Old Lady Wenlock[233] came to the Hôtel Europa close beside us, and was a constant pleasure. My mother drove with her frequently. She scarcely ever said anything that was not worth observing, and her reminiscences were of the most various kinds. She it was who, by telling my mother of her own strong wish and that of other people to possess some of my sketches, first suggested the idea of selling my drawings. We amused ourselves one evening by putting prices on the backs of sketches of the winter—highly imaginative prices, as it seemed to us. Some time afterwards Lady Wenlock had a party, and asked for the loan of my portfolio to show to her friends: when they came back there were orders to the amount of £60.
Other friends of whom we saw much this winter were old Lady Selina Bridgeman, sister of my mother's dear friend Lady Frances Higginson; and Lord and Lady Hobart. Lord Hobart was afterwards Governor of Madras, but at this time he was excessively poor, and they lived in a tiny attic apartment in the Via Sistina. At many houses we met the long-haired Franz Liszt, the famous composer, and heard him play. Mr. and Mrs. Archer Houblon also were people we liked, and we were drawn very near to them by our common interest in the news which reached us just after our arrival in Rome of the engagement of Arthur Stanley, just after his appointment to the Deanery of Westminster, to Lady Augusta Bruce (first cousin of Mrs. Houblon), the person whom his mother had mentioned as the one she would most like him to marry.
A little before Christmas—a Christmas of the old kind, with a grand Papal benediction from the altar of St. Peter's—Henry Alford, Dean of Canterbury, and his family came to Rome. With them I went many delightful expeditions into the distant Campagna: to Ostia, with its then still gorgeous marbles and melancholy tower and pine; to Castel Fusano, with its palace, like that of the Sleeping Beauty, rising lovely from its green lawns, with its pine avenue and decaying vases with golden-flowered aloes, and beyond all the grand old forest with its deep green recesses and gigantic pines and bays and ilexes, its deep still pools and its abysses of wood, bounded on one side by the Campagna, and on the other by the sea; to Collatia, with its woods of violets and anemones, and its purling brook and broken tower; to Cerbara, with its colossal caves and violet banks, and laurustinus waving like angels' wings through the great rifts; to Veii, with its long circuit of ruins, its tunnelled Ponte Sodo and its mysterious columbarium and tomb. Another excursion also lives in my mind, which I took with Harry and Albert Brassey, when we went out very early to Frascati, and climbed in the gorgeous early morning to Tusculum, where the little crocuses were just opening upon the dew-laden turf, and then made our way across hedge and ditch to Grotta Ferrata and its frescoes.
I have always found—at Rome especially—that the pleasantest way is to see very little, and to enjoy that thoroughly. "Je n'avale pas les plaisirs, je sais les goûter."
In the spring our sketchings and excursions were frequently shared by our cousins, Maria and Mary Shaw-Lefevre, who came to Rome with their maternal aunt, Miss Wright, whom I then saw for the first time, but who afterwards became the dearest of my friends—a nominal "Aunt Sophy," far kinder and far more beloved than any real aunt I have ever known.
But most of all does my remembrance linger upon the many quiet hours spent alone with the mother during this winter, of an increasing communion with her upon all subjects, in which she then, being in perfect health, was able to take an active and energetic interest.
Especially do I look back to each Sunday afternoon passed in the Medici Gardens, where she would sit on the sheltered sunny seats backed by the great box hedges—afternoons when her gentle presence, when the very thought of her loved existence, made all things sweet and beautiful to me, recalling Cowper's lines—