility of his at
titude. The relation to Nature of the other Italian
schools differs from that of the Venetians as courtship
— even ardent courtship — differs from marriage.
Was Rubens lawfuUy married to nature, or did he
merely keep up the most unregulated of flirtations?
Three or four of this great carnal cataracts omament
the walls of the Pitti. If the union was really solemnized
Foreign Parts. ^O

242 FOREIGN PARTS.
it must be said that the m&age was at best a stoi'my
one. He is a strangely irresponsible jurable of the true
and the false. He paints a fuU flesh surface that radiates
and palpitates with iUusion, and into the midst of it
he thrusts a mouth, a nose , an eye, of the most primi
tive composition. But if you want breathless -vigor,
hit or miss, taking your ticket at a venture, as in a
carnival raffle or on an English railway, here you
have it. III.
I -WENT the other day to the suppressed Convent of
San Marco, paid ray franc at the profane little wicket
which creaks away at the door (no less than six custo
dians, apparently, are needed to tum it, as if it had
a recusant conscience), passed along the bright, still
cloister, and went in to look at Fra Angelico's "Craci-
fixion," in that dusky chamber in the basement. I
looked long; one can hardly do otherwise. The fresco
deals with the high pathetic, and after perceiving its
meaning you feel as little at liberty to go away ab
ruptly as you would to leave church during the sermon.
You raay be as little of a formal Christian as Fra An
gelico was rauch of one; it yet seems a kind of intel
lectual duty to let so sincere a presentment of the
Christian story work its utmost purpose on your mind.
The three crosses rise high against a strange crimson
sky, which deepens mysteriously the tragic expression
of the scene; but I confess to my inabUity to determine
whether this lurid background is an intentional bit of
picturesqueness, or simply a happy corruption of the
original color. In tbe former case it is tragedy quite
in the modern taste, Between the crosses, in no great

FLORENTINE NOTES. 243
c'Omposition, are scattered the most exemplary saints
— Jcneeling, praying, weeping, pitying, worshipping.
The swoon of the Madonna is depicted at the left;
and this gives the gathered saints a strange appearance
of being historically present at the actual scene. Every
thing is so real that you feel a vague impatience, and
almost ask yourself how it was that amid the army of
his consecrated servants the Lord was permitted to
suffer? On reflection, you see that the painter's design,
in so far as it is very definite, has been simply to offer
a great representation of Pity. This was the eraotion
presuraably raost familiar to his own benignant spirit,
and his colors here seem dissolved in softly-falling
tears. Of this simple yearning compassion the figures
are all admirably expressive. No later painter learned
to render with more masterly truth than Fra Angelico
a single, concentrated, spiritual emotion. Immured in
his quiet convent, he apparently never received an in
telligible impression of evil; and his conception of
human life was a tender sense of perpetually loving
and being loved. But how, immured in his quiet con
vent, away frora the streets and the studios, did he
becorae that genuine, finished, perfectly professional
painter? No one is less of a mere pietistic amateur.
His range was broad, from this really heroic fresco to
the little trampeting seraphs, in their opaline robes,
enamelled, as it were, on the gold margins of his pic
tures. I sat out the sermon, and departed, I hope, with
the gentle preacher's blessing. I went into the smaUer
refectory, near by, to refresh my memory of the beau
tiful Last Supper of Domenico Ghirlandaio. It would
be putting things roughly to say that I felt as if I had
i6*

244 FOREIGN PARTS.
adjourned from a serraon to a coraedy; but one ma}/
certainly say that Ghirlandaio's theme, as contrasted
with the blessed Angelico's, was the dramatic, spec
tacular side of human life. How keenly he observed
it and how richly he rendered it, the world about him
of color and costume, of handsome heads and pictorial
groupings ! In his admirable school there is no painter
one enjoys more largely and irresponsibly. Lippo Lippi
is sirapler, quainter, more frankly expressive; but one
looks at him with a reranant of the sympathetic dis
comfort provoked by all those early masters whose
conceptions were still a trifle too large for their means.
The pictorial vision in their minds seeras to stretch
and strain their undeveloped skill almost to a sense of
pain. But in Ghirlandaio the skUl and the imagina
tion are equal, and he gives us a delightful impression
of enjoying his own resources. Of all the painters of
his time he seems to us the most modern. He enjoyed
a crimson mantle spreading and tumbling in curious
folds and embroidered with needlework of gold, just
as he enjoyed a handsome, well-rounded head, with
vigorous, dusky locks, profiled in courteous adoration.
He enjoyed, in short, the various reality of things, and
he had the good fortune to live at a tirae when reality
was sumptuous and delightful. He was not especially
addicted to giving spiritual hints; and yet how hard
and meagre they seem, the professed and finished
realists of our own day, unfurnished with that spiritual
candor which makes half the richness of Ghirlandaio!
The Last Supper at San Marco is an excellent example
of the natural reverence of an artist of that time with
whom reverence was not, as one may say, a specialty.
The main idea with him has been the variety, the

FLORENTINE NOTES. 245
briUiancy, the material charm of the scene, which finds
expression, with irrepressible generosity, in the ac
cessories of the background. Instinctively he iraagines
an opulent garden — imagines it with a good faith which
quite tides him over the reflection that Christ and his
disciples were poor raen and unused to sit at raeat in
palaces. Great full-fruited orange-trees peep over the
wall before which the table is spread, strange birds fly
through the air, and a peacock perches on the edge
of the partition and looks down on the sacred repast.
It is striking that, without any religious purpose at all
intense, the figures, in their varied naturalness, have a
dignity and sweetness of attitude which admits of
numberless reverential constructions. This is the happy
tact of an unperturbed faith.
On the staircase which leads up to the little painted
cells of the Beato Angelico I suddenly faltered and
paused. Somehow I had grown averse to the intenser
zeal of the Monk of Fiesole. I wanted no more of hira
that day. I wanted no raore raacerated friars and
spear-gashed sides. Ghirlandaio's way of telling his
story had put rae in the humor for something more
largely intelligent, more profanely beautiful. I departed,
walked across the square, and found it in the Academy,
standing in a certain spot and looking up at a certain
high-hung picture. It is difficult to speak adequately,
perhaps even intelligibly, of Sandro Botticelli. An ac
complished critic (Mr. Pater, in his "Studies on the
History of the Renaissance") has lately done so, on
the whole more eloquently than conclusively. He was
a raost peculiar genius, and of aU the raultitudinous
masters of his group incomparably the most interesting.

246 FOREIGN PARTS.
the one who detains and perplexes and fascinates yiiiu
most. Putting aside whatever seems too recondit^ in
Mr. Pater's interpretation, it is evidence of the painter's
power that he has furnished so fastidious a critic so
inspiring a theme. A rigidly sufficient account of his
genius is that his own imagination was active, that his
fancy was audacious and adventurous. Alone among
the painters of his time, he seems to me to possess
invention. The glow and thrill of expanding observa
tion — this was the feeling that sent his comrades to
their easels; but Botticelli had a faculty which loved
to play tricks with the actual, to sport and wander and
explore on its own account. These tricks are some
times so ingenious and so lovely that it would be
easy to talk nonsense about them. I hope it is not
nonsense, however, to say that the picture to which I
just alluded (a Coronation of the Virgin, with a group
of life-sized saints below and a garland of miniature
angels above) is one of the supremely beautiful pro
ductions of the human mind. It is hung so high that
you need a good glass to see it; to say nothing of the
unprecedented delicacy of the work. The lower half
of the picture is of moderate interest; but the dance
of hand-clasped angels round the heavenly couple
above has a beauty newly exhaled from the deepest
sources of inspiration. Their perfect little hands are
locked with ineffable elegance; their blowing robes are
tossed into folds of which each line is a study; their
charming feet have the relief of the raost delicate
sculpture. But, as I said before, of BotticeUi there is
much, too much to say. Only add to this iUimitable
grace of design that his adventurous fancy goes a-

FLORENTINE NOTES. 247
paying, not on wanton errands of its own, but on those
of some mystic superstition which trembles forever in
his 'heart. IV.
The more I look at the old Florentine domestic
architecture the raore I like it — that of the great
houses, at least; and if I ever ara able to build a
stately dweUing for myself, I do not see how in con
science I can buUd it different frora these. They are
sombre and frowning, and look a trifle more as if they
were meant to keep people out than to let them in;
but I know no buUdings raore expressive of dorai-
cihary dignity and security, with less of obtrusive and
insubstantial pretension. They are impressively hand
some, and yet they contrive to be so with the narrowest
means. I do not say at the smaUest cost; that is an
other raatter. There is money buried in the thick
waUs and diffused through the echoing excess of space.
The merchant nobles of the fifteenth century, I sup
pose, had money enough, though the present bearers
of their names are glad to let out their palaces in
suites of apartments which are occupied by the com
mercial aristocracy of another republic. I have been
told of fine old mouldering chambers of which I might
enjoy possession for a sum not worth mentioning. I
am afraid that in the depths of these stern-faced old
houses there is a good deal of dusky discomfort, and
I speak now simply of the stern faces themselves as
you can see them frora the street; see them ranged
cheek to cheek in the gray historic light of the Via
dei Bardi, the Via Maggio, the Via degli Albizzi.
The stern expression depends on a few simple

248 FOREIGN PARTS.
features: on the great iron-caged -windows of pie
rough-hewn basement; on the noble stretch of space
between the sumrait of one high, round-toppe'd wirtdow
and the bottora of that above; on the high-hung sculp
tured shield at the angle of the house; on the flat, far-
projecting roof; and, finally, on the raagnificent tall
ness of the whole building, which so dwarfs our
modern attenipts at size. The finest of these Flor
entine palaces are, I imagine, the tallest dweUing-
houses in Europe. Some of those of M. Haussmann,
in Paris, may climb very nearly as high; but there is
all the difference in the world between the impressive
ness of a building which takes breath, as it were, some
six or seven times, from story to story, and of one
which erects itself to an equal height in three long-
drawn pulsations. When a house is ten windows wide
and the drawing-room floor is as high as a chapel, it
can afford to have but three stories. The spacious
ness of some of these ancient drawing-rooms savors
almost of the ludicrous. The "family circle," gathered
anywhere within speaking distance, must look like a
group of pUgrims encamped in the desert on a little
oasis of carpet. Madame G  , living at the top of
a house in that dusky, tortuous old Borgo Pinti,
initiated me the other evening most good-naturedly,
lamp in hand, into the far-spreading mysteries of her
apartraent. Such quarters seem a translation into
space of the old-fashioned idea of leisure. Leisure
and "room" have been passing out of our manners to
gether; but here and there, being of stouter structure,
the latter lingers and survives.
Here and there, indeed, in this blessed Italy, re
luctantly modern in spite alike of boasts and lamenta-

FLORENTINE NOTES. 249
jons, it seems to have been preserved for curiosity's
and fancy's sake, with a vague, sweet odor of the em-
balmer's spices about it. I went the other morning to
the Corsini Palace. The Corsinis, obviously, are great
people. One of the ornaments of Rome is their great
white-faced palace in the dark Trastevere, and its
voluminous gaUery, none the less picturesque for the
pictures all being poor. Here they have a palace on
the -Arno, with another large, handsome, respectable,
uninteresting collection. It contains three or four fine
pictures by early Florentines. It was not especially
for the pictures that I went, however; and certainly not
for the pictures that I stayed. I was in the same
humor as X  when we walked the other day
through the beautiful residential apartments of the
Pitti Palace. "I suppose I care for nature," he said.
"I know there have been tiraes when I have thought
that the greatest pleasure in life was to lie under a
tree and gaze away at blue hills. But just now I had
rather recline on that faded sea-green satin sofa and
gaze down through the open door at that retreating
¦vista of gUded, deserted, haunted chambers. In other
words, I prefer a good 'interior' to a good landscape.
It is a raore concentrated pleasure. I like fine old
rooras, that have been lived in in a large way. I like
the musty upholstery, the antiquated gimcracks, the
-view out of the tall, deep-erabrasured windows at gar
den cypresses rocking against a gray sky. If you
don't know why, I can't tell you." It seemed to me
at the Palazzo Corsini that I did know why. In places
that have been lived in so long and so much and in
such a large way, as my friend said — that is, under
social conditions so complex and, to an American

2';0 FOREIGN PARTS.
sense, so curious — the past seeras to have left a sen
sible deposit, an aroma, an atmosphere. This ghostly
presence teUs you no secrets, but it prompts you. to
try and guess a few. What has been done and said
here through so many years, what has been ventured
or suffered, what has been dreamed or despaired of?
Guess the riddle if you can, or if you think it worth
your ingenuity. The rooras at the Palazzo Corsini
suggest none but comfortable memories. One of them,
indeed, seemed to me such a tranquil perfection of a
room, that I lounged there untU the old custodian
came shuffling back to see whether, possibly, I was
trying to conceal a Caravaggio about my person — a
great crimson-draped drawing-room of the amplest and
yet most charming proportions, with its walls hung
with large dark pictures, its great concave ceiling
frescoed and moulded with dusky richness, and half a
dozen south windows looking out on the Arno, whose
swift yellow tide sends up the light in a sort of cheer
ful flicker. I believe that, in my relish for this fine
combination, I uttered a monstrous folly — some mo
mentary willingness to be maimed or crippled all my
days if I might pass them in such a room as that. In
fact, half the pleasure of inhabiting this spacious
saloon would be that of using one's legs, of strolling
up and down past the windows, one by one, and mak
ing desultory journeys from station to station and corner
to corner. Near by is a colossal ball-room, domed and
pUastered like a Renaissance cathedral, and superabund
antly decorated with marble effigies, all yellow and
gray with the years.

