e
swirling water, thinking of how that Terme Apollo had lain there, the
Tiber, like Marsyas, flaying one fair flank of the god; I felt Rome
and its unchanging meaning grip me again, and liberate me from the
frettings of my own past and present.

We went in to see some people who are furnishing an apartment in
Palazzo Orsini. A very Roman impression this: the central court of
that fortified palace built into the theatre of Marcellus; lemons
spaliered and rows of Tangerine trees, with little Moorish-looking
fountains between; only the sky above, only the sound of the bubbling
fountains.

You look out of a window and behold, close by, the unspeakable
rag-fair of that foul quarter, with its yells and cries rising up and
stench of cheap cooking. We saw some small Renaissance closets, still
with their ceilings and fire-places, where tradition says a last
Savelli was stabbed. A feudal fortress this, and, like those of the
hills round Rome which these ruins mimic, raising its gardens and
pompous rooms above the squalor of the mediaeval village. Immediately
below, the corridors of the theatre; below that, the shops, where
pack-saddles, ploughs, scythes, wooden pails--the things of a
village--are for sale in the midst of those black arches. And then the
dining-room, library, bath-rooms of excellent New Englanders crowning
it all; and in the chapel, their telephone! "Take care," I said, "the
message will come some day--not across space, but across time. _Con
chi parlo?_" Well, say, _The White Devil of Italy!_

In that Campitelli quarter, the constant blind turnings behind the
great giant palaces; places for cut-throats, for the sudden onslaught
of bravos.

I feel very often that if one lived in all this picturesqueness, the
horrors of the past, the vacuity of the present, would drive one I
know not whither. I have had, more than ever this time, the sense of
horror at the barbarism of Rome, of civilisation being encamped in all
this human refuse, and doing nothing for it; and the feeling of horror
at this absorbing Italy, and at one's liking it! They are impressions
of the sort I had at Tangier. And the face of an idiot beggar--the
odd, pleased smile above his filth--suddenly brought back to me that
special feeling, I suppose of the East. We are wretched, transitional
creatures to be so much moved by such things, by this dust-heap of
time, and to be pacified in spirit by the sight of all this litter of
ages; 'tis a Hamlet and