“‘Dear Bottom, if you can, I wish you’d write
A prologue for our comedy to-night;
Just tap that comic vein of yours which runs
Discharging a continuous stream of puns.’”
And that is what the second prologue consists of, with some repetition even of the jokes of the first, ending:—
“Now who plays Pyramus! no, that won’t go well,
I cannot get a good thing out of Lowell.
Faith, that’s too near the truth, it’s past my power,
For I’ve been trying at it half an hour.
At all events I can proclaim with glory
Snug is enacted by our Attic Story;
Who sought a lion’s skin through Rome a week,
Quite a nice way of playing hide and seek.
But the last lion that was seen in Rome
Was Dickens,—and he carried his skin home.
Thisbe’s moustache. The Greek girls never had any?
I’ll just remind them of Miss Hairyadne.
But I can’t do it. Dite al Signore,—
What’s more I won’t—che sono fuori.”[93]
An undercurrent of anxiety and affection for his father runs through the correspondence at this time, and a month later he seeks to gratify a grandfather’s feelings by devoting a whole letter, written as clearly as possible that his father might read it himself, about the sayings and doings of the two children. Some theologic questions are beginning,” he writes, “to vex her [Mabel’s] mind somewhat. She inquired of me very gravely the other day, when I said something to her about her Heavenly Father, ‘Papa, have I got a Heavenly Grandfather?’ The pictures in the churches make a great impression (and not always a pleasant one) upon her. She said to me one day: ‘O my dear papa, I love you so very much, because you take care of me; and I love mamma very much because she takes care of me; and I love Mary very much because she takes care of me; and I love Heavenly Father because he takes care of me; and I love the Madonna very much because she takes care of me; and I love the angels because they take care of me; and I love that one with the swords stuck into her, and that other one with the stick.’ These last were no doubt pictures she had seen somewhere. During Carnival, we did not let her go to the Corso much, because there was so much throwing of confetti, which are small seeds or pellets of clay about as large as peas, coated with plaster of Paris. However, she saw the edges of the great stream, here and there, as it overflowed into the side streets, and talked a great deal to Faustina about Pulcinelli and Pagliacci. She threatened rather sharply to pay back ‘Mister Pulcinello’ (as she always respectfully called him when she spoke of him in English) in his own coin, if he threw any confetti, or oftener, nasty confetti, at her. One day she was walking with me through the Piazza di Spagna, with half a roll in her hand, when she saw one of the lacqueys of the S. P. Q. R. in his queer costume. She instantly set him down for a Pulcinello, and I had much ado to hinder her from hurling the fragment of her roll at him, much as she once threw a dry bun at somebody else who shall be nameless. She is making great progress in Italian under the tuition of Dinda and Amelia, two nice little girls, daughters of our Padrone. One of the great events in her day is always the pudding—in trattoria Italian il budino. As soon as the great tin stufa has safely made its descent from the head of the facchino to the floor, she begins a dance around it, shouting in a voice loud enough to be heard as far as the Trinità dei Monti, ‘O Faustina, ditemi! C’è un puddino oggi?’ And if it turn out that there be only a pie, which is a forbidden dolce to her, she forthwith drops her voice to its lowest key and growls—‘Mi dispiace molto, mo-o-lto, Faustina; pudino non c’è: ce sono solamente pasticcie.’ Sometimes I have heard her add with a good deal of dignity, ‘Dite al cuoco che mi dispiace molto.’ A day or two ago, when she saw a plum-pudding come upon the table, she could not contain herself, but, springing up into her chair (for she can never express satisfaction without using her legs—her intoxications seeming to take direction the reverse of common), she began dancing and waving her arms quite like a Bacchanal, at the same time singing—
‘Oh, quanto mi piace, roba dolce, il puddino!
Quando lo mangio, sono felice, padrino!’
I offer this to Jemmy to translate, as an Italian exercise, for his paper. If it be not equal to Dante, upon my word I think it quite up to a good deal of Tasso, and much more to the point than nine tenths of Petrarca. Improvisations are seldom put to the test of being written down, but this bears it very well. The tender padrino—Dear little Father—was an adroit bribe, which got her a third piece of pudding by the unanimous vote of our household senate. Ask Charlie to read over the muddy stuff which Byron thought it necessary to pump up about St. Peter’s, etc., in ‘Childe Harold,’ and say if he do not agree with me that his lordship would have made a better hand of it if he had devoted himself to sincerities like this?...