TUSCAN CITIES. 25«t

TUSCAN CITIES.
Florence, April i8, 1S73.
The cities I mean are Leghorn, Pisa, Lucca, and
Pistoja, among which I have been spending the last
few days. The most striking fact as to Leghorn, it
must be conceded at the outset, is that, being in Tuscany,
it should be so scantily Tuscan. The traveller curious
in local color must content hiraself with the deep blue
expanse of the Mediterranean. The streets, away frora
the docks, are raodern, genteel and rectangular; Liver
pool raight acknowledge thera if it were not for their
fresh-colored stucco. They are the offspring of the
new industry which is death to the old idleness. Of
picturesque architecture, fruit of the old idleness, or
at least of the old leisure, Leghorn is singularly de
stitute. It has neither a church worth one's attention,
nor a municipal palace, nor a museum, and it may
claira the distinction, unique in Italy, of being the
city of no pictures. In a shabby corner, near the
docks, stands a statue of one of the elder grand-dukes
of Tuscany, appealing to posterity on grounds now
vague — chiefly that of having placed certain Moors
under tribute. Four colossal negroes, in very bad
bronze, are chained to the base of the raonuraent,
which forms with their assistance a sufficiently fantastic
group; but to patronize the arts is not the line of the
Livornese, and, for want of the slender annuity which
would keep its precinct sacred, this curious memorial

252 FOREIGN PARTS,
is buried in dockyard rubbish, I raust add that,.- on
the other hand, there is a very well-conditioned and,
in attitude and gesture, extremely realistic statue of
Cavour in one of the city squares, and a pair of toga'd
effigies of recent grand-dukes in another, Leghorn is
a city of magnificent spaces, and it was so long a
journey from the sidewalk to the pedestal of these
images that I never took the time to go and read the
inscriptions. And in truth, vaguely, I bore the originals
a grudge and wished to know as little about them as
possible; for it seemed to me that as patres patrice, in
their degree, they might have decreed that the great
blank, ochre-faced piazza should be a trifle less ugly.
There is a distinct amenity, however, in any experi
ence of Italy, and I shall probably in the future not
be above sparing a light regret to several of the hours
of which the one I speak of was composed, I shall
reraember a large, cool, bourgeois villa in a garden, in
a noiseless suburb — a middle-aged villa, roomy and
stony, as an Italian villa should be, I shall remeraber
that, as I sat in the garden, and, looking up from my
book, saw through a gap in the shrubbery the red
house-tiles against the deep blue sky and the gray
underside of the ilex-leaves turned up by the Mediter
ranean breeze, I had a vague consciousness that I was
not in the Western world.
If you should also wish to have it, you must not
go to Pisa; and indeed we are most of us forewarned
as to Pisa frora an early age. Few of us can have had
a chUdhood so unblessed by contact with the arts as
that one of its occasional diversions should not have
been a puzzled scrutiny of some alabaster model of the
Leaning Tower, under a glass cover in a back-parlor.

TUSCAN CITIES. 253
Pisa and its monuments have, in other words, been in
dustriously -vulgarized; but it is astonishing how well
they have survived the process. The charm of Pisa is,
in f9.ct, a charra of a high order, and is but partially
foreshadowed by the famous crookedness of its campa
nile. I felt it irresistibly and yet almost inexpressibly
the other afternoon, as I raade my way to the classic
comer of the city through the warm, drowsy air, which
nervous people come to inhale as a sedative. I was
with an invalid corapanion, who had had no sleep to
speak of for a fortnight. "Ah ! stop the carriage," said
my friend, gaping, as I could feel, deliciously, "in the
shadow of this old slumbering palazzo, and let me sit
here and close my eyes, and taste for an hour of ob
livion." Once strolling over the grass, however, out of
which the four marble monuments rise, we awaked re-
sponsively enough to the present hour. Most people
remember the happy reraark of tasteful, old-fashioned
Forsyth (who touched a hundred other points in his
"Italy" hardly less happily) as to the three beautiful
buUdings being "fortunate alike in their society and
their solitude." It must be adraitted that they are
more fortunate in their society than we felt ourselves
tp be in ours; for the scene presented the animated
appearance for which, on any fine spring day, all the
choicest haunts of ancient quietude in Italy are becom
ing yearly more remarkable. There were clamorous
beggars at all the sculptured portals, and bait for
beggars, in abundance, trailing in and out of them
under convoy of loquacious ciceroni. I forget just how
I apportioned the responsibility of intrusion, for it was
not long before fellow-tourists and fellow-countrymen
becarae a vague, deadened, muffled presence, like the

2 54 FOREIGN PARTS.
dentist's last words when he is giving you ether.
They suffered a sort of mystical disintegration in the
dense, bright, tranquil atmosphere of the place. The
cathedral and its corapanions are fortunate indeed in
everything — fortunate in the spacious angle of the gray
old city-wall, which folds about them in their sculptured
elegance like a strong protecting arm; fortunate in the
broad green-sward which stretches from the marble
base of cathedral and cemetery to the ragged foot of
the rampart; fortunate in the little vagabonds who dot
the grass, plucking daisies and exchanging Italian cries;
fortunate in the pale-gold tone to which time and the
soft sea-damp have mellowed and darkened their
marble plates; fortunate, above all, in an indescribable
gracefulness of grouping (half hazard, half design)
which insures them, in one's memory of things ad
mired, very much the same isolated corner which they
occupy in the charming city.
Of the smaller cathedrals of Italy, I know none that
I prefer to that of Pisa; none which, on a moderate
scale, produces more the impression of a great church.
Indeed, it seems externally of such moderate size that
one is surprised at its grandeur of effect within. An
architect of genius, for all that he works with colossal
blocks and cumbrous pillars, is certainly the most cun
ning of all artists. The fagade of the cathedral of Pisa
is a small pyraraidal screen, covered with delicate carv
ings and chasings, distributed over a series of short
columns upholding narrow arches. It looks like" an
imitation of goldsmith's work in stone, and the space
covered is apparently so sraall that there seems a fit
ness in the dainty labor. How it is that on the inner
side of this fagade the wall should appear to rise to a

TUSCAN CITIES. 255
splendid height, and to support one end of a ceiling as
rerriote in its gilded grandeur, one could almost fancy,
as that of St. Peter's; how it is that the nave should
stretch away in such solemn vastness, the shallow
transepts carry out the grand impression, and the apse
of the choir hollow itself out like a dusky cavern fretted
with golden stalactites — all this must be expounded
by a keener architectural analyst than I, To sit some
where against a pillar, where the vista is large and the
incidents cluster richly, and vaguely revolve these
mysteries -without answering them, is the best of one's
usual enjoyment of a great church. It takes no great
ingenuity to conjecture that a gigantic Byzantine Christ,
in mosaic, on the concave roof of the choir, contributes
largely to the impressiveness of the place. It has even
more of stiff solemnity than is common to works of its
school, and it raade me wonder more than ever what
the human mind could have been when such unlovely
forms could satisfy its conception of holiness. There
seems something traly pathetic in the fate of these huge
mosaic idols, and in the change that has befaUen our
manner of acceptance of them. It is a singular con
trast between the original sublimity of their pretensions
and the way in which they flatter that audacious sense
of the grotesque which the modern imagination has
smuggled even into the appreciation of religious forms.
They were meant to be hardly less grand than the
Deity itself, but the only part they play now is to
mark the further end of our progress in spiritual re
finement. The two limits, in this line, are admirably
represented in the choir at Pisa, by the flat gUded
Christ on the roof and the beautiful specimen of the
painter Sodoma on the waU. The latter, a smaU pic-

256 FOREIGN PARTS.
ture of the Sacrifice of Isaac, is one of the best ex
amples of its exquisite author, and perhaps, as chance
has it, the most perfect opposition that could be found
to the spirit of the great mosaic. There are many
painters raore powerful than Sodoma — painters who,
like the author of the raosaic, attempted and compassed
grandeur; but none possess a more persuasive grace,
none more than he have sifted and chastened their
conception till it exhales the sweetness of a perfectly
distilled perfume.
Of the patient, successive efforts of painting to arrive
at the supreme refinement of Sodoma, the Carapo Santo
hard by offers a most interesting meraorial. It presents
a long, blank raarble wall to the relative profaneness
of the cathedral close, but within it is a, perfect trea
sure-house of art. A long quadrangle surrounds an
open court, where weeds and wild roses are tangled
together, and a sunny stillness seems to rest consent-
ingly, as if Nature had been won to consciousness of
the precious relics committed to her. Something in
the place reminded me of the collegiate cloisters of
Oxford; but it must be confessed that this is a hand
some corapliraent to Oxford. The open arches of the
quadrangles of Magdalen and Christchurch are not of
raellow Carrara marble, nor do their columns, slim
and elegant, seem to frame the unglazed windows of a
cathedral. To be buried in the Campo Santo of Pisa
you need only be illustrious, and there is liberal aUow
ance both as to the character arid the degree of your
fame. The most obtrusive object in one of the long
vistas is a most complicated monument to Madame
Catalani, the singer, recently erected by her possibly
too-appreciative heirs. The wide pavement is a mosaic

TUSCAN CITIES. 257
of sepulchral slabs,, and the walls, below the base of
the paling frescos, are incrusted with inscriptions and
encumbered with urns and antique sarcophagi. The
place is at once a cemetery and a museum, and its
especial charm is its strange mixture of the active and
the passive, of art and rest, of life and death. Origin
aUy its walls were one vast continuity of closely pressed
frescos; but now the capricious scars and stains have
come to out-number the pictures, and the cemetery has
grown to be a burial-place of pulverized masterpieces as
well as of finished lives. The fragments of painting
that remain are, however, fortunately, the best; for one
is safe in believing that a host of undimmed neighbors
would detract but little frora the two great works of
Orcagna. Most people know the "Triuraph of Death"
and the "Last Judgraent" from descriptions and en
gravings; but to measure the possible good faith of
imitative art one must stand there and see the painter's
howling potentates dragged into hell in all the vivid
ness of his bright, hard coloring; see his feudal cour
tiers on their palfreys, holding their noses at what they
are so fast coming to; see his great Christ, in judg
ment, refuse forgiveness with a gesture coraraanding
enough to extinguish the idea. The charge that
Michael Angelo borrowed his cursing Saviour from this
great figure of Orcagna is more valid than most accu
sations of plagiarism; but of the two figures, one at
least could be spared. For direct, triuraphant expres
siveness these two superb frescos have probably never
been surpassed. The painter aims at no very delicate
meanings, but he drives certain gross ones home so
effectively that for a paraUel to his skiU one must look
Foreign Parts. 1/

258 FOREIGN PARTS.
to the stage. Some of his feraale figures are superb,
but they look like creatures of a formidable tempera
ment. There are charming women, however, on the other
side of the cloister — in the beautiful frescos of Be
nozzo Gozzoli. If Orcagna's work was elected to sur
vive the ravages of time, it is a happy chance that it
should be balanced by a group of performances of such
a different temper. The contrast is the more striking
that, in subject, the work of both painters is narrowly
theological. But Benozzo cares, in his theology, for
nothing but the story, the scene, and the drama — the
chance to pile up palaces and spires in his back
grounds against pale blue skies cross-barred with
pearly, fleecy clouds, and to scatter sculptured arches
and shady trellises over the front, with every incident
of human life going forward lightly and gracefully be
neath them. Lightness and grace are the painter's
great qualities; and, if we had to characterize him
briefly, we might say that he marks the hithermost
limit of unconscious elegance. His charm is natural
fineness; a little more, and we should have refinement
— which is a very different thing. Like all les dilicats
of this world, as M. Renan calls them, Benozzo has
suffered greatly. The space on the walls he originally
covered with his Old Testament stories is immense;
but his exquisite handiwork has peeled off by the acre,
as one may almost say, and the latter compartments of
the series are swallowed up in huge white scars, out
of which a helpless head or hand peeps forth, like
those of creatures sinking into a quicksand. As for
Pisa at large, although it is not exactly what one would'
caU a mouldering city — for it has a certain well-aired

TUSCAN CITIES. 259
cleanness and brightness, even in its supreme tran
quiUity- — it affects the imagination in very much the
same way as the Campo Santo. And, in truth, a city
so ancient and deeply historic as Pisa is at every step
but the burial-ground of a larger life than its present
one. The wide, empty streets, the goodly Tuscan
palaces (which look as if about all of them there
were a genteel private understanding, independent of
placards, that they are to be let extremely cheap), the
delicious relaxing air, the full-flowing yellow river, the
lounging Pisani, smelling, metaphorically, their poppy-
flowers, seeraed to me all so many adraonitions to re
signation and obli-vion. And this is what I mean by
saying that the charm of Pisa (apart from its cluster
of monuraents) is a charm of a high order. The archi
tecture is not especially curious; the lions are few;
there are no fixed points for stopping and gaping. And
yet the impression is profound; the charm is a moral
charm. If I were ever to be incurably disappointed;
ifl had lost my health, my money, or my friends; if
I were resigned, forevermore, to pitching my expecta
tions in a minor key, I think I should go and live at
Pisa. Something in the atmosphere would assent most
soothingly to my mind. Its quietude would seem
something more than a stillness — a hush. Pisa may
be a dull place to live in, but it is a capital place to
wait for death.
Nothing could be more charming than the country
between Pisa and Lucca — unless possibly it is the
country between Lucca and Pistoja. If Pisa is -dead
Tuscany, Lucca is Tuscany stUl living and enjoying,
desiring and intending. The town is a charming
mixture of antique oddity and modern animation;
17*

26o FOREIGN PARTS. r
and not only the town, but the country — the bloorii-
ing, romantic country which you behold from the
faraous proraenade on the city-wall. The wall is of
superbly solid brickwork and of extraordinary breadth,
and its suramit, planted with goodly trees, and swelling
here and there into bastions and little open gardens,
surrounds the city with a circular lounging-place of
extreme picturesqueness. This well-kept, shady, i-vy-
grown rampart reminded me of certain mossy corners
of England; but it looks away to a prospect of more
than English loveliness — a broad, green plain, where
the summer yields a double crop of grain, and a circle
of bright blue mountains speckled with high-hung con
vents and profiled castles and nestling villas, and
traversed by valleys of a deeper and duskier blue. In
one of the deepest and shadiest of these valleys a
charming watering-place is hidden away yet awhUe
longer frora railways — the baths to which Lucca has.
given its narae. Lucca is pre-eminently a city of
churches; ecclesiastical architecture being, indeed, the
only one of the arts to which it seems to have given
attention. There are felicitous bits of domestic architec
ture, but no great palaces, and no importunate frequency
of pictures. The cathedral, however, is a resumd of the
merits of its companions, and is a singularly noble and
interesting church. Its peculiar boast is a wonderful
inlaid front, on which horses and hounds and hunted
beasts are lavishly figured in black marble over a
white ground. What I chiefly enjoyed in the gray
solemnity of the nave and transepts was the superb
effect of certain second-story Gothic arches (those
which rest on the pavement are Lombard). These
arches are delicate and slender, like those of the cloister

TUSCAN CITIES. 26 1
at Pisa, and they play their part in the dusky upper
air with real sublimity.
At Pistoja there is, of course, a cathedral, and
there is nothing unexpected in its being, externally at
least, a very imposing one; in its having a grand cam
panile at its door, a brilliant baptistery, in alternate
layers of black and white marble, across the way, and
a stately civic palace on either side. But even if I
had the space to do otherwise, I should prefer to speak
less of the particular objects of interest at Pistoja than
of the pleasure I found it to lounge away in the empty
streets the quiet hours of a warm afternoon. To say
where I lingered longest would be to tell of a little
square before the hospital, out of which you look up
at the beautiful frieze in colored earthenware by the
brothers DeUa Robbia, which runs across the front of
the buUding. It represents the seven orthodox offices
of charity, and with its briUiant blues and yeUows, and
its tender expressiveness, it brightens up amazingly,
to the sense and soul, this little gray corner of the
mediaeval city. Pistoja is stUl strictly mediseval. How
grass-grown it seemed, how drowsy, how full of idle
vistas and melancholy nooks! If nothing was supreraely
wonderful, ever)rthing was delicious.

