University of Virginia Library

21. CHAPTER XXI.
A WALK ON THE CAMPAGNA.

It was a bright forenoon of February; a month in
which the brief severity of a Roman winter is already
past, and when violets and daisies begin to show themselves
in spots favored by the sun. The sculptor came
out of the city by the gate of San Sebastiano, and walked
briskly along the Appian Way.

For the space of a mile or two beyond the gate, this
ancient and famous road is as desolate and disagreeable as
most of the other Roman avenues. It extends over small,
uncomfortable paving-stones, between brick and plastered
walls, which are very solidly constructed, and so high as
almost to exclude a view of the surrounding country. The
houses are of most uninviting aspect, neither picturesque,
nor homelike and social; they have seldom or never a
door opening on the wayside, but are accessible only
from the rear, and frown inhospitably upon the traveller
through iron-grated windows. Here and there appears a
dreary inn, or a wine-shop, designated by the withered
bush beside the entrance, within which you discern a stone-built
and sepulchral interior, where guests refresh themselves

with sour bread and goats' milk cheese, washed
down with wine of dolorous acerbity.

At frequent intervals along the roadside, uprises the
ruin of an ancient tomb. As they stand now, these structures
are immensely high and broken mounds of conglomerated
brick, stone, pebbles, and earth, all molten by
time into a mass as solid and indestructible as if each
tomb were composed of a single boulder of granite.
When first erected, they were cased externally, no doubt,
with slabs of polished marble, artfully wrought bas-reliefs,
and all such suitable adornments, and were rendered majestically
beautiful by grand architectural designs. This
antique splendor has long since been stolen from the dead,
to decorate the palaces and churches of the living. Nothing
remains to the dishonored sepulchres, except their
massiveness.

Even the pyramids form hardly a stranger spectacle, or
are more alien from human sympathies, than the tombs of
the Appian Way, with their gigantic height, breadth, and
solidity, defying time and the elements, and far too mighty
to be demolished by an ordinary earthquake. Here you
may see a modern dwelling, and a garden with its vines
and olive-trees, perched on the lofty dilapidation of a
tomb, which forms a precipice of fifty feet in depth on
each of the four sides. There is a home on that funereal
mound, where generations of children have been born,
and successive lives been spent, undisturbed by the ghost
of the stern Roman whose ashes were so preposterously
burdened. Other sepulchres wear a crown of grass,
shrubbery, and forest-trees, which throw out a broad

sweep of branches, having had time, twice over, to be a
thousand years of age. On one of them stands a tower,
which, though immemorially more modern than the tomb,
was itself built by immemorial hands, and is now rifted
quite from top to bottom by a vast fissure of decay; the
tomb-hillock, its foundation, being still as firm as ever, and
likely to endure until the last trump shall rend it wide
asunder, and summon forth its unknown dead.

Yes; its unknown dead! For, except in one or two
doubtful instances, these mountainous sepulchral edifices
have not availed to keep so much as the bare name of
an individual or a family from oblivion. Ambitious of
everlasting remembrance, as they were, the slumberers
might just as well have gone quietly to rest, each in his
pigeon-hole of a columbaria, or under his little green
hillock, in a graveyard, without a headstone to mark the
spot. It is rather satisfactory than otherwise, to think
that all these idle pains have turned out so utterly abortive.

About two miles, or more, from the city-gate, and right
upon the roadside, Kenyon passed an immense round pile,
sepulchral in its original purposes, like those already mentioned.
It was built of great blocks of hewn stone, on a
vast, square foundation of rough, agglomerated material,
such as composes the mass of all the other ruinous tombs.
But whatever might be the cause, it was in a far better
state of preservation than they. On its broad summit
rose the battlements of a mediæval fortress, out of the
midst of which (so long since had time begun to crumble
the supplemental structure, and cover it with soil, by

means of wayside dust) grew trees, bushes, and thick
festoons of ivy. This tomb of a woman had become the
citadel and donjon-keep of a castle; and all the care that
Cecilia Metella's husband could bestow, to secure endless
peace for her beloved relics, had only sufficed to make
that handful of precious ashes the nucleus of battles, long
ages after her death.

A little beyond this point, the sculptor turned aside
from the Appian Way, and directed his course across the
Campagna, guided by tokens that were obvious only to
himself. On one side of him, but at a distance, the Claudian
aqueduct was striding over fields and watercourses.
Before him, many miles away, with a blue atmosphere
between, rose the Alban hills, brilliantly silvered with
snow and sunshine.

He was not without a companion. A buffalo-calf, that
seemed shy and sociable by the selfsame impulse, had
begun to make acquaintance with him, from the moment
when he left the road. This frolicsome creature gambolled
along, now before, now behind; standing a moment
to gaze at him, with wild, curious eyes, he leaped aside
and shook his shaggy head, as Kenyon advanced too nigh;
then, after loitering in the rear, he came galloping up, like
charge of cavalry, but halted, all of a sudden, when the
sculptor turned to look, and bolted across the Campagna,
at the slightest signal of nearer approach. The young,
sportive thing, Kenyon half fancied, was serving him as a
guide, like the heifer that led Cadmus to the site of his
destined city; for, in spite of a hundred vagaries, his
general course was in the right direction, and along by

several objects which the sculptor had noted as landmarks
of his way.

In this natural intercourse with a rude and healthy
form of animal life, there was something that wonderfully
revived Kenyon's spirits. The warm rays of the sun,
too, were wholesome for him in body and soul; and so
was a breeze that bestirred itself occasionally, as if for the
sole purpose of breathing upon his cheek, and dying softly
away, when he would fain have felt a little more decided
kiss. This shy, but loving breeze reminded him strangely
of what Hilda's deportment had sometimes been towards
himself.

The weather had very much to do, no doubt, with these
genial and delightful sensations, that made the sculptor so
happy with mere life, in spite of a head and heart full of
doleful thoughts, anxieties, and fears, which ought in all
reason to have depressed him. It was like no weather
that exists anywhere, save in Paradise and in Italy; certainly
not in America, where it is always too strenuous on
the side either of heat or cold. Young as the season was,
and wintry as it would have been under a more rigid sky,
it resembled summer rather than what we New Englanders
recognize in our idea of spring. But there was an indescribable
something, sweet, fresh, and remotely affectionate,
which the matronly summer loses, and which thrilled,
and, as it were, tickled Kenyon's heart with a feeling
partly of the senses, yet far more a spiritual delight. In
a word, it was as if Hilda's delicate breath were on his
cheek.

After walking at a brisk pace for about half an hour,

he reached a spot where an excavation appeared to have
been begun, at some not very distant period. There was
a hollow space in the earth, looking exceedingly like
a deserted cellar, being enclosed within old subterranean
walls, constructed of thin Roman bricks, and made accessible
by a narrow flight of stone steps. A suburban villa
had probably stood over this site, in the imperial days of
Rome, and these might have been the ruins of a bathroom,
or some other apartment that was required to be
wholly or partly under ground. A spade can scarcely
be put into that soil, so rich in lost and forgotten things,
without hitting upon some discovery which would attract
all eyes, in any other land. If you dig but a little way,
you gather bits of precious marble, coins, rings, and engraved
gems; if you go deeper, you break into columbaria,
or into sculptured and richly frescoed apartments
that look like festive halls, but were only sepulchres.

The sculptor descended into the cellar-like cavity, and
sat down on a block of stone. His eagerness had brought
him thither sooner than the appointed hour. The sunshine
fell slantwise into the hollow, and happened to be
resting on what Kenyon at first took to be a shapeless
fragment of stone, possibly marble, which was partly concealed
by the crumbling down of earth.

But his practised eye was soon aware of something
artistic in this rude object. To relieve the anxious tedium
of his situation, he cleared away some of the soil, which
seemed to have fallen very recently, and discovered a
headless figure of marble. It was earth-stained, as well
it might be, and had a slightly corroded surface, but at

once impressed the sculptor as a Greek production, and
wonderfully delicate and beautiful. The head was gone;
both arms were broken off at the elbows. Protruding
from the loose earth, however, Kenyon beheld the fingers
of a marble hand; it was still appended to its arm, and a
little farther search enabled him to find the other. Placing
these limbs in what the nice adjustment of the fractures
proved to be their true position, the poor, fragmentary
woman forthwith showed that she retained her modest
instincts to the last. She had perished with them, and
snatched them back at the moment of revival. For these
long-buried hands immediately disposed themselves in the
manner that nature prompts, as the antique artist knew,
and as all the world has seen, in the Venus de Medici.

“What a discovery is here!” thought Kenyon to himself.
“I seek for Hilda, and find a marble woman! Is
the omen good or ill?”

In a corner of the excavation, lay a small round block
of stone, much incrusted with earth that had dried and
hardened upon it. So, at least, you would have described
this object, until the sculptor lifted it, turned it hither and
thither in his hands, brushed off the clinging soil, and
finally placed it on the slender neck of the newly discovered
statue. The effect was magical. It immediately
lighted up and vivified the whole figure, endowing it with
personality, soul, and intelligence. The beautiful Idea at
once asserted its immortality, and converted that heap of
forlorn fragments into a whole, as perfect to the mind, if
not to the eye, as when the new marble gleamed with
snowy lustre; nor was the impression marred by the earth

that still hung upon the exquisitely graceful limbs, and
even filled the lovely crevice of the lips. Kenyon cleared
it away from between them, and almost deemed himself
rewarded with a living smile.

It was either the prototype or a better repetition of the
Venus of the Tribune. But those who have been dissatisfied
with the small head, the narrow, soulless face, the
buttonhole eyelids, of that famous statue, and its mouth
such as nature never moulded, should see the genial
breadth of this far nobler and sweeter countenance. It is
one of the few works of antique sculpture in which we
recognize womanhood, and that, moreover, without prejudice
to its divinity.

Here, then, was a treasure for the sculptor to have
found! How happened it to be lying there, beside its
grave of twenty centuries? Why were not the tidings of
its discovery already noised abroad? The world was
richer than yesterday, by something far more precious
than gold. Forgotten beauty had come back, as beautiful
as ever; a goddess had risen from her long slumber,
and was a goddess still. Another cabinet in the Vatican
was destined to shine as lustrously as that of the Apollo
Belvedere; or, if the aged pope should resign his claim,
an emperor would woo this tender marble, and win her as
proudly as an imperial bride!

Such were the thoughts, with which Kenyon exaggerated
to himself the importance of the newly-discovered
statue, and strove to feel at least a portion of the interest
which this event would have inspired in him, a little while
before. But, in reality, he found it difficult to fix his

mind upon the subject. He could hardly, we fear, be
reckoned a consummate artist, because there was something
dearer to him than his art; and, by the greater
strength of a human affection, the divine statue seemed
to fall asunder again, and become only a heap of worthless
fragments.

While the sculptor sat listlessly gazing at it, there was
a sound of small hoofs, clumsily galloping on the Campagna;
and, soon, his frisky acquaintance, the buffalo-calf,
came and peeped over the edge of the excavation.
Almost at the same moment, he heard voices, which approached
nearer and nearer; a man's voice, and a feminine
one, talking the musical tongue of Italy. Besides
the hairy visage of his four-footed friend, Kenyon now
saw the figures of a peasant and a contadina, making gestures
of salutation to him, on the opposite verge of the
hollow space.