And to free the pent emotion
Even prayer’s wings spread in vain:
Then but one relief is given:
Not a voice of mortal birth,
But a language born in heaven,
And in mercy lent to earth:
Lent to consecrate our sighing,
Shed a glory on our tears,
And uplift us without dying
To the Vision-circled spheres.
[AN ART PILGRIMAGE THROUGH ROME.]
Rome as we saw it in 1863 was already so far modernized as to possess two railway lines, one on the Neapolitan and one on the Civita Vecchia side. The old and more romantic entrance was by the Porta del Popolo, which was reached by crossing the Ponte Molle. Two traditions help to invest this plain, strong bridge with peculiar interest. It was within sight of it that the great battle was fought which decided the triumph of Constantine and Christianity in the already tottering Roman Empire. Here the miraculous cross appeared to the great leader the night before the battle, lighting up the horizon with its mystic radiance, and blazoning forth those prophetic words: In hoc signo vinces—“In this sign shalt thou conquer”—which were afterwards graven as the motto of the emperor on his new standard, or labarum. Near the Ponte Molle, too, then called Pons Milviensis, were the spoils of the temple, and notably the seven-branched candlestick, thrown into the Tiber to save them from the hands of the invading Huns; and it is seriously believed that, were the river to be drained and carefully dredged in that spot, many rare and valuable historical relics would be found. It is supposed that, the flow of the water being very sluggish, and the mud, with its tawny color, oozy and detaining, these treasures may easily have remained embedded in their unsavory hiding-place.
The modern entrance from the Civita Vecchia side is unattractive in the extreme, but the new depot at the Piazza de’ Termini affords a very fair first view of Rome. Before reaching the city, a beautiful spectacle is presented by the long rows of aqueducts standing sharply defined out of the low, olive-spotted plain, and by the massive tomb of Cecilia Metella, rising in towering prominence among the lesser monuments of the Appian Way. Beautiful at all times, this scene of lovely and suggestive grandeur is still more beautiful by moonlight; and, if one could forget the unfortunate details of that most prosaic of modern buildings, a railway-station, the Piazza de’ Termini would hardly break the spell. On one side are the ruins of the baths of Diocletian, their brick walls covered with golden wall-flowers, and just beyond them the cloister and church of Santa Maria degli Angeli. The interior of this church is supported by huge monolith columns of granite, still bearing the marks of the fire which destroyed the baths, from whose adjoining halls they were taken. On the opposite side are the prisons for women—a far happier and more peaceful abode than most places of the sort, the jailers being cloistered sisters specially vowed to this heroic work of self-devotion. A little further on is the great fountain, divided into three compartments, each backed by a basso-rilievo of great merit, the centre one representing in gigantic proportions Moses striking the rock. The small domed church of the Vittoria, which faces the fountain, is the national ex-voto commemorating the battle of Lepanto, and boasts a masterpiece of one of the sculptors of the Renaissance—a term too often convertible with artistic decadence. This is a languishing and affected but marvellously correct statue of S. Teresa on her death-bed; and the church is served by barefooted Carmelite friars. The streets branching from the Piazza, though not so narrow, are to the full as crooked as those in the lower portion of the city; but, to the practised Italian traveller, they will appear almost wide. Those of Genoa and Venice are veritable lanes, through which two wheelbarrows could not pass each other, and across which you could literally shake hands out of the windows of each floor; so that the Roman streets do not strike you as uncommonly narrow, unless you are fresh from Paris or Munich.