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Updated: May 6, 2025
Far away in the distance rose the Alban Hills above the dim Campagna, with the more lofty Sabines beyond, and Soracte, clear cut against the sky like a wave frozen in the moment of breaking. Below lay the ancient city, with its strange mingling of the old and the new, of past things embedded in the present; or is it the present thinly veiling the rich and mighty past, who shall say?
In the blue distance rose Soracte, and other heights, which have gleamed afar, to our imaginations, but look scarcely real to our bodily eyes, because, being dreamed about so much, they have taken the aerial tints which belong only to a dream.
And, self-satisfied, he passed to the triclinium, where he sat down to supper with Eunice. During the meal a lector read to them the Idyls of Theocritus. Out of doors the wind brought clouds from the direction of Soracte, and a sudden storm broke the silence of the calm summer night.
I left thee on a good trail, and full of hope; hence I trust that thou hast either satisfied thy pleasant desires in the embraces of Lygia, or wilt satisfy them before the real wintry wind from the summits of Soracte shall blow on the Campania.
"Like a long-swept wave about to break, That on the curl hangs pausing" and by that token of a great bard, I recognized Monte Soracte. The dragoon took us by the arms, and away we scampered over the Campagna, with one of the loveliest sunsets before us, that ever painted itself on my retina. I cannot portray in words the glory that flooded the whole western heaven.
I saw Soracte on the horizon, and I looked at everything as if for the last time; nor do I wish ever to see any of these objects again, though no place ever took so strong a hold of my being as Rome, nor ever seemed so close to me and so strangely familiar.
Peter's, the Vatican, the Castle of St. Angelo, the Tiber with its great bends and many bridges, and to lonely, far-away Soracte; westward, on the other side of the river, rose the Janiculum with its close-wedged houses, grade on grade, and on its summit the church of San Pietro in Montorio and the flashing cataract of the Acqua Paola fountain, the stone-pines of the Villa Dolia cresting the ridge above; eastward, the Palatine, a world of ruins in a world of gardens, lay between us and the Coliseum, and over them and the wall, the aqueducts, the plain, the eye ranged to the snow-capped Sabine Hills, on whose many-colored declivities tiny white towns were dotted like browsing sheep; southward, we gazed down upon the Pyramid of Cestius, upon the beautiful Protestant cemetery with its white monuments and dark cypresses where lie Shelley and Keats, upon the stately Porta San Paolo, a great mediæval gateway flanked with towers, and beyond, the Campagna, purple, violet, ultramarine, oceanic, rolling out toward the Alban Hills, which glittered with snow, rising sharply like island-peaks and sloping down like promontories into the plain; and over all the sun and sky and shadows of Italy.
It was to be the same journey, they found; one day for the galleries at Florence "from what I hear," said the young man, "it is barely enough," and the rest at Rome. He talked of Rome very pleasantly; he was evidently quite well read, and he quoted Horace about Soracte. Miss Winchelsea had "done" that book of Horace for her matriculation, and was delighted to cap his quotation.
"Do so, but you must at the same time fulfil some commissions which I give you for the journey." So they parted. Two years had passed, when, one day in January, Pope Silvester was summoned to Paterno, the little castle on Soracte, where the Roman-German Emperor dwelt, and now lay ill. When Silvester entered the sick-room, the Emperor sat upright, but looked troubled.
We lost it over and over again; but still it reappeared, now on one side of us, now on the other; perhaps from beneath the roots of old trees, or the pasture-land of a thousand years old, and leading on towards the base of Soracte. I forget where we finally lost it.
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