262 FOREIGN PARTS.

RAVENNA.
Ravenna, June 8, 1874.
I WRITE these lines on a cold Swiss mountain-top,
shut in by an intense white mist from any glimpse of
the under-world of lovely Italy; but as I jotted down
the other day, in the ancient capital of Honorius and
Theodoric, the few notes of which they are composed,
I let the original date stand for local color's sake. Its
raere look, as I transcribe it, emits a grateful glow in
the raidst of the Alpine rawness, and gives a de
pressed imagination something tangible to grasp while
awaiting the return of fine weather. For Ravenna
was glowing, less than a week since, as I edged along
the narrow strip of shadow binding one side of the
erapty, white streets. After a long, chilly spring, the
summer this year descended upon Italy with a sudden
jump and a terrible veheraence of purpose. I stole
away frora Florence in the night, and even on top of
the Apennines, under the dull starlight and in the
rushing train, one was mainly conscious of perspira
tion. At Bologna I found a festa, or rather two festas, a
civil and a religious, going on in mutual mistrust and
disparagement. The civil one was the now legal Italian
holiday of the Statute; the religious, a jubilee of cer
tain local churches. The latter is observed by the
Bolognese parishes in couples, and coraes round for
each couple but once in ten years — an arrangement

RAVENNA. 263
by which fhe faithful at large insure themselves a
liberal recurrence of expensive processions. It was not
my business to distinguish the sheep frora the goats,
the prayers frora the scoffers; it was enough that,
melting together under the scorching sun, they raade
the picturesque city doubly picturesque. The com
bination at one point was really dramatic. While a
long procession of priests and young virgins in white
veUs, bearing tapers, was being organized in one of
the streets, a review of the King's troops was going on
outside of the town. On its return, a large detachment
of cavalry passed across the space where the incense
was burning, the pictured banners swaying, and the
litany being droned, and checked the advance of the
little ecclesiastical troop. The long vista of the street,
between the porticos, was festooned with garlands and
scarlet and tinsel; the robes and crosses and canopies
of the priests, the clouds of perfumed smoke, and the
white veils of the maidens, were resolved by the hot,
bright air into a gorgeous medley of color, across
which the mounted soldiers went rattling and flashing
like a conquering army trampling over an embassy of
propitiation. It was, to tell the truth, the first time an
Itahan festa had worn to my eyes that warmth of
coloring, that romantic confusion which tradition pro
mises; and I confess that my eyes found more pleasure
in it than they found an hour later in the picturesque
on canvas, as one observes it in the Pinacoteca, I
found myself scowling most unmercifully at Guido and
Doraenichino. For Ravenna, however, I had nothing but smUes —
grave, philosophic smUes, such as accord with the
tranquU, melancholy interest of the place. I arrived

264 FOREIGN PARTS.
there in the evening, before, even at drowsy Ravenna,
the festa of the Statuto had altogether put itself to
bed. I immediately strolled forth from the inn, and
found it sitting up awhile longer on the piazza, chiefly
at the cafe door, listening to the band of the garrison
by the light of a dozen or so of feeble tapers, fastened
along the front of the palace of the Government. Be
fore long, ho-wever, it had dispersed and departed, and
I was left alone with the gray illumination and with
an affable citizen, whose testimony as to the manners
and customs of Ravenna I had aspired to obtain. I
had already taken notice enough to borrow confidence
to suggest deferentially that it was not the liveliest
place in the world, and my friend adraitted that in
fact it was a trifle sluggish. But had I seen the Corso?
Without seeing the Corso it was unfair to conclude
against Ravenna. The Corso of Ravenna, of a hot
suramer night, had an air of surprising seclusion and
repose. Here and there in an upper, closed window
glimmered a light; my companion's footsteps and my
own were the only sounds; not a creature was within
sight. The suffocating atraosphere helped me to be
lieve for a moment that I was walking in the Italy of
Boccaccio, hand-in-hand with the plague, through a
city which had lost half its population by pestilence
and the other half by flight. I turned back into my
inn, profoundly satisfied. This, at last, was old-world
dulness of a prime distiUation; this, at last, was an
tiquity, history, repose.
This irapression was largely confirraed and enriched
on the following day; but it was obliged, at an early
stage of ray explorations, to give precedence to another
— the lively realization, naraely, of my iraperfect ac-

RA-VENNA. 265
quaintance with Gibbon and other cognate authorities.
At Ravenna, the waiter at the cafe and the coachman
who drives you to the Pine-Forest allude to Galla Pla
cidia and Justinian, as to any attractive topic of the
hour; wherever you turn you encounter some peremp
tory challenge to your knowledge of unfamiliar periods.
For myself, I could only attune my intellect vaguely to
the intensely historical character of the place — I could
only feel that I was breathing an atmosphere of re
cords and relics. I conned my guide-book and looked
up at the great mosaics, and then fumbled at poor
Murray again for some intenser light on the court of
Justinian; but I can imagine that to a visitor raore in
timate with the originals of the various great almond-
eyed mosaic portraits in the vaults of the churches,
these extremely curious works of art raay have a re
ally formidable interest. I found Ravenna looking by
dayhght like a vast, straggling, depopulated vUlage.
The streets with hardly an exception are grass-grown,
and though I walked about all day I faUed to perceive
a single wheeled vehicle. I remember no shop but the
little establishment of an urbane photographer, whose
views of the Pine-Forest gave me an irresistible desire
to transport rayself thither. There was no architecture
to speak of; and though there are a great raany large
domiciles with aristocratic names, they stand cracking
and baking in the sun in no very comfortable fashion.
The houses for the raost part have a half-rustic look;
they are low and meagre and shabby and interspersed
with high garden waUs, over which the long arms of
tangled plants hang motionless into the stagnant streets.
Here and there in aU this dreariness, in sorae particu
larly silent and grassy corner, rises an old brick church

266 FOREIGN PARTS.
with a fagade more or less spoUed by cheap moderni
zation, and a strange cylindrical campanile, pierced
with small arched windows and extremely suggestive
of the fifth century. These churches constitute the
palpable interest of Ravenna, and their own principal
interest, after thirteen centuries of well-intentioned spo
liation, resides in their unequalled coUection of early
Christian mosaics. It is in a certain sense a curiously
siraple interest, and it conducts one's reflections into a
narrow and definite channel. There are older churches
in Rome, and churches which, looked at as museums,
are more variously and richly entertaining; but in
Rome you stumble at every step upon some curious
pagan memorial, often beautiful enough to lead your
thoughts wandering far from the primitive rigidities of
the Christian faith.
Ravenna, on the other hand, began with the church,
and all its raonuments and relics are harmoniously
rigid. By the raiddle of the first century it possessed
an exemplary saint — Apollinaris, a disciple of Peter —
to whom its two finest churches are dedicated. It was
to one of these, jocosely entitled the "new" one, that
I first directed my steps. I lingered outside awhile
and looked at the great red, barrel-shaped bell-towers,
so rusty, so crumbling, so archaic, and yet so resolute
to ring in another century or two, and then went in to
the coolness, the shining marble columns, the queer
old sculptured slabs and sarcophagi, and the long mo
saics, scintillating under the roof, upon the wall of the
nave. San Apollinare Nuovo, like most of its com
panions, is a magazine of early Christian odds and
ends; of fragments of yellow marble incrusted with
quaint sculptured emblems of primitive dogma; great

RA-VENNA. 267
rough troughs, containing the bones of old bishops;
episcopal chairs with the marble worn narrow with
centuries of pressure from the solid episcopal person;
slabs from the fronts of old pulpits, covered with carven
hieroglyphics of an alraost Egyptian abstruseness —
lambs, and stags, and fishes, and beasts of theological
affinities even less apparent. Upon all these strange
things the strange figures in the great mosaic panorama
look down, with colored cheeks and staring eyes, life
like enough to speak to you and answer your wonder
ment, and tell you in bad Latin of the decadence that
it was in such and such a fashion they believed and
worshipped. First, on each side, near the door, are
houses and ships and various old landmarks of Ra
venna; then begins a long procession, on one side, of
twenty-two white-robed virgins and three obsequious
magi, terrainating in a throne bearing the Madonna
and Child, surrounded by four angels; on the other
side, of an equal number of male saints (twenty-five,
that is) holding crowns in their hands and leading to
the Saviour, enthroned between angels of singular ex
pressiveness. What it is these long, slim seraphs ex
press I cannot quite say; but they have an odd, know
ing, sidelong look out of the narrow ovals of their eyes
which, though not without sweetness, would certainly
make me feel like murmuring a defensive prayer or so
if I were to find rayself alone in the church toward
dusk. AU this work is of the latter part of the sixth
century and briUiantly preserved. The gold backgrounds
twinkle as if they had been inserted yesterday, and
here and there a figure is executed almost too rauch
in the modern manner to be interesting; for the charra
of mosaic- work is, to my sense, confined altogether to

268 FOREIGN PARTS.
the infancy of the art. The great Christ, in the series
of which I speak, is quite an elaborate picture, and
yet he retains enough of the orthodox stiffness to make
him impressive in the simpler, elder sense. He is clad
in a purple robe, like an emperor, his hair and beard
are artfully curled, his eyebrows arched, his coraplexion
is brilliant, his whole aspect such a one as the popular
mind may have attributed to Honorius or Valentinian.
It is all very Byzantine, and yet I found in it rauch of
that interest which is inseparable, to a facile imagin
ation, from all early representations of the Saviour.
Practically, they are no more authentic than the more
or less plausible inventions of Ary Scheffer and Holman
Hunt; but they borrow a certain value, factitious per
haps but irresistible, from the mere fact that they are
twelve or thirteen centuries less distant from the ori
ginal. It is soraething that this is the way people in
the six!th century imagined Jesus to have looked; the
image is by so much the less complex. The great
purple-robed monarch on the wall at Ravenna is at
least a very potent and positive Christ, and the only
objection I have to make to him is that, though in this
character he raust have had a full apportionment of
divine fore-knowledge, he betrays no apprehension of
Dr. Channing and M. Renan. If one's preference lies,
for distinctness' sake, between the old narrowness and
the modern coraplexity, one raust adrait that the nar
rowness here has a very grand outline.
I spent the rest of the morning in picturesque
transition between the hot yeUow streets and the cool
gray interiors of the churches. The grayness every
where was lighted up by the scintiUation, on vault and
entablature, of mosaics more or less archaic, but always

J RA-VENNA. 26g
brUliant and elaborate, and everywhere, too, by the
same keen wonderment that, while centuries had worn
themselves away and empires risen and fallen, these
litUe cubes of colore^d glass had stuck in their allotted
places and kept their freshness. I have no space to
enumerate the Ravennese churches one by one, and,
to tell the truth, ray memory of them has already be
come a sort of hazy confusion and formless meditation.
The total aspect of the place, its sepulchral stillness,
its absorbing perfume of evanescence and decay and
mortality, confounds the distinctions and blurs the de
taUs. The Cathedral, which is very vast and high,
has been excessively modernized, and was being still
more so by a lavish application of tinsel and cotton-
velvet, in preparation for the centenary feast of St.
ApoUinaris, which befalls next month. Things on this
occasion are to be done handsomely, and a fair Raven
nese informed me that a single family had contributed
three thousand francs towards a month's vesper-rausic.
It seeraed to rae hereupon that I should like in the
August twilight to wander into the quiet nave of San
ApoUinare, and look up at the great mosaics through
the resonance of some fine chanting. I remember dis
tinctly enough, however, the tall basUica of San Vitale,
of octagonal shape, like an exchange or custom-house
—modelled, I believe, upon St. Sophia at Constantinople.
It is very lofty, very solemn, and, as to the choir, densely
pictured over on arch and apse with mosaics of the
Jime of Justinian. These are regular pictures, full of
movement, gesture and perspective, and just enough
sobered in hue by time to look historic and venerable.
In the middle of the church, under the great dome,
sat an artist whom I envied, raaking at an effective

270 FOREIGN PARTS.
angle a picture of the choir and its broken lights, its
decorated altar and its incrusted, twinkling waUs. The
picture, when it is finished, wUl hang, I suppose, on
the library wall of some person of taste; but even if it
is much better than is probable (I didn't look at it),
aU his taste wUl not tell the owner, unlessJie_haTC
been there, in just what a soundless, "mouldering, out-
of-the-way corner of old Italy it was-painted. An even
better place for an artist fond of dusky architectural
nooks, except that here the dusk is excessive and he
would hardly be able to tell his green from his red, is
the extraordinary little church of the Santi Nazaro e
Celso, otherwise known as the mausoleura of Galla
Placidia. This, perhaps, on the whole, is the most
irnpre^iye^ and picturesque spot in Ra-yenna. It con
sists of a sort ofTiarrow, low-browed cave, shaped like
a Latin cross, every inch of which, except the floor, is
covered with dense symbolic mosaics. Before you and
on each side, through the thick, brown light, loom
three enormous barbaric sarcophagi, containing the re
mains of potentates of the Lower Empire. It is as if
history had burrowed under ground to escape from
research, and you had fairly run it to earth. On the
right lie the ashes of the Emperor Honorius, and in
the middle those of his sister, Galla Placidia, a lady
who, I believe, had great adventures. On the other
side rest the bones of Constantius HI. The place is
like a little natural grotto lined with glimmering mineral
substances, and there is something quite tremendous
in being shut up so closely with these three imperial
ghosts. The shadow of the great Roman name seems
to brood upon the huge sepulchres and abide forever
within the narrow walls.

