Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 1804-1864 -- Friends and associates; Novelists, American -- 19th century -- Biography
picture of his own accord, and lovingly." These are the iconoclasms
of the Goth and Vandal at their first advent to Rome. They remained to
alter their mood, and extol what they had before assaulted; and so did
my father, as we shall see presently. But at first he was sick and cold
and uncomfortable; and he consoled himself by hitting out at everything,
in the secret privacy of his diary, since opened to the world. With
warmer weather came equanimity and kinder judgments; but there is
a refreshing touch of truth and justice even in these mutterings of
exasperation.
It was not so much, I suppose, that Rome was cold as that my father had
expected it to be otherwise. When one is in a place where tradition and
association invite the soul forth to be warmed and soothed and rejoiced,
and the body, venturing out, finds nothing but chill winds and
frigid temperature and discomfort, the shock is much greater and
more disagreeable than if one had been in some northern Canada or
Spitzbergen, where such conditions are normal. Ice in the arctic circle
is all right and exhilarating, but in the Piazza of St. Peter's it is an
outrage, and affects the mind and heart even more than the flesh.
Circumstances caused my father to pass through several distinct phases
of feeling while he was in Rome. First, his own indisposition and the
inclement weather depressed and exasperated him.
Time, in due course, brought relief in these respects, and he began
to enjoy himself and his surroundings. Anon, the springs of creative
imagination, long dormant in him, were roused to activity by thoughts
connected with the Faun of Praxiteles in the Capitol. He now became
happy in the way of his genius and immediately took a new interest
in all things, looking at them from the point of view of possible
backgrounds or incidents for the romance which had begun to take form
in his mind. He describes what he saw con amore, and all manner of
harmonious ideas bloom through his thoughts, like anemones and other
flowers in the Villa Pamphili and the Borghese. This desirable mood
continued until, after our return to Rome from the Florentine visit, my
sister caught the Roman fever. She lay for weeks in danger of death; and
her father's anxiety about her not only destroyed in him all thoughts of
literary production and care for it, but made even keeping his journal
no longer possible for him. That strain, so long continued, broke
him down, and he never recovered from it so as to be what he had been
before. Nevertheless, when she became convalescent, the reaction from
his dark misgivings made him, for a time, as light-hearted as a boy;
and, the carnival happening to be coincident with her recovery, he
entered into the fun of it with a zest and enjoyment that surprised
himself. But, again, it presently became evident that her recovery was
not complete, and probably never would be so; the injury to her health
was permanent, and she was liable to recurrences of disease. His spirits
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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