University of Virginia Library

42. LETTER XLII.

To be rid of the dust of travel, and abroad in a
strange and renowned city, is a sensation of no slight
pleasure anywhere. To step into the street under
these circumstances and inquire for the Roman Forum,
was a sufficient advance upon the ordinary feeling to
mark a bright day in one's calendar. I was hurrying
up the Corso with this object before me a half hour
after my arrival in Rome, when an old friend arrested
my steps, and begging me to reserve the “Ruins” for
moonlight, took me off to St. Peter's.

The façade of the church appears alone, as you
walk up the street from the castle of St. Angelo. It
disappointed me. There is no portico, and it looks
flat and bare. But approaching nearer, I stood at the
base of the obelisk, and with those two magnificent
fountains sending their musical waters as if to the
sky, and the two encircling wings of the church embracing
the immense area with its triple colonnades, I
felt the grandeur of St. Peter's. I felt it again in the
gigantic and richly-wrought porches, and again with
indescribable surprise and admiration at the first step
on the pavement of the interior. There was not a
figure on its immense floor from the door to the altar,
and its far-off roof, its mighty pillars, its gold and
marbles in such profusion that the eye shrinks from
the examination, made their overpowering impression
uninterrupted. You feel that it must be a glorious
creature that could build such a temple to his Maker.

An organ was playing brokenly in one of the distant
chapels, and, drawing insensibly to the music, we
found the door half open, and a monk alone, running
his fingers over the keys, and stopping sometimes as
if to muse, till the echo died and the silence seemed
to startle him anew. It was strange music very irregular,
but sweet, and in a less excited moment, I could
have sat and listened to it till the sun set.

I strayed down the aisle, and stood before the
“Dead Christ” of Michael Angelo. The Savior lies
in the arms of Mary. The limbs hang lifelessly down,
and, exquisitely beautiful as they are, express death
with a wonderful power. It is the best work of the
artist, I think, and the only one I was ever moved in
looking at.

The greatest statue and the first picture in the world
are under the same roof, and we mounted to the Vatican.
The museum is a wilderness of statuary. Old
Romans, men and women, stand about you, copied,
as you feel when you look on them, from the life,
and conceptions of beauty in children, nymphs, and
heroes, from minds that conceived beauty in a degree
that has never been transcended, confuse and bewilder
you with their number and wonderful workmanship.
It is like seeing a vision of past ages. It is calling up
from Athens and old classic Rome, all that was distinguished
and admired of the most polished ages of
the world. On the right of the long gallery, as you
enter, stands the bust of the “Young Augustus” — a
kind of beautiful, angelic likeness of Napoleon, as
Napoleon might have been in his youth. It is a boy,
but with a serene dignity about the forehead and lips,
that makes him visibly a boy-emperor — born for his
throne, and conscious of his right to it. There is
nothing in marble more perfect, and I never saw anything
which made me realize that the Romans of history
and poetry were men — nothing which brought
them so familiarly to my mind, as the feeling for beauty
shown in this infantine bust. I would rather have
it than all the gods and heroes of the Vatican.

No cast gives you any idea worth having of the
Apollo Belvidere. It is a god-like model of a man.
The lightness and the elegance of the limbs; the free,
fiery, confident energy of the atitude; the breathing,
indignant nostril and lips; the whole statue's mingled
and equal grace and power, are, with all its truth to
nature, beyond any conception I had formed of manly
beauty. It spoils one's eye for common men to look
at it. It stands there like a descended angel, with a
splendor of form and an air of power, that makes one
feel what he should have been, and mortifies him for
what he is. Most women whom I have met in Europe,
adore the Apollo as far the finest statue in the
world, and most men say as much of the Medicean
Venus. But, to my eye, the Venus, lovely as she is,
compares with the Apollo as a mortal with an angel of
light. The latter is incomparably the finest statue.
If it were only for its face, it would transcend the other
infinitely. The beauty of the Venus is only in the
limbs and body. It is a faultless, and withal, modest
representation of the flesh and blood beauty of a woman.
The Apollo is all this, and has a soul. I have
seen women that approached the Venus in form, and
had finer faces — I never saw a man that was a shadow
of the Apollo in either. It stands as it should, in a
room by itself, and is thronged at all hours by female
worshippers. They never tire of gazing at it; and I
should believe, from the open-mouthed wonder of
those whom I met at its pedestal, that the story of the
girl who pined and died for love of it, was neither improbable
nor singular.

