Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 by Various

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The debased taste and the unfeeling ignorance of restorers have been
employed, as so often in Italy, to spoil and desecrate the memorials
of the past; and the munificence of Pius, _Munificentia Pii IX._, is
placarded on the inner walls. One is too frequently reminded at Rome of
the old and new lamps in the story of Aladdin.

We turn reluctantly from the Nomentan Way, and passing through Rome,
we go out of the gate which opens on the Appian. About a mile from the
present wall, just where the road divides before coming to the Catacombs
of St. Callixtus, a little, ugly, white church, of the deformed
architecture of the seventeenth century, recalls, by its name of _Domine
quo vadis?_ "O Lord, whither goest thou?" one of the most impressive,
one of the earliest and simplest, of the many legends of the legendary
religious annals of Rome. It relates, that, at the time of the
persecution of Nero, St. Peter, being then in Rome, was persuaded to fly
secretly from the city, in the hope of escaping from the near peril.
Just as he reached this place, trembling, we may well believe, not more
with fear than with doubt, while past scenes rose vividly before him,
and the last words heard from his Master's lips came with a flood of
self-reproach into his heart,--as he hurried silently along, with head
bowed down, in the gray twilight, he became suddenly aware of a presence
before him, and, looking up, beheld the form of that beloved Master whom
he was now a second time denying. He beheld him, moreover, in the act
of bearing his cross. Peter, with his old ardor, did not wait to be
addressed, but said, _Domine, quo vadis?_--"O Lord, whither goest
thou?" The Saviour, looking at him as he had looked but once before,
replied, _Venio Romam iterum crucifigi_,--"I come to Rome to be
crucified a second time"; and thereupon disappeared. Peter turned,
reentered the gate, and shortly after was crucified for his Lord's sake.
His body, it is said, was laid away in a grave on the Vatican Hill,
where his great church was afterwards built.

And here we come upon another legend, which takes us out again on the
Appian Way, to the place where now stands the Church of St. Sebastian.
St. Gregory the Great relates in one of his letters, that, not long
after St. Peter and St. Paul had suffered martyrdom, some Christians
came from the East to Rome to find the bodies of these their countrymen,
which they desired to carry back with them to their own land. They so
far succeeded as to gain possession of the bodies, and to carry them as
far as the second milestone on the Appian Way. Here they paused, and
when they attempted to carry the bodies farther, so great a storm of
thunder and lightning arose, that they were terrified, and did not
venture to repeat their attempt. By this time, also, the Romans had
become aware of the carrying off of the sacred bodies, and, coming out
from the city, recovered possession of them. One of the old pictures on
the wall of the portico of the ancient basilica of St. Peter's preserved
a somewhat different version of the legend, representing the Romans as
falling violently upon the Oriental robbers, and compelling them, with
a storm of blows, to yield up the possession of the relics they were
carrying away by stealth.

But the legend went on further to state, that, on the spot where they
thus had regained the bodies of their saints, the Romans made a deep
hole in the ground, and laid them away within it very secretly. Here for
some time they rested, but at length were restored to their original
tombs, the one on the Ostian Way, the other on the Vatican. But St.
Peter was again to be laid in this secret chamber in the earth on the
Appian Way. In the episcopate of the saint and scoundrel Callixtus,
the Emperor Elagabalus, with characteristic extravagance and caprice,
resolved to make a circus on the Vatican, wide enough for courses of
chariots drawn by four elephants abreast. All the older buildings in the
way were to be destroyed, to gratify this imperial whim; and Callixtus,
fearing lest the Christian cemetery, and especially the tomb of the
prince of the apostles might be discovered and profaned, removed the
body of St. Peter once more to the Appian Way. Here it lay for forty
years, and round it and near it an underground cemetery was gradually
formed; and it was to this burial-place, first of all, that the name
Catacomb,[B] now used to denote all the underground cemeteries, was
applied.

[Footnote B: A word, the derivation of which is not yet determined. The
first instance of its use is in the letter of Gregory from which we
derive the legend. This letter was written A.D. 594.]

