Have you ever ridden through deep chestnut woods when the sun is still so low that it only strikes the under branches of the trees, and creeps up their trunks like a rising bath of gold? When every dell is still a mist of cool emerald, and on the banks the level beams are kissing open the tightly whorled fronds of the fern, filling the tiny cups of the moss with topaz wine and turning its million-feathered spikelets into an upstanding frieze of fairy spears, each strung with a yellow pearl?
Where some stream has cut its way deep through the rich soil the forget-me-nots have grown so high and thick that they almost meet across the water; their blue is too dreamy yet to reflect the sky; they look up to that with the calm unseeing innocence of a newborn child that as yet knows not day from night. Ah, look well then, for later in the day the jealous tree-tops will take all the light to themselves, and every lovely detail, below, only visible in that first fleeting hour, will be lost in the deep forest shadow that is neither light nor darkness, but all one quivering mysterious green.
We four rode through the woods silently, drinking in the crystal freshness of the air; and then, almost before we knew it, we were out in a blaze of heat, leaving the Alban Hills behind and crossing the plain that divides them from the Sabines, one of the old roads to Naples. In that first week of September it was like an unroofed hot-house, vines and corn and pomegranates crowding against each other till one would hardly have known where to get in the shears or the sickle; the dust from our horses’ feet rose in golden clouds as we went along, and everywhere was the whirr of wings and the long droning note of the cicala.
We were glad enough to reach Genazzano and pause in the shade before the old church; but we had had some difficulty in penetrating so far, the Piazza and every street leading to it being full of peasants, who had come in from all the surrounding district to pay their respects to the Madonna del Buon Consiglio, on this, September 8, our Blessed Lady’s birthday. Of course the greatest concourse takes place here on April 25, the especial Feast of “Our Lady of Good Counsel,” but the people are always glad to repair to this famous sanctuary, and on the day we visited it the little town was full of the brilliant costumes which one very rarely sees now.
The picture round which so much devotion centres is a very sweet one, rather Byzantine in character, as is natural, for it came to Italy from the other side of the Adriatic—miraculously transported, probably at the time when all that country came under Moslem rule. It was thus that the Holy House of Loreto, when the holy places of Jerusalem fell into the hands of the Turks, was carried by the angels to Christian shores and thence to Italy, the dwellers near its last Eastern resting-place mourning despairingly round the deserted spot from which it disappeared between dark and dawn on the night of December 9, 1294. I am writing of Genazzano and not of Loreto just now, but I must pause to remark that this miracle of the transportation of the house of the Blessed Virgin is far more clearly attested than many events in our own modern history; yet there are people, who would stake their lives on the truth of those events, who dismiss the miracle of Loreto with a smile of incredulity.
This picture of Our Lady of Good Counsel would not interest them. Yet I would advise even such persons to go and have a look at the beautiful copy of it in St. John Lateran’s. It is quite small, a half length or less; the Blessed Mother holds the Child in her arms, and He is reaching up to whisper in her ear; she listens, with her heart in her deep sweet eyes, and the “counsel” is stored up for the children who appeal to her in their perplexities. There is an exquisite expression of confidence and familiarity on both the celestial Faces. Our Holy Father, Pius X, has such a great devotion to Our Lady of Good Counsel that, as all Catholics know, he has added the invocation “Mater Boni, Consilii, ora pro nobis,” to the Litany of the Blessed Virgin.
From Genazzano we went on to Palestrina, arriving there in time to go and watch the sunset from the ruined terraces of the Temple of Fortune. The place has passed from hand to hand, used as a fortress at one time and another since the fourth century before Christ; but to me its interest never lay in those comparatively modern developments. It is the story of times lost in the mist of ages, when those first cyclopean blocks were fitted together without the aid of cement—when a race, whose only traces are these mute huge stones that suggest all and tell nothing, lived and fortified itself on this outpost of the mountains—that is the story that I want to hear.
There at Palestrina, when the sun was sinking into the level gold of the sea—forty miles away, but so clear and calm—I leaned over the stone bulwark, red in the sunset, hot to my hand (had it not baked in four or five thousand years of sunshine?), and felt that unearthly thrill of a revelation palpitatingly near yet still withheld. It has come only a few times in my life—once at Torcello, once among the lost tombs of Etruria, there at Palestrina, and in the great hall of the unmarked sepulchre of the last Ming Emperor in Pechilia. That was modern indeed, a seventeenth-century affair, but the ancient spirit was there—something that brooded over a lonely mighty country, unchanged, untampered with, before the beginnings of history.
At Palestrina—or, to give the place its right name, Præneste—the Emperors were mere upstarts; Camillus, who took it and made it an appanage of Rome four hundred years or so before this time—Marius and Sulla, and the Roman ladies who had summer villas here and left those amazing “vanity boxes” (such arsenals of cosmetics and beautifiers as surprise even our modern beauty-artists) behind them—all these seem vulgar intruders on that sacredly ancient ground.
For, of all the cities of Romagna, Præneste has, I think, the most perfect situation. It seems to have grown out of the wall of the hills to watch over the southern roads to Rome. Before it the Campagna stretches away to the sea and to the north, the horizon there brokenly outlined by the low Volscian and Ciminian Hills. Not so towards the sea; in the near distance a castle or a single tower breaks the plain, midway Rome shimmers like a net of pearls thrown down across the Tiber; but the west is the empty west always, left to the sun and the wind, with the wide heavens above, and that one long sword of light laid on its farther bound where the tideless Mediterranean laps against the shore. To the south, at an almost direct angle, rise the Alban Hills, near, familiar, friendly, with their symmetrical volcanic slopes so restful to the eye; where they sink to the plain farthest from Palestrina, the Appian Way leads on to Naples, and that is the way most of the world travels; but the more beautiful road is the one which leads, right past the foot of the Sabines, through the level valley which separates them from the Alban range, to Anagni and Valmontone and Frosinone, following the classic Liris as it takes an almost straight course through the garden it has ploughed and watered.