RA-VENNA. 271
But there are other memories attached to Ravenna
beside those of primitive bishops and degenerate em-
¦ perors. Byron lived here and Dante died here, and
the tomb__qf the one jpqet and the dweUing ofthe other
are among the regular objects of interest. The grave
of Dante, it must be said, is anything but Dantesque,
and the whole precinct is disposed with that curious
vulgarity of taste which distinguishes most modern
Italian tributes to greatness. Dante commemorated in
stucco, even in a slumbering corner of Ravenna, is not
a satisfactory spectacle. Fortunately, of all poets he
least needs a monument, as he was pre-eminently an
architect in diction, and built himself his memorial in
verses more solid than Cyclopean blocks. If Dante's
tomb is not Dantesque, neither is Byron's house Byronic,
being a horaely, shabby, two-storied dwelling, directly
on the street, with as little as possible of isolation and
mystery. In Byron's time it was an inn, and it is
rather a curious reflection that "Cain" and the
"Vision of Judgment" should have been written at an
hotel. Here is a commanding precedent as to self-
abstraction for tourists who are at once sentimental and
literary. I must declare, indeed, that my acquaintance
with Ravenna considerably increased my esteem for
Byron and helped to renew ray faith in the sincerity of
his inspiration. A man so much de son temps as Byron
was, can have spent two long years in this profoundly
stagnant city only by the help of taking a great deal
of disinterested pleasure in his own genius. He had
indeed a notable pastime (the various churches, by
the way, are adorned with monuments of ancestral
Guicciolis); but it is none the less obvious that Ra
venna, fifty years ago, would have been an intolerably-

272 FOREIGN PARTS.
dull residence to a foreigner of distinction unprovided
with a real intellectual passion. The hour one spends
with Byron's memory, then, is a charitable one. After
all, one says to one's self, as one turns away from the
grandiloquent little slab in the front of his house and
looks down the deadly provincial vista of the empty,
sunny street, the author of so many superb stanzas
asked_ less from the world than he gave -to it. One of
his diversions was to ride in the Pineta, which, be
ginning a couple of miles from the city, extends for
some twenty-five railes along the sands of the Adriatic.
I drove out to it for Byron's sake, and Dante's, and
Boccaccio's, all of whora have interwoven it with their
fictions, and for that of a possible whiff of coolness
from the sea. Between the city and the forest, in the
midst of malarious rice-swamps, stands the finest of
the Ravennese churches, the stately temple of San
Apollinare in Classe. The Eraperor Augustus con
structed hereabouts a harbor for fleets, which the ages
have choked up, and which survives only in the title
of this ancient church. Its extrerae lonelines makes it
doubly impressive. They opened the great doors for
me, and let a shaft of heated air go wander up the
beautiful nave, between the twenty-four lustrous, pearly
columns of cipollino marble, and mount the wide stair
case of the choir, and spend itself beneath the mosaics
of the vault. I passed a delicious half-hour sitting in
this wave of tempered light, looking down the cool,
gray avenue of the nave, out of the open door, at the
vivid green swamps, listening to the melancholy stUl
ness. I rambled for an hour in the Pineta, between
the tall, smooth, silvery stems of the pines, beside a
creek which led me to the outer edge of the wood and

RAVENNA. 273
a view of white sails, gleaming and gliding behind the
sand-hUls. It was infinitely picturesque; but, as the
trees stand at wide intervals, and bear far aloft in the
blue air but a little parasol of foliage, I suppose that,
of a glaring summer day, the forest was only the more
Itahan for being perfectly shadeless.

jPoreign Parts.

2 74 FOREIGN PARTS.

HOMBURG REFORMED.
Homburg, July 28, 1873,
I HA-VE been finding Homburg a very pleasant :
place, but I have been half ashamed to confess it.
People assure me on all sides that its glory is sadly
dimmed, and that it can be rightly enjoyed only to the
rausic of roulette and of clinking napoleons. It is
known by this time, I suppose, even in those virtuously
disinterested communities where these lines raay cir
culate, that the day of roulette in these regions is over,
and that in the matter of rouge-et-noir united Germany
has taken a new departure. The last unhallowed gains
at the green tables were pocketed last summer, and
the last hard losses, doubtless, as imperturbably endured
as if good-natured chance had still a career to run.
Chance, I believe, at Homburg was not amazingly good-
natured, and kept her choicest favors for the bank;
but now that the reign of virtue has begun, I have no
doubt there are plenty of in-egular characters who think
that she was much the more amiable creature of the
two. What provision has been made for this ad
venturous multitude I am at loss to conceive, and how
life strikes people now for whom, any time these
twenty years, it has been concentrated in the shifting
victory of red or black. Some of them have taken to
better courses, I suppose; some of them, doubtless, to

HOMBURG REFORMED. 275,
worse; but I have a notion that many of them have
begun to wear away the dull remainder of existence in
a kind of melancholy, ghostly hovering round the
deserted Kursaals. I have seen many of these blighted
survivors sitting about under the trees in the Kur-
garten, with the old habit of imperturbabUity stUl in
their blank, fixed faces — neat, elderly gentlemen, elderly
ladies not especially venerable, whose natural attitude
seems to be to sit with their elbows on the table and
their eyes on the game. They have all, of course, a
pack of cards in their pockets, and their only consola
tion must be to play "patience" forevermore. When
I remember, indeed, that I am in legendary Gerraany,
I find it easy to believe that in these mild summer
nights, when the stupid people who get up at six
o'clock to drink the waters are safely in bed, they as
semble in some far-away corner of the park and make
a green table of the moonlit grass. Twice a week the
old garaing-rooms at the Kursaal are thrown open, the
chandeliers are lighted, and people go and stare at
the painting and gUding. There is an immense deal
of it, all in the elaborate rococo style in which French
decorators of late years have become so proficient, and
which makes an apartment look half like a throne-
room and half like a cafe; but when you have walked
about and looked at the undressed nymphs on the
ceUings and the listless crowd in the great mirrors,
you have nothing to do but to walk out again. The
clever sumptuosity of the rooms makes virtue look rather
foolish and dingy, and classes the famous M. Blanc, in
the regard of pleasure-loving people, with the late
Emperor of the French and other potentates raore
sinned against than sinning — raartyred benefactors to
18'

276 FOREIGN PARTS.
that large portion of the huraan race who would fain
consider the whole world as a watering-place. It is
certainly hard to see what thrifty use the old garaing-
rooms can be put to; they must stand there always in
their gorgeous eraptiness, like the painted torab-chambers
of Eastern monarchs.
There was certainly fair entertainraent in watching
the play — and in playing, according to circurastances;
but even in the old days I think I should have got my
chief pleasure at the Kursaal in a spectacle which has
survived the fall of M. Blanc. As you pass in the
front door, you look straight across the breadth of the
building through another great door which opens on
the gardens. The Kursaal stands on an elevation, and
the ground plunges away behind it with a great stretch,
which spreads itself in a charming park. Beyond the
park it rises again into the gentle slopes of the Taunus
raountains, and raakes a high wooded horizon. This
picture of the green hollow and the blue ridge greets
you as you come in, framed by the opposite doorway,
and I have sometimes wondered whether in the gaming
days an occasional novice with a tender conscience, on
his way to the tables, may not have seemed to see in it
the pleading face of that mild economist, mother
Nature herself It is, doubtless, thinking too fancifully
of the human raind to believe that a youth with a
napoleon to stake, and the consciousness of no more
rigid maternal presence than this, should especially
heed the suggestion that it would be better far to take
a walk in the woods. The trath is, I imagine, that
nature has no absolute voice, and that she speaks to us
very rauch according to our moods. The view from
the terrace at the Kursaal has often had confusion

HOMBURG REFORMED. 277
pronounced upon it by players with empty pockets,
and has been sentiraentally enjoyed by players with
a run of luck. We have the advantage now, at least, of
finding it always the sarae, and always extremely pretty.
Homburg, indeed, is altogether a very pretty place, and
its prettiness is of that pleasing sort which steals gradually
on the attention. It is one of nature's own watering-
places, and has no need, like so many of the audacious
sisterhood, to bully you by force of fashion into think
ing it tolerable.
Your half-hour's ran from Frankfort across a great
sunny expanse of cornfields and crab-apple trees is
indeed not particularly charming; but the sight of the
to-wn as you approach it, with its deep-red roofs rising
out of thick shade at the base of its blue hills, is a
pledge of salubrious repose. Homburg stands on a
gentle spur of the highest of these hills, and one of its ,
prettiest features is your seeing the line of level plain
across the foot of its long sloping main street, and the
hne of wooded mountain across the top. The main
street, which is almost all of Homburg proper, has the
look of busy idleness which belongs to watering-places.
There are people stroUing along and looking into the
shop-windows, who seem to be on the point of buying
something for the sake of something to do. The shops
deal chiefly in the lighter luxuries, and the young ladies
who wait in them wear a great many ribbons and a
great deal of hair. AU the houses take lodgers, and
every second one is an hotel, and every now and then
you hear them chanting defiance at each other to the
sound of the dinner-beU. In the middle of the street
is the long red stuccoed fagade of the Kursaal — the
beating heart of the Homburg world, as one might have

278 FOREIGN PARTS.
called it forraerly. This heart beats rauch slower now,
but whatever social entertainment you raay still find at
Homburg you must look for there. People asserable
there in very goodly crowds, if only to talk about the
dreadful dulness, and to commiserate each other for
not having been in the place before. The Kursaal is
kept up by a tax, promptly levied on all arriving
strangers, and it seems to be prosperously enough
maintained. It gives you a reading-room where you
may go and practise indifference as you see a sturdy
Briton settling down heavily over your coveted "Times,"
just as you might of old when you saw the croupier
raking in your stakes; rausic by a very fair band twice
a day; a theatre, a cafe, a restaurant and a table-
d'hote, and a garden illuminated every three or four
evenings in the Vauxhall manner. People differ very
much as to the satisfaction they take in sitting about
under flaring gas-lamps and watching other people
march up and down and pass and repass them by the
hour. The pastime, pushed to extremes, tends, to my
own thinking, to breed misanthropy — or an extra relish
at least for a good book in one's own room and the
path through the woods where one is least likely to
meet any one. But if you use the Kursaal sparingly,
and reserve it for an hour or two in the evening, it is
certainly amusing enough.
I should be very sorry to underestimate the enter
tainment to be found in observing the comings and
goings of a multifarious European crowd, or the number
of suggestions and conclusions which, with a desultory
logic of its own, the process contributes to one's philo
sophy of life. Every one who prefers to sit in a chair
and look rather than walk up and down and be looked

HOMBURG REFORMED. 2 7g
at, -may be assumed to possess this intellectual trea
sure. The observations of the "cultivated American"
bear chiefly, I think, upon the great topic of national
idiosyncrasies. He is apt to have a keener sense of
them than Europeans; it matters more to his imagina
tion that his neighbor be English, French, or German.
He often seems to me to be a creature wandering
aloof, but half naturalized hiraself His neighbors
are outlined, defined, imprisoned, if you will, by their
respective national moulds, pleasing or otherwise; but
his own tjrpe has not hardened yet into the old-
world bronze. Superficially, no people carry more
signs and tokens of what they are than Americans.
I recognize them, as they advance, by the whole
length of the promenade. The signs, however, are all
ofthe negative kind, and seem to assure you, first of
all, that the individual belongs to a country in which
the social atmosphere, like the material, is extremely
thin. American women, for the most part, in com
pUance with an instinct certainly not ungraceful, fill
out the ideal mould with wonderful Paris dresses; but
their dresses do little toward completing them, charac
terizing them, shelving and labelling them socially.
The usual English lady, marching definitely about
under the burden of the national costume, has in
describably more the air of what one raay call a social
factor — the air of social responsibility, of having a
part to play and a battle to fight. Sometimes, when
the battle has been hard, the lady's face is very grim
and unlovely, and I prefer the listless, rustling person
ality of ray countrywomen; at others, when the cause
has been graceful and the victory easy, she has a
robust amenity which is one of the most agreeable

