behind its pillared atrium and
gate-tower; and looking from afar like a hillside fortress among the
jerry-built modern streets.

_Maundy Thursday_, 1899.

VII.

BEYOND PONT MOLLE.

A meadow near the Tiber, of grass and daisies, tufted with
yellow-hearted jonquils. Larks and sun and wind overhead; in the
distance the pale mountains, patched with snow. All round, the pale
green embosomings of the soft earth hills. If the Umbrians got their
love of circular hill lines at home, they learned in Rome the real
existence of the green grass valleys and hills unbroken by
cultivation, like those behind Perugino's _Crucifixion_ and Spagna's
_Muses_.

All round, as I sit in that place, the dry last year's stalks dance in
the wind above the new grass and flowers. O Easter, Resurrection,
Renovation!

The larks proclaim it!

_Easter_, 1899.

SPRING 1900.

I.

OUTSIDE THE GATES.

Rome took hold of me again as usual, yesterday, bicycling near Porta
S. Sebastiano. On the walls which enclose those remote forsaken vignas
(fit abode for lamias and female vampyres, as in Frau von Degen's
tale), nay, even on the gates of old Rome are painted great
advertisements exhorting the traveller to go to such or such a
curiosity shop. The Arch of Drusus was surrounded by a band of
Cookites, listening inattentively to their Bear Leader; and the whole
Via Appia, to beyond Cecilia Metella, was alive with cabs and landaus.
But such things, which desecrate Venice and spoil Florence, are all
right in Rome; Rome, somehow, knows how to subdue them all to her
eternal harmony. That all the vulgarities of all the furthest lands
should all pass through Rome, like all the barbarians, the nations and
centuries, seems proper and fit. The spirit of the place requires
them, as much as the captives who came in the triumphs, as the Goths
and Huns, as the pilgrims of the Mediaeval Jubilees, and it subdues
them: subdues them, as it subdues with the chemistry of this odd
climate of crumble and decay, the new dreadful houses; as it has
made, with the marvellous rank Roman vegetation, a sort of Forum or
Palatine of the knocked-down modern houses, the empty unfinished
basements behind the hoardings under my window. Driving at midnight
from the station, my eye and mind were caught not merely by Castor and
Pollux under the electric light, and by the endless walls of high
palaces, but also by a colossal advertisement of Anzio, in English,
setting