Hawthorne and His Circle

XIII

No doubt my father had grown fond of England during his four years' residence there. Except for its profits he had not, indeed, liked the consular work; but even that had given zest to his several excursions from it, which were in themselves edifying and enjoyable. The glamour of tradition, too, had wrought upon him, and he had made friends and formed associations. Such influences, outwardly gentle and unexacting, take deeper hold of the soul than we are at the time aware. They show their strength only when we test them by removing ourselves from their physical sphere.

Accordingly, though he looked forward with pleasure to leaving England for the Continent, he was no sooner on the farther side of the narrow seas than he began to be conscious of discomfort, which was only partly bodily or sensible. An unacknowledged homesickness afflicted him—an Old-Homesickness, rather than a yearning for America. He may have imagined that it was America that he wanted, but, when at last we returned there, he still looked back towards England. As an ideal, America was still, and always, foremost in his heart; and his death was hastened partly by his misgiving, caused by the civil war, lest her best days were past. But something there was in England that touched a deep, kindred chord in him which responded to nothing else. America might be his ideal home, but his real home was England, and thus he found himself, in the end, with no home at all outside of the boundaries of his domestic circle. A subconscious perception of this predicament, combined with his gradually failing health, led him to say, in a moment of frank self-communion, "Since this earthly life is to come to an end, I do not try to be contented, but weary of it while it lasts."

It is true that Rome, vehemently as at first he rebelled against it, came at last to hold a power over him. Rome, if you give it opportunity, subtly fastens its grasp upon both brain and heart, and claims sympathies which are as undeniable as our human nature itself. Yet there is something morbid in our love for the mystic city, like a passion for some beautiful but perilous woman with a past—such as Miriam in The Marble Faun, for example. Only an exceptionally vigorous and healthy constitution can risk it without danger. Had my father visited Rome in his young manhood, he might have both cared for it less and in a sense have enjoyed it more than he did during these latter years of his life.

But from the time we left London, and, indeed, a little before that, he was never quite himself physically. Our departure was made at the most inclement moment of a winter season of unusual inclemency; they said (as they always do) that no weather to be compared with it had been known for twenty years. We got up before dawn in London, and after a dismal ride in the train to Folkestone, where the bitter waves of the English Channel left edgings of ice on the shingle beach where I went to pick up shells, we were frost-bitten all our two-hours passage across to Boulogne, where it became cold in dead earnest, and so continued all through Paris, Lyons, and Marseilles, and down the Mediterranean to Genoa and Civita Vecchia, and thence up the long, lonely, bandit-haunted road to Rome, and in Rome, with exasperating aggravations, right up to April, or later. My own first recollection of St. Peter's is that I slid on the ice near one of the fountains in the piazza of that famous edifice; and my father did the same, with a savage satisfaction, no doubt, at thus proving that everything was what it ought not to be. Either in London, or at some intermediate point between that and Paris, he caught one of the heaviest colds that ever he had; and its feverish and debilitating effects were still perceptible in May. "And this is sunny Italy—and this is genial Rome!" he wrathfully exclaims. It was like looking forward to the Garden of Eden all one's life, and going to vast trouble and expense to get there, and, on arriving, finding the renowned spot to be a sort of Montreal ice-palace. The palaces of Rome are not naturally fitted to be ice-palaces, and the cold feels all the colder in them by consequence.

But I am going too fast. The first thing my father did, after getting on board the little Channel steamer, was to go down in the cabin and drink a glass of brandy-and-water, hot, with sugar; and he afterwards remarked that "this sea-passage was the only enjoyable part of the day." But the wind cut like a scimitar, and he came on deck occasionally only—as when I came plunging down the companion-way to tell him, with the pride of a discoverer, that France was broad in sight, and the sun was shining on it. "Oh!" exclaimed my mother, looking up from her, pale discomfortableness on a sofa, with that radiant smile of hers, and addressing poor Miss Shepard, who was still further under the sinister influence of those historic alpine fluctuations which have upset so many. "Oh, Ada, Julian says the sun is shining on France!" Ada never stirred. She was the most amiable and philosophic of young ladies; but if thought could visit her reeling brain at that moment, she probably wondered why Providence had been so inconsiderate as to sever Britain from its Gallic base in those old geologic periods before man was yet born to sea-sickness.

Sunshine on the pale, smooth acclivities of France, and half a dozen bluff-bowed fishing-boats, pitching to the swell, were all that was notable on our trip across; and of Boulogne I remember nothing, except the confused mountain of the family luggage on the pier, and afterwards of its being fed into the baggage-car of the train. Ollendorff abandoned me thus early in my travels; nor was my father much better off. But Miss Shepard, now restored to life, made amends for her late incompetence by discoursing with excited French officials with what seemed to me preternatural intelligence; indeed, I half doubted whether there were not some conspiracy to deceive in that torrent of outlandish sounds which she and they were so rapidly pouring forth to one another. However, all turned out well, and there we were, in a compartment of a French railway-train, smelling of stale tobacco, with ineffective zinc foot-warmers, and an increasing veil of white frost on the window-panes, which my sisters and myself spent our time in trying to rub off that France might become visible. But the white web was spun again as fast as we dissipated it, and nothing was to be seen, at all events, but long processions of poplars, which interested me only because I imagined myself using them as lances in some romantic Spenserian adventure of knight-errantry—for the spell of that chivalric dream still hung about me. So we came to Amiens, a pallid, clean, chilly town, with high-shouldered houses and a tall cathedral, and thence went on to Paris at five o'clock. It was already dusk, and our transit to the Hotel de Louvre in crowded cabs, through streets much unlike London, is the sum of my first impressions of the wonderful city.

