oofs
with the telephone wires like gossamer stretched over them. Sunshine;
distant noise and incessant bells. Rome in a fashion consoling; but
how empty!

_April_ 3.

II.

PALM SUNDAY.

This morning I know not what ceremony in the Portico of SS. Apostoli:
a little procession, some monks, a priest in purple, and a few
draggle-tailed people before the closed door, chanting at intervals,
till the door opened and they entered, their silver cross in its
purple bag ahead, and their little branches of olive. The fine carved
Roman eagle in its magnificent garland of oak-leaves, presiding, very
fierce and contemptuous, over this little scene. When one effaces the
notion of habit, how very odd to see a company of nineteenth-century
people, battered and galled by life like old cab-horses, stationing in
a portico singing verses and holding branches of olive! There is
something refreshing, something of the fields and hills, of leisure
and childishness, in the proceeding, if only the poor creatures
realised it. But to most of them, I take it, the bearing of a silver
cross, of an olive branch, is in reality as utilitarian (though
utilitarian in regard to another world) as holding the tail of a
saucepan or rattling a money-box. For how many, one wonders, is that
door, opening to the cross and the olive branches, the door of an
inner temple, of a place swept and garnished in the pious fancy? alas!
alas!

I went on, on foot, past the Capitol, through the Montanara region,
with a growing sense, which I have had ever since return here, of the
squalor, the lousiness, the dust-heap, the unblushing _immondezzaio_
quality of Rome and its inhabitants. Everything ragged, filthy,
listless; the very cauliflowers they were selling looking all stalk,
fit for that refuse midden which symbolises the city. By the Temple of
Vesta a lot of carts were drawn up, with galled horses and ragged
crouching peasants--that sort of impression which Piranesi gives.

A school of little girls, conducted by a nun, was filing out of S.
Maria in Cosmedin, and I helped up the leathern curtain for them to
pass. Tatters, squalor, with that abundant animal strength and beauty
of these people; one feels they have been eating and drinking, and
befouling the earth and the streets with the excrements of themselves
and their lives, love-making and begetting, and suffering stolidly all
through the centuries, and one wonders why? as one wonders before a
ditch ful