28o FOREIGN PARTS.
things in the world. But these are metaphysical
depths, though in strictness they ought not to be out
of the way as one sits araong German pipes and been
The smokers and drinkers are the solid elerrient at
the Kursaal — the dorainant tone is the German tone.
It comes home very forcibly to the sense of our ob
servant American, and it pervades, naturally enough,
all his impressions of Homburg. People have come
to feel strongly within the last four years that they
must take the German tone into account, and they
will find nothing here to lighten the task. If you
have not been used to it, if you don't particularly
relish it, you doubtless deserve some sympathy; but I
advise you not to shirk it, to face it frankly as a
superior critic should, and to call if necessary for a
pipe and beer also, and build yourself into good-humor
with it. It is very agreeable, in an unfamiliar country,
to collect travellers' evidence in regard to local raanners
and national character. You are sure to have some
vague impressions to be confirmed, some ingenious
theory to be illustrated, some favourite prejudice in
any case to be revised and iraproved. Even if your
opportunities for observation are of the commonest
kind, you find them serving your purpose. The
sraallest things become significant and eloquent and
deraand a place in your note-book. I have learned
no especial Gerraan secrets, I have penetrated into
the bosora of no German families; but somehow I
have received — I constantly receive — a weighty im
pression of Germany. It keeps rae corapany as I
walk in the woods and fields, and sits beside me —
not precisely as a black care, but with an influence,
as it were, which reminds one of the after-taste of

HOMBURG REFORMED. 28 1
those articles of diet which you eat because they are
good for you and not because you like them — when at
last, of an evening, I have found the end of a bench
on the proraenade behind the Kursaal. One's irapres
sion of Germany may or may not be agreeable, but
there is very little doubt that it is what one may caU
highly nutritive. In detaU, it would take long to say
what it consists of I think that, in general, in such
matters attentive observation confirms the common
fame, and that you are very likely to find a people on
your travels what you found them described to be
under the mysterious woodcut in some Peter Parley
task-book or play-book of your childhood. The French
are a light, pleasure-lo-ving people; ten years of the
Boulevard brings no essential amendraent to the phrase.
The Germans are hea-yy and fair-haired, deep drinkers
and strong thinkers; a fortnight at Homburg doesn't
reverse the formula. The only thing to be said is
that, as you grow older, French lightness and German
weightiness become more complex ideas. A few
weeks ago I left Italy in that really demoralized con
dition into which Italy throws those confiding spirits
who give her unlimited leave to please them. Beauty,
I had come to believe, was an exclusively Italian pos
session, the human face was not worth looking at un
less redeeraed by an Italian smile, nor the human
voice worth listening to unless attuned to Italian
vowels. A landscape was no landscape without vines
festooned to fig-trees swaying in a hot wind — a raoun
tain a hideous excrescence unless melting off into a
Tuscan haze. But now that I have absolutely ex
changed vines and figs for corn and cabbages, and
¦violet Apennines for the homely plain of Frankfort,

282 FOREIGN PARTS.
and liquids for gutturals, and the Italian smile for
the German grin, I am much better contented than
I could have ventured to expect. I have shifted my
standard of beauty, but it still commands a glimpse
of the divine idea.
There is something here, too, which pleases, sug
gests and satisfies. Sitting of an evening in the Kur-
garten, within ear -shot of the music, you have an
almost inspiring feeling that you never have in Italy —
a feeling that the substantial influences about you are
an element of the mysterious future. They are of
that varied order which seems to indicate the large
needs of large natures. From its pavilion among the
trees ring out the notes of the loud orchestra, playing
Mozart, Beethoven, and Weber — such music as no
other people has composed, as no other people can
play it. Round about in close groups sit the sturdy,
prosperous natives, with their capacious heads, their
stout necks, their deep voices, their cigars, their beer,
their intelligent applause, their talk on all things —
largely enjoying, and yet strongly intending. Far
away in the mild starlight stretch the dusky woods
whose gentle murmur, we may suppose, unfolds here
and there to a fanciful German ear some prophetic
legend of a still larger success and a still richer
Fatherland. The success of the Fatherland one sees
reflected more or less vividly in all true German faces,
and the relation between the face and the success
seems demonstrated by a logic so unerring as to make
en-vy vain. It is not the German success I envy, but
the powerful German temperament and the com
prehensive German brain. With these advantages one
needn't be restless; one can afford to give a good

HOMBURG REFORMED. 283
deal of time to sitting out under the trees over pipes
and beer and discussion tinged with metaphysics.
But success of course is raost forcibly embodied in
the soldiers and officers who now form so large a
proportion of every German group. You see them at
aU times lounging soberly about the gardens; you look
at them (I do, at least) with a great deal of impartial
deference, and you find in them something which
seems a sort of pre-established negation of an ad
versary's chances. Compared with the shabby little
unripe conscripts of France and Italy, they are indeed
a solid, brilliant phalanx. They are generally of ex
ceUent stature, and they have faces in which the look
of education has not spoiled the look of good-natured
simplicity. They are all equipped in brandnew uni
forms, and in these warm days they stroll about in
spotless white trousers. Many of them wear their fine
fair beards, and they all look like perfect soldiers and
excellent fellows. It doesn't do, of course, for an
officer to seem too much a good fellow, and the young
captains and adjutants who ornament the Kurgarten
of an evening seldom err in this direction. But they
are business-like warriors to a man, and in their dark
blue uniforms and crirason facings, with their swords
depending from their unbelted waists through a hole
in their plain surtouts, they seem to suggest that war
is somehow a better economy than peace.
But with all this, I am giving you Hamlet with
Hamlet himself omitted. Though the garaing is
stopped, the weUs have not dried up, and people stiU
drink thera, and find thera very good. They are in
deed a very palatable dose, and "medical advice" at
Homburg flatters one's egotism so unblushingly as rather

284 FOREIGN PARTS.
to try the faith of people addicted to the old-fashioned
confusion between the beneficial and the disagreeable.
You have indeed to get up at half past six o'clock —
but of a fine summer morning this is no great hard
ship — and you are rewarded on your arrival at the
spring by triumphant strains of music. There is an
orchestra perched hard by, which plays operatic selec
tions while you pace the shady walks and wait for
your second glass. All the Homburg world is there;
it is the fashionable hour; and at first I paid the
antique prejudice just mentioned the tribute of think
ing it was all too frivolous to be salutary. There are
half a dozen springs, scattered through the charming
wooded park, where you may find innumerable shady
strolls and rustic benches in bosky nooks, where it is
pleasant to lounge with a good light book. In the after
noon I drink at a spring with whose luxurious prettiness
I still find it hard to associate a doctor's prescription.
It rerainds rae of a back-scene at the theatre, and I
feel as if I were drinking some fictitious draught pre
pared by the property-man; or rather, being a little
white temple rising on slim columns among still green
shades, it rerainds me of some spot in the antique
world where the goddess Hygeia was worshipped by
thirsty pilgriras; and I ara disappointed to find that
the respectable young woman who dips my glass is
not a ministering nymph in a tunic and sandals.
Beyond this valley of healing waters lie the great
woods of fir and birch and beech and oak which
cover the soft slopes of the Taunus. They are full of
pleasant paths and of the frequent benches which
testify to the German love of sitting in the open air.
I don't know why it is — because, perhaps, we have

HOMBURG REFORMED. 285
aU read so many Teutonic legends and ballads — but
it seems natural in Germany to be in a wood. One
need have no very rare culture, indeed, to find a
vague old-friendliness in every feature of the land
scape. The villages with their peaked roofs, covered
with red scalloped shingles, and the brown beams
making figures on the plastered cottage walls, the
grape-vine on the wall, the swallows in the eaves, the
Hausfrau, sickle in hand, with her yellow hair in a
top-knot and her short blue skirt showing her black
stockings — what is it all but a background to one of
Richter's charraing woodcuts? I never see a flock of
geese on the roadside, and a little tow-pated raaiden
driving them with a forked switch, without thinking of
Grimm's household tales. I look around- for the old
crone who is to come and inforra her she is a king's
daughter. I see nothing but the white KaiserKche
Deutsche sign-post, teUing one that this is such and
such a district of the Landwehr. But with such easy
magic as this I ara perhaps right in not especially re
gretting that the late enchantress of the Kursaal should
have been handed over to the police.

286 FOREIGN PARTS.

DARMSTADT.
Darmstadt, September 6, 1873,
Spending the summer just past at Homburg, I have ,
been conscious of a sort of gentle chronic irritation of
a natural sympathy with the whole race of suppressed,
diminished and mutilated sovereigns. This was fostered
by my frequent visits to the great dispeopled Schloss,
about whose huge and awkward bulk the red roofs of
the little town, as seen from a distance, cluster with
an air of feudal allegiance, and which stands there as
a respectable makeweight to the hardly scantier mass
of the florid, fresh-colored Kursaal. It was formerly
the appointed residence of the Landgrafs of the very
diminutive state of Hesse-Homburg, the compact cir
cumference of which these modest potentates raight
have the satisfaction of viewing, any fine morning,
without a telescope, from their dressing-room windows.
It is something of course to be monarch of a realm
which slopes away with the slope of the globe into
climates which it requires an effort to believe in and
are part of the regular stock of geography; but per
haps we are apt to underestimate the peculiar com
placency of a sovereign to whose possessions the blue
horizon makes a liberal margin, and shows him his

DARMSTADT, 287
cherished inheritance visibly safe and sound, undipped,
unmenaced, shining like a jewel on its velvet cushion.
This modest pleasure the Landgrafs of Hesse-Homburg
must have enjoyed in perfection; the chronicle of their
state-progresses should be put upon the same shelf as
Xavier de Maistre's "Voyage autour de ma Chambre,"
Though small, however, this rounded particle of sover
eignty was still visible to the naked eye of diplomacy,
and Herr von Bismarck, in 1866, swallowed it as
smoothly as a gentleman following a tonic regime dis
poses of his homoeopathic pellet. It had been merged
shortly before in the neighboring empire of Hesse-
Darmstadt, but promptly after Sadowa it was "ceded"
to Prassia. Whoever is the loser, it has not been a
certain lounging American on hot afternoons. The
gates of the Schloss are now wide open, and the great
garden is public property, and much resorted to by
old gentlemen who dust off the benches with bandannas
before sitting down, and by sheepish soldiers with af
fectionate sweethearts. Picturesquely, the palace is all
it should be — very huge, very bare, very ugly, with
'great clean courts, in which round-barreUed Mecklen
burg coach-horses must often have stood waiting for
their lord and master to rise from table. The gateways
are adorned with hideous sculptures of about 1650,
representing wigged warriors on corpulent chargers,
cork-screw pUasters, and scroll-work like the "flourishes"
of a country writing-master — the whole glazed over
with briUiant red paint. In the middle of the larger
court stands an immense isolated round tower, painted
white, and seen from aU the country about. The
gardens have very few flowers, and the sound of the

288 FOREIGN PARTS.
rake nowadays is seldora heard on the gravel; but
there are plenty of fine trees — sorae really ^stupendous
poplars, untrimraed and spreading abroad like oaks,
chestnuts which would make a figure in Italy, beeches
which would be called "rather good" in England;
plenty of nooks and bowers and densely woven arcades,
triumphs of old-fashioned gardenry; and a large duU-
bosoraed pond into which the unadorned castle-walls
peep from above the trees. Such as it is, it is a place
a small prince had rather keep than lose; and as I sat
under the beeches — reraerabering that I was in the
fatherland of ghost-stories — I used to fancy the warm
twilight was pervaded by a thin spectral influence from
this slender stream of erapire, and that I could hear
vague supernatural Achs! of regret araong the bushes,
and see the gliraraer of broad-faced phantoms at the
windows. One very hot Sunday the Emperor carae,
passed up the raain street under several yards of red
and white calico, and spent a couple of days at the
Schloss. I don't know whether he saw any reproach
ful ghosts there, but he found, I believe, a rather scanty
flesh-and-blood welcome in the town. The burgomasters
measured off the proper number of festoons, and the
innkeepers hung out their flags, but the townsfolk, who
know their new master chiefly as the grira old wizard
who has dried up the golden stream which used to
flow so bounteously at the Kursaal, took an outing
indeed, like good Gerraans, and stared sturdily at the
show, but paid nothing for it in the way of hurrahs.
The Emperor, raeanwhile, rattled up and down the
street in his light barouche, wearing under his white
eyebrows and mustache the physiognomy of a person-

DARMSTADT. 28g
age quite competent to dispense with the approbation
of ghosts and shopkeepers. "Homburg may have
ceased to be Hessian, but evidently it is not yet Prus
sian," I said to a friend; and he hereupon reminded
me that I was within a short distance of a raore elo
quent memento of the energy of Bismarck, and that I
had better come over and take a look at the blighted
Duchy of Darmstadt. I have followed his advice, and
have been strolling about in quest of impressions. It
is for the reader to say whether my impressions were
¦yorth a journey of an hour and a half
I confess, to begin with, that they forra no very ter
rible tale — that I saw none ofthe "prorainent citizens"
confined in chains, and no particular symptoms of the
ravages of a bmtal soldiery. Indeed, as you walk into
the town through the grand, dull, sUent street which
leads from the railway station, you seem to perceive
that the genius loci has never been frighted, like
Othello's Cyprus, frora its propriety. You behold this
comfortable spirit embodied in heroic bronze on the
top of a huge red sandstone column, in the shape of
flie Grand-Duke Louis the First, who, though a very
smaU potentate, surveys posterity frora a raost pro
digious altitude. He was a father to his people, and
some fifty years ago he created the beaux quartiers of
Darmstadt, out of the midst of which his effigy rises,
looking do-wn upon the Trafalgar Square, the Place de
la Concorde, of the locality. Behind him the fine, duU
street pursues its course and pauses- in front of the
florid fagade of the Schloss. This entrance into Darm
stadt responds exactly to the fanciful tourist's precon
ceptions, and as soon as I looked up the raelancholy
) Foreign Parts. 9

290 FOREIGN PARTS.
vista, my imagination feU to rubbing its hands and to
whispering that this indeed was the ghost of a litUe
German court-city — a mouldering Modena or Ferrara
of the North. I have never known a little court-city,
having, by ill-luck, come into the world a day too late;
but I like to think of them, to visit them in these blank
early years of their long historic sleep, and to try and
guess what they must be dreaming of They seem to
murmur, as they snore everlastingly, of a very snug
little social systera — of gossiping whist-parties in wain
scoted grand-ducal parlors, of susceptible Aulic Coun
cillors and esthetic canonesses, of emblazoned com
manders-in-chief of five hundred warriors in periwigs,
of blond young hussars, all gold-lace and bUlet-doux,
ofa rainiature world of precedents, jealousies, intrigues,
ceremonies, superstitions — an oppressively dull world,
doubtless , to your fanciful tourist if he had been con
deraned to spend a month in it. But Darmstadt, ob
viously, was not dull to its own sense in the days be
fore Bisraarck, and doubtless the pith of its complaint
of this terrible man is that he has made it so. All
around Duke Louis's huge red pedestal rises a series
of sober-faced palaces for the transaction of the affairs
of this little empire. Before each of them is a striped
red-and- white sentry-box, with a soldier in a spiked
helmet mounting guard. These public offices all look
highly respectable, but they have an air of sepulchral
StUlness. Here and there, doubtless, in their echoing
chambers, is to be heard the scratching of the bureau
cratic quiU; but I imagine that neither the home nor
the foreign affairs of Hesse-Darrastadt require nowa
days an army of functionaries, and that if some grizzled

DARMSTADT. 2gi
old clerk were to give you an account of his avoca
tions, they would bear a family likeness to those of
Charles Lamb at the India House. There are half a
dozen droshkies drawn up at the base of the monu
ment, with the drivers sitting in the sun and wonder
ing sleepily whether any one of the three persons in
sight, up and down the street, wUl be likely to want a
carriage. They wake up as I approach and look at
me very hard; but they are phlegmatic German coach
men, and they neither hail me with persuasive cries
nor project their vehicles forcibly upon me, as would
certainly be the case at Modena or Ferrara. But I
pass along and ascend the street, and find something
that is really very Ferrarese. The grand-ducal Schloss
rises in an immense mass out of a great crooked
square, which has a very pretty likeness to an Italian
piazza. Some of the houses have Gothic gables, and
these have thrifty shop-fronts and a general air of
paint and varnish; but there is shabbiness enough, and
sun, and space, and bad smells, and old women under
colored umbrellas seUing cabbages and plums, and
several persons loafing in a professional manner, and,
in the midst of it aU, the great moated palace, with
soldiers hanging over the parapets of the little bridges,
and the inner courts used as a public thoroughfare.
On one side, behind the shabby Gothic gables, is
huddled that elderly Darmstadt to which Duke Louis
affixed the modem mask of which his own effigy is
the most eminent feature. A mask of some sort old
Darmstadt most certainly needs, and it were well if it
might have been one of those glass covers which in
Germany are deposited over too savory dishes. The
19*

2g2 FOREIGN PARTS.
little crooked, gabled streets presume quite too auda
ciously on uncleanness being an element of the pic
turesque. The gutters stroll along with their hands in
their pockets, as it were, and pause in great pools be
fore crossings and dark archways to embrace their
tributary streams, till the odorous murraur of their con
fluence quite smothers the voice of legend. There is
dirtiness and dirtiness. Soraetiraes, picturesquely, it
is very much to the point; but the American traveller
in Germany will generally prefer not to enjoy local
color in this particular form, for it invariably reminds
him of the raost sordid, the most squalid prose he
knows — the corner-groceries and the region of the docks
in the city of New York.
The Schloss, however, is characteristic without
abatement, and it seems to me a great pity there should
not be some such monumental edifice in the middle
of every town, to personify the municipal soul, as it
were, to itself If it can be beautiful, so much the
better; but the Schloss at Darmstadt is ugly enough,
and yet — to the eye — it amply serves its purpose. The
two fagades toward the square date from the middle
of the last century, and are characteristically dreary
and solemn, but they hide a great rambling structure
of a quainter time: irregular courts, archways boring
away into darkness, a queer great yellow beU-tower
dating from the sixteenth century, a pUe of multi
tudinous windows, roofs and chimneys. Seen from the
adjacent park, all this masses itself up into the sem
blance of a fantastic citadel. One rarely finds a citadel
with a handsomer moat. The moat at Darrastadt
yawns down out of the raarket-place into a deep ver-

DARMSTADT, 293
durous gulf, with sloping banks of turf, on which tame
shrubs are planted — mingled with the wild ones lodged
in the stout foundations. It forms, indeed, below the
level of the street, a charming little belt of grass and
flowers. The Schloss possesses, moreover, as it pro
perly should, a gallery of pictures, to which I pro
ceeded to seek admission. I reflected, on my way,
that it is of the first iraportance, picturesquely speak
ing, that the big building which, as I just intimated,
should resume to its own sense the civic individuality
of every substantial town, should always have a com
pany of soldiers lounging under its portal and grouped
about the guard-room. A green moat, a great arch
way, a guard-room opening out of its shadow, a couple
of pacing sentinels, a group of loafing musketeers, a
glimpse on one side of a sunny market-place, on the
other of a dusky court — combine the objects as you
may, they make a picture; they seem for the moment,
as you pass, and pause, and glance, to transport you
into legend. Of course the straddling men-at-arms
who helped to render rae this service were wearers of
the spiked helmet. The Grand-Duke of Hessen-Darm-
stadt StUl occupies the Schloss, and enjoys a nominal
authority. I believe that he holds it, for special
reasons, on rather easy terms, but I do not en-vy the
emotions of the grand-ducal breast when he sees a
row of these peculiarly uncoraproraising little head
pieces bristling and twinkling under his windows. It
can hardly be balm to his resentment to know that
they sometimes conceal the flaxen pates of his own
hereditary Hessians. The spiked helraets, of course,
salute rigorously when this very limited monarch passes

294 FOREIGN PARTS.
in and out; but I sometimes think it fortunate, under
these circumstances, that the average German counte
nance has not a turn for ironical expression. The Duke,
indeed, in susceptible moods, might take an airing in
his own palace without driving abroad at all. There
is apparently no end to its corridors and staircases,
and I found it a long journey to the picture-gallery. I
spent half an hour, to begin with, in the library, wait
ing tUl the custodian was at liberty to attend to me.
The half-hour, however, was not lost, as I was enter
tained by a very polite librarian, with a green shade
over his eyes, and as I filled my lungs, moreover, with
what I was in the humour to call the atraosphere of
Gerraan science. It was a very warm day, but the
windows were tight-closed, in the manner of the coun
try, and had been closed, presumably, since the days
of Louis the First. The air was as dry as iron filings;
it smelt of old bindings, of the insides of old books; it
tasted of dust and snuff. Here and there a Herr Pro
fessor, walled in with circumjacent authorities, was
burying his nose in a folio; the gray light seemed to
add a coating of dust to the tiers of long brown shelves.
I came away with a headache, and that exalted esteem
for the German brain, as a mere working organ, which
invariably ensues upon my observation of the physical
conditions of German life. I don't know that I received
any very distinct impression from the picture-gallery
beyond that of there being such and such a nuraber
of acres more of mouldering brush-work in the world.
It was a good deal like the library, terribly close, and
lined for room after roora (it is a long series) with tiers
of dusky brown canvases, on which the light of the

DARMSTADT. 2g5
unwashed windows seemed to turn sallow and joyless.
There are a great many fine names on the frames, but
they rarely correspond to anything very fine within
them, though, indeed, there are several specimens of
the early German school which are quite welcome (to
my mind) to their assumed "originality," Early or
late, German art rarely seems to me a happy adventure.
Two or three of the rooms were filled with large ex
amples of the modern German landscape school, laefore
which I lingered, but not for the pleasure of it. I was
reflecting that the burden of French phUosophy just
now is the dogma that the Germans are a race oifaux
bonshommes ; that their transcendental aesthetics are a
mere kicking up of dust to cover their picking and
stealing; and that their frank-souled na'ivete is no
better than a sharper's "alias." I do not pretend to
weigh the charge in a general sense, but I certainly
think that a good French patriot, in my place, would
have cried out that he had caught the hypocrites in
the act. These blooming views of Switzerland and
Italy seemed to me the most dishonest things in the
world, and I was puzzled to understand how so very
innocent an affair as a landscape in oUs could be raade
such a vehicle of offence. These were extremely
clever; the art of shuffling away trouble has rarely
been brought to greater perfection. It is evidently an
elaborate system; there is a school; the pictures were
¦aU from different hands, and the precious recipe had
been passed round the circle.
But why should I talk of bad pictures, since I
brought away from Darmstadt the memory of one of
the best in the world? It forras the sole art-treasure

296 FOREIGN PARTS.
of the place, and I duly went in quest of it; but I
kept it in reserve, as one keeps the best things, and
meanwhUe I strolled in the Herrengarten. The fond
ness of Germans for a garden , wherever a garden can
be conceived, is one of their most amiable characteris
tics, and I should be curious to know how large a sec
tion of the total soil of the fatherland is laid out in
rusty lawns and gravel-paths, and adorned with beechen
groves and bowers. The garden-hours of one's life, as
I may say, are not the least agreeable, and there are
more garden-hours in German lives than in most others.
But I shall not describe my garden-hours at Darrastadt.
Part of thera was spent in walking around the theatre,
which stands close beside the Schloss, with its face
upon the square and its back among the lawns and
bowers. The theatre, in the little court-city of my
regrets, is quite an affair of state, and the manager
second only in importance to the prime-minister or the
commander-in-chief Or rather the Grand-Duke is
manager himself, and the leading actress, as a matter
of course, his morganatic wife. The present Grand-
Duke of Hesse-Darmstadt, I believe, is a zealous patron
of the drama, and maintains a troupe of comedians,
who doubtless do much to temper the dulness of his
capital. The present theatre is simply a picturesque
rain, having been lately burned down, for all the world
like an American opera-house. But the actors have
found a provisional refuge, and I have just been pre
sented with the programme of the opening night of the
winter season. I saw the rest of Darmstadt as I took
my way to the palace of Prince Karl. It was a very
quiet pUgrimage, and I perhaps met three people in

DARMSTADT.

297

the long, dull, proper street through which it led me.
One of them was a sentinel with a spiked helmet
marching before the snug little palace of the Prince
Louis — the gentleman who awhile ago married the
Princess Alice of England. Another was a school-boy
in spectacles, nursing a green bag full of Greek roots,
I suppose, of whom I asked my way; and the third was
the sturdy little musketeer who was trying to impart a
reflet of authority to the neat little white house occu
pied by the Prince Karl. But this frowning soldier is
no proper symbol of the kindly custom of the house.
I was admitted unconditionally, ushered into the little
dra-wing-room, and allowed half an hour's undisturbed
contemplation of the beautiful Holbein — the famous
picture of the Meyer family. The reader interested in
such matters may remember the discussion carried on
two years since, at the time of the general exhibition
of the younger Holbein's works in Dresden, as to the
respective raerits — and I believe the presumptive pri
ority in date — of this Darmstadt picture and the pre
sentation of the same theme which adorns the Dresden
Gallery. I forget how the question was settled — -
whether, indeed, it was settled at all, and I have never
seen the Dresden picture; but it seems to me that if I
were to choose a Holbein, this one would content me.
It represents a sort of plain-lovely Virgin holding her
child, crowned with a kind of gorgeous episcopal
crown, and worshipped by six kneeling figures — the
worthy Goodman Meyer, his wife and their progeniture.
It is a wonderfully solid work, and so full of whole
some human substance that I should think its owner
could go about his daily doings the better — eat and

298 FOREIGN PARTS.
drink and sleeps and perform the various functions of
life raore largely and sraoothly — for having it con
stantly before his eyes. I was not disappointed, and I
may now confess that my errand at Darmstadt had
been much more to see the "Holbeinische Gemalde"
than to examine the trail of the serpent — the foot
prints of Bismarck.

IN HOLLAND. 2gg

IN HOLLAND.
The Hague, August 8, 1874.
It would amount to positive impudence, I suppose,
to introduce these few impressions of Dutch scenery
by an overt allusion to the beauties of the Rhine.
And yet it was by the Rhine, a few day since, that I
entered Holland; and it was along an arm ofthe Rhine,
subdued to the likeness of a homely Dutch canal, that
I wandered this afternoon in drowsy Leyden. As many
as thirty years ago, I believe, it was good taste to make
an apology for a serious mention, of the descriptive
sort, of the vineyards of Bingen or the cloister of
Nonnenwerth; and if the theme had been rubbed
threadbare then, it can hardly be considered present
able now. But thus much I raay boldly affirm, that if
my corrupt modern consciousness had not assured me
that these were terribly faded charms, I should not
have guessed it from the testimony of my eyes. After
platitudes, as well as after battles, nature has a way —
all her own — of renewing herself; and in a decent at
titude, at the bow of the boat, with my face to nature
and my back to man, I ventured to greet the castled
crags as frankly as if I were making a voyage of dis
covery. The time seems to me to have come round
again when one ought really to say a good word for
them. I insist upon the merits of no particular raera-

300 FOREIGN PARTS.
ber of the crurabling fraternity; there are many worthy
men whose pockets it might be awkward to examine;
and the Rhenish dungeons, frora a more farailiar stand
point than the deck of the steamer, may prove to be
half buried in beer-bottles and lemon-peel. But they
still pass their romantic watchword from echo to echo,
and they "compose" as bravely between the river and
the sky as if fifty years of sketching and sonneteering
had done nothing to tame them. The fine thing about
the Rhine is that it has that which, when applied to
architecture and painting, is called style. It is in the
grand raanner — on the liberal scale; that is, it is on
the liberal scale while it lasts. There is less of it, in
quantity, than I had been remembering these fifteen
years. The classic sites corae and go within an easy
four hours; and if you embark at Mayence you leave
the last and most perfect of the castled crags — the
Drachenfels — behind you just as your organism, phy
sical and mental, is being thoroughly attuned to the
supreme felicity of river navigation. It was a grayish
day as I passed, and the Drachenfels looked as if it
had been stolen from a background of Claude to do
service in the Rhenish foreground. It has the ideal,
romantic outline.
It stands there, however, like some last ringing
word in an interrupted phrase. The vast white river
sweeps along into Holland on a level with its banks,
finally to die in a slush of marshes and a mesh of
canals, within sound of the surge of the North Sea.
I left it to its destiny, and gathered my first impres
sions of Holland from the window of the train. The
most pertinent thing one may say of these first impres
sions is that they are exactly, to the letter, what one

