Mrs. Hugh Fraser

“ But near Rome, looking towards the soft green outline of the Alban Hills, all that seems illusion; this is reality, this empty space, untroubled by past or future, this sweep of dun gold and fading purple; its surrounding hills that all look towards Rome have seen the place unpeopled, seen it swarming with life; have seen it flaring with pomp and then submerged in blood; now they are guardians of that which modern cataclysms have failed to rend—the peace of a place whence even the memory of humanity is banished and Nature smiles and broods alone over her lovely handiwork. ”

“ Narrow and anything but straight, with great palaces and mean buildings crowding promiscuously and set as close together as possible—princely houses flanked by humble shops—with cross streets debouching into it every few hundred yards, and pouring forth a stream of traffic, spreading away here and there as if pushed out by main force, but yielding as little as possible of the coveted sidewalks, it is the real artery of Rome, pulsing with the life of a people who, from the days of Julius Cæsar to our own, have carried on existence in the open air. ”

“ Over the last eastern spur of the Julian Alps the old Roman roadmakers had cut one of their splendid roads to connect the seat of Empire with the North. They worked along the lines of least resistance, thinking only of facilitating the movements of Roman troops, and not at all of possible invaders who might march down to Rome. On the crest of the pass they looked for a commanding spot to serve as the site for a garrison station; the season was early summer and their glance at once fell on an enormous pear tree, a dome of snowy blossoms visible for many a mile around. ”

“ A romance must be a love story, and of all the love stories of time, that of Rome is the most marvellous. Certain girl children, we are told, were born so beautiful that, like Helen of Troy, Lucrezia Borgia—and she whose soul was of equal loveliness with what the chronicler calls “the supreme and royal beauty” of her body, Saint Radegonde, Queen of France, they were passionately loved, passionately defended, passionately sung, from the hour of their birth. ”

“ In the very dawn of my recollections there is the memory of one of childhood’s long, long springs—when the days are all blue and silver overhead, and golden haze in the distance, and live emerald underfoot—when my old Maria used to convey me in the morning all the way from Villa Negroni on the Esquiline to Villa Borghese at Porta del Popolo, there to play in the grass till the sun began to sink towards St. Peter’s. I was three years old, and there was as yet no all-important baby brother to whose existence my own was to be subordinated a year later. ”

“ The infancy of the day is a very wonderful thing anywhere, but most of all in my own Romagna, where the glow of the later hours and the riotous colours of sunset have a ripeness which blends but too well with the ancientness of the buildings and the gilded tumble of the ruins that are, and always will be, Campagna’s landmarks. But at dawn it is all young, bland, mysteriously dewy and immaculate, tint blending into tint, and shadow shaded through a hundred indefinable modulations of unborn blue and hinted violet and cloud grey, that will be plain gold later in the day. ”

“ In my girlhood there were times when I was not very strong; life was almost too full, and I had to rest from it sometimes. Then my angel mother would make me lie down in her favourite room, the one where the walls were rose and old-gold, and the ceiling a vault of mother-of-pearl seen through Tuscan grapevines, and she would set a bunch of those white roses and a tiny Venetian goblet of amber-coloured “Est-Est” beside me, and leave me alone for hours, while the fountain played in the courtyard and the Roman dusk came down and made shadows in the room. ”

“ A few minutes before noon the crowd thickens there near the Collegio Romano till it is hard to make one’s way through it; the buzz of talk ceases, men get out their watches, and hold them in their hands while all [96] eyes are turned upward as if expecting the advent of some celestial apparition. Silence reigns for a minute or two; then it is rent by the thunderous boom of the midday gun at Sant’ Angelo, and the next instant a babel of deafening sound has broken over the city. Every Church bell in Rome is ringing madly. ”

“ Rome sends humble enquiries to Etruria, beseeching to be taught how to address and propitiate the great gods. Etruria gladly condescends to reply, and in a given time, though not without much strife and bloodshed, Etruria becomes first a tributary and then a vassal of the adolescent Empress of the world, who, through all the centuries of her after history, repeats that requisition. Rough, practical, hard-handed, and strong, yet avid of beauty, she will have all that is fairest and most precious. ”

