, the great python of a
cactus.

Looking down into the deserted church through the window of the
loggia, one half expects to see stoled ghosts in the vagueness below.
Outside and opposite, the immense counterforts of the Palatine, and
its terrace and sparse cypresses.

IV.

S. PAOLO FUORI.

The wonderful loveliness of the double colonnade of polished granite
pillars on the polished pale grey marble floor; fantastic, like
transfigured pools and streams of purest water.

_May_ 9.

V.

PINETA TORLONIA.

Asphodels on the banks. As we come up, the peasants drive into the
stable, one by one, a lot of mares with their foals. Along the road a
drove of great long-horned grey oxen; a bull-calf canters among them.
Between us and St. Peter's is a dell full of scrub ilex; walls also,
full of valerian and that grey myrrh-like weed.

From that little height we face a tremendous black storm, against
which all the Sabine and Alban hills flash in the low sunlight, above
the green Campagna pale like a strip of sea.

_May_ 12.

SPRING 1897.

I.

RETURN AT MIDNIGHT.

Driving from the station at midnight, the immensity of everything,
gigantic proportions of silent palaces and closed churches. Passing in
front of the Quirinal, the colossal Dioscuri with their horses, the
fountain flowing down and spurting upwards between them, white under
the electric light, against the deep blue darkness.

Even the incredible huge vulgarity of modern things, advertisements,
yards long at the street corners under the gas, and immense rows of
jerry-built houses, somehow help to make up the impression of Rome as
a theatre of the ages: a gigantic stage, splendidly impressive to eye
and fancy, where Time has strutted and ranted, and ever will continue.

At night particularly one feels the Piranesi grandeur, but also the
Callot picturesqueness which are secondary qualities of Rome. As a
whole the town belongs mainly to the shabby and magnificent
seventeenth century. Those hundreds of architecturally worthless
Jesuit churches are not, as we are apt stupidly to say, absurd or
meaningless, but quite the contrary; admirably suited to their place
and function among ruins and vagueness. The beggars and loafers, the
inconceivable squalor and lousiness, are also, in this sense, in
their rights.

_March_ 24.

II.

VILLA MADAMA.

The great empty, unfinished, hulk, very grand and with delicate
details, stranded