“I was the only one of the party at table that day, and there was an amount of vivacity among the dishes such as I never saw before. I took my soup by the process of absorption, the whole of it having suddenly leaped out of my plate into my lap. The table was literally at an angle of 45° all the time, with occasional eccentricities of the horizontal and the perpendicular, every change of level (or dip rather) being accomplished with a sudden jerk, which gave us a fine opportunity for studying the force of projectiles. Imagine the Captain, the First Mate, and myself at every one of these sudden hiccoughs (as it were) of the vessel, each endeavoring to think that he has six hands and finding too late that he has only two, during which interval between doubt and certainty, I have seen the contents of three dishes, A B C, change places, A taking the empty space left by B, B in like manner ejecting C, and C very naturally, having nowhere else to go, is thrown loose upon society and leads a nomadic life, first upon the tablecloth, then upon the seat, then upon the floor, every new position being a degradation, until at last it finds precarious lodging in one of the lee staterooms. You find your legs in a permanent condition of drunkenness, and that without any of the previous exhilaration. The surface of the country is such as I never saw described in any geographical work; the only thing at all approaching it which I have met with was the state of affairs during the great earthquake at Lisbon. You have just completed your arrangements for descending an inclined plane, when you find yourself climbing an almost perpendicular precipice, the surface of which being, by a curious freak of nature, of painted floor-cloth, renders your foothold quite precarious. It is like nothing but a nightmare.
“Mabel was very sick, and her only comfort was to lie in my berth and take ‘strange food’ (which she immediately returned again) through a spoon which opens in a very mysterious and interesting manner out of the handle of a knife which John Holmes gave me the day we sailed.[90] However, she was up again the next day, and has continued most devoted in her attendance at table, not to speak of little supernumerary lunches of crackers and toast which she contrives to extract from the compassion of the steward or cook. The galley is a favorite place of resort for her, to which she retires as one would to a summer-house, and where, inhaling the fumes from a cooking-stove of a very warm temperament, she converses with the cook (as well as I can learn) on cosmography, and picks up little separate bits of geography like disjointed fragments of several different dissected maps. With what extraordinary and thrilling narratives she repays him I can only guess, but I heard her this morning assuring Mary that she had seen two rats, one red and the other blue, running about the cabin. Indeed, her theories on the subject of natural history correspond with that era of the science when Goldsmith wrote his ‘Animated Nature.’ She cultivates her vocal powers by singing ‘Jeannette and Jeannot’ with extraordinary vigor, and with a total irrecognition of the original air, which may arise from some hereditary contempt of the French. She assists regularly at ‘’bouting ship,’ as she calls it, standing at the wheel with admirable gravity. The Captain always takes the wheel and issues the orders when the ship is put about, and as this ceremony has taken place pretty regularly every few hours for the last eight days, Mabel has acquired all the requisite phrases. At intervals during the day, a shrill voice may be heard crying out, “Bout ship!’ ‘Mainsail ha-u-l!’ ‘Tacks and sheets!’ ‘Let go and ha-u-ll,’ the whole prefixed by an exceedingly emphatic ‘Ha-a-a-rd a lee!!’ There is no part of the vessel except the hold and the rigging which she has not repeatedly inspected. With all the sailors she is on intimate terms, and employs them at odd hours in the manufacture of various articles of furniture.... Nannie has been a constant source of interest and amusement to Mabel, who climbs up to visit her every day fifty times at least, and gives her little handfuls of hay and oats which Nannie seems to eat with a particular relish.”
The humorous account of the chief mate which occurs in the section “In the Mediterranean,” in “Leaves from my Journal,” is taken from a full and lively letter written by Lowell a few days later on shipboard to his brother-in-law, Dr. Estes Howe. By that time they were off Tunis. “Perhaps the finest thing we have seen,” he writes to Dr. Howe, “was the first view of the African coast, which was Cape Espartel in Morocco. There were five mountains in the background, the highest being as tall as the Catskills, but the outlines much sharper and grander. They were heaped together as we saw the Adirondacks from Burlington. We were a whole day and half the night in beating through the Straits of Gibraltar, and had very fine views of the shores on both sides. The little Spanish town of Tarifa had a great charm for me, lying under a mountain opposite the Moorish coast, with its now useless walls all around it. The fires of the charcoal burners on the mountains were exceedingly picturesque, especially at night, when they gave to some dozen peaks on both sides the aspect of volcanoes. Apes Hill, opposite the rock of Gibraltar, is higher and more peculiar in its forms than the rock itself. In some views it is almost a perfect cone, and again, some of the lower peaks, when you can catch their individual outlines, are pyramidal. After getting through the Straits, we kept along the Spanish coast, with very light winds and a new moon, as far as Cape de Gat. We were four days in making these 150 miles (we ran 280 miles in one day on the Atlantic). All along there were noble mountains, with here and there a little white town sprinkled along their bases on the edge of the water like the grains of rice which the girl dropped in the fairy tale. Sometimes you see larger buildings on the slope of the mountain, which seem to be convents. All are white except the watch-towers, which you see now and then on points, and these are commonly of a soft brown, the color of the stone. The hues of the mountains at sunset and just after were exquisite. The nearer ones were of a deep purple, and I now understand what was meant by the Mediterranean atmosphere....”
