"A child forsaken, waking suddenly,

Whose gaze afeard on all things round doth rove,

And seeth only that it cannot see

The meeting eyes of love."

Two hours later, Dorothea was seated in an inner room or boudoir of a

handsome apartment in the Via Sistina.

I am sorry to add that she was sobbing bitterly, with such abandonment

to this relief of an oppressed heart as a woman habitually controlled

by pride on her own account and thoughtfulness for others will

sometimes allow herself when she feels securely alone. And Mr.

Casaubon was certain to remain away for some time at the Vatican.

Yet Dorothea had no distinctly shapen grievance that she could state

even to herself; and in the midst of her confused thought and passion,

the mental act that was struggling forth into clearness was a

self-accusing cry that her feeling of desolation was the fault of her

own spiritual poverty. She had married the man of her choice, and with

the advantage over most girls that she had contemplated her marriage

chiefly as the beginning of new duties: from the very first she had

thought of Mr. Casaubon as having a mind so much above her own, that he

must often be claimed by studies which she could not entirely share;

moreover, after the brief narrow experience of her girlhood she was

beholding Rome, the city of visible history, where the past of a whole

hemisphere seems moving in funeral procession with strange ancestral

images and trophies gathered from afar.

But this stupendous fragmentariness heightened the dreamlike

strangeness of her bridal life. Dorothea had now been five weeks in

Rome, and in the kindly mornings when autumn and winter seemed to go

hand in hand like a happy aged couple one of whom would presently

survive in chiller loneliness, she had driven about at first with Mr.

Casaubon, but of late chiefly with Tantripp and their experienced

courier. She had been led through the best galleries, had been taken

to the chief points of view, had been shown the grandest ruins and the

most glorious churches, and she had ended by oftenest choosing to drive

out to the Campagna where she could feel alone with the earth and sky,

away-from the oppressive masquerade of ages, in which her own life too

seemed to become a masque with enigmatical costumes.

To those who have looked at Rome with the quickening power of a

knowledge which breathes a growing soul into all historic shapes, and

traces out the suppressed transitions which unite all contrasts, Rome

may still be the spiritual centre and interpreter of the world. But

let them conceive one more historical contrast: the gigantic broken

revelations of that Imperial and Papal city thrust abruptly on the

notions of a girl who had been brought up in English and Swiss

Puritanism, fed on meagre Protestant histories and on art chiefly of

the hand-screen sort; a girl whose ardent nature turned all her small

allowance of knowledge into principles, fusing her actions into their

mould, and whose quick emotions gave the most abstract things the

quality of a pleasure or a pain; a girl who had lately become a wife,

and from the enthusiastic acceptance of untried duty found herself

plunged in tumultuous preoccupation with her personal lot. The weight

of unintelligible Rome might lie easily on bright nymphs to whom it

formed a background for the brilliant picnic of Anglo-foreign society;

but Dorothea had no such defence against deep impressions. Ruins and

basilicas, palaces and colossi, set in the midst of a sordid present,

where all that was living and warm-blooded seemed sunk in the deep

degeneracy of a superstition divorced from reverence; the dimmer but

yet eager Titanic life gazing and struggling on walls and ceilings; the

long vistas of white forms whose marble eyes seemed to hold the

monotonous light of an alien world: all this vast wreck of ambitious

ideals, sensuous and spiritual, mixed confusedly with the signs of

breathing forgetfulness and degradation, at first jarred her as with an

electric shock, and then urged themselves on her with that ache

belonging to a glut of confused ideas which check the flow of emotion.

Forms both pale and glowing took possession of her young sense, and

fixed themselves in her memory even when she was not thinking of them,

preparing strange associations which remained through her after-years.

Our moods are apt to bring with them images which succeed each other

like the magic-lantern pictures of a doze; and in certain states of

dull forlornness Dorothea all her life continued to see the vastness of

St. Peter's, the huge bronze canopy, the excited intention in the

attitudes and garments of the prophets and evangelists in the mosaics

above, and the red drapery which was being hung for Christmas spreading

itself everywhere like a disease of the retina.




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