“I follow I know not what path; half-hopeful, half-afraid, I go; my sight is dim, my heart has grown cold, my hearing is faint, my eyes are closed. I am lying sightless and without motion, I cannot hear the wailing of the brethren, and the blue smoke from the censer pours forth for me no fragrance; yet my love shall not die; and in the name of that love, O my brothers, I implore you, that each one of you may thus call upon God: Lord, on that day, when the trumpet shall sound the end of the world, receive Thy departed Servant, O Lord, into Thy happy dwelling-place.”
Looking back on that summer in Rome, I shut my eyes now, and I see the Campagna, with its prodigal wealth of tail grasses and gay wild flowers; its little sharp asphodels with their faint smell of garlic; the Villa d’Este, with its overgrown terraces, and musical waterfalls, and tangled vegetation—the home of an invisible slumbering Princess; and Tivoli.
“Tibur Argæo positum colono Sit meæ sedes utinam senectæ Sit modus lasso maris et viarum Militiæque.”
That was the first Ode of Horace I ever read when I was up to Arthur Benson, in Remove, at Eton. I remember wondering at the time, what sort of place Tibur was, where Horace, tired of journeys by land and by sea, and tired of wars and rumours of war, wished to build himself a final nest.
When I saw Tivoli, with its divinely elegant waterfall, I understood his wish; nor could I imagine a more enchanting haven, a more complete and peaceful final goal for the end of a pilgrimage.
I see the lake of Nemi, where the barges of Tiberius—is it Tiberius?—still rest beneath the water; and Frascati, and the view from the roof of a house in the Via—which Via? I forget, but it was not far from Porta Pia; and from thence, in the red sunset, you saw St. Peter’s; and I see the view of the whole city from the Janiculum … more memories here, and older ones from Macaulay … and the Palatine by moonlight; the moon streaming on all the thousand fragments, and the few large plinths of the Forum; and Vernon Lee saying that _moonlight on the Palatine_ sounded like a stage direction in a play of Shelley’s; and I see the marbles coloured like some pale seaweed in Santa Maria in Cosmedìn, and the peep at St. Peter’s, through the keyhole of one of the College gardens, and the fountains in the moonlight, on the top of the hill, as you drive from the station, and the fountain of Trevi into which I threw a penny, wishing that I might come back to Rome, one day, but not as a diplomat; and the Milanese shops in the Corso, and the vast cool spaces of St. Peter’s, on a hot day, when you swung back the heavy curtain; and the courtyard in Brewster’s Palace; and then the heat; the great heat when the shutters were shut, and one stayed indoors all day; and the arrival of an Indian Prince, whom we met in frock-coats, at six in the morning, at the railway station, and who turned out not to be a Prince at all, but a man of inferior caste, and who drank far too much whisky, and far too little soda, in the Embassy garden, and became painfully loud and familiar; and at a little tea-party in my rooms, with Brewster and someone else; a Roman lady, looking like a Renaissance picture, regal, stately, in a white fur and tippet; a lady with hosts of adorers, who, when she saw a book on the Burmese or Buddhism, on my table, called _The Hearts of Men_, said with a smile: “That is a subject, I think, I know something about”; and the Roman women, no less majestic, but more vociferous, in the Trastevere, or kneeling with the grace of sculpture before the Pietà in St. Peter’s.