Hard by this tea-room there is a public elevator by which the reader will no doubt rather ascend with me than, climb the Spanish Steps without me; after the first time, I never climbed them. The elevator costs but ten centimes, and I will pay for both; there is sometimes drama thrown in that is worth twice the money; for there is war, more or less roaring, set between the old man who works the elevator and the young man who sells the tickets to it. The law is that the elevator will hold only eight persons, but one memorable afternoon the ticket-seller insisted upon giving a ticket to a tall, young English girl who formed an unlawful ninth. The elevator-man, a precisian of the old school, expelled her; the ticket-seller came forward and reinstated her; again the elder stood upon the letter of the law; again the younger demanded its violation. The Tuscan tongue in their Roman mouths flew into unintelligibility, while the poor girl was put into the elevator and out of it; and the respective parties to the quarrel were enjoying it so much that it might never have ended if she had not taken the affair into her own hands. She finally followed the ticket-seller back to his desk, to which he retired after each act of the melodrama, and threw her ticket violently down. “Here is your ticket!” she said in English so severe that he could not help understanding and cowering before it. “Give me back my money!” He was too much stupefied by her decision of character to speak; and he returned her centimes in silence while we got into our cage and mounted to the top, and the elevator-man furiously repeated to himself his side of the recent argument all the way up. This did not prevent his touching his hat to each of us in parting, and assuring us that he revered us; a thing that only old-fashioned Romans seem to do nowadays, in the supposed decay of manners which the comfortable classes everywhere like to note in the uncomfortable. Then some ladies of our number went off on a platform across the house-tops to which the elevator had brought us, as if they expected to go down the chimneys to their apartments; and the rest of us expanded into the Piazza Trinita de' Monti; and I stopped to lounge against the uppermost balustrade of the Spanish Steps.
It is notable, but not surprising, how soon one forms the habit of this, for, seen from above, the Spanish Steps are only less enchanting than the Spanish Steps seen from below, whence they are absolutely the most charming sight in the world. The reader, if he has nothing better than a post-card (which I could have bought him on the spot for fifty a franc), knows how the successive stairways part and flow downward to right and left, like the parted waters of a cascade, and lose themselves at the bottom in banks of flowers. No lovelier architectural effect was ever realized from a happy fancy; but, of course, the pictorial effect is richer from below, especially from the Via dei Condotti, where it opens into the Piazza di Spagna. I suppose there must be hours of the day, and certainly there are hours of the night, when in this prospect the Steps have not the sunset on them. But most of the time they have the sunset on them, warm, tender; a sunset that begins with the banks of daffodils and lilies and anemones and carnations and roses and almond blossoms, keeping the downpour of the marble cascades from flooding the piazza, and mounts, mellowing and yellowing, up their gray stone, until it reaches the Church of Trinita de' Monti at the top.
There it lingers, I should say, till dawn, bathing the golden-brown facade in an effulgence that lifelong absence cannot eclipse when once it has blessed your sight. It is beauty that rather makes the heart ache, and the charm of the Steps from above is something that you can bear better if you are very, very worthy, or have the conceit of feeling yourself so. It is a charm that imparts itself more in detail and is less exclusively the effect of perpetual sunset. From the parapet against which you lean you have a perfecter conception of the architectural form than you get from below, and you are never tired of seeing the successive falls of the Steps dividing themselves and then coming together on the broad landings and again parting and coming together.
If there were once many models, male, female, and infant, brigands, peasants, sages, and martyrs, lounging on the Spanish Steps, as it seems to me there used to be, and as every one has heard say, waiting there for the artists to come and carry them off to their studios and transfer them to their canvases, they are now no longer there in noticeable number. I saw some small boys in steeple-crowned soft hats and short jackets, with their little legs wound round with the favorite bandaging of brigands; and some mothers suitable for Madonnas, perhaps, with babes at the breast; there was a patriarchal old man or two, ready no doubt to pose for the prophets, or, at a pinch, for yet more celestial persons; but for the rest the Steps were rather given up to flower-girls, fruit-peddlers, and beggars pure and simple, on levels distinctly below those infested by the post-card peddlers. The whole neighborhood abounds in opportunities for charity, and at the corner of the Via Sistina there is a one-legged beggar who professes to black shoes in the intervals of alms-taking, and who early made me his prey. If sometimes I fancied escaping by him to my lounge against the parapet of the steps, he joyously overtook me with a swiftness of which few two-legged men are capable; he wore a soldier's cap, and I hoped, for the credit of our species, that he had lost his leg in battle, but I do not know.
On a Sunday evening I once hung there a long time, watching with one eye the people who were coming back from their promenade on the Pincian Hill, and with the other the groups descending and ascending the Steps. On the first landing below me there was a boy who gratified me, I dare say unconsciously, by trying to stand on his hands; and a little dramatic spectacle added itself to this feat of the circus. Two pretty girls, smartly dressed in hats and gowns exactly alike, and doubtless sisters, if not twins, passed down to the same level. One was with a handsome young officer, and walked staidly beside him, as if content with her quality of captive or captor. The other was with a civilian, of whom she was apparently not sure. Suddenly she ran away from him to the verge of the next fall of steps, possibly to show him how charmingly she was dressed, possibly to tempt him by her grace in flight to follow her madly. But he followed sanely and slowly, and she waited for him to come up, in a capricious quiet, as if she had not done anything or meant anything. That was all; but I am not hard to suit; and it was richly enough for me.
Her little comedy came to its denouement just under the shoulder of the rose-roofed terrace jutting from a lowish, plainish house on the left, beyond certain palms and eucalyptus-trees. It is one of the most sacred shrines in Rome, for it was in this house that the “young English poet whose name was writ in water” died to deathless fame three or fourscore years ago. It is the Keats house, which when he lived in it was the house of Severn the painter, his host and friend. I had visited it for the kind sake of the one and the dear sake of the others when I first visited Rome in 1864; and it was one of the earliest stations of my second pilgrimage. It is now in form for any and all visitors, but the day I went it had not yet been put in its present simple and tasteful keeping. A somewhat shrill and scraping-voiced matron inquired my pleasure when she followed me into the ground-floor entrance from somewhere without, and then, understanding, called hor young daughter, who led me up to the room where Keats mused his last verse and breathed his last sigh. It is a very little room, looking down over the Spanish Steps, with their dike of bloom, across the piazza to the narrow stretch of the Via del Babuino. I must have stood in it with Severn and heard him talk of Keats and his ultimate days and hours; for I remember some such talk, but not the details of it. He was a very gentle old man and fondly proud of his goodness to the poor dying poet, as he well might be, and I was glad to be one of the many Americans who, he said, came to grieve with him for the dead poet.