THE ALTAR OF THE UNKNOWN GOD ON THE PALATINE.
Can you wonder then that our Goddess, Imperial and lovely Rome, seemed to have stepped down among ordinary mortals?
Another thing. We had left a great city in search of joy. And we had found it. Up there in Umbria we had culled it from the roadside as you cull flowers. We had drunk of Lethe and gathered forgetfulness beside its waters. The burden of the world had slipped from off our shoulders. Little by little our feet had grown lighter upon the hillside. Our mountainous doubts, our despairs, our days of little faith, became mere memories. All the old fears of a city 'with houses both sides of the street,' were forgotten. We no longer bruised our feet on paving stones, but felt the soft warm earth beneath our soles and smelt the fragrance of pine-needles in the woods. Life became a beautiful and simple thing. Holy too.
But here in Rome old doubts came back upon us, taking us unawares. 'The poor in great cities are not like the poor in Umbria,' said the Philosopher; 'here they suffer so.' We heard more tales of pain in those first days in Rome than we had heard in all the sunny months we had been dreaming away in Umbria. And on our first night in the city a courtesan screaming hopelessly below our windows as she was dragged to prison made our new-found joys shiver away to death. We felt like the Israelites when they looked upon their manna the second day and found it full of worms, and we knew that we had gathered the food of angels in the sunlit spaces of the Umbrian plain.
I am no Utopian who seeks to bring the country to the town. I know too well how soon its incorruptible beauty would be corrupted. It is only in the hills that we may find it and the open spaces. There, it seems, we must go to learn our lesson, and when we have learnt it, this A B C of beauty, we can come back to the towns and learn more difficult things, the reverence for beliefs which are no longer beliefs, as Emerson taught, the beauty of a city, and of a poor man's smile. But just as the Israelites, when the need for manna was past, returned to ordinary food and found it good, so we too drifted back to our old content and began reluctantly to worship our old gods again.
And it would be childish to deny that the great Exhibition for which Rome was preparing marked her splendid prosperity under the rule of the House of Savoy; or that the magnificent memorial to Victor Emmanuel on the brow of the Capitol is the most imposing monument in the whole city; or that the Palatine has gained in picturesqueness now that the débris has been cleared away from its lower slopes.
