Somehow it gave the humanest
touch in the complex impression of the overhistoried scene. It made one
feel very old, yet very young--old with the age and young with the youth
of the world--and very much at home.
VI
PERSONAL RELATIONS WITH THE PAST
I was myself part of the antiquity with which I have been trying to be
honest; and, though my date was no earlier than the seventh decade of
the nineteenth century, still so many and such cataclysmal changes had
passed over Rome since my time that I was, as far as concerned my own
consciousness, practically of the period of the Pantheon, say. The
Pantheon, in fact, was among my first associations with Rome. I lodged
very near it, in the next piazza, so that, if we were not
contemporaries, we were companions, and I could not go out of my hotel
to look up a more permanent sojourn without passing by it. Perhaps I
wished to pass by it, and might really have found my way to the Corso
without the Pantheon's help.
I have no longer a definite idea why I should have made my sojourn in
the very simple and modest little street called Via del Gambero, which
runs along behind the Corso apparently till it gets tired and then
stops.
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