Standing before the wonderful altar-piece of Guido Reni's Crucifixion, painted against a wild and stormy sky, we realized how the suffering face of the compassionate Christ must have risen again and again before the despairing eyes of the persecuted child-wife:
"the piece
Of Master Guido Reni, Christ on Cross,
Second to nought observable in Rome."
Other and more impressive associations with Shelley's life in Rome than the little room on the Corso we found this afternoon when we drove out to the Baths of Caracalla, which even now cover so large a space that they have been well named a city of pleasure. We climbed over the mountainous ruin and up the winding stairs, trying to find just such a perch as Shelley described in the preface to his "Prometheus Unbound."
Bald and naked are these walls to-day, but not unsightly, as they stand out against the blue of the Roman sky and the fresh green of the Campagna. They are denuded of the vines and flowers that adorned them when, as Shelley says, he wrote his poem "among the flowery glades and thickets of odoriferous blossoming trees which are extended, in ever-winding labyrinths, upon its immense platforms and dizzy arches suspended in the air."
Now as then Rome lies on one side, with her many domes and towers; on the other are the mountains, blue in the distance, and white beyond the blue, where the snow lingers late upon their peaks. Like another mountain stands out the dome of St. Peter's, which Ampère says is "the only one of the works of man that possesses something of the grandeur of the works of God."
Being in the mood for poetic associations, we drove around by the Porta San Paolo, just outside of which, enclosed by high walls and overshadowed by the great pyramidal Tomb of Caius Cestius, is the old Protestant Cemetery. An ideal Campo Santo is this lovely spot, of which Shelley wrote that "it might make one in love with death to think that one should be buried in so sweet a place." We wandered over the grass and looked up at the sky through the trees, while Zelphine quoted the lines that fit the scene so well:
"Pass, till the spirit of the spot shall lead
Thy footsteps to a slope of green access,