The travellers made a brief halt at Malta, whence they took steamer to Naples, and from there went by rail to Florence. There they stayed, living in the Via Maggio, from the 26th of August to the 30th of October. Neither in his letters nor in the sketches which he afterward published under the title of “Leaves from my Journal in Italy and Elsewhere” can one find more than a slight record of Lowell’s sojourn in a city which was especially endeared to him by that study of Dante which had been his real introduction to the great world. “I liked my Florentine better than my Roman walks,” he said; “apart from any difference in the men, I had a far deeper emotion when I stood on the Sasso di Dante, than at Horace’s Sabine farm, or by the tomb of Virgil;”[91] for he found it harder “to bridge over the gulf of Paganism than of centuries,” and the marked individuality of mediæval Italian towns attracted him all the more for their being modern and Christian. In Florence there was an added pleasure in the companionship of Mr. and Mrs. Frank Shaw, and in the society of William Page.
In a letter to Mr. John Holmes, written from Rome half a year later, Lowell writes: “Once when I was in Florence, Page and Shaw and I took a walk out of the city to see a famous Cenacolo of Andrea del Sarto in the refectory of a suppressed convent, about a mile and a half outside the Porta Santa Croce. We took a roundabout course among the hills, going first to Galileo’s tower, and then to that of the old Church of San Miniato which Michelangelo defended. Thence we descended steeply toward the Arno, crossed it by a ferry-boat, and then found ourselves opposite a trattoria. It was a warm October day, and we unanimously turned in at the open door. There were three rooms, one upstairs, where one might dine ‘more obscurely and courageously’ the kitchen, and the room in which we were. As I sat upon the corner of the bench, I looked out through some grape-trailers which hung waving over the door, and saw first the Arno, then, beyond it a hill on which stood a villa with a garden laid out in squares with huge walls of box and a clump of tall black cypresses in the middle, then, to the right of this, the ruined tower of San Miniato, and beyond it that from which Milton had doubtless watched the moon rising ‘o’er the top of Fesole.’ This was my landscape. Behind me was the kitchen. The cook in his white linen cap was stirring alternately a huge cauldron of soup and a pan of sausages, which exploded into sudden flame now and then, as if by spontaneous combustion. A woman wound up at short intervals a jack which turned three or four chickens before the fire, and attended a kind of lake of hot fat in which countless tiny fishes darted, squirmed, and turned topsy-turvy in a way so much more active and with an expression of so much more enjoyment than is wont to characterize living fish, that you would have said they had now for the first time found their element, and were created to revel in boiling oil. The wine sold here was the produce of the vineyard which you could see behind and on each side of the little trattoria. We had a large loaf of bread, and something like a quart and a half of pure cool wine for nine of our cents. During the whole time I was in Florence, though I never saw any one drink water, I also never saw a single drunken man, except some Austrian soldiers, and only four of these—two of them officers. In Rome, also, drunkenness is exceedingly rare, but less so, I think, than in Florence. Here you see everywhere the sign, Spaccio d’ Acqua Vitæ. In Florence I never remember to have seen spirits advertised for sale, except by those who dealt in the wants of the Forestieri.”
Just before leaving the city for Rome, Lowell was filled with consternation at a letter received from home, telling him that his father had been stricken with paralysis. His first impulse was to take his family to Rome and then return at once to America, but a little reflection showed him how useless this would be. “I should never have left home,” he wrote his father from Pisa, where they had halted on their way to Leghorn, “if I had not thought that you wished it, or rather wished that we should have been abroad and got back. I hope to find a letter awaiting us at Rome. But at any rate we shall come home as soon as we can. I hardly know what I am writing, for I have just got word from Mr. Black at Leghorn, saying that our places are engaged on board the steamer for Civita Vecchia, and that we must be there as soon as possible in the morning. I am going on in the early train, leaving Maria to come at one o’clock with a servant from the hotel. It is now between nine and ten, and the rain still falls heavily. I fear a bad day to-morrow, and what with that and thinking about you and home, my mind is confused. I find nothing abroad which, after being seen, would tempt me away from Elmwood again. I enjoy the Art here, but I shall equally enjoy it there in the retrospect. I wish some of the buildings were on the other side of the water, but I suppose we should be more contented not to see them if they were.”