Raphael's “Transfiguration” is agreed to be the
finest picture in the world. I had made up my mind
to the same opinion from the engravings of it, but was
painfully disappointed in the picture. I looked at it
from every corner of the room, and asked the custode
three times if he was sure this was the original. The
color offended my eye, blind as Raphael's name should
make it, and I left the room with a sigh, and an unsettled
faith in my own taste, that made me seriously
unhappy. My complacency was restored a few hours
after on hearing that the wonder was entirely in the
drawing — the colors having quite changed with time.
I bought the engraving immediately, which you have
seen too often, of course, to need my commentary.
The aerial lightness with which he has hung the figures
of the Savior and the apostles in the air, is a triumph
of the pencil over the laws of nature, that seem
to have required the power of the miracle itself.

I lost myself in coming home, and following a
priest's direction to the Corso, came unexpectedly upon
the “Pantheon,” which I recognised at once.
This wonder of architecture has no questionable beauty.
A dunce would not need to be told that it was
perfect. Its Corinthian columns fall on the eye with
that sense of fulness that seems to answer an instinct
of beauty in the very organ. One feels a fault or an

excellence in architecture long before he can give the
feeling a name; and I can see why, by Childe Harold
and others, this heathen temple is called “the pride of
Rome,” though I can not venture on a description.
The faultless interior is now used as a church, and
there lie Annibal Carracci and the divine Raphael —
two names worthy of the place, and the last of a shrine
in every bosom capable of a conception of beauty.
Glorious Raphael! If there was no other relic in
Rome, one would willingly become a pilgrim to his
ashes.

With my countryman and friend, Mr. Cleveland, I
stood in the Roman forum by the light of a clear half
moon. The soft silver rays poured in through the
ruined columns of the Temple of Fortune and threw
our shadows upon the bases of the tall shafts near the
capitol, the remains, I believe, of the temple erected
by Augustus to Jupiter Tonans. Impressive things
they are, even without their name, standing tall and
alone, with their broken capitals wreathed with ivy,
and neither roof nor wall to support them where they
were placed by hands that have mouldered for centuries.
It is difficult to rally one's senses in such a
place, and be awake coldly to the scene. We stood,
as we supposed, in the Rostrum. The noble arch,
still almost perfect, erected by the senate to Septimius
Severus, stood up clear and lofty beside us, the three
matchless and lonely columns of the supposed temple
of Jupiter Stator threw their shadows across the Forum
below, the great arch, built at the conquest of
Jerusalem to Titus, was visible in the distance, and
above them all, on the gentle ascent of the Palatine,
stood the ruined palace of the Cesars, the sharp edges
of the demolished walls breaking up through vines
and ivy, and the mellow moon of Italy softening rock
and foliage into one silver-edged mass of shadow. It
seems as if the very genius of the picturesque had arranged
these immortal ruins. If the heaps of fresh
excavation were but overgrown with grass, no poet nor
painter could better image out the Rome of his dream.
It surpasses fancy.

We walked on over fragments of marble columns
turned up from the mould, and leaving the majestic
arches of the Temple of Peace on our left, passed
under the arch of Titus (so dreaded by the Jews), to
the Coliseum. This too is magnificently ruined —
broken in every part, and yet showing still the brave
skeleton of what it was — its gigantic and triple walls,
half encircling the silent arena, and its rocky seats
lifting one above the other amid weeds and ivy, and
darkening the dens beneath, whence issued the gladiators,
beasts, and Christian martyrs, to be sacrificed for
the amusement of Rome. A sentinel paced at the
gigantic archway, a capuchin monk, whose duty is to
attend the small chapels built around the arena, walked
up and down in his russet cowl and sandals, the
moon broke through the cleft in the wall, and the
whole place was buried in the silence of a wilderness.
I have given you the features of the scene — I leave
you to people it with your own thoughts. I dare not
trust mine to a colder medium than poetry.