Now, on my later visit, it was a cold, rainy day, and it was chill within the house and without, and I imputed my weather to the time of Keats's sojourn, and thought of him sitting by his table there in that bare, narrow, stony room and coughing at the dismal outlook. Afterward I saw the whole place put in order and warmed by a generous stove, for people who came to see the Keats and Shelley collections of books and pictures; but still the sense of that day remains. The young girl sympathized with my sympathy, and wished to find a rose for me in the trellis through which the rain dripped. She could not, and I suggested that there would be roses in the spring. “No,” she persisted, “sometimes it makes them in the winter,” but I had to come away through the reeking streets without one.
When it rains, it rains easily in Rome. But the weather was divine the evening I looked one of my latest looks down on the Spanish Steps. The sun had sunk rather wanly beyond the city, but a cheerful light of electrics shone up at me from the Via dei Condotti. I stood and thought of as much as I could summon from the past, and I was strongest, I do not know why, with the persecutions of the early Christians. Presently a smell of dinner came from the hotels around and the houses below, and I was reminded to go home to my own table d'hote. My one-legged beggar seemed to have gone to his, and I escaped him; but I was intercepted by the sight of an old woman asleep over her store of matches. She was not wakened by the fall of my ten-centime piece in her tray, but the boy drowsing beside her roused himself, and roused her to the dreamy expression of a gratitude quite out of scale with my alms.
V. AN EFFORT TO BE HONEST WITH ANTIQUITY
My visit to the Roman Forum when the Genius Loci verified to my ignorance and the intelligence of my companions the well-conjectured site of the Temple of Jupiter Stator was not the first nor yet the second visit I had paid the place. There had been intermediate mornings when I met two friends there, indefinitely more instructed, with whom I sauntered from point to point, preying upon their knowledge for my emotion concerning each. Information is an excellent thing—in others; and but for these friends I should not now be able to say that this mouldering heap of brickwork, rather than that, was Julius Caesar's house; or just where it was that Antony made his oration over the waxen effigy which served him for Caesar's body. They helped me realize how the business life and largely the social life of Rome centred in the Forum, but spared me so much detail that my fancy could play about among its vanished edifices without inconvenience from the clutter of shops and courts and monuments which were ultimately to hem it in and finally to stifle it. They knew their Forum so well that they could not only gratify any curiosity I had, but could supply me with curiosity when I had none. For the moment I was aware that this spot or that, though it looked so improbable, was the scene of deeds which will reverberate forever; they taught me to be tolerant of what I had too lightly supposed fables as serious traditions closely verging on facts. I learned to believe again that the wolf suckled Romulus and Remus, because she had her den no great way off on the Palatine, and that Romulus himself had really lived, since he had died and was buried in the Forum, where they showed me his tomb, or as much of it as I could imagine in the sullen little cellar so called. They also showed me the rostrum where the Roman orators addressed the mass-meetings of the republican times, and they showed me the lake, or the puddle left of it, into which Curtius (or one of three heroes of the name) leaped at an earlier day as a specific for the pestilence which the medical science of the period had failed to control. In our stroll about the place we were joined by one of the several cats living in the Forum, which offered us collectively its acquaintance, as if wishing to make us feel at home. It joined us and it quitted us from time to time, as the whim took it, but it did not abandon us wholly till we showed a disposition to believe in that lake of Curtius, so called after those three public-spirited heroes, the first being a foreigner. Then the cat, which had more than once stretched itself as if bored, turned from us in contempt and went and lay down in a sunny corner near the tomb of Romulus, and fell asleep.
It is quite possible that my reader does not know, as lately I did not, that the Roman Forum is but one of several forums connected with it by ways long centuries since buried fathoms deep and built upon many stories high. But I am now able to assure him that in the whole region between the Roman Forum and the Forum of Trajan, which were formerly opened into each other by the removal of a hill as tall as the top of Trajan's Column, you pass over other forums hidden beneath your feet or wheels. You cannot be stayed there, however, by the wonders which archaeology will yet reveal in them (for archaeology has its relentless eye upon every inch of the ground above them), but you will certainly pause at the Forum of Trajan, where archaeology, as it is in Commendatore Boni, has had its way already. In fact, until his work in the Roman Forum is finished, the Forum of Trajan must remain his greatest achievement, and the sculptured column of the great emperor must serve equally as the archaeologist's monument. I do not remember why in the old time I should have kept coming to look at that column and study the sculptured history of Trajan's campaigns, toiling around it to its top. I think one could then get close to its base, as now one cannot, what with the deepening of the Forum to its antique level and the enclosure of the whole space with an iron rail. The area below is free only to a large company of those cats which seem to have their dwelling among all the ruins and restorations of ancient Rome. People come to feed the Trajan cats with the fish sold near by for the purpose, and one morning, in pausing to view his column from the respectful distance I had to keep, I counted no less than thirteen of his cats in his forum. They were of every age and color, but much more respectable in appearance than the cats of the Pantheon, which have no such sunny expanse as that forum for their quarters, but only a very damp corner beside the temple, and seem to have suffered in their looks and health from the situation. It was afterward with dismay that I realized the fatal number of the Trajan cats coming to their breakfast that morning so unconscious of evil omen in the figure; but as there are probably no statistics of mortality among the cats of Rome, I shall never know whether any of the thirteen has rendered up one of their hundred and seventeen lives.