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Rome was very still these hesitant days of early May, Rome was very
beautiful--I have never known her so beautiful! The Pincian, in spite
of its afternoon parade, had the sad air of forced retirement of some
well-to-do family. The Piazza di Spagna basked in its wonted flood
of sunshine with a curious Sabbatical calm. A stray _forestieri_ might
occasionally cross its blazing pavements and dive into Piale's or Cook's,
and a few flower girls brought their irises and big white roses to the
steps, more from habit than for profit surely. The Forum was like a wild,
empty garden, and the Palatine, a melancholy waste of fragments of the
past where an old Garibaldian guard slunk after the stranger, out of
lonesomeness, babbling strangely of that other war in which he had part
and mixing his memories with the tags of history he had been taught to
recite anent the Roman monuments. As I wandered there in the drowse of
bees among the spring blossoms and looked out upon the silent field that
once was the heart of Rome, it was hard to realize that again on this
richly human soil of Italy the fate of its people was to be tested in
the agony of a merciless war, that even now the die was being cast less
than a mile away across the roofs. The soil of Rome is the most deeply
laden in the world with human memories, which somehow exhale a subtle
fragrance that even the most casual stranger cannot escape, that condition
the children of the soil. The roots of the modern Italian run far down
into the mould of ancient things: his distant ancestors have done much
of his political thinking for him, have established in his soul the
conditions of his present dilemma.... I wonder if Prince von Buelow ever
spent a meditative hour looking down on the fragments of the Forum from
the ilex of the Palatine, over the steep ascent of the Capitoline that
leads to the Campidolgio, as far as the grandiose marble pile that fronts