October.--It is easy enough to get acquainted in Rome, at least for an official; besides, there are many of one’s countrymen living here, and parties and receptions are the order of the day and night through the entire social season. The members of the consular and diplomatic corps we soon met, and then there are so many American artists here worth knowing whose studios are open to all lovers of the beautiful. We made immediately the acquaintance of U. S. Minister and Mrs. W. W. Astor at their home in the Rospigliosi palace. There we met many interesting people.
Mrs. Astor is a young and very beautiful woman, and very charming in her manners. They have two pretty children. Mr. W. Waldorf Astor, though a multi-millionaire, personally leads a simple life in Rome. He is a close student. Every bright morning sees him riding with an antiquarian among the outskirts and ruins of the city. He is an acknowledged authority in kindred matters and his papers on the discoveries in Yucatan and elsewhere, read before one of the learned societies here, attracted attention. He is not playing ambassador as an amusement. His legation business is as closely attended to as if he were a poor, hard-working clerk in need of a salary. There is no ostentation about him personally. Officially, he attends to it that the social position of the United States Minister is what it should be.
One night at a dinner party he was relating the incident of a Union soldier who had donned a gray uniform once and entered the Rebel army at Atlanta. He had read a description of this soldier’s experiences and hairbreadth escapes in the Atlantic Monthly, and had been extraordinarily impressed. The soldier’s name, as he remembered it, was the same as my own. Could we be related? I astonished him by saying that I was more than related, that I was the soldier myself, and the article in the Atlantic was my own. Mr. Astor grasped my hand, saying he had thought of that soldier’s action a hundred times. My narrative had made Mr. Astor a friend. He rarely introduced me to a friend after that without adding: “He is the man who went into Atlanta.”
The palace where Mr. Astor lives is the same that our Minister Marsh occupied when I was here some years ago. It is built on the ruins of the Baths of Constantine.
I have looked everywhere trying to find the “hills” of Rome, but almost in vain. They can barely be located, and are not half as defined as the hills of Boston.
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Yesterday I went to look at the apartment where the consulate used to be by the Spanish stairway. The consul’s little back room is where the Poet Keats died. I could think I saw him lying there waiting for beautiful death to come, and I seemed to hear him say to his friend Severn: “I already feel the flowers growing over me.” And I saw Severn too, forgetting his easel, to sweep and cook and wait and watch all the nights alone, till the beautiful soul of Keats should take its flight. The room is a poorly lighted common little bedroom where the poet died, but it will be visited many a day in memory of one who lived, not between brick walls, but in high imaginations. We also went to the poet’s simple grave, as we had often done before, and looked at the green sod above one who
Had loved her with a love that was his doom.
It was the love for Fannie Brawn and not the bitter pens of the Quarterlies, that killed John Keats after all. Severn found that out only six short years ago, when the love letters from Keats to Fannie Brawn were placed in the now old man’s hands.
December 28.--Spite of bad weather we are having some wonderful sunsets lately, and strangers in Rome linger long on the Spanish stairway to enjoy a scene they have so often heard of--a sunset by the Tiber.