Though at length St. Peter was restored to the Vatican, from which he
has never since been removed, and where his grave is now hidden by his
church, the place where he had lain so long was still esteemed sacred.
The story of St. Sebastian relates how, after his martyred body had been
thrown into the Cloaca Maxima, that his friends might not have the last
satisfaction of giving it burial, he appeared in a vision to Lucina, a
Roman lady, told her where his body might be found, and bade her lay it
in a grave near that in which the apostles had rested. This was done,
and less than a century afterward a church rose to mark the place of his
burial, and connected with it, Pope Damasus, the first great restorer
and adorner of the catacombs, [A.D. 266-285,] caused the chamber that
was formed below the surface of the ground around the grave of the
apostles to be lined with wide slabs of marble, and to be consecrated as
a subterranean chapel. It is curious enough that this pious work should
have been performed, as is learned from an inscription set up here by
Damasus himself, in fulfilment of a vow, on the extinction among the
Roman clergy of the party of Ursicinus, his rival. This custom of
propitiating the favor of the saints by fair promises was thus early
established. It was soon found out that it was well to have a friend
at court with whom a bargain could be struck. If the adorning of this
chapel was all that Damasus had to pay for the getting rid of his
rival's party, the bargain was an easy one for him. There had been
terrible and bloody fights in the Roman streets between the parties of
the contending aspirants for the papal seat. Ursicinus had been driven
from Rome, but Damasus had had trouble with the priests of his faction.
Some of them had been rescued, as he was hurrying them off to prison,
and had taken refuge with their followers in the Basilica of St. Maria
Maggiore. Damasus, with a mob of charioteers, gladiators, and others of
the scum of Rome, broke into the church, and slew a hundred and sixty
men and women who had been shut up within it. Ursicinus, however,
returned to the city; there were fresh disturbances, and a new massacre,
on this occasion, in the Church of St. Agnes; and years passed before
Damasus was established as undisputed ruler of the Church.

It was then, in fulfilment of the vow he had made during his troubles,
that _Saint_ Damasus (for he became a saint long since, success being a
great sanctifier) adorned the underground chapel of the apostles. The
entrance to it is through the modern basilica of St. Sebastian. It is
a low, semicircular chamber, with irregular walls, in which a row of
arched graves (_arcosolia_) has been formed, which once were occupied,
probably, by bodies of saints or martyrs. Near the middle of the chapel
is the well, about seven feet square, within which are the two graves,
lined with marble, where the bodies of the apostles are said to have
lain hid. Fragments of painting still remain on the walls of this
pit, and three faint and shadowy figures may be traced, which seem to
represent the Saviour between St. Peter and St. Paul. Over the mouth of
the well stands an ancient altar. However little credence may be given
to the old legends concerning the place, it is impossible not to look
with interest upon it. For fifteen hundred years worshippers have knelt
there as upon ground made holy by the presence of the two apostles. The
memory of their lives and of their teachings has, indeed, consecrated
the place; and though superstition has often turned the light of that
memory into darkness, yet here, too, has faith been strengthened, and
courage become steadfast, and penitence been confirmed into holiness, by
the remembrance of the zeal, the denial of Peter, and the forgiveness of
his Master, by the remembrance of the conversion, the long service, the
exhortations, and the death of Paul.

The catacombs proper, to which entrance may be had from the Basilica of
St. Sebastian, are of little importance in themselves, and have lost, by
frequent alteration and by the erection of works of masonry for their
support, much that was characteristic of their original construction.
During a long period, while most of the other subterranean cemeteries
were abandoned, this remained open, and was visited by numerous
pilgrims. It led visitors to the church, and the guardians of the church
found it for their interest to keep it in good repair. Thus, though
its value as one of the early burial-places of the Christians was
diminished, another interest attached to it through the character of
some of those visitors who were accustomed to frequent its dark paths.
Saint Bridget found some of that wild mixture of materialism and
mysticism, (a not uncommon mingling,) which passes under the name of
her Revelations, in the solitude of these streets of the dead. Here St.
Philip Neri, the Apostle of Rome, the wise and liberal founder of the
Oratorians, the still beloved saint of the Romans, was accustomed
to spend whole nights in prayer and meditation. Demons, say his
biographers, and evil spirits assailed him on his way, trying to terrify
him and turn him back; but he overcame them all. Year after year he kept
up this practice, and gained strength, in the solitude and darkness, and
in the presence of the dead, to resist fiercer demons than any that had
power to attack him from without. And it is related, that, when St.
Charles Borromeo, his friend, the narrow, but pure-minded reformer of
the Church, came to Rome, from time to time, he, too, used to go at
night to this cemetery, and watch through the long hours in penitence
and prayer. Such associations as these give interest to the cemetery of
St. Sebastian's Church.