Then, marshalled by princely yet deferential personages in rich costumes, we proceeded up staircases and along gilded corridors to a suite of sumptuous apartments, with many wax candles in candelabra, which were immediately lighted by an attendant, and their lustre was reflected from tall mirrors which panelled the rooms. The furniture thus revealed was costly and elegant, but hardly comfortable to an English-bred sense; the ceilings were painted, the floor rich with glowing carpets. But the glow of color was not answered by a glow of any other sort; a deadly chill pervaded this palatial place, which fires, as big as one's fist, kindled in fireplaces as large as hall bedrooms, did nothing to dissipate. Hereupon our elders had compassion on us, and, taking from the tall, awful bedsteads certain crimson comforters, they placed each of us in an easy-chair and tucked the comforters in over us. These comforters, covered with crimson silk, were of great thickness, but also of extraordinary lightness, and for a few minutes we had no confidence in their power to thaw us. But they were filled with swan's-down; and presently a novel and delightful sensation—that of warmth—began to steal upon us. It steadily increased, until in quarter of an hour there might be seen upon our foreheads and noses, which were the only parts of us open to view, the beads of perspiration. It was a marvellous experience. The memory of the crimson comforters has remained with me through life; light as sunset clouds, they accomplished the miracle of importing tropic warmth into the circle of the frozen arctic. I think we must have been undressed and night-gowned before this treatment; at any rate, I have forgotten how we got to bed, but to bed we somehow got, and slept the blessed sleep of childhood.

The next morning my father, apparently as an accompaniment of his cold, was visited by a severe nosebleed; no importance was attached to it, beyond its preventing him from going forth to superintend the examination of our luggage at the custom-house—the mountain having been registered through from London. This duty was, therefore, done by Miss Shepard and my mother. The next day, at dinner, the nosebleeding began again. "And thus," observed my father, "my blood must be reckoned among the rivers of human gore which have been shed in Paris, and especially in the Place de la Concorde, where the guillotines used to stand"—and where our restaurant was. But these bleedings, which came upon him at several junctures during his lifetime, and were uniformly severe and prolonged, probably had a significance more serious than was supposed. The last one occurred not many weeks before his death, and it lasted twenty-four hours; he was never the same afterwards. He joked about it then, as now, but there was the forewarning of death in it.

But that day lies still unsuspected in the future, six years away. For the present, we were in splendid Paris, with Napoleon III. in the Tuileries, and Baron Haussmann regnant in the stately streets. For a week we went to and fro, admiring and—despite the cold, the occasional icy rains, and once even a dark fog—delighted. In spirit and in substance, nothing could be more different from London. For my part, I enjoyed it without reservation; the cold, which depressed my sick father, exhilarated me. For Notre Dame, the Tuileries, the Louvre, the Madeleine, the pictures, and the statues, I cared little or nothing; I hardly even heeded the column of the Place Vendome or the mighty mass of the Arc de Triomphe. But the Frenchiness of it all captivated me. The throngs in the streets were kaleidoscopic in costume and character: priests, soldiers, gendarmes, strange figures with turbans and other Oriental accoutrements; women gayly dressed and wearing their dresses with an air; men with curling mustachios, and with nothing to do, apparently, but amuse themselves; romantic artists with soft felt hats and eccentric beards; grotesque figures of poverty in rags and with ominous visages, such as are never seen in London; martial music, marching regiments, with gorgeous generals on horseback, with shining swords; church processions; wedding pageants crowding in and out of superb churches; newspapers, shop-signs, and chatter, all in French, even down to the babble of the small children. And the background of this parade was always the pleasant, light-hued buildings, the majority of them large and of a certain uniformity of aspect, as if they had been made in co-operation, and to look pretty, instead of independently and incongruously, as in England. These people seemed to be all playing and prattling; nobody worked; even the shopkeepers held holiday in their shops. Such was my boyish idea of Paris. Napoleon had been emperor only five or six years; he had been married to Eugenie only four or five; and, so far as one could judge who knew nothing of political coups d'etat and crimes, he was the right man in the right place. Moreover, the French bread was a revelation; it tasted better than cake, and was made in loaves six feet long; and the gingerbread, for sale on innumerable out-door stalls, was better yet, with quite a new flavor. I ate it as I walked about with my father. He once took a piece himself, and, said he, "I desired never to taste any more." How odd is, sometimes, the behavior of grown-up people!

But even my father enjoyed the French cookery, though he was in some doubt whether it were not a snare of the evil one to lure men to indulgence. We dined in the banquet-hall of our hotel once or twice only; in general we went to neighboring restaurants, where the food was just as good, but cost less. I was always hungry, but hungrier than ever in Paris. "I really think," wrote my father, "that Julian would eat a whole sheep." In his debilitated state he had little appetite either for dinners or for works of art; he looked even upon the Venus of Milo with coldness. "It seemed," wrote he, speaking of the weather one morning, "as if a cold, bitter, sullen agony were interposed between each separate atom of our bodies. In all my experience of bad atmospheres, methinks I never knew anything so atrocious as this. England has nothing to compare with it." The "grip" was a disease unnamed at that epoch, but I should suppose that it was very vividly described in the above sentence. He had the grip, and for nearly six months he saw everything through its medium.