The voyage by steamer to Civita Vecchia was a very rough one, occupying five days instead of the eleven hours in which it sometimes was made. A letter from Dr. Howe was received a few days after the Lowells reached Rome, which gave more exact account of Dr. Lowell’s illness and left little hope of anything like permanent restoration. “Had it been possible,” Lowell replied to his brother-in-law, “I should have come home at once. But I could neither leave Maria here, nor safely expose her to the inclemencies of a winter passage across the Atlantic. There is nothing for it, but to hope and pray. But the thought that I have no right to be here casts a deeper shadow over everything in the dreary city of ruin and of an activity that is more sad than ruin itself. The dear Elmwood that has always looked so sunny in my memory comes now between me and the sun, and the long shadow of its eclipse follows and falls upon me everywhere. It is a wonderful satisfaction to me now to feel that dear Father and I have been so much at one and have been sources of so much happiness to each other for so many years.”
The entrance into Rome is thus described in a letter to Miss Maria Fay:—
“It has been raining fast, but as we approach Rome, winding up and down among the hills and hollows of the Campagna between high stone walls, the clouds break and the moon shines out with supreme clearness. The tall reeds which lean over the road here and there glisten like steel, wet as they still are with the rain. The orange-trees have all silver leaves, and even the dark laurels and cypresses glitter. It is like an enchanted garden of the Arabian Nights. Presently we overtake other lumbering diligences (we are posting and have done the thirty-five miles from Civita Vecchia in ten hours), and rattling through the gate are stopped by cocked-hatted officials, who demand passports. Opposite are the high walls of the Inquisition. We are in Rome. One ought to have a sensation, and one has. It is that of chill. One climbs stiffly down from the coupé, and stamps about with short-skirted and long-booted postilions whose huge spurs are clanking in every direction. Very soon we, being armed with a lascia passare,—there are three coach loads of us,—drive off, leaving four other loads behind still wrangling and jangling with the cocked hats. As we rattle away, the light from the window of the uffizio di polizia gleams upon the musket of a blue overcoated French soldier marching to and fro on guard. Five minutes more rattle and the Dome glistens silverly in the moonlight, and the Titanic colonnade marches solemnly by us in ranks without end. Then a glimpse of feathery fountains, a turn to the right, a strip of gloomy street, a sudden turn to the left, and we are on the bridge of St. Angelo. Bernini’s angels polk gayly on their pedestals with the emblems of the Passion in their arms, and by wringing your neck you may see behind you on the left the huge castle refusing to be comforted by the moonlight, with its triumphant archangel just alighting on its summit. Another sharp turn to the left, and you are in a black slit of street again, which at last, after half a mile of unsavoriness, becomes the Corso, the main street of modern Rome. And everything thus far is palpably modern, especially the Hotel d’Angleterre, at which we presently alight. Next day we remove to lodgings already engaged for us by F. Boott, near the Pincio, in the highest part of the city. Here we manage to be comfortable through a month of never-ceasing rain. Then it clears, and we have a month of cloudless sunshine, with roses blooming in the gardens and daisies in the fields. To-day is the first rainy day, and I devote it to you.”
The Lowells had their quarters at Capo le Case, No. 68, on the third piano, and were surrounded by a few English and American friends. Mr. and Mrs. Story were not in Rome when they first arrived, but joined them in about a fortnight, when the rains had ceased at last and so permitted walks in the Campagna. The first part of their stay had been dreary enough, and drew from Lowell the whimsical remark: “Sometimes as I look from the Pincian, I think that the best thing about [modern Rome] is that the hills look like Brighton.” And Mrs. Lowell draws a humorous picture of her husband, and their half homesick feelings, when she writes: “Through Mr. Black we have the English journals and papers, and it really gives me a little home feeling when I see a bundle of Examiners and Athenæums brought in just as they used to be from Mr. Wells’s, and see James selecting his cigar with particular satisfaction and giving the fire an express arrangement, and then drawing up his chair to it and putting his feet on the fender, beginning to read.”