A little later, when we came to the first ruins that precede the aqueducts, there were the white cattle, stepping about among the broken pillars, with their huge spreading horns all gilded. These had not changed since the days when the sun gleamed on the grandeurs of classic Rome. Only then yonder building—temple, or tomb, or villa—fronted the morning with a forgotten stateliness, a lost grace.
Is anything comparable to the scene that meets the traveller on his entry into Rome? Alas! St. John Lateran no longer stands like some titanic splendid ship about to slip her moorings and sail away into the wild, lonely sea of the Campagna. New walls have sprung up without the noble ancient walls; sordid disjointed lengths of streets, mean houses with blistered, leprous plaster; and evil-looking little wine-shops. Nevertheless, nothing can spoil the moment when the Lateran Church first gathers shape against the sky. All those statues with tossing gesture against the faint blue of the new day, heroic figures with outstretched arms seeming to gather pilgrims into the city; and in the midst of them the Saviour uplifting the Cross of Salvation! To the believer what a welcome! And it is Rome herself at a glance, too; for if the Church stands here beckoning between earth and sky, she is jostled below and round about by the still speaking wonders of old Pagan Rome.
XXX
One of the advantages of being “little people in a little place” is the pleasure small things can give one. The Duke of Devonshire has seventy men in his garden. Is it possible to imagine taking an interest in anything conducted on so enormous a scale? It is not gardening, it is horticultural government! There can be no individual knowledge of any “beloved flower,” as our Dutch friend has it. Outside a millionaire’s greenhouse we once beheld regiment after regiment of Begonia pots. It made one’s brain reel. How insupportable anything so repeated would become!
Even in small gardens there is too much of a tendency nowadays to overdo garden effects. The flagged-path effect can certainly be overdone. We were tempted to visit a farmhouse the other day, adorably placed on a high Sussex down just where a stretch of table-land dominates an immense panorama of undulating country, and a vast half-circle of horizon. With a few more trees no situation could have been more beautiful.
“It was a party of the name of Mosensohn” who had taken the old farmhouse, we are told, and they were transmogrifying it according to the most modern principles of how the plutocrat’s farmhouse should look.
In some ways it was very well done. The fine old lines of wall and roof were carefully preserved; the high brick wall with its arched doorway and door with the grille in it, were quite in keeping, and gave one a sense of comfortable seclusion as one stepped in off the high road.
But the square court, once the farmyard, divided by two different levels, was completely flagged. Only a few beds against the wall, and a strip of turf on the lower level under the house, afforded any relief to the eye. There was a sunk garden beyond which was turfed, and the sense of rest it instantly afforded made one realize what the incoming family will suffer on a scorching August day from the glare and refractions of the flags in a space so hemmed in. In the right spirit of garden mania, we were not above taking what hints we could. And some were very good. All the beds on that first level were planted with cool-looking blue and purple flowers—a happy thought where there was so much hot stone. And the old cow stables had been very cleverly converted into a most Italian-looking brick pergola which ran the length of the sunk Rose Garden, and ended in a round summer-house with a window. From there, as well as from the Rose Garden, the wide view over the Downs met the gaze. Vividly coloured herbaceous borders ran along the side nearest to the sudden slope of the hill. There is something very pleasing to the senses when the glance passes from such an ordered kaleidoscope of colour to the misty vastness of a far-reaching view.
In the middle of the Rose Garden was a sunk fountain in a long narrow basin.