Belmont chronicle. [volume] (St. Clairsville, Ohio) 1855-1973, 1862-03-13
Mrs. Stoves Description Of Rome.

Mrs. Stoves Description Of Rome.
Mrs Stowe, in the new chapters Of Agnes
ct Sorrento" in the Atlantic Monthly for
March, gives US tire following beautiful
description Of the "Eernsi City"
a, vision rises upon US from the land. of
shadows. We SEQ wide plain, miles and
miles in extent, rolling up in soft billows of
green, and grded on all sides BY blue noun
tains, whose silver crests cleaning in the
setting sunlight tell that the winter vet
fingers on their tops, though spring has
decSed all the plain. So silent, 50 lonely,
so fair is this waving expanse with its guar
dian mountains, it might be some wild soli-
tude, an American prairie or Asiatic steppe,
but that in the midst thereof, on some Bill
lows of rolling land, we discern a city, SOM
bre, quaint, and old,-a city of dreams and
nysteries,-a city of the living and the
dead. And that is Rome, weird, wonder
full, ancient, mighty Rome, mighty once
by physical force and grandeur, mightier
now IN physical deca1ence and weakness by
the spell OF a potent moral enchantment.
As the sun Is moving westward, the whole
air around becomes flooded with luminous
ness which seems to transfnse itself with
pervading presence through every rart of
the city, and make all its ruinous and mossy
age bright and living. The air shivers with
the silver vibrations of hundreds of bells.
and the evening glory goes up and down,
soft-footed and angelic, transfguring ali
thiBga The broken columns of the Forum
seem to swim in golden mist, and lumin-
Gus floods fill the Coliseum as it stands with
its thousand arches looking out into the city
like so many sightless eye-holes in the skull
of the past The tender light pours up
streets dark and iD-paved, Into noisome
and cayernous dens called houses, where
the peasantry of to-day vegetate in content
ed subservience. 1t Eliminates many a
dingy courtyard, where the moss is green
on the walls, and gurgling fountains fall into
quaint old scul ptured basins. 1t lights up
the gorgeous palaces of Rome's modern
princes, built with stones wrenched from
ancient ruins. 1t streams through wilder
ness of churches, each with its tolling pray
er-bell, and steals through painted windows
into the dazzling confusion of pictured and
gilded glories that glitter and gleam from
roof and wall within. And it goes, too,
across the Tiber, up the filthy and noisesome
Ghetto, where, hemmed in by ghostly su-
perstition the sons of Isreal are growing up
without vital day, ike wan white plants in
cellars; and the black mournful obelisks Of
the expresses in the villas around, it touches
with a solemn glory. The castle of St. An.
| gelo looks ike great translucent, luminous
orb, and the statues of saints and apostles
on the top of St john Lateran glow as IL
made of living fire, and seem to stretch out
glorifed hands of welcome to the pilgrims
that are approaching the Holy City across
the soft, palpitating sea of green that lies
| stretched like misty veil around it.
Then, as now, Rome was an enchantress
of mighty and wonderful power, with her
damp, and mud, and mould, her iIl-fed, ill.,
housed populace, her ruins Of old glory
rising dim and ghostly amid her palaces Of
to-day. With all her awful secrets Of rapine,
cruelty, ambition, injustice, with her foul
orgies of unnatural crime with the very
corruption of the old buried Roman Empire
steaming up as from a charncl-house, and
permeating all modern life with its efluvinm
Of deadly uncleanness, still Rome had tha'
strange, bewildering charm of melancholy
grandeur and glory which made all heartl
cleave to her, and eyes and feet turn long,
ingly towards her from the ends Of the earth
Great souls and pious yearned for her as fol
mother, and could not be quieted
till they had kissed the dust of her streets
There they fondly thought was rest to b
found that rest which through all wear
life ever recedes like the mirage of thl
: desert; there sins we're to be sbriven whicl
, no common priest might forgive, and heav,
burdens unbound from the conscience by nl
, infallible wisdom; there was to be revealet
to the praying soul the substance Of thing
! hoped ior, the evidence of thugs not seer,
Even the mighty spirit Of Luther yearns:
for the breast of this great unknown mother
q and came humb}y thither to sock the reposs
which he found afterwards In Jesua