University of Virginia Library

56. LETTER LVI.

The yearly ceremony of giving dowries to twelve
girls, was performed by the pope, this morning, in the
church built over the ancient temple of Minerva. His
holiness arrived, in state, from the Vatican, at ten,
followed by his red troop of cardinals, and preceded
by a clerical courier, on a palfrey, and the body-guard
of nobles. He blessed the crowd, right and left, with
his three fingers (precisely as a Parisian dandy salutes
his friend across the street), and, descending from his
carriage (which is like a good-sized glass boudoir upon
wheels), he was received in the papal sedan, and
carried into the church by his Swiss bearers. My legation
button carried me through the guard, and I
found an excellent place under a cardinal's wing, in
the penetralia within the railing of the altar. Mass
commenced presently, with a chant from the celebrated
choir of St. Peter's. Room was then made through
the crowd, the cardinals put on their red caps, and the
small procession of twelve young girls entered from a
side chapel, bearing each a taper in her hand, and
robed to the eyes in white, with a chaplet of flowers
round the forehead. I could form no judgment of anything
but their eyes and feet. A Roman eye could
not be otherwise than fine, and a Roman woman's foot
could scarce be other than ugly, and, consequently,
there was but one satin slipper in the group that a
man might not have worn, and every eye I could see
from my position, might have graced an improvisatrice.
They stopped in front of the throne, and, giving
their long tapers to the servitors, mounted in
conples, hand in hand, and kissed the foot of his holiness,
who, at the same time, leaned over and blessed
them, and then turning about, walked off again behind
the altar in the same order in which they had entered.

The choir now struck up their half-unearthly chant
(a music so strangely shrill and clear, that I scarce
know whether the exquisite sensation is pleasure or
pain), the pope was led from his throne to his sedan,
and his mitre changed for a richly jewelled crown, the
bearers lifted their burden, the guard presented arms,

the cardinals summoned their officious servants to unrobe,
and the crowd poured out as it came.

This ceremony, I found, upon inquiry, is performed
every year, on the day of the annunciation—just nine
months before Christmas, and is intended to commemorate
the incarnation of our Savior.

As I was returning from a twilight stroll upon the
Pincian hill, this evening, the bells of the convent of
Santa Trinita rung to vespers. I had heard of the
singing of the nuns in the service at the convent chapel,
but the misbehavior of a party of English had excluded
foreigners, of late, and it was thought impossible
to get admittance. I mounted the steps, however,
and rung at the door. It was opened by a pale nun,
of thirty, who hesitated a moment, and let me pass.
In a small, plain chapel within, the service of the altar
was just commencing, and, before I reached a seat,
a low plaintive chant commenced, in female voices,
from the choir. It went on, with occasional interruptions
from the prayers, for perhaps an hour. I can
not describe the excessive mournfulness of the music.
One or two familiar hymns occurred in the course of
it, like airs in a recitative, the same sung in our churches,
but the effect was totally different. The neat, white
caps of the nuns were just visible over the railing before
the organ, and, as I looked up at them and listened
to their melancholy notes, they seemed, to me,
mourning over their exclusion from the world. The
small white cloud from the censer mounted to the ceiling,
and creeping away through the arches, hung over
the organ till it was lost to the eye in the dimness of
the twilight. It was easy, under the influence of their
delightful music, to imagine within it the wings of
that tranquillizing resignation one would think so necessary
to keep down the heart in these lonely cloisters.

The most considerable ruins of ancient Rome are
those of the Baths. The Emperors Titus, Caracalla,
Nero, and Agrippa, constructed these immense places
of luxury, and the remains of them are among the
most interesting and beautiful relics to be found in the
world. It is possible that my readers have as imperfect
an idea of the extent of a Roman bath as I have
had, and I may as well quote from the information
given by writers upon antiquities. “They were open
every day, to both sexes. In each of the great baths,
there were sixteen hundred seats of marble, for the
convenience of the bathers, and three thousand two
hundred persons could bathe at the same time. There
were splendid porticoes in front for promenade, arcades
with shops, in which was found every kind of
luxury for the bath, and halls for corporeal exercises,
and for the discussion of philosophy; and here the
poets read their productions and rhetoricians harangued,
and sculptors and painters exhibited their
works to the public. The baths were distributed into
grand halls, with ceilings enormously high and painted
with admirable frescoes, supported on columns of
the rarest marble, and the basins were of oriental alabaster,
porphyry, and jasper. There were in the centre
vast reservoirs, for the swimmers, and crowds of
slaves to attend gratuitously upon all who should
come.”

The baths of Diocletian (which I visited to-day),
covered an enormous space. They occupied seven
years in building, and were the work of forty thousand
Christian slaves, two thirds of whom died of fatigue and
misery! Mounting one of the seven hills of Rome,
we come to some half-ruined arches, of enormous
size, extending a long distance, in the sides of which
were built two modern churches. One was the work
of Michael Angelo, and one of his happiest efforts.
He has turned two of the ancient halls into a magnificent
church, in the shape of a Greek cross, leaving in
their places eight gigantic columns of granite. Af
ter St. Peter's it is the most imposing church in
Rome.

We drove thence to the baths of Titus, passing the
site of the ancient gardens of Mecænas, in which still
stands the tower from which Nero beheld the conflagration
of Rome. The houses of Horace and Virgil
communicated with this garden, but they are now undistinguishable.
We turned up from the Coliseum
to the left, and entered a gate leading to the baths of
Titus. Five or six immense arches presented their
front to us, in a state of picturesque ruin. We took a
guide, and a long pole, with a lamp at the extremity,
and descended to the subterranean halls, to see the
still inimitable frescoes upon the ceilings. Passing
through vast apartments, to the ruined walls of which
still clung, here and there, pieces of the finely-colored
stucco of the ancients, we entered a suite of long galleries,
some forty feet high, the arched roofs of which
were painted with the most exquisite art, in a kind of
fanciful border-work, enclosing figures and landscapes,
in as bright colors as if done yesterday. Farther on
was the niche in which was found the famous group
of Laocoon, in a room belonging to a subterranean
palace of the emperor, communicating with the baths.
The Belvedeve Meleager was also found here. The
imagination loses itself in attempting to conceive the
splendor of these under-ground palaces, blazing with
artificial light, ornamented with works of art, never
equalled, and furnished with all the luxury which
an emperor of Rome, in the days when the wealth
of the world flowed into her treasury, could command
for his pleasure. How short life must have
seemed to them, and what a tenfold curse became
death and the common ills of existence, interrupting
or taking away pleasures so varied and inexhaustible.

These baths were built in the last great days of
Rome, and one reads the last stages of national corruption
and, perhaps, the secret of her fall, in the character
of these ornamented walls. They breathe the very
spirit of voluptuousness. Naked female figures fill every
plafond, and fauns and satyrs, with the most licentious
passions in their faces, support the festoons and hold
together the intricate ornament of the frescos. The
statues, the pictures, the object of the place itself, inspired
the wish for indulgence, and the history of the
private lives of the emperors and wealthier Romans
shows the effect in its deepest colors.

We went on to the baths of Caracalla, the largest
ruins of Rome. They are just below the palaces of
the Cesars, and ten minutes' walk from the Coliseum.
It is one labyrinth of gigantic arches and ruined halls,
the ivy growing and clinging wherever it can fasten its
root, and the whole as fine a picture of decay as
imagination could create. This was the favorite haunt
of Shelley, and here he wrote his fine tragedy of Prometheus.
He could not have selected a more fitting
spot for solitary thought. A herd of goats were
climbing over one of the walls, and the idle boy who
tended them lay asleep in the sun, and every footstep
echoed loud through the place. We passed two or
three hours rambling about, and regained the populous
streets of Rome in the last light of the sunset.