“ Then, if I recognise him as truly an Angel of God, I will do as thou hast asked me. But, if I find thou lovest another man, both him and thee I will slay with my own sword.”
With calm and heavenly authority, Cecilia replied: “If thou wilt follow my counsel, Valerianus, if thou wilt consent to be purified in the fountain of eternal life, if thou wilt believe in the one true and living God, thou shalt behold my Guardian Angel.” ”

“ The Bride of the Sea, seen from the distance, seems to rise like a softly coloured pearl from the misty embrace of the waters, and the effect is one of such awesome charm that, for a while, the mind can hardly carry the suggestions that crowd in upon it. What Venice contains! Is there any city in the world, save only Rome and Jerusalem—the cradle and the House—that can compare with that jewel-case? ”

“ The great process of destruction has not been confined to Rome alone. Only the other day I learnt from a correspondent that the lovely Villa Doria at Pegli has been swept away to “make room” (in our half-depopulated Italy!) for a German soap factory! To the vultures of commerce nothing is sacred. All that is ancient and beautiful is an insult to the industrial nobodies, with their sordid past and their ignoble future. The more perfect a spot is the more it arouses their desire to destroy it and annihilate even its memory by using its site for the basest ends. ”

“ We have indeed one beautiful picture of Honorius, when still but a youth he entered Rome again, and again heard the Roman shouts as he passed on to the Palatine, standing in his gilded chariot, the sun resting on his dark head and playing radiantly on the great necklaces of emeralds that rose and fell in response to the joyful beatings of a heart still very young, still responsive at times to noble impulses, the people cheering him madly, and the women weeping for joy at the sight of his beauty. ”

“ For the rest of the day and all the ensuing night the tormentors continued to pile the fires, till it seemed as if the heat must crack the very marble. No sound came from the sealed room, and at sunrise the next day the executioners were convinced that their work was done. Nothing mortal could survive in that furnace.
So they opened the door—and Cecilia, radiant and fresh as a rose washed in dew, knelt there in prayer, her lovely face raised to Heaven, her pure hands clasped in love and thanksgiving. Terrified, the men rushed to tell Almachius of the portent. ”

“ Peter suffered martyrdom. Its terrace porch, high on the side of the slope, is the one spot I know of from which all Rome can be seen, spread out like a mantle of jewels on either side of its yellow river and raising its classic hills in a wide semicircle against the shifting red and gold of the Campagna, the blue of the serrated Sabines to the east [114] and the soft green outlines of the Alban Mountains to the south. The vast perfection of the scene is almost more than sight can suffer; the beauty becomes a menace in some strange way ”

“ John Lateran look down on it as the angels might look down on the dead; wherever a convent or villa lies along a ridge, the slender spires of cypresses mark the line, answering to every kiss of the breeze, though the dark velvet of their foliage refuses a single gleam to the sun; add to this the rush and sparkle of Rome’s innumerable fountains, and you have a vision so matchless in beauty and so supreme in associations that it inspires an awe too great for delight. ”

“ Thou hast now, my Gratian, by my decision and that of my brave comrades, been invested with the Imperial robes. Begin to strengthen thy soul to bear their weight. Prepare to cross the Danube and the Rhine, to stand firm in battle with these thy warrior friends, to shed thy blood and give up thy life itself for the defence of thy subjects, to think nothing too great or too little by which thou canst preserve the safety of the Empire. ”

“ Raised on a daïs hung with rich silk, surrounded with lighted tapers that shed a soft glow all around, half smothered in flowers, Cecilia lay there while all Rome, beside itself with joy, came to gaze upon her and entreat her prayers. No perfumes were permitted to be used, since the heavenly fragrance of roses and lilies still emanated from the coffin. The nuns knelt round her for a guard of honour, and soon the great Pope Clement VIII, who had barely recovered from a severe illness, travelled in from Frascati to pray beside her. ”

