A Stroll on the Pincian

In this pleasant spot, the red-trousered French soldiers are always to
be seen; bearded and grizzled veterans, perhaps with medals of Algiers
or the Crimea on their breasts. To them is assigned the peaceful duty of
seeing that children do not trample on the flower beds, nor any youthful
lover rifle them of their fragrant blossoms to stick in the beloved
one's hair. Here sits (drooping upon some marble bench, in the
treacherous sunshine) the consumptive girl, whose friends have brought
her, for cure, to a climate that instils poison into its very purest
breath. Here, all day, come nursery-maids, burdened with rosy English
babies, or guiding the footsteps of little travellers from the far
Western world. Here, in the sunny afternoons, roll and rumble all kinds
of equipages, from the cardinal's old-fashioned and gorgeous purple
carriage to the gay barouche of modern date. Here horsemen gallop on
thoroughbred steeds. Here, in short, all the transitory population of
Rome, the world's great watering-place, rides, drives, or promenades!
Here are beautiful sunsets; and here, whichever way you turn your eyes,
are scenes as well worth gazing at, both in themselves and for their
historic interest, as any that the sun ever rose and set upon. Here,
too, on certain afternoons of the week, a French military band flings
out rich music over the poor old city, floating her with strains as loud
as those of her own echoless triumphs.

Hilda and the sculptor (by the contrivance of the latter, who loved best
to be alone with his young countrywoman) had wandered beyond the throng
of promenaders, whom they left in a dense cluster around the music. They
strayed, indeed, to the farthest point of the Pincian Hill, and leaned
over the parapet, looking down upon the Muro Torto, a massive fragment
of the oldest Roman wall, which juts over, as if ready to tumble down
by its own weight, yet seems still the most indestructible piece of work
that men's hands ever piled together. 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.
These, nevertheless, are the solid framework of hills that shut in Rome,
and its wide surrounding Campagna,--no land of dreams, but the broadest
page of history, crowded so full with memorable events that one
obliterates another; as if Time had crossed and recrossed his own
records till they grew illegible.