Besides the Venus and the populace, we saw various particular persons. I went with my father to the bank, and saw a clerk give him a long roll of bright gold coins, done up in blue paper; and we visited, or were visited by, a Miss MacDaniel and her mother, two Salem women, "of plain, New England manners and appearance," wrote my father, "and they have been living here for nearly two years. The daughter was formerly at Brook Farm. The mother suffered so much from seasickness on the passage that she is afraid to return to America, and so the daughter is kept here against her will, and without enjoyment, and, as I judge, in narrow circumstances. It is a singular misfortune. She told me that she had been to the Louvre but twice since her arrival, and did not know Paris at all." This looks like a good theme for Mr. Henry James.

We called on the American minister to Paris, Judge John Young Mason, a simple and amiable personage. He was rubicund and stolid, and talked like a man with a grievance; but, as my father afterwards remarked, it was really Uncle Sam who was the aggrieved party, in being mulcted of seventeen thousand dollars a year in order that the good old judge should sleep after dinner in a French armchair. The judge was anticipating being superseded in his post, but, as it turned out, was not driven to seek second-rate employment to support himself in his old age; he had the happiness to die in Paris the very next year.

But the most agreeable of our meetings was with Miss Maria Mitchell, the astronomer, who, like ourselves, was stopping a few days in Paris on her way to Rome. She desired the protection of our company on the journey, though, as my father remarked, she looked well able to take care of herself. She was at this time about forty years old; born in Nantucket; the plainest, simplest, heartiest of women, with a face browned by the sun, of which she evidently was accustomed to see as much as of the other stars in the heavens. Her mouth was resolute and full of expression; but her remarkable feature was her eyes, which were dark and powerful, and had the kindest and most magnetic look of comradeship in them. Her dark hair was a little grizzled. She was dressed in plain gray, and was active and energetic in her movements. She was, as the world knows, a woman of unusual intellect and character; but she had lived alone with her constellations, having little contact with the world or practical knowledge of it, so that in many respects she was still as much a child as I was, and I immediately knew her for my friend and playmate and loved her with all my heart. There was a charming quaintness and innocence about her, and an immense, healthy curiosity about this new old world and its contents. She had a great flow of native, spontaneous humor, and could say nothing that was not juicy and poignant. She was old-fashioned, yet full of modern impulses and tendencies; warmhearted and impulsive, but rich in homely common-sense. Though bold as a lion, she was, nevertheless, beset with the funniest feminine timidities and misgivings, due mainly, I suppose, to her unfamiliarity with the ways of the world. There was already a friendship of long standing between her and Miss Shepard, and they did much of their sightseeing during the coming year together, and debated between themselves over the statues and pictures. Her talk with us children was of the fine, countrified, racy quality which we could not resist; and in the evenings, as we journeyed along, she told us tales of the stars and gave us their names. On the steamer going to Genoa, one night, she pointed out to me the constellation Orion, then riding high aloft in glittering beauty, and I kindly communicated to my parents the information that the three mighty stars were known to men as O'Brien's Belt. This was added to the ball of jolly as a household word.

[IMAGE: MARIA MITCHELL]

Miss Mitchell's trunk was contributed to our mountain, when we set out anew on our pilgrimage, with a result at first deplorable, for the number of our own pieces of luggage being known and registered in the official documents, it turned out, at our first stopping-place, that the trunk of our new companion had been substituted for one of our own, which, of course, was left behind. It was ultimately recovered, I believe, but it seemed as if the entire world of French officialdom had to be upheaved from its foundations in order to accomplish it.

Our route lay through Lyons to Marseilles. At Lyons I remember only the enormous hotel where we slept the first night, with corridors wandering like interminable streets, up-stairs and down, turning corners, extending into vistas, clean-swept, echoing, obscure, lit only by the glimmering candle borne by our guide. We seemed to be hours on our journey through these labyrinths; and when at last we reached our rooms, they were so cold and so unwarmable that we were fain to journey back again, up and down, along and athwart, marching and countermarching past regiments of closed doors, until at length we attained the region of the hotel dining-saloon, where it was at least two or three degrees less cold than elsewhere. After dinner we had to undertake a third peregrination to bed, and a fourth the next morning to get our train. The rooms of the hotel were on a scale suited to the length of the connecting thoroughfares, and the hotel itself stood hard by a great, empty square with a statue in the middle of it. But the meals were not of a corresponding amplitude. And I think it was at the railway station of this town that the loss of the trunk was discovered.

The region from Lyons to Marseilles, along the valley of the Rhone, with the lower ranges of the Alps on our left hand, was much more picturesque than anything France had shown us hitherto. Ancient castles crowned many of the lower acclivities; there were villages in the vales, and presently vineyards and olive groves. The Rhone, blue and swift as its traditions demanded, kept us close company much of the way; the whole range of country was made for summer, and the wintry conditions under which we saw it seemed all the more improper. It must have been near midnight when our train rolled into the station at Marseilles, and my pleasure in "sitting up late" had long become stale.

The sun shone the next morning, and, being now in the latitude of Florence and such places, it could not help being hot, though the shaded sides of the streets were still icy cold; and most of the streets were so narrow that there was a great deal of shade. The whole population seemed to be out-of-doors and collecting in the sun, like flies, a very animated and voluble population and of a democratic complexion; the proportion of poor folks was noticeable, and the number of women, who seemed to camp out in the squares and market-places, and there gossip and do their knitting, as other women might at their firesides; but here the sun is the only fire. But a good deal of the bustle this morning was occasioned by the news from Paris that an attempt to assassinate Napoleon III. had been made the day before; had we remained one day longer in Paris we might have assisted at the spectacle. The Marseilles people seemed to take it comfortably; nobody was very sorry that the attempt had been made, nor very glad that it had not succeeded. It was something to talk about. It was ten years more before the French got thoroughly used to the nephew of his uncle and decided that he was, upon the whole, a good thing; and soon after they lost him. And for a decade after Sedan, chatting with the boulevardiers in Paris, they would commonly tell me that they wished they had the empire back again. Perhaps they will have it, some day.

There was a great deal of filth in Marseilles streets and along her wharves and in the corners of her many public squares; and even our hotel, the "Angleterre," was anything but clean; it was a tall, old rookery, from the windows of our rooms in which I looked down into an open space between the strange, old buildings, and saw a juggler do his marvels on a bit of carpet spread on the pavement, while a woman handed him the implements of magic out of a very much travelled and soiled deal-box. Later in the day, when the place was deserted, I heedlessly flung out of the window the contents of a glass of water, and, looking after it in its long descent, I was horrified to see approaching a man of very savage and piratical aspect, with a terrible black beard and a slouch hat. As luck would have it, the water struck him full on the side of the face, probably the first time in many a year that he had felt the impact of the liquid there. I withdrew my head from the window in alarm, mingled with the natural joy that a boy cannot help feeling at such a catastrophe; and by-and-by, when I felt certain that he must have passed on, I peeped out again, but what were my emotions at beholding him planted terribly right under the window where he had been baptized, and staring upward with a blood-thirsty expression. I immediately drew back again, but too late—our eyes had met, and he had made a threatening gesture at me. I now felt that a very serious thing had happened, and that if I ventured out upon the streets again I should assuredly be assassinated; that it would be no mere attempt, as in the case of the Emperor, but a pronounced success. I did not tell my fears to any of my family—I had not, to say the truth, informed any of them of the incident which had imperilled my life, but I no longer felt any curiosity to see more of Marseilles, and was sincerely thankful when I found myself, betimes next morning, on board the Calabrese, bound for Genoa. I never saw my murderer again, but I could make a fair likeness of him, I believe, to-day. The trip to Genoa, and onward to Civita Vecchia, lasted two or three days, the steamer generally pursuing her course by night and laying up by day.

The first morning, soon after sunrise, found us approaching the bay of Genoa, with the sun rising over the Mediterranean on our right and throwing its light upon the curving acclivity on which the city stands. The water had a beautiful blue-green color and was wonderfully clear, so that, looking down through it over the ship's side, as we glided slowly to our moorings, I saw sea-weeds and blocks of marble and other marine curiosities which reawakened my old passion for aquariums. Indeed, to be candid with the reader—as is my study throughout this narrative—nothing in Genoa the Superb itself has, I find, remained with me so distinctly as that glimpse of the floor of the bay through the clear sea-water. I did not care to go up into the town and see the palaces and churches; I wanted to stay on the beach and hunt for shells—Italian shells—and classical or mediaeval sea-anemones. Of course, I had to go up into the town; and I saw, no doubt, the churches and the palaces, with their rooms radiant with the mellow brilliance of precious marbles and painted ceilings, and statues and pictures, under the personal conduct of no less an individual than Salvator Rosa himself—for that was the name of our guide—and for years afterwards I never doubted that he was the creator of the paintings which, in Rome and elsewhere, bore his signature. I say I must have seen these things, but in memory I cannot disentangle them from the innumerable similar objects which I beheld, later, in other Italian cities; their soft splendor and beautiful art could not hold their own for me beside that cool translucence of the Mediterranean inlet, with its natural marvels dimly descried as'I bent over the boat's side. It was for that, and not for the other, that my heart yearned, and that became a part of me, all the more, no doubt, that it was denied me. Our aim in the world is beauty and happiness; but we are late in learning that they exist in the will and imagination, and not in this or that accredited and venerable thing or circumstance that is mechanically obtruded on our unready attention. If you were put down in the Garden of Eden, and told that you might stay there an hour and no more, what would you do? How would you "improve" your time? Would you run to and fro, and visit the spot where Adam first stood erect, and the place where he sat when he named the animals, and the thymey bank on which he slept while Eve was taking form from his rib, and the tree on which grew the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, and the precise scene of the temptation and the fall, and the spot on which stood the altars on which Cain and Abel offered their sacrifices, and where, presently, wrathful Cain rose up against his brother and slew him? Would you make sure of all these set sights in order that you might reply satisfactorily to the cloud of interviewers awaiting you outside the Garden? Or would you simply throw yourself down on the grass wherever the angel happened to leave you, and try to see or to realize or to recall nothing, but passively permit your soul to feel and experience and grow what way it would, prompted by the inner voice and guided by the inner light, heedless of what the interviewers were expecting and of what duty and obligation and the unique opportunity demanded? It is worth thinking about. It may be conceded that there is some risk to run.

