Where did all that riches come from?
Out of what unfathomable opulence, out of what pitiable penury, out of
what fear, out of what love? One fancies the dying hands of wealth that
released their gift to the sacred use, the knotted hands of work that
spared it from their need. The giving continues in this latest Christian
age as in the earliest, and Rome is increasingly Rome in a world which
its thinkers think no longer believes.
From San Paolo we were going to another shrine, more hallowed to our
literary sense, and we drove through the sweet morning sunshine and
bird-singing, past pale-pink clouds of almond bloom on the garden
slopes, with snowy heights far beyond, to the simple graveyard where
Keats and Shelley lie. Our way to the Protestant cemetery held by some
shabby apartment-houses of that very modern Rome which was largely so
jerry-built, and which I would not leave out of the landscape if I
could, for I think their shabbi-ness rather heightens your sense of the
peaceful loveliness to which you come under the cypresses, among the
damp aisles, so thickly studded with the stones recording the death in
exile of the English strangers lying there far from home.
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