But, if each of these bare facts could be parted from the others and
intelligently presented, what would it avail with the reader who has
never seen the originals of my psychograph? It is from some such
question, and not from want of a hospitable will, that I hesitate to ask
him to go with me on a golden morning of March and spend it in the Villa
Medici on the Pincian Hill. If I could I should like to pour its
yellowness and mellowness round him, perfumed with a potpourri of
associations from the time of Lucullus down through every mediaeval and
modern time to that very day, when I knew Carolus Duran to be living
somewhere in these beauteous bounds as the head of the French Academy
which has its home in them. The academic garden-paths, with a few happy
people wandering between their correctly balanced passages of box; the
blond facade of the casino looking down with its statues and reliefs on
these parterres; a young girl vanishing up an aisle of the grove beside
the garden into whatever dream awaited her youth in the leafy dusk; an
old American pair gazing after her from the terrace, with the void of
the vanished years aching in their hearts for the Rome that was once
young with them: does this represent to the reader an appreciable
morning in the Villa Medici? He may be grateful to me if he does, and if
he likes.
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