IN HOLLAND, 3OI
expects them to be. If you come this way, as I did,
chiefly with an eye to Dutch pictures, your first acqui
sition, is a sense, no longer an araiable inference, but
a direct perception, of the undiluted accuracy of Dutch
painters. You have seen it all before; it is vexatiously
familiar; it was hardly worth while to have come! At
Amsterdam, at Leyden, at The Hague, and in the
country between them, this is half your state of mind.
When you are looking at the originals, you seem to be
looking at the copies; and when you are looking at
the copies, you seem to be looking at the originals.
Is it a canal-side in Haarlem, or is it a Van derHeyden?
Is it a priceless Hobbema, or is it a meagre pastoral
vista, stretching away from the railway-track? The
maid-servants in the streets seem to have stepped out
of the frarae of a Gerard Dow, and appear equally
adapted for stepping back again. You have to rub
your eyes to ascertain their normal situation. And so
you wander about, with art and nature playing so
assiduously into each other's hands that your experience
of Holland becomes something singularly compact and
complete in itself — striking no chords that lead else
where, and asking no outside help to unfold itself
This is what we raean when we say, as we do at
every turn, that HoUand is so curious. Italy is not
curious, as a general thing, nor is England, in its lead
ing features. They are siraply both erainent speciraens
of a sort of beauty which pervades in a greater or less
degree all our conceptions of the beautiful. We ad
mire them because they stand, as it were, in the high
road of admiration, and whether we pass them at a
ran or at a walk our pace is part of the regular
aesthetic business of life. But to enjoy the Low Coun-

302 FOREIGN PARTS.
tries, we have to put on a very particular pair of spec
tacles and bend our nose well over our task, and, be
yond our consciousness that our gains are real gains,
remain decidedly at loss how to classify thera. This
is the charming thing in Holland — the way one feels
one's observation lowered to a relish of the harmonies
of the minor key; persuaded to respect small things
and take note of small differences; so that really a
week's sojourn here, if properly used, ought to make
one at the worst a raore reasonable, and at the best a
raore kindly, person. The beauty which is no beauty;
the ugliness which is not ugliness; the poetry which is
prose, and the prose which is poetry; the landscape
which seeras to be all sky until you have taken par
ticular pains to discover it, and turns out to be half
water when you have discovered it; the virtues, when
they are graceful '(like cleanliness) exaggerated to a
vice, and when they are sordid (like the getting and
keeping of money) refined to a dignity; the mUd gray
light which produced in Rembrandt the very genius of
chiaroscuro; the stretch of whole provinces on the
principles of a billiard-table, which produced a school
of consummate landscapists; the extraordinary reversal
of custom, in which man seems, with a few windmills
and ditches, to do what he wiU, and Providence, hold
ing the North Sea in the hollow of his hand, what it
can — all these elements of the general spectacle in
this entertaining country at least give one's regular
habits of thought the stimulus of a little confusion,
and make one feel that one is dealing with an original
genius. The curious fortunately excludes neither the im
pressive nor the agreeable; and Amsterdam, where I

IN HOLLAND. 303
took my first Dutch walk, is a stately city, even though
its street-vistas do look as if they were pictured on a
tea-caddy or a hand-screen. They have for the most
part a broad, sluggish canal in the raiddle, on either
side of which a row of perfectly salubrious, but ex
tremely attenuated trees grow out of a highly cultivated
soU of compact yellow bricks. Cultivated I call it by
a proper license, for it is periodically raked by the
broom and the scrubbing-brush, and religiously manured
with soapsuds. You lose no time, of course, in drawing
the inevitable parallel between Amsterdara and Venice,
and it is well worth drawing, as an illustration of the
uses to which the sarae materials may be put by dif
ferent minds. Sky and sea in both cases, with archi
tecture between; winding sea-channels washing the feet
of goodly houses erected with the profits of trade. And
yet the Dutch city is a complete reversal of the Italian,
and its founders might have carefully studied Venetian
effects -with the set purpose of producing exactly the
opposite ones. It produces them in the moral line
even more vividly than in the material. It is not that
one place is aU warm color and the other aU cold; one
aU shimmer and softness and raeUow interfusion of
every possible phase of ruin, and the other rigidity,
angularity, opacity, prosperity, in their very essence; it
is more than anything that they teU of such different
lives and of such a different view of life. The outward
expression on one side is perfect poetry, and on the
other is perfect prose; and the marvel is the way in
which thrifty Amsterdam imparts the prosaic turn to
things which in Venice seera the perfect essence of
poetry. Take, for instance, the silence and quiet of the
canals; it has in the two places a difference of quality

304 FOREIGN PARTS.
which it is almost impossible to express. In the one
it is the StUlness of order, and in the other of vacancy
— the sleep of idleness and the sleep of rest; the quiet
that comes of letting everything go by the board, and
the quiet that comes of doing things betimes and being
able to sit with folded hands and say they are weU
done. In one of George Eliot's novels there is a por
trait of a thrifty farmer's wife who rose so early in the
morning to do her work that by ten o'clock it was aU
over, and she was at her wit's end to know what to do
with her day. This good woman seems to rae an ex
cellent iraage of the genius of Amsterdam as it is
reflected in the house-fronts^I penetrated no deeper.
It is impossible to iraagine anything raore expressive
of the nuraerous ideas represented by the French
epithet bourgeois than these straight fagades of clean
black brick, capped with a rococo gable of stone painted
white and armed like the forehead of the unicorn with
a little horizontal horn — a bracket and pulley for haul
ing storable goods into the attic. The famous Dutch
cleanliness seems to me quite on a level with its repu
tation, and asserts itself in the most ingenious and
ludicrous ways. A rosy serving-maid, redolent of soap
suds from her white cap to her white sabots, stands
squirting water from a queer little engine of polished
copper over the majestic front of a genteel raansion
whose complexion is not a visible shade less iraraaculate
than her own. The perforraance suggests a dozen ques
tions, and you can only answer them all with a laugh.
What is she doing, and why is she doing it? Does she
imagine the house has a speck or two which it is of
consequence to reraove, or is the squirt applied raerely
for purposes of light refreshment — of endearment, as

IN HOLLAND. 305
it were? Where could the speck'or two possibly have
come from, unless produced by spontaneous genera
tion? There are no specks in the road, which is a neaf
parquet of scoured and polished brick; nor on the trees,
whose trunks are to aU appearance carefully sponged
every morning. The speck exists evidently only as
a sort of mathematical point, capable of extension, in
the good woman's Batavian brain, and the operation
with her copper kettle is, as the metaphysicians would
say, purely subjective. It is a necessity, not as regards
the house, but as regards her own temperament. Of a
dozen harmlessly factitious necessities of the sarae sort,
the canal-sides at Amsterdam offer lively evidence.
Nothing coiUd be raore thoroughly in keeping with the
bourgeois spirit than the way in which you everywhere
find this briUiant cleanliness and ceremonious thrift
playing the part, not of a convenience, but of a restric
tion; not of a means, but of an end. The windows
are of those huge plates of glass which offer a delect-
ably uninterrapted field for friction; but they are
'masked internally by thick white blinds, invariably
drawn, and the only use of their transparency to any
mortal is to enable the passer-by to examine the tex
ture of the stuff. The front doors are hedged in with
litde square padlocked barriers, to guard the doorsteps
firom the poUution of footprints, and the visitor must
pocket his pride and apply at a humbler portal with
the baker and the mUkman. In such houses must
dwell people whose nerves are proof against the irrita
tion of minute precautions — people who cover their
books with white paper and find occasion for a week's
conversation in a mysterious drop of candle-grease on
a tablecloth. The traveller with an eye for detaUs wiU
Foreign Paris.

3o6 FOREIGN PARTS.
find some eloquence in the fact that, though the canals
at Amsterdam and Leyden offer continually this charm
ing pretext of trees by a water-side, there is not in
their whole length a single bench for a contemplative,
lounge. The traveUer in question though, shrewd
fellow, wUl not be prevented by the absence of benches
from taking in the scene, as he looks up and down
and sees the wide green barges come floating through
the respectable stiUness, and the quaint old scroll-work
of the gables peep out through the meagre density of
the trees.
At The Hague, evidently, people take life in a
lighter, raore irresponsible fashion. There are two or
three benches by the canals and an air of mitigated
devotion to compound interest. There are wide, tranquU
squares, planted in the middle with shady walks and
bordered with fine old abodes of moneyed leisure,
where you may boldly ring at the front door. The
Hague is in fact a very charming little city, and I
should be at a loss to say how much I find it to my
taste. It is the model of a minor capital; small
enough for convenience and compact sociability, and
yet large enough to exhibit certain metropolitan airs
and graces. It is one of the cities which please in
definably on a short acquaintance and prompt one's
fretful fancy to say that just this, at last, is the place
where we could corae and lead the (frora the worldly
point of view) ideal life. It hits the happy raedium
between the bustling and the stagnant; it is Dutch
enough for all sorts of comfortable -virtues, and, where
these intermit, it is English and French, and, in its
diplomatic character, cosmopolitan. There must be
very pleasant things done here, and I hope, for sym-

IN HOLLAND.

307

raetr/s sake, there are pleasant people to do them
worthily. I iraagine there are. But I do -wrong to
consume valuable space in these fruitiess speculations
when I have not yet said a word on the topic on which
I had it chiefly at heart to touch. A week in HoUand
is necessarily a week in the company of Rembrandt
and Paul Potter, Ruysdael and Gerard Dow. These
admirable artists have had my best attention, but I
do not know that they have given rae any new im
pressions, or indeed that, in the literal meaning of the
word, they have given me any impressions at all. I
looked for a long time, only this morning, at the hand
of Madame van Mieris in the littie picture in the
Museum here, by her husband, representing him and
his wife playing with a tiny spaniel. He is pulling
the dog's ear and she is pressing the animal against
her bosom with an arm bare to the elbow. It seemed
to me that it was worth the journey to Holland simply
to see this appreciative husband's version of his wife's
hand, and that if I had seen nothing else I should
have been repaid; but beyond producing this eminently
practical reflection, the picture was not suggestive. I
find in my guide-book, on the margin of the page
which dUates upon the great Van der Heist at Amster
dam (the Banquet of the Civic Guard), the inscrip
tion in pencil — superb, superb, superb! But this simply
connotes enjoyment and not criticism. Let me how
ever have the satisfaction of repeating, in ink for the
printer, that the picture is superb. To the great
treasure (after Rembrandt's Lesson of Anatomy) of the
IVIuseum here — Paul Potter's famous Bull — one would
wUlingly pay some more elaborate compliment; not
because it is a stronger work (on the contrary), but

308 FOREIGN PARTS.
because it is the work of a lad of twenty-two. The
subject is the most prosaic conceivable, and the treat
ment is perfectly in keeping; but if one considers the
magnificent success of the enterprise from the painter's
own point of view, there is certainly real poetry in
the fact of his youth. It is hardly less true of Rem
brandt than of his various smaller comrades (unusual
as the judgment may seem), that he is not an in
tellectually suggestive painter. There are no ideas in
Ostade and Terburg, in Metzu and Ruysdael (who,
by the way, gives me the largest sum of tranquU
pleasure of any painter of the school); but you bear
thera no grudge, for they give you no reason to expect
thera. It is one of the regular traditions, however,
that Rembrandt does, and I can only say that in
this case tradition has distinctly missed her way. It
is the more singular that he should not, inasmuch as (I
should go so far as to say) he was really not, strictly
speaking, a painter. He was perfectly arbitrary, and
he kept on terras with observation only so long as it
suited him. This may be verified by reference to any
of the most delusively picturesque of his work-s. They
are magnificent; but compare thera, for simple verity,
with the little Adrian van Ostade in the Van der Hoop
collection, and compare them, for thought, with any
fine Tintoretto.

IN BELGIUM. 309

IN BELGIUM.
Ostend, August 14, 1874.
Belgium, in most itineraries, is visited conjointly
with Holland. This is all very well so long as Belgium
is visited first; and my advice to travellers who relish
a method in their emotions is in this region to reverse
the plan which is generally most judicious, and pro
ceed in all confidence from south to north. Passing
from the Low Countries into Flanders, you come back
into the common world again — into a picturesque
phase of it, certainly, and a country rich in archi
tectural and artistic treasures. But you miss that
something, individual and exquisite, which forms the
charm of Holland, and of which, during the last forty-
eight hours of ray stay there (it seems a part of the
delicacy of all things that one calculates one's stay in
the little Dutch garden by hours), my impression be
came singularly deep. It has become deeper still in
retrospect, as such things do, and there are moments
when I feel as if in coraing away I had wantonly
turned ray back upon the abode of tranquil happiness.
I keep seeing a green canal with a screen of thin-
stemmed trees on one side of it, and a foot-path, not
at all sinuous, on the other. Beside the foot-path is
a fed-brick wall, superstitiously clean, and if you
follow it a little while you come to a large iron gate

3IO FOREIGN PARTS.
flanked with jhigh posts, with baUs on top. Although
the climate is darap, the ancient iron-work of the gate
has not a particle of rust, and its hinges, as you turn
it, are in perfect working order. Beyond it is a
garden planted with tulips of a hundred kinds, and in
the middle of the garden is a pond. Over the pond
is stretched, from edge to edge, a sort of trellis of
tense cord, which at first excites your surprise. In a
moraent, however, you perceive the propriety of the
pond's being carefully guarded, for its contents are
singularly precious. They consist of an iraraense
number of gigantic water-lilies, sitting motionless
among their emerald pads, and of a brilliancy and
softness which raake you fancy they are modelled in
wax; of a thousand little gold-fishes, of so deep a
crimson that they look as if they were taken out every
morning and neatly varnished over with a fine brush;
and, lastly, of a majestic swan, of the purest porcelain.
About the swan there is no doubt; he is of the finest
Dutch delf — a substance which at a certain distance
looks as well as flossy feathers, and has the advantage
that a creature composed of it cannot circulate to the
detriment of varnished fishes and waxen lilies. I do
not know how this pond looks on paper, but in nature,
if one may call it nature, it was delicious. There was
a skyful of rolling gray clouds, with two or three little
patches of blue, and over the tulip-beds there played
a little cool breeze, with its edge just blurred by
dampness. Under the trees was just one bench, but it
was strictly sufficient.
I must not linger on Dutch benches, however, with
all the art-wealth of Flanders awaiting me. I have
by no means in fact examined it all, and have had to

