ld. The most sympathetic is the Fountain of the
Triton, who blows the water through his wreathed horn and on the coldest
day seems not to mind its refluent splash on his mossy back; in fact, he
seems rather to like it.

[Illustration: 32 THE FOUNTAIN OF TREVI]

He is one of many tritons, rivers, sea-gods, and aqueous allegories
similarly employed in Rome and similarly indifferent to what flesh and
blood might find the hardship of their calling. I had rashly said to
myself that their respective fountains needed the sun on them to be just
what one could wish, but the first gray days taught me better. Then the
thinly clouded sky dropped a softened light over their glitter and
sparkle and gave them a spirituality as much removed from the suggestion
of physical cold as any diaphanous apparition would suggest. Then they
seemed rapt into a finer beauty than that of earth, though I will not
pretend that they were alike beautiful. No fountain can be quite ugly,
but some fountains can be quite stupid, like, for instance, those which
give its pretty name to the Street of the Four Fountains and which
consist of two extremely plain Virtues and two very dull old Rivers,
diagonally dozing at each other over their urns in niches of the four
converging edifices. They are not quite so idiotic under their
disproportionate foliage as the conventional Egyptian lions of the
Fountain of Moses, with manes like the wigs of so many lord chancellors,
and with thin streams of water drooling from the tubes between their
lips. But these are the exceptional fountains; there are few sculptured
or architectural designs which the showering or spouting water does not
retrieve from error; and in Rome the water (deliciously potable) is so
abundant that it has force to do almost anything for beauty, even where,
as in the Fontana Paolina, it is merely a torrent tumbling over a
facade. It is lavished everywhere; in the Piazza Navona alone there are
three fountains, but then the Piazza Navona is very long, and three
fountains are few enough for it, even though one is that famous Fountain
of Bernini, in which he has made one of the usual rivers--the Nile, I
believe--holding his hand before his eyes in mock terror of the ungainly
facade of a rival architect's church opposite, lest it shall fall and
crush him. That, however, is the least merit of the fountain; and
without any fountain the Piazza Navona would be charming; it is such a
vast lake of sunshine and is