The preeminence which the Appian Way, _regina viarum_, held among the
great streets leading from Rome,--not only as the road to the South and
to the fairest provinces, but also because it was bordered along its
course by the monumental tombs of the greatest Roman families,--was
retained by it, as we have seen, as the street on which lay the chief
Christian cemeteries. The tombs of the Horatii, the Metelli, the
Scipios, were succeeded by the graves of a new, less famous, but not
less noble race of heroes. On the edge of the height that rises just
beyond the Church of St. Sebastian stand the familiar and beautiful
ruins of the tomb of Cecilia Metella. Of her who was buried in this
splendid mausoleum nothing is known but what the three lines of the
inscription still remaining on it tell us,--

CAECILIAE Q. CRETICI F. METELLAE CRASSI.

She was the daughter of Quintus, surnamed the Cretan, and the wife of
Crassus. But her tomb overlooks the ground beneath which, in a narrow
grave, was buried a more glorious Cecilia.[C] The contrast between the
ostentation and the pride of the tombs of the heathen Romans, and the
poor graves, hollowed out in the rock, of the Christians, is full of
impressive suggestions. The very closeness of their neighborhood to each
other brings out with vivid effect the broad gulf of separation that lay
between them in association, in affection, and in hopes.

[Footnote C: Gueranger, _Histoire de St. Cecile_. p. 45.]

Coming out from the dark passages of the Catacombs of St. Callixtus, in
the clear twilight of a winter's evening, one sees rising against the
red glow of the sky the broken masses of the ancient tombs. One city of
the dead lies beneath the feet, another stretches before the eyes far
out of sight. The crowded history of Rome is condensed into one mighty
spectacle. The ambitions, the hates, the valor, the passions, the
religions, the life and death of a thousand years are there; and, in
the dimness of the dusky evening, troops of the dead rise before the
imagination and advance in slow procession by opposite ways along the
silent road.

[To be continued]

* * * * *

THE PURE PEARL OF DIVER'S BAY.

[Concluded.]

V

Did she talk of flesh and blood, when she said that she would find
him?--The summer passed away; and when autumn came, it could not be said
that search for the bodies of these fishermen was quite abandoned. But
no fragment of boat, nor body of father or son, ever came, by rumor or
otherwise, to the knowledge of the people of the Bay.

The voyage was long to Clarice. Marvellous strength and acuteness of
vision come to the eyes of those who watch. Keen grow the ears that
listen. The soldier's wife in the land of Nena Sahib inspires
despairing ranks: "Dinna ye hear the pibroch? Hark! 'The Campbells are
coming!'"--and at length, when the hope she lighted has gone out in
sullen darkness, and they bitterly resent the joy she gave them,--lo,
the bagpipes, banners, regiment! The pibroch sounds, "The Campbells
are coming!" The Highlanders are in sight!--But, oh, the voyage was
long,--and Clarice could see no sail, could hear no oar!

Clarice ceased to say that she must find the voyagers. She ceased to
talk of them. She lived in these days a life so silent, and, as
it seemed, so remote from other lives, that it quite passed the
understanding of those who witnessed it. Tears seldom fell from her
eyes, complaints never;--but her interest was aroused by no temporal
matter; she seemed, in her thoughts and her desires, as far removed as a
spirit from the influences of the external world.

This state of being no person who lives by bread alone could have
understood, or endured patiently, in one with whom in the affairs of
daily life he was associated.

The Revelator was an exile in Patmos.

Dame Briton was convinced that Clarice was losing her wits. Bondo Emmins
yielded to the force of some inexplicable law, and found her fairer
day by day. To his view, she was like a vision moving through a dream,
rather than like any actual woman; and though the drift of the vision
seemed not towards him, he was more anxious to compel it than to
accomplish any other purpose ever entertained. The actual nearness,
the apparent unattainableness, of that he coveted, excited in him such
desires of conquest and possession as he would seek to appease in
one way alone. To win her would have been to the mind of any other
inhabitant of Diver's Bay a feat as impracticable as the capture of the
noble ghost of Hamlet's father, as he stands exorcized by Mrs. Kemble.

And yet, while her sorrow made her the pity and the wonder of the
people, it did not keep her sacred from the reach of gossip. Observing
the frequency with which Bondo Emmins visited Old Briton's cabin, it was
profanely said by some that the pale girl would ere long avert her eyes
from the dead and fix them on the living.

