Not to have heard
their rich harmony would he like not having heard the echo in the
baptistery of Pisa, a life-long loss.
Heaven knows how punctiliously our guide would have acquainted us with
every particular of the Lateran group, which for a thousand years before
the Vatican was the home of the popes. We begged off from this and that,
but even indolence like mine would not spare itself the sight of the
Scala Santa. That was another of the things which I distinctly
remembered from the year 1864, and I did not find the spectacle of the
modern penitents covering the holy steps different in 1908. Now, as
then, there was something incongruous in their fashions and aspirations,
but one could not doubt that it was a genuine piety that nerved them to
climb up and down the hard ascent on their knees, or, at the worst, that
it was good exercise. Still, I would rather leave my reader the sense of
that most noble fagade of the church, with its lofty balustraded
entablature, where the gigantic Christ and ten of his saints look out
forever to the Alban hills.
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