Italian hours . erraces for the love ofthe general outer picture, the splendid fashion in which the frettedmountains of marble, as they might have been, round about,seemed to inlay themselves, for the effect of the distinctionI speak of, with vegetations of dark emerald. There above all— or at least in what such aspects did further for the prodigyof the Convent, whatever that prodigy might for do them — was,to a life-long victim of Italy, almost verily as never before, theoperation of the old love-philtre; there were the inexhaustiblesources of interest and charm. These mystic fountains broke
Italian hours . erraces for the love ofthe general outer picture, the splendid fashion in which the frettedmountains of marble, as they might have been, round about,seemed to inlay themselves, for the effect of the distinctionI speak of, with vegetations of dark emerald. There above all— or at least in what such aspects did further for the prodigyof the Convent, whatever that prodigy might for do them — was,to a life-long victim of Italy, almost verily as never before, theoperation of the old love-philtre; there were the inexhaustiblesources of interest and charm. These mystic fountains broke out for me elsewhere, again andagain, I rejoice to say — and perhaps more particularly, to befrank about it, where the ground about them was pressed withdue emphasis of appeal by the firm wheels of the great wingedcar. I motored, under invitation and protection, repeatedly backinto the sense of the other years, that sense of the old andcomparatively idle Rome of my particular infatuated prime which [ 310 J. SUBIACO OTHER ROMAN NEIGHBOURHOODS I was living to see superseded, and this even when the fond vistabristled with innumerable signs of the times, unmistakablefeatures of the new era, that, by I scarce know what perverselaw, succeeded in ministering to a happy effect. Some of thesefalse notes proceed, simply from the immense growth of every sortof facilitation — so that people are much more free than of oldto come and go and do, to inquire and explore, to pervade andgenerally infest; with a consequent loss, for the fastidiousindividual, of his blest earlier sense, not infrequent, of having theoccasion and the impression, as he used complacently to say, allto himself. We none of us had anything quite all to ourselvesduring an afternoon at Ostia, on a beautiful June Sunday; it wasa different affair, rather, from the long, the comparatively slowand quite unpeopled drive that I was to remember having lasttaken early in the autumn thirty years before, and which occupiedthe
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