“As for Walter, he grows and thrives finely. He can say A, B, C, D, or something considerably like it—nearer, in fact, a good deal, than the first four letters of the Chinese alphabet would be. He has done, during the last week, what I have challenged many older persons to do, namely, cut a double tooth. I doubt if a cabinet minister in Europe can say the same of himself. He has grown very fond of his papa, and sometimes crawls to my door of a morning before I am out of bed, and then, getting upon his feet, knocks and calls ‘Papa! papa!’ laying the accent very strongly on the first syllable. If he hears my voice, he immediately springs up in Mary’s lap, and begins shouting lustily for me. He is the fairest boy that ever was seen, and has the bluest eyes, and is the baldest person in Rome except two middle-aged Englishmen, who, you know, have a great knack that way.... In a word, he is one of that countless number of extraordinary boys out of which the world contrives afterward to make such ordinary men. I think him rather intelligent—but, as the picture dealers say, chi sa? As he is mine, I shall do rather as the picture-buyers, and call what I have got by any name I please. One cannot say definitely so early. It is hard to tell of a green shoot just worming out of the ground whether it will be an oak or an onion—they all look much alike at first.”
Not an oak, but a plant and flower of light, Lowell might shortly have said, for this is the last reference in life to the child suddenly stricken down and left behind in a Roman grave by the mourning parents, when, on the 29th of April, they went away from Rome to Naples with the one child of their four who lived to them. On the 13th of the month Lowell wrote to his eldest sister: “We are now within a fortnight of bidding farewell to what I am now forced to call dear old Rome. In spite of its occupation by an army of ten thousand French soldiers, in spite of its invasion by that more terrible force, the column of English travellers, in spite of the eternal drumming and bugling and sentinelling in the streets, and the crowding of that insular Bull—qui semper habet fœnum in cornu—there is an insensible charm about the place which grows upon you from hour to hour. There must be few cities where one can command such absolute solitude as here. One cannot expect it, to be sure, in the Colosseum by moonlight, for thither the English go by carriage loads to be lonely with a footman in livery behind them, and to quote Byron’s stuff out of Murray’s Guide; there perch the French in voluble flocks, under the necessity (more painful to them than to any other people) of being poetical—chattering Mon Dieu! qu’un joli effet! But an hour’s walk will take one out into the Campagna, where you will look across the motionless heave of the solitude dotted here and there with lazy cattle to the double wall of mountain, the nearest opaline with change of light and shadow, the farther Parian with snow that only grows whiter when the cloud shadows melt across it—the air overhead rippling with larks too countless to be watched, and the turf around you glowing with strange flowers, each a wonder, yet so numberless that you would as soon think of gathering a nosegay of grass blades. On Easter Sunday I spent an incomparable day at the Fountain of Egeria, stared at sullenly, now and then, by one of those great gray Campagna bulls, but totally safe from the English variety which had gone to get broken ribs at St. Peter’s. The show-box unholiness of Holy Week is at last well over. The best part of it was that on Holy Thursday all the Vatican was open at once—fifteen miles of incomparable art. For me the Pope washed perfumed feet, and the Cardinal Penitentiary wielded his long rod in vain. I dislike such spectacles naturally, and saw no reason why I should undergo every conceivable sort of discomfort and annoyance for the sake of another discomfort or annoyance at the end....
“The finest show I have seen in Rome is the illumination of St. Peter’s. Just after sunset I saw from the head of the scalinata, the little points of light creeping down from the cross and lantern (trickling, as it were) over the dome. Then I walked over to the Piazza di San Pietro, and the first glimpse I caught of it again was from the Ponte Sant’ Angelo. I could not have believed it would have been so beautiful. There was no time or space to pause here. Foot passengers crowding hither and thither as they heard the shout of Avanti! from the coachmen behind—dragoon-horses getting unmanageable just where there were most women to be run over—and all the while the dome drawing all eyes and thoughts the wrong way, made a hubbub to be got out of as soon as possible. Five minutes more of starting and dodging, and we were in the piazza. You have seen it and know how it seems, as if the setting sun had lodged upon the horizon and then burnt out, the fire still clinging to its golden ribs as they stand out against the evening sky. You know how, as you come nearer, you can see the soft travertine of the façade suffused with a tremulous golden gloom like the innermost shrine of a water-lily. And then the change comes as if the wind had suddenly fanned what was embers before into flame. If you could see one sunset in a lifetime and were obliged to travel four thousand miles to see it, it would give you a similar sensation; but an everyday sunset does not, for we take the gifts of God as a matter of course.
“After wondering long enough in the piazza, I went back to the Pincio (or rather the Trinità dei Monti) and watched it for an hour longer. I did not wish to see it go out. To me it seemed better to go home with the consciousness that it was still throbbing, as if I could make myself believe that there was a kind of permanence in it, and that I should see it there again some happy evening. Before leaving it, I went away and came back several times, and at every return it was a new miracle—the more miraculous for being a human piece of fairy work.