I next find myself in a coach, with four horses harnessed to it, trundling along the road from Civita Vecchia to Rome; for of Monaco I recall nothing, nor of Leghorn; and though we passed within sight of Elba, I saw only a lonely island on our starboard beam. As for the coach, it was a necessity, if we would continue our journey, for the railroad was still in the future in 1858. The coach-road was not only as rugged and uneasy as it had been any time during the past three hundred years, but it was outrageously infested by banditti; and, indeed, a robbery had taken place on it only a week or two before. For miles and miles on end it was totally destitute of dwellings, and those that we saw might well have been the harboring-places of iniquity. Moreover, we were so long delayed in making our start that it was already afternoon before we were under way, and finally one of our horses gave out ere we were many miles advanced, compelling us to hobble along for the remainder of the trip at reduced speed. As the shades of evening began to fall, we saw at intervals sundry persons lurking along the roadway, clad in long cloaks and conical hats, with the suggestion of the barrel of a musket about them, and it is probable that we were preserved from a tragic fate only by the fortunate accident that we were just behind the mail-coach and might theoretically have hailed it for help had we been attacked. Meanwhile, my father, with ostensible pleasantry, suggested that we should hide our gold coin (of which we carried a considerable store) in various queer, out-of-the-way receptacles. I remember that an umbrella was filled with a handful or two of the shining pieces, and stuck with studied carelessness through the straps in the roof of the vehicle. This was regarded by us children as excellent sport, though I think there was a lingering feeling of apprehension in the bottom of my soul. My father kept a moderate sum in napoleons in his pockets, so that, should the worst happen, the bandits might fancy it was our all. But then there was our mountain of luggage, incredibly strapped on the top of the conveyance, and behind it, and no reasonable bandits, one would suppose, could have failed to be satiated with that. However, it was written that we were to reach Rome unscathed, albeit long after dark, and though we did not get past the Porta del Popolo without suffering legalized robbery on the part of the custom-house officials. But by that time we were so weary, downcast, and chilled that depredation and outrage could not rouse or kindle us.

We ended, at last, in one of those refrigerator hotels to which our travels had made us accustomed, in one of the hollow, dull, untoward caverns of which I was presently put to bed and to sleep. "Oh, Rome, my country, City of the Soul!" Oh, Byron, were you an Esquimau?

XIV

We arrived in Rome on the 17th of January, 1858, at eleven o'clock at night. After a day or two at Spillman's Hotel, we moved into lodgings in the Via Porta Pinciana, the Palazzo Larazani. The street extended just below the ridge of the Pincian Hill, and was not far from the broad flight of steps mounting upward from the Piazza d' Espagna, on the left as you go up. In spite of its resounding name, our new dwelling had not a palatial aspect. It was of no commanding height or architectural pretensions; a stuccoed edifice, attached on both sides to other edifices. The street, like other Roman streets, was narrow; it was dirty like them, and, like them, was paved with cobble-stones. The place had been secured for us by (I think) our friends the Thompsons; Mr. Thompson—the same man who had painted my father's portrait in 1853—had a studio hard by. The Thompsons had been living in Rome for five years or more, and knew the Roman ropes. They were very comfortable people to know; indeed, Rome to me would have been a very different and less delightful place without them, as will hereafter appear. The family consisted of Cephas Giovanni Thompson, the father and artist; his wife and his two sons and one daughter. "Cephas Giovanni," being interpreted, means plain Peter John; and it was said (though, I believe, unjustifiably) that Peter John had been the names originally given to Thompson by his parents at the baptismal-font, but that his wife, who was a notable little woman, a sister of Anna Cora Mowatt, the actress, well known in America and England seventy years ago, had persuaded him to translate them into Greek and Italian, as more suitable to the romantic career of an artist of the beautiful. I fancy the story arose from the fact that Mrs. Thompson was a woman who, it was felt, might imaginably conceive so ambitious a project. She was small, active, entertaining, clever, and "spunky," as the New-Englanders would have said; indeed, she had a rousing temper, on occasion. Her husband, on the other hand, had the mildest, wisely smiling, philosophic air, with a low, slow voice, and a beard of patriarchal fashion and size, though as yet it was a rich brown, with scarcely a thread of silver in it. Brown and abundant, also, was his hair; he had steady, bright, brown eyes, and was rather under the average height of Anglo-Saxon man. But for all this mild-shining aspect of his, his dark eyebrows were sharply arched, or gabled rather; and my mother, who had absorbed from her former friend, George Combe, a faith in the betrayals of phrenology, expressed her private persuasion that good Mr. Thompson had a temper, too. She and George Combe turned out to be right in this instance, though I am not going to tell the tale of how we happened to be made acquainted with the fact. Little thunder-storms once in a while occur in human skies as well as in the meteorological ones; and the atmosphere is afterwards all the sweeter and softer. No people could be more good, honest, and kind than the Thompsons.

There was no other artist in Rome who could paint as well as Mr. Thompson. That portrait of my father, to which reference has been made, which now hangs in my house, looks even better, as a painting, to-day than it did when it was fresh from his easel. Rubens could not have laid on the colors with more solidity and with truer feeling for the hues of life. But the trouble with Thompson was that he had never learned how to draw correctly; and this defect appeared to some extent in his portraits as well as in his figures. The latter were graceful, significant, full of feeling and character; but they betrayed a weakness of anatomical knowledge and of perspective. They had not the conventional incorrectness of the old masters preceding Raphael, but an incorrectness belonging personally to Thompson; it was not excessive or conspicuous to any one, and certainly not to Thompson himself. But his color redeemed all and made his pictures permanently valuable. He was at this time painting a picture of Saint Peter being visited by an angel, which was rich and beautiful; and he had some sketches of a series based on Shakespeare's Tempest; and standing on one side in the studio was a glowing figure of a woman in Oriental costume, an odalisque, or some such matter, which showed that his sympathy with life was not a restricted one. Later in our acquaintance he fell in love with the bright Titian hair of my sister Rose, and made a little portrait of her, which was one of his best likenesses, apart from its admirable color; it even showed the tears in the child's eyes, gathering there by reason of her antipathy to posing.

