Mrs. Charles MacVeagh

“ However, the Roman episode was of small importance in his life, and he would not have grudged the honorable position to Valadier, whose bust stands alone facing the principal promenade of the Pincian. That architect lived to welcome back the exiled Pius VII and to finish for him the gardens begun by order of Napoleon.
One explanation of Rome's charm may be found in her power of suggestion. Although the things to be seen in the Eternal City are of transcendent interest, the things which are only apprehended have a still stronger hold upon the imagination. ”

“ No happier fate can befall an imaginative child from northern lands than to wander at will through this Roman playground. All unconsciously the classic beauty is woven into his spiritual fibre, and with that strange sensation of coming into his own peculiar to such children he finds, in these seemingly endless rows of white marble heads, faces which stimulate his fancy or fit the names of heroes already known to him. ”

“ The soft Roman sunshine then filters through the ilex branches only upon groups of little children and their nurses, solitary old men who have become as little children, and bands of seminarists or theological students wearing black or scarlet gowns and speaking divers tongues. The little company occupy the benches, or walk demurely in small groups beneath the trees, or play the endless plays of babyhood, in and out of the warm shadows; all of them living in a dreamland as old as life itself, and finding in this quiet garden of the Eternal City a background full of sympathy and significance. ”

“ In the centre of the garden stands an obelisk the history of which brings back the memory of a beautiful pagan youth who lived more than eighteen hundred years ago, and of another story of Old Nile, more pitiful, if less important, than the story of Moses. ”

“ As she rises to move away, she pauses, on one knee, to implore divine protection for the child whom she must abandon to his fateThe heroic size of the figure enhances the strength and dignity of the artist's conception. ”

“ Not far from the fountain of Moses stand two umbrella-pines, their great boles shooting high up through all the foliage about. A hundred years ago they marked the exit into a side lane from the vineyard where they had been planted, for until that time these Gardens of the Pincio had been for centuries the vineyard belonging to the Augustinian monks of Santa Maria del Popolo, the same order from which, about i4Q4> young Cardinal Farnese bought the property by the Tiber, on which he built the Farnese Palace. ”