At the foot of the Pyramid is the Old Protestant Cemetery, a lovely spot, now closed. Here is the grave of Keats, with the inscription:
"This grave contains all that was mortal of a young English poet, who, on his death-bed, in the bitterness of his heart at the malicious power of his enemies, desired these words to be engraven on his tombstone: 'Here lies one whose name was writ in water.' February 24, 1821."
"Go thou to Rome—at once the paradise,
The grave, the city, and the wilderness;
And where its wrecks like shattered mountains rise,
And flowering weeds, and fragrant copses dress
The bones of desolation's nakedness,
Pass, till the spirit of the spot shall lead
Thy footsteps to a slope of green access,
Where, like an infant's smile, over the dead,
A light of laughing flowers along the grass is spread,
"And grey walls moulder round, on which dull Time
Feeds, like slow fire upon a hoary brand;
And one keen pyramid, with wedge sublime,
Pavilioning the dust of him who planned
This refuge for his memory, doth stand
Like flame transformed to marble; and beneath
A field is spread, on which a newer band
Have pitched in Heaven's smile their camp of death,
Welcoming him we lose with scarce extinguished breath."
Shelley's Adonais.
Very near the grave of Keats is that of Augustus William Hare, the elder of the two brothers who wrote the "Guesses at Truth," ob. 1834.
"When I am inclined to be serious, I love to wander up and down before the tomb of Caius Cestius. The Protestant burial-ground is there, and most of the little monuments are erected to the young—young men of promise, cut off when on their travels full of enthusiasm, full of enjoyment; brides, in the bloom of their beauty, on their first journey; or children borne from home in search of health. This stone was placed by his fellow-travellers, young as himself, who will return to the house of his parents without him; that, by a husband or a father, now in his native country. His heart is buried in that grave.
"It is a quiet and sheltered nook, covered in the winter with violets; and the pyramid, that overshadows it, gives it a classic and singularly solemn air. You feel an interest there, a sympathy you were not prepared for. You are yourself in a foreign land; and they are for the most part your countrymen. They call upon you in your mother tongue—in English—in words unknown to a native, known only to yourself: and the tomb of Cestius, that old majestic pile, has this also in common with them. It is itself a stranger among strangers. It has stood there till the language spoken round about it has changed; and the shepherd, born at the foot, can read the inscription no longer."—Rogers.
The New Burial Ground was opened in 1825. It extends for some distance along the slope of the hill under the old Aurelian Wall, and is beautifully shaded by cypresses, and carpeted with violets. Amid the forest of tombs we may notice that which contains the heart of Shelley (his body having been burnt upon the shore at Lerici, where it was thrown up by the sea), inscribed:
"Percy Bysshe Shelley, Cor Cordium. Natus IV. Aug. MDCCXCII. Obiit VIII. Jul. MDCCCXXII.
'Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea change
Into something rich and strange.'"