"I meant to go to Chocorua as you suggested, but the congregation advised otherwise, so I came over here. It seemed the better thing to do. Up in New Hampshire you can't do much but rest, but here you can improve your taste and collect a good deal of homiletic material. So I've settled down in Rome. I want to have time to take it all in."
"Do you begin to feel rested?" I asked.
"Not yet. It's harder work than I thought it would be. There's so much to take in, and it's all so different. I don't know how to arrange my material. What I want to do, in the first place, is to have a realizing sense of being in Rome. What's the use of being here unless you are here in the spirit?
"What I mean is that I should like to feel as I did when I went to Mount Vernon. It was one of those dreamy autumn days when the leaves were just turning. There was the broad Potomac, and the hospitable Virginia mansion. I had the satisfying sense that I was in the home of Washington. Everything seemed to speak of Washington. He filled the whole scene. It was a great experience. Why can't I feel that way about the great events that happened down there?"
We were by this time on the height of the Janiculum near the statue of Garibaldi. Bagster made a vague gesture toward the city that lay beneath us. There seemed to be something in the scene that worried him. "I can't make it seem real," he said. "I have continually to say to myself, 'That is Rome, Italy, and not Rome, New York.' I can't make the connection between the place and the historical personages I have read about. I can't realize that the Epistle to the Romans was written to the people who lived down there. Just back of that new building is the very spot where Romulus would have lived if he had ever existed. On those very streets Scipio Africanus walked, and Cæsar and Cicero and Paul and Marcus Aurelius, and Epictetus and Belisarius, and Hildebrand and Michelangelo, and at one time or another about every one you ever heard of. And how many people came to get emotions they couldn't get anywhere else! There was Goethe. How he felt! He took it all in. And there was Shelley writing poetry in the Baths of Caracalla. And there was Gibbon."
"But we can't all expect to be Shelleys or even Gibbons," I suggested.
"I know it," said Bagster, ruefully. "But if one has only a little vessel, he ought to fill it. But somehow the historical associations crowd each other out. When I left home I bought Hare's 'Walks in Rome.' I thought I would take a walk a day as long as they lasted. It seemed a pleasant way of combining physical and intellectual exercise. But do you know, I could not keep up those walks. They were too concentrated for my constitution. I wasn't equal to them. Out in California they used to make wagers with the stranger that he couldn't eat a broiled quail every day for ten days. I don't see why he couldn't, but it seemed that the thought of to-morrow's quail, and the feeling that it was compulsory, turned him against what otherwise might have been a pleasure. It's so with the 'Walks.' It's appalling to think that every morning you have to start out for a constitutional, and be confronted with the events of the last twenty-five centuries. The events are piled up one on another. There they are, and here you are, and what are you going to do about them?"
"I suppose that there isn't much that you can do about them," I remarked.
"But we ought to do what we can," said Bagster. "When I do have an emotion, something immediately turns up to contradict it. It's like wandering through a big hotel, looking for your room, when you are on the wrong floor. Here you are as likely as not to find yourself in the wrong century. In Rome everything turns out, on inquiry, to be something else. There's something impressive about a relic if it's the relic of one thing. But if it's the relic of a dozen different kinds of things it's hard to pick out the appropriate emotion. I find it hard to adjust my mind to these composite associations."
"Now just look at this," he said, opening his well-thumbed Baedeker: "'Santa Maria Sopra Minerva (Pl. D. 4), erected on the ruins of Domitian's temple of Minerva, the only mediæval Gothic church in Rome. Begun A.D., 1280; was restored and repainted in 1848-55. It contains several admirable works of art, in particular Michelangelo's Christ.'"