I set myself to visit the grave of poor Keats. He was sick of many griefs, but the greatest of these was that he could not make the vulgar howl their applause. He had all the enjoyment of a Divine gift; it could only be the bodily sickness affecting the mind when his heart was bitter, and he exclaimed his name was writ in water. Yet they have graved those feeble words on his tombstone!
Were I dying for praise, I should show my insight into man, and say, “My name is writ in brandy and water.” How that would be swallowed down!
I visited Keats’s grave from very mixed motives; life is sad enough without being sentimental. To stand before the grave is a little dangerous; if one walked backwards for a short distance in an absent fit, he would precipitate himself over a sunk wall into the adjoining cemetery, and lie there for good, like Shelley.
As in duty bound, I visited the tomb of Shelley also.
I was on my way to the church of St. Paolo fuori, a sight not to be neglected by any species of pilgrim whatever.
On one’s way one can leave a card on the Scipios; their tomb is handy, but they are always out, those wonderful people called the “authorities” having removed the sarcophagi and busts. But you will be asked in; and you can go down the windings by torchlight, and say you did it. Then, en route, one can pay one’s respects to the early Christians who owned some uncomfortable catacombs hereabout, in which they resided.
For an account of these and of how they shelved their dead, vide some more gushing writer.
St. Paolo is too magnificent for a church. It has a fine architectural pedigree up to Constantine, having endured all the horrors for generations of decay and fire, to be only rebuilt at greater cost than before.
I did not go on purpose to behold the church, but to almost adore the ancient cloisters at the back. The delicately twisted columns of the arches are so winning, they actually awake one’s affections; and if thinking of a thing ever after is love, they fill you with this fondest of recollections.
A good many of us rise in life. Wolsey, he rose; the Bonapartes rose; Coke rose (upon Littleton); the Gladstones rose; Lazarus rose; but no man, priest, soldier, lawyer, M.P., or resurrect, ever rose in death, as did St. Peter. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John; writers as eminently inspired as Isaiah; Paul, the most gifted of apostles, whose ideas on charity lifted Christianity miles over the heads of all other religious or moral founders, had no such rise in death as Peter; but it was the keys that did it.