“ But the morning is the Corso’s real prime, a midday of spring for choice, when, from a cloudless sky, the sun in his zenith rakes the long street from the Piazza di Venezia to the Popolo without leaving so much as an inch of shade as a refuge from his fierce rays, except where the shop-awnings extend a merciful protection to foot-passengers. The flower vendors are everywhere, offering whole baskets of lilacs—the fat Roman lilacs—carnations, and roses for a franc or two, and eagerly offering to carry the burden home for one on the spot. ”

“ Innocent III was a great and good Pope, but he lived in a turbulent age. During fourteen years of his reign two rivals, Philip and Otto, were rending Europe with their struggles for the supreme honours of the Holy Roman Empire; the Albigensian heresy was holding a hideous carnival of sacrilege, carnage, and obscenity in some of its fairest lands; Rome itself was the scene of ever-recurring battles between the great nobles, who would ride forth in the morning followed by great companies of armed men, on the chance of meeting an enemy or an enemy’s retainer to kill. ”

“ There the vendors of jewels, keen-eyed Jews and Syrians, armed to the teeth, had to draw aside angrily for the passage of bulky wares which one gem from the tiny silk-wrapped packet in their bosoms would have paid for ten times over; here comes a richly draped litter with armed horsemen in attendance—a great noble’s wife? No, only a beautiful woman being carried to the slave market where she will fetch the highest price. Suddenly a solitary horseman dashes through the throng at break-neck pace, heedless of the death his steed’s hoofs may deal. ”

“ Valentinian’s next care was to provide Gratian with wise tutors, and surely few youths were ever more favoured in that respect. The tie between him and St. Ambrose was as strong and tender a one as history has ever presented to our admiration. Gratian, in every circumstance of his short and stormy life, turns to the great Bishop for support and counsel. Ambrose never seems to have the young ruler out of his thoughts; the Saint’s outburst of sorrow at his death is the cry of a broken heart. It all forms a chapter of most unusual beauty in the story of mankind. ”

“ But so great was the mourning for good King Lucius when his death was announced, that the people gave themselves up to their grief and put the matter of the election aside. And Tanaquil, the wise woman, caused it to be proclaimed, in an hour or two, that Lucius was merely stunned and not dead at all, and that until his recovery should be complete he desired that Servius should fill his place. Great was the rejoicing in Rome, and with much alacrity the people put themselves under the orders of the young Servius, who himself in all things obeyed the noble Tanaquil. ”

“ And Rome, from the hour when the first hut was built on the right bank of the yet nameless river, when the stones of her first low wall wrote her name on that predestined soil, has been loved with a personal passion that has not its like in the world’s history. So, we know, she will be loved to the end. The very hatreds that have attacked her, the cataclysms that have exhausted themselves in attempts to annihilate her, the cupidity and treachery that have bargained for her whom no price can buy, no hand of man can hold, all testify to the desire of the nations to call her theirs. ”

“ This that we fell in love with was a painting of a Sphinx—a great white marble creature with globed breasts and a face of bestial beauty, cold as ice. She crouched on her high pedestal in a tangle of white roses flooded with moonlight. A young man, little more than a boy, was falling back from her, his ashy face, sublime in death, still transfigured with the mortal ecstasy of her kiss ”

“ Peter, the poor Jew, was to be scourged and crucified; St. Paul’s Roman citizenship forbade these humiliations; he was to be beheaded.
It is a long way from the Capitol to the Ostian gate and the Vatican, and the Apostles’ limbs, cramped from long confinement, must have moved slowly and wearily over the Via Sacra, now, for the first time, deserving of its name; the heat at that time of year is overpowering, and the blaze of midday beat down upon their heads. ”

“ The Borghese anemone was a real wild thing, very like the English wind-flower that shimmers all along the landslip and the undercliff where the spring tides are flinging the Channel surf in thunder against the cliffs of the Isle of Wight. Only the English wind-flower is pale and fragile, white or lavender for choice, and the Roman one is of a flaunting purple-pink, with a strong stem the colour of brown madder—as is fitting for a self-respecting flower sprung from a soil that has been steeped in sun and soaked in blood. ”