Cora Thompson, the daughter, was the most good-natured and sunny-tempered of girls; she may have been fifteen at this time; she inherited neither the handsomeness of her father nor the sharp-edged cleverness of her mother; but she was lovable. Of the two boys, the younger was named Hubert; he was about ten years old, small of his age, and not robust in make or constitution. He was, however, a smart, rather witty youth, a little precocious, perhaps, and able to take care of himself. Some five and twenty years after the date of which I am now writing I was at a large political dinner in New York and was there introduced to a Mr. Thompson, who was the commissioner of public works, and a party boss of no small caliber and power. He was an immense personage, physically likewise, weighing fully three hundred pounds, and, though not apparently advanced in years, a thorough man of the world and of municipal politics. After we had conversed for a few minutes, I was struck by a certain expression about my interlocutor's eyebrows that recalled long-forgotten days and things. I remembered that his name was Thompson, and had an impression that his initials were H. O. "Are you little Hubert Thompson?" I suddenly demanded. "Why, of course I am—all that's left of him!" he replied, with a laugh. So this was the boy whom, a quarter of a century before, I could have held out at arm's-length. We talked over the old days when we played together about the Roman streets and ruins. Nothing more reveals the essential strangeness of human life than this meeting after many years with persons we have formerly known intimately, who are now so much changed in outward guise. We feel the changes to be unreal, and yet, there they are! Grover Cleveland was being groomed for his first Presidential term then; Hubert was one of his supporters in New York, and he presented me to the pyramidal man of destiny. Poor Hubert died, lamentably, not long after. He was a good and affectionate son. He was perhaps too kind-hearted and loyal for the political role which he enacted.

The elder Thompson boy was called Edmund, or, in my vernacular, Eddy. There were in his nature a gravity, depth, and sweetness which won my heart and respect, and we became friends in that intimate and complete way that seems possible only to boys in their early teens. For that matter, neither of us was yet over twelve; I think Eddy was part of a year my junior. But you must search the annals of antiquity to find anything so solid and unalterable as was our friendship. He was the most absolutely good boy I ever knew, but by no means goody-goody; he had high principles, noble ambitions, strong affections, the sweetest of tempers; his seriousness formed a healthy foil to my own more impetuous and hazardous character. "The thoughts of a boy are long, long thoughts"; and not in many long lifetimes could a tithe of the splendid projects we resolved upon have been carried out. We were together from morning till night, month after month; we walked interminably about Rome and frequented its ruins, and wandered far out over the Campagna and along the shores of famous Tiber. We picked up precious antique marbles, coins, and ancient curiosities of all sorts; we hunted for shells and butterflies and lizards; our hearts were uplifted by the martial music of the French army bands, which were continually resounding throughout Rome; and we admired the gleaming swords of the officers and the sharp, punctual drill and marching of the red-legged rank and file. We haunted the lovely Villa Borghese, the Pincian Hill, the Villa Pamphili Doria; we knew every nook and cranny of the Palace of the Csesars, the Baths of Caracalla, the Roman Forum, the Coliseum, the Egerian Grove; we were familiar with every gate that entered Rome; we drank at every fountain; we lingered through the galleries of the Vatican and of the Capitol; we made St. Peter's Church our refuge in inclement weather; we threaded every street and by-way of the city; we were on friendly and confidential terms with the custode of every treasure. And all the time we talked about what we thought, what we felt, what we would do; there is no looking backward in boys' confidences; they live in the instant present and in the infinite future. Eddy and I arranged to spend one lifetime in Central Africa, in emulation of the exploits of David Livingstone; there, freed from all civilized burdens, we would live, and we would run, catch the wild goat by the hair, and hurl our lances in the sun. At another epoch of our endless lives we would enter the army and distinguish ourselves in heroic war; we would have swords like sunbeams and ride steeds like Bucephalus. Then, and interleaved with all this, as it were, there was an immense life of natural history; we would have a private museum to rival the famous ones of nations. Eddy was especially drawn towards insects, while my own predilection was still for conchology; and both of us spent hours every week in classifying and arranging our respective collections, not to speak of the time we devoted to hunting for specimens. Eddy had a green net at the end of a stick, and became very skilful in making his captures; and how we triumphed over a "swallow-tail," so difficult to catch, or an unfamiliar species! Eddy had his pins and his strips of cork, and paper boxes; and his collections certainly were fairer to look upon, to the ordinary view, than mine; moreover, his was the more scientific mind and the nicer sense of order. For the display of my snail-shells I used bits of card-board and plenty of gum-arabic; and I was affluent in "duplicates," my plan being to get a large card and then cover it with specimens of the shell, in serried ranks. I also called literature to my aid, and produced several little books containing labored descriptions of my collection, couched, so far as possible, in the stilted and formal phraseology of the conchological works to which I had access, but with occasional outbursts after a style of my own. Here is a chapter from one of them; a pen-and-ink portrait of the shell is prefixed to the original essay:

"CLAUSILIA BUBIGUNIA

"This handsome and elegant little shell is found in mossy places, or in old ruins, such as the Coliseum—where it is found in immense numbers—or the Palace of the Caesars. But in Italy it is common in any mossy ruin, in the small, moss-covered holes, where it is seen at the farthest extremity. After a rain they always crawl out of their places of concealment in such numbers that one would think it had been raining clausilias. The shell, in large and fine specimens, is five-eighths of an inch in length. The young are very small and look like the top part of the spire of the adults. This shell is also largest in the middle, shaped something like a grain of wheat. It has nine whorls, marked by small white lines, which look like fine white threads of sewing-cotton; and just below them are marks which look like very fine and very small stitches of white cotton. The color of the shell, down to next to the last whorl, is a brown color, but the very last whorl is a little lighter. The shell is covered all over with fine lines, but they need to be looked at through a magnifying-glass, they are so fine. The lip is turning out, and very thin; inside there are three ridges, two on the top part of the mouth, and the other, which is very small, is below. The shell, when the animal is out of it, is semi-transparent, and the little colomella, or pillar, can be indistinctly seen through."

There follows a detailed and loving description of the animal inhabiting the shell, which I must reserve for a future edition. Of another species of snail, Helix strigata, our learned author observes that "This shell is, when dead, one of those which is found on the banks of the Tiber. It is a strange circumstance that, although it is a land shell, it should be found more on the banks of a river than anywhere else, and also only on the banks of the Tiber, for it is not found on the banks of any other river. Any one would think that dead shells were gifted with the power of walking about, for certainly it is an inexplicable wonder how they got there." Of Helix muralis we are informed that "The Romans eat these snails, not the whole of them, but only their feet. In ancient times the most wealthy people used to eat snails, and perhaps they ate the very ones which the poorest people eat nowadays. It is most probable, for there are a great many different kinds of snails round Rome, and the Romans would probably select the best." I may perhaps be permitted to remark that the correct orthography of this writer fills me with astonishment, inasmuch as in later life I have reason to know that he often went astray in this respect. Of the uniform maturity of the literary style, I have no need to speak.

Eddy's father was in the habit of giving him an income of two or three pauls a week, dependent on his good behavior and punctual preparation of his lessons; and since Eddy was always well behaved and faithful in his studies, the income came in pretty regularly. Eddy saved up this revenue with a view to buying himself a microscope, for the better prosecution of his zoological labors; being, also, stimulated thereto by the fact that I already possessed one of these instruments, given me by my father a year or two before. Mine cost ten shillings, but Eddy meant to get one even more expensive. I had, too, a large volume of six hundred pages on The Microscope, Its History, Construction, and Uses, by Jabez Hogg, the contents of which I had long since learned by heart, and which I gladly communicated to my friend. At length Eddy's economies had proceeded so far that he was able to calculate that on his twelfth birthday he would possess a fortune of five scudi, and he decided that he would buy a microscope at that figure; it is needless to add that the microscope had long since been selected in the shop, and was decidedly superior to mine. We could hardly contain our impatience to enter upon the marvellous world whereof this instrument was the key; that twelfth birthday seemed long in coming, but at last it came.

I was to go with my friend to the shop to see him make the purchase; and I was at his house betimes in the morning. But what a stupendous surprise awaited me! Eddy was too much excited to say anything; with a face beaming with emotion, he led me into the sitting-room, and there, upon the table, was a microscope. But such a microscope! It was of such unheard-of magnificence and elaborateness that it took my breath away, and we both stood gazing at it in voiceless rapture. It was tall and elegant, shining with its polished brass and mirrors, and its magnifying powers were such as to disclose to us the very heart of nature's mystery. It was quiet Mr. Thompson's birthday present to his son. That gentleman sat smiling in his armchair by the window, and presently he said, with a delightful archness, "Well, Eddy, I suppose you are ready to give me back all that money you've been collecting?" Eddy grinned radiantly. He spent his savings for microscope-slides and other appurtenances, and for weeks thereafter he could hardly take his eye away from the object-lens. He was luminous with happiness, and I reflected his splendor from my sympathetic heart. Dear old Eddy! In after years he entered West Point and became a soldier, and he died early; I never saw him after parting from him in Italy in 1859. But he is still my first friend, and there has been no other more dear.

I am not aware that Rome has ever been described from the point of view of a twelve-year-old boy, and it might be worth doing; but I have delayed attempting it somewhat too long; the moving pictures in my mind have become too faded and confused. And yet I am surprised at the minuteness of some of my recollections; they have, no doubt, been kept alive by the numerous photographs of Rome which one carries about, and also by the occasional perusal of The Marble Faun and other Roman literature. But much is also due to the wonderful separateness which Rome retains in the mind. It is like nothing else, and the spirit of it is immortal. It seems as if I must have lived a lifetime there; and yet I cannot make out that our total residence in the city extended over fourteen months. Certainly no other passage of my boyhood time looms so large or is rooted so deep.

But the passion for Rome (unless one be a Byron) is not a plant of sudden growth, and I dare say that, during those first frigid weeks, I may have shared my father's whimsical aversion to the city. He has described, in his journals, how all things seemed to be what they should not; and he was terribly disgusted with the filth that defiled the ruins and the street corners. He was impressed by the ruins, but deplored their nakedness. "The marble of them grows black or brown, it is true," says he, "and shows its age in that way; but it remains hard and sharp, and does not become again a part of nature, as stone walls do in England; some dry and dusty grass sprouts along the ledges of a ruin, as in the Coliseum; but there is no green mantle of ivy spreading itself over the gray dilapidation." We stumbled upon the Fountain of Trevi in one of our early rambles, not knowing what it was. "One of these fountains," writes my father, referring to it, "occupies the whole side of a great edifice, and represents Neptune and his steeds, who seem to be sliding down with a cataract that tumbles over a ledge of rocks into a marble-bordered lake, the whole—except the fall of water itself—making up an exceedingly cumbrous and ridiculous affair." He goes to St. Peter's, and "it disappointed me terribly by its want of effect, and the little justice it does to its real magnitude externally; as to the interior, I am not sure that it would not be even more grand and majestic if it were less magnificent, though I should be sorry to see the experiment tried. I had expected something dim and vast, like the great English cathedrals, only more vast and dim and gray; but there is as much difference as between noonday and twilight." The pictures, too, were apt in these first days to go against the grain with him. Contemplating a fresco representing scenes in purgatory, he broke forth: "I cannot speak as to the truth of the representation, but, at all events, it was purgatory to look at this poor, faded rubbish. Thank Heaven, there is such a thing as whitewash; and I shall always be glad to hear of its application to old frescoes, even at the sacrifice of remnants of real excellence!" Such growlings torture the soul of the connoisseur; but the unregenerate man, hearing them, leaps up and shouts for joy. He found the old masters, in their sacred subjects, lacking in originality and initiative; and when they would represent mythology, they engendered an apotheosis of nakedness. His conclusion was that "there is something forced, if not feigned, in our taste for pictures of the old Italian school." Of the profane subjects, he instances the Fornarina, "with a deep bright glow on her face, naked below the waist, and well pleased to be so, for the sake of your admiration—ready for any extent of nudity, for love or money—the brazen trollop that she is! Raphael must have been capable of great sensuality to have painted this picture of his own accord, and lovingly." These are the iconoclasms of the Goth and Vandal at their first advent to Rome. They remained to alter their mood, and extol what they had before assaulted; and so did my father, as we shall see presently. But at first he was sick and cold and uncomfortable; and he consoled himself by hitting out at everything, in the secret privacy of his diary, since opened to the world. With warmer weather came equanimity and kinder judgments; but there is a refreshing touch of truth and justice even in these mutterings of exasperation.

It was not so much, I suppose, that Rome was cold as that my father had expected it to be otherwise. When one is in a place where tradition and association invite the soul forth to be warmed and soothed and rejoiced, and the body, venturing out, finds nothing but chill winds and frigid temperature and discomfort, the shock is much greater and more disagreeable than if one had been in some northern Canada or Spitzbergen, where such conditions are normal. Ice in the arctic circle is all right and exhilarating, but in the Piazza of St. Peter's it is an outrage, and affects the mind and heart even more than the flesh.

Circumstances caused my father to pass through several distinct phases of feeling while he was in Rome. First, his own indisposition and the inclement weather depressed and exasperated him.

Time, in due course, brought relief in these respects, and he began to enjoy himself and his surroundings. Anon, the springs of creative imagination, long dormant in him, were roused to activity by thoughts connected with the Faun of Praxiteles in the Capitol. He now became happy in the way of his genius and immediately took a new interest in all things, looking at them from the point of view of possible backgrounds or incidents for the romance which had begun to take form in his mind. He describes what he saw con amore, and all manner of harmonious ideas bloom through his thoughts, like anemones and other flowers in the Villa Pamphili and the Borghese. This desirable mood continued until, after our return to Rome from the Florentine visit, my sister caught the Roman fever. She lay for weeks in danger of death; and her father's anxiety about her not only destroyed in him all thoughts of literary production and care for it, but made even keeping his journal no longer possible for him. That strain, so long continued, broke him down, and he never recovered from it so as to be what he had been before. Nevertheless, when she became convalescent, the reaction from his dark misgivings made him, for a time, as light-hearted as a boy; and, the carnival happening to be coincident with her recovery, he entered into the fun of it with a zest and enjoyment that surprised himself. But, again, it presently became evident that her recovery was not complete, and probably never would be so; the injury to her health was permanent, and she was liable to recurrences of disease. His spirits sank again, not so low as before, but, on the other hand, they never again rose to their normal level. It was in this saddened mood that he once more took up the Roman romance and finished it; it is a sad book, and when there is a ray of sunshine across the page, it has a melancholy gleam. After we returned to Concord, his apprehensions concerning Una's unsound condition were confirmed; and, in addition, the bitter cleavage between North and South inspired in him the gloomiest forebodings. A wasting away of his whole physical substance ensued; and he died, almost suddenly, while in years he might be considered hardly past the prime of his life. A sensitive eye can trace the effects of the death-blow all through The Marble Faun, and still more in Septimius and Grimshawe, published after his death. In The Dolliver Romance fragment, which was the last thing he wrote, there is visible once more some reminiscence of the old sunshine of humor that was so often apparent in his time of youth and vigor; but it, too, has a sad touch in it, such as belongs to the last rays of the star of day before it sinks below the horizon forever. Night follows, and the rest is silence.