ican of the
nineteenth. Not only all roads in space, but all roads across Time,
converge hither.

_March_ 11.

III.

SANTA BALBINA.

Went to take the English seeds to the gardener at S. Saba, and got in
return some plants of border pinks. The most poetical and real place
in all Rome.

Afterwards bicycled to S. Balbina. Impression of primitive church (the
outside has from a distance a look as of something in a Pinturicchio
fresco) given over to the Franciscan nuns--thirty--who look after two
hundred unruly girls off the streets. Their thick grey cloaks are
folded on the pews; images, screens, lecterns, all the litter of a
priestly lumber-room, poked here and there, a little portable iron
pulpit, not unlike a curtained washstand, in front of a beautiful tomb
of a grave mediaeval person above a delicate mosaic of the Cosmatis,
and a small coloured Rue Bonaparte St. Joseph on the episcopal mosaic
throne in the apse!

_March_ 15.

IV.

THE CATACOMBS.

To-day Catacombs of S. Domitilla in Via Sette Chiese, with Maria,
Guido and Pascarella. The impression of walking for miles by
taper-light between those close walls of brown friable stone, or that
soft dusty ground, in a warm vague stifling air; the monotonous rough
sides, the monotonous corners, the widenings in and out of little
Galla Placidia-like crypts, with rough hewn pillars and faded
frescoes; of the irregularly cut pigeon-holes, where bits of bone
moulder, and the brown earth seems half composed of bone.

That brown soft earth of the Catacombs, the stuff you would scratch
off the damp walls with your nail; rotting stone, rotting bone: the
very soil of Rome lilackish like cocoa, friable, light, which used
somehow to give me the horrors already as a child; the soil in which
the gardener of S. Saba grows his pinks and freesias without a spade
or hoe visible anywhere; the soil which seems to demand no plough; the
farthest possible from the honest and stiff clay, demanding human
work, of nature; the Roman soil, a _compost_, as Whitman would say,
ready manured! The work of man in this earth (of which a pinch
transported into church front or roof produces great tufts of fennel
and wild mignonette), the work of man in it merely to have died!

No sense of the ages in these Catacombs, or of the solemnity of death,
or of the sweetness of religion; black narrow passages gutted for
centuries, the poor wretched human remains (save those few turned up