Richard Henry Dana, the elder, born in Boston in 1815, came to Rome to die in 1882.
Very near the tomb of William Wetmore and Emelyn Story is that of Constance Fenimore Woolson. Over the graves of William and Mary Howitt is the inscription: “Let not your heart be troubled; believe in God, believe also in me.”
On the wall just back of the new tomb erected over the ashes of Shelley by Onslow Ford in 1891 is a memorial tablet placed to Frederick W. H. Myers, bearing this inscription:—
“This tablet is placed to the memory of Frederick William Henry Myers, born at Keswick, Cumberland, Feb. 6, 1843; died in Rome, Jan. 17, 1901. ‘He asked life of Thee, and Thou gavest him long life ever and forever.’”
Over the grave of John Addington Symonds, whose best monument is in his admirable History of the Renaissance in Italy, is a Latin inscription written by Professor Jowett of Oxford, and a stanza from the Greek of Cleanthes, translated by Mr. Symonds as follows:—
“Lead thou, our God, law, reason, motion, life;
All names for Thee alike are vain and hollow;
Lead me, for I will follow without strife,
Or, if I strive, still more I blindly follow.”
John Addington Symonds, who certainly ranks as the most gifted interpreter of Italy, in her art, her legends and associations, and her landscape loveliness, died in the Rome he so loved in 1893. His wife was ill in Venice, but his daughter, Margaret,—his inseparable companion and his helper in his work,—was with him. It is Miss Symonds who prefaced a memorial volume to her father with the exquisite lines:—
“O Love; we two shall go no longer
To lands of summer beyond the sea.”
Near the graves of Keats and of his friend, Joseph Severn, are those of Augustus William Hare and John Gibson, the sculptor, who died in 1868. Some ten years before Hawthorne, meeting Gibson at a dinner given by T. Buchanan Read, wrote of him that it was whispered about the table that he had been in Rome for forty-two years and that he had a quiet, self-contained aspect as of one who had spent a calm life among his clay and marble.
Dwight Benton, an American painter and writer, who was for some time in the diplomatic service and whose home had been in Rome for more than a quarter of a century, lies buried here. For many years he was the editor of The Roman World, which still sustains the interesting character that marked it during his editorship. Of his work in art a friend wrote:—