IN BELGIUM. 3 I I
pay the tourist's usual tribute to reluctant omission.
In suchj cases, if you are travelling con amore, the
things oraitted assume to the mind's eye a kind of
mocking perfection, and the dozen successes of your
journey seem a sraall compensation for this fatal
faUure. There is a certain little hotel de ville at
Louvain and a cathedral at Tournay which make a
dehcious figure in the excellent hand-book of M. Du
Pays; but I hasten to declare that I have not seen
them, and am well aware that my observations are by
so much the less valuable. I first made acquaintance
with Belgium, however, through the cathedral of
Antwerp, and this is a first-rate introduction. I went
into it of a Sunday morning during raass, and ira
raediately perceived that I was in a sturdily Catholic
country. The iraraense edifice was crowded with
worshippers, and their manner was much more re-
ceuilli, as the phrase is, than that of the faithful in
Itahan churches. This too in spite of the fact that
the great Rubenses were unveiled in honor of the day,
so that aU the world might behold them gratis. To
be receuilli in the presence of a Rubens seems to me
to indicate the real devotional temperament. The
crowd, the Rubenses, the atmosphere, and the pre
sence of sorae hundred or so of dear feUow-tourists
was rather hostUe to tranquil appreciation, so that at
first I saw littie in the cathedral of Antwerp to justify
its great reputation. But I came back in the late
afternoon, at that time which a wise man wiU always
choose for visiting (finally at least) a great church —
the half-hour before it closes. The Rubenses, those
monstrous flowers of art, had folded their gorgeous
petals; but this I did not regret, as I had been in the

312 FOREIGN PARTS.
interval to the Museum, where there are a dozen
more, and I had drifted to a conclusion. The church
was empty, or filled only with the faded light and its
O'wn immense solemnity. It is very magnificent; not
duskily nor mysteriously so, but with a vast, simple,
harmony which, like all great things, grows and grows
as you observe it. Its length is extraordinary, and it
has the peculiarity, unique in my observation, of pos
sessing no less than six aisles, besides the nave. Its
height is in harmony with these splendid proportions,
and it gave me altogether (I do not know the literal
measurements) an almost unequalled impression of
vastness. ExternaUy, its great tower, of the most florid
and flamboyant, the most embroidered and perforated
Gothic, is one of the few worthy rivals of the peerless
steeple of Strasburg.
The Antwerp Museum is very handsomely appointed,
and has an air of opulence very striking after the
small and dusky treasure-houses of thrifty Holland.
But there is logic in both cases. You bend your nose
over a Gerard Dow and use a magnifying glass; whereas,
the least that can be done by the protectors of Rubens's
glory is to give you a room in which you can stand
twenty yards from the canvas. I may say directly that
even at twenty yards Rubens gave me less pleasure
than I had hoped. I say hoped rather than expected,
for I was already sufficiently familiar with him to have
felt the tendency of ray impressions, and yet I had
fancied that in the atmosphere in which he wrought,
in the city of which he is the most distinguished son,
they might be diverted into the channel of sympathy.
But they followed their own course, and I can express
thera only by saying that the painter does not [please

IN BELGIUM. 313
me. If Rubens does not please you, what is left? —
for I find myself utterly unable to perceive in him a
trace of that inteUectual impressiveness claimed by
some of his adrairers. I read awhile since a charming
book in which an acute French critic, M. Emile Mon
tegut, records his impressions of Belgium and Holland,
and this work was partly responsible for ray supposi
tion that I should find more in the author of the
"Descent from the Cross" collectively, at Antwerp,
than I had found in him, individually, at London,
Paris, and Florence. M. Montegut, I say, is acute, and
the number of things his acuteness finds in Rubens it
would take up all my space to recount. According to
him, Rubens was not only one of the greatest of mere
painters, but he was the greatest genius who ever
thought, bmsh in hand. The answer to this seeras
simple: Rubens, to my sense, absolutely did not think.
He not only did not think greatly, but he did not
think at aU. M. Montegut declares that he was a great
dramatist superadded to a great painter, and calls upon
the people of Antwerp to erect to him in the market
place a colossal monument (the one already standing
there wUl do, it seems to rae) and inscribe upon the
pedestal his title to the glory of having carried his art
beyond its traditional hraits and produced effects gene
rally achieved only by the highest draraatic poetry. If
the great painter of rosy brawn had had half his com
mentator's finesse, he would have been richly endowed,
M, Montegut finds, among other things, unutterable
meanings in the countenance of the Abyssinian king
who is looking askance at the Virgin in the "Adora
tion" of the Antwerp Museum, I remembered them
so well that, in leaving the cathedral, I hurried to com-

314 FOREIGN PARTS.
mune with this masterpiece of expressiveness. I re
commend hira to the reader who raay next pass that
way. Let hira tell rae, frora an unbiassed mind, how
many supplementary emotions he finds reflected in the
broad concupiscence of the monarch's black visage. I
was disappointed; dramatists of the first order are
rare, and here was one the less. If Rubens is any
where dramatic, in the finer sense of the term, it is in
his masterpiece, the "Descent from the Cross," of the
cathedral; of all his pictures, this one comes the
nearest to being impressive. It is superbly painted,
and on the whole very noble; but it is only a happier
specimen of the artist's habitual raanner — painting by
improvisation, not by reflection. Besides the Rubenses
at Antwerp, I have seen several others. Those at
Brussels, unfortunately, with most of their companions
of the Flemish school, have been now some two years
invisible. They are being restored; but one is curious
to see the effect of two years' refreshment upon the
native robustness of raost Rubenses. I need not speak
of these various productions in detail; sorae are better,
some are worse, all are powerful, and all, on the whole,
are irritating. They all tell the same story — that the
artist had in a magnificent degree the painter's tempera
ment, without having in anything like a proportionate
degree the painter's raind. When one, therefore, says
that he was perfectly superficial, one indicates a raore
fatal fault than in applying the same term to many a
more delicate genius. What raakes Rubens irritating
is the fact that he always might have been more inter
esting. Half the conditions are there — vigor, facility,
color, the prodigious impulse of genius. Nature has
given them all, and he holds the other half in his own

IN BELGIUM. 315
hands. But just when the others should appear and
give the picture that stamp which draws from us, over
and above our relish of the natural gift, a certain fine
sympathy with the direction it takes, Rubens uncloses
his careless grasp, and drops them utterly out of sight.
He never approaches something really fine but to miss
it; he never atterapts a really interesting effect but to
vulgarize it. Our deepest interest, as to an artist, de
pends on the way he deliberates and chooses. Every
thing up to that point raay be superb, but we care for
him with a certain affection only when we feel him
responsibly selecting araong a nuraber of possibUities.
This sensible inteUectual pulsation often gives a charm
lo the works of painters to whom nature has been any
thing but liberal, and the great limitation of Rubens
is that in him one never perceives it. He takes what
comes, and if it happens to be really pictorial, he has
a singular faculty of suggesting that there is no raerit
in his having taken it. He never waits to choose; he
never pauses to deliberate; and one may say, vulgarly,
he throws away his oranges when he has given them
but a single squeeze. The foolish fellow does not
know how sweet they are! One ends, in a manner, by
disliking his real gifts. A little less facility, we call
out, a shade or so less color, a figure or so the fewer
tossed in, a bosora or two less glowingly touched; only
something once in a while to arrest us with the thought
that it has arrested you!
Almost as noteworthy as anything else in the Ant
werp Museum is the titie of a picture by Titian, of
average Titianesque merit. It is worth transcribing
for its bizarre conflict of suggestions. "John, Bastard
of Sforza, Lord of Pesaro, husband, by her first mar-

3l6 FOREIGN PARTS.
riage, of Lucretia Borgia, and then Bishop of Paphos
and Admiral of the Pontifical Galleys, is presented to
St. Peter by the Pope Alexander VI." Add to this
that St. Peter is seated upon a fragment of antique
sculpture, surrounded by a frieze representing a pagan
sacrifice! Even that harshly sincere genius, Quentin
Matsys, who shines hard by in a brilliantly pure piece
of coloring, can hardly persuade us that we are in
siraple Flanders, and not in complex Italy.
It often happens in travelling that places turn out
to be less curious than we had supposed, but it is a
comparatively rare fortune to find them more so. And
yet this was my luck with Brussels, a city of which my
iraagination had raade so light that it hung by a hair
whether I should go there or not. It is generally
spoken of by its admirers as a miniature Paris, and I
always viewed it with that contempt with which a
properly regulated mind regards those shabby, pirated
editions of the successful French books of the day
which are put forth in Belgium. These ill-conditioned
little volumes are miniature Victor Hugos and Miche-
lets. But Brussels should ask to be delivered from its
friends. It is not a miniature anything, but a very
solid and extensive old city, with a physiognoray and
character quite its own. It is very much less elegant
than the Paris of the last twenty years; but it is de
cidedly more picturesque. Paris has nothing to com
pare for quaintness of interest with the Brussels Hdtel
de Ville, and the queer old carved and many-windowed
houses which surround the square. The Hdtel de
Ville is magnificent, and its beautiful Gothic belfry
gives, in quite another line, an equal companion in
one's raemory to the soaring campanile of the palace

IN BELGItM. 317
of the Signoria at Florence. Few cities have a cathe
dral in so impressive a position as St. Gudule- — on a
steep hiU-top, with a long flight of steps at the base of
its towers; and few cities, either, have so charming a
public garden as the Pare. There is something pecu
liarly picturesque in that high-in-the-air look of the
Pare as you glance from end to end of its long alleys,
and see the sky beneath the arch of the immense trees
meeting the bend of the path. All this part of Brus
sels, and the wide, windy Place Royale, handsome as
the handsome was understood fifty years ago, has an
extreme brightness and gaiety of aspect which is yet
quite distinct from the made-to-order brilliancy of the
finest parts of renovated Paris. The Brussels Museum
of pictures is admirably arranged; but, unfortunately,
as I have said, only half of it is now accessible. This,
however, contains sorae geras of the Dutch school —
among them a picture by Steen, representing a lad
coming into a room to present a fish to a ruddy virago
who sits leering at him. The young man, for reasons
best known to himself, is sticking out his tongue, and
these reasons, according to M. Montegut, are so numer
ous and recondite that I should like the downright old
caricaturist himself to have heard a few of them. I
wonder where his tongue would have gone.
Ghent I found to be an enormous, empty city, with
an old Flemish gable-end peeping here and there from
its rows of dull white houses, and various tall and bat
tered old church-towers looking down over deserted,
sunny squares. In the raiddle of aU this, in the stately
church of St. Bavon, is the great local treasure, the
"Adoration of the Lamb," by the brothers Van Eyck.
This is not only one of the pictures of Ghent, but one

3l8 FOREIGN PARTS.
of the pictures of the world. It represents a large
daisied meadow shut in with a great flowering tangle
of hedges, out of which emerge various saints of either
sex, carrying crowns and palms. In front are two
other groups of apostles and prophets, all kneeling
and worshipping. In the centre is an altar, surmounted
with the fleecy symbol of the Word, and surrounded
with a ring of adoring angels. Behind is a high horizon
of blue mountains, and the silhouettes of three separate
fantastic cities, all apparently composed of church-
towers.. The picture is too perfect for praise; the
coloring seems not only not to have lost, but actually
to have been intensified and purified, by time. One
may say the same of the precious Memlings at Bruges
— and this is all I can say of that drowsy little city of
grassy streets and colossal belfries and sluggish canals
and mediaeval memories.

THE END.

PRINTING OFFICE OF THE PUBLISHER.

August 1889.
Tauchnitz Edition.

Latest Volumes:
Mr. Mee^on's Will. By H. Rider Haggard, i vol.
The Invasion ofthe Crimea. By A. W. Kinglake, vols. 11 & 1 2.
The Fisherman's Daughter. By Florence Montgomery, i v.
The Rogue. By W. E. Norris, 2 vols.
The Invasion 6f the Crimea. By A. W. Kinglake, vols. 1 3 & 1 4
(Conclusion).
Colonel Quaritch, V.C. By H. Rider Haggard, 2 vols.
Captain Jim's Friend & The Argonauts of North Liberty.
By Bret Harte, 1 vol. "*
In the City of Flowers. By Emraa MarshaU, i vol.
Little Mrs. Murray. By F. C. Philips, i vol.
In Far Lochaber. By William Black, 2 vols.
Robbery under Arms. By Rolf Bolderwood, 2 vols.
The Outcasts, i vol.
Under-Currents. By the Author of "Molly Baw'i," 2 vols.
Cressy. By Bret Harte, i vol.
John Ward, Preacher. By Margaret Deland, i vol.
A Village Tragedy. By Margaret L. Woods, i vol.
Uncle Piper of Piper's Hill. By Tasma, 2 vols.
Greifenstein. By F. Marion Crawford, 2 vols.
Guilderoy. By Ouida, 2 vols.
Neighbours oh the Green. By Mrs. Oliphant, i vol. '
On Circumstantial Evidence. By Florence Marryat, 2 vols.|
The Pleasures of Life. By Sir John Lubbock, Bart., i vol.
The Fatal Phryne. By F. C. Philips & C. J. Wills, i vol. ,
The Reproach of Annesley. By Maxwell Gray, 2 vols.
Cleopatra. By H. Rider Haggard, 2 vols. 1
Alma. By Emma Marshall, i vol. |
The Open Door. By Blanche Willis Howard, 2 vols. /'i
A complete Catalogue of the Tauchnitz.
Edition is attached to this work.

3 9002 00765 0394

i