Emmins had frequent opportunities for making manifest his good-will
towards the family of Briton. The old man fell on the ice one day and
broke his thigh, and was constrained to lie in bed for many a day, and
to walk with the help of crutches when he rose again. Then was the
young man's time to serve him like a son. He brought a surgeon from
the Port,--and the inefficiency of the man was not his fault, surely.
Through tedious days and nights Emmins sat by the old man's bedside,
soothing pain, enlivening weariness, endeavoring to banish the gloomy
elements that combined to make the cabin the abode of darkness. He would
have his own way, and no one could prevent him. When Old Briton's money
failed, his supplies did not. Even Clarice was compelled to accept his
service thankfully, and to acknowledge that she knew not how they could
have managed without him in this strait.

The accident, unfortunate as it might be deemed, nevertheless exercised
a most favorable influence over the poor girl's life. It brought her
soul back to her body, and spoke to her of wants and their supply,--of
debts, of creditors,--of fish, and sea-weed, and the market,--of bread,
and doctor's bills,--of her poor old father, and of her mother. She came
back to earth. Now, henceforth, the support of the household was with
her. Bondo Emmins might serve her father,--she had no desire to prevent
what was so welcome to the wretched old man,--but for herself, her
mother, the house, no favor from him!

And thus Clarice rose up to rival Bondo in her ready courage. When her
father, at last careful, at last anxious, thoughtful of the future,
began to express his fear, he met the ready assurance of his daughter
that she should be able to provide all they should ever want; let him
not be troubled; when the spring came, she would show him.

The spring came, and Clarice set to work as never in her industrious
life before. Day after day she gathered sea-weed, dried it, and carried
it to town. She went out with her mother in the fishing-boat, and the
two women were equal in strength and courage to almost any two men of
the Bay. She filled the empty fish-barrels,--and promised to double the
usual number. She dried wagon-loads of finny treasure, and she made good
bargains with the traders. No one was so active, no one bade fair to
turn the summer to such profit as Clarice. She had come back to flesh
and blood.--John came back from Patmos.

Her face grew brown with tan; it was not lovely as a fair ghost's, any
longer; it was ruddy,--and her limbs grew strong. Bondo Emmins marked
these symptoms, and took courage. People generally said, "She is well
over her grief, and has set her heart on getting rich. There is that
much of her mother in her." Others considered that Emmins was in the
secret, and at the bottom of her serenity and diligence.

Dame Briton and her spouse were not one whit wiser than their
neighbors. They could not see that any half-work was impossible with
Clarice,--that, if she had resolved, for their sake, to live as people
must, who have bodies to respect and God-originated wants to supply, she
must live by a ceaseless activity. Because she had ascended far beyond
tears, lamentation, helplessness, they thought she had forgotten.

Yes, they came to this conclusion, though now and then, not often,
generally on some pleasant Sunday, when all her work was done, Clarice
would go down to the Point and take her Sabbath rest there. No danger of
disturbance there!--of all bleak and desert places known to the people
of Diver's Bay, that point was bleakest and most deserted.

The place was hers, then. In this solitude she could follow her
thoughts, and be led by them down to the ocean, or away to heavenly
depths. It was good for her to go there in quietness,--to rest in
recollection. Strength comes ever to the strong. This pure heart had
nothing to fear of sorrow. Sorrow can only give the best it has to such
as she. Grief may weaken the selfish and the weak; it may make children
of the foolish and drivellers; by grief the inefficient may come to the
fulness of their inefficiency;--but out of the bitter cup the strong
take strength, though it may be with shuddering.

One Sunday morning Clarice lingered longer about the house than usual,
and Emmins, who had resolved, that, if she went that day to the Point,
he would follow her, found her with her father and mother, talking
merely for their pleasure,--if the languid tones of her voice and the
absent look of her eyes were to be trusted.

Emmins thought that this moment was favorable to him. He was sure of
Dame Briton and the old man, and he almost believed that he was sure
of Clarice. Finding her now with her father and mother at home on this
bright Sunday morning, one glance at her face surprised him and, almost
before he was aware, he had spoken what he had hitherto so patiently
refrained from speaking.

But the answer of Clarice still more surprised him. With her eyes gazing
out on the sea, she stood, the image of silence, while Bondo warily
set forth his hopes. Old Briton and the dame looked on and deemed the
symptoms favorable. But Clarice said,--

"Heart and hand I gave to him. I am the wife of Luke;--how can I marry
another?"

Bondo seemed eager to answer that question, for he hastily waved his
hand toward Dame Briