A WALK AT DUSK.
Yesterday went, in a band at dusk, for a melancholy stroll through the back streets. The Piranesi effect: yards of palaces, Marescotti, Massimo alle Colonne, the staircase of Palazzo Altieri. These immense grass-grown yards, with dreary closed windows all round, fountains alone breaking their silence, look like a bit of provincial life, of some tiny mountain town, enclosed in Rome. At Monte Giordano (Palazzo Gabbrielli) it becomes the walled Umbrian town, castellated. In this gloom, this sadness of icy evening sky between the high roofs, and after the appalling sadness of a church, squalid, dark, a few people kneeling, and the sacristan extinguishing the altars after a Benediction (every grief, one would think, laid down on that floor only to pick up a weight of the grief of others); after this there was something sweet and country-like in the splash of the fountains at Monte Giordano; the water bringing from the free mountains into this gloomy city; and to me the recollection of a Tuscan villa, of peace and serenity.
February 27.