LETTERS TO A YOUNG POET

was still the empty, the hot, the fever-discredited Rome, and
this circumstance, together with other practical difficulties of
settling in, helped to perpetuate the unrest about us, so that the
foreignness lay upon us with the weight of homelessness. Add
to this that Rome (when you do not yet know it) has a stifling,
saddening effect upon you during the first few days: through
the inanimate and dismal museum feeling which it exhales,
through the multdplicity of its pasts, dragged into view and
laboriously maintained pasts (on which a small present supports
itself), through the unspeakable over-estimation of all these
defaced and dilapidated things, fostered by savants and philolo-
gists and imitated by the ordinary tourist to Italy, which are yet
fundamentally no more than fortuitous remains of another time
and a life that is not ours and should not be ours. Finally after
weeks of daily resistance you find your bearings again, although
still a little bewildered, and you reflect : no, there is not more
beauty here than elsewhere, and all these objects which have
been continuously admired for generations, which workmen’s
hands have mended and restored, signify nothing, are nothing
and have no heart and no worth ;—but there is much beauty
here, because there is much beauty everywhere. Eternally living
waters move along the old aqueducts into the great town and
dance in the numerous squares over white stone bowls and
display themselves in broad capacious basins and murmur by
day and increase their murmuring in the night, which here is
great and starry and soft with winds. And gardens are here,
unforgettable avenues and flights of stairs, stairs devised by
Michelangelo, stairs which are built after the pattern of down-
ward gliding waters,—broad in their descent, bringing forth
step from step as if they were waves. Through impressions like
these you come to yourself, win your way back from the
pretentious manifold which talks and chatters there (and how
talkative it is!), and you learn slowly to recognize the very few
things in which something eternal endures that you can love,
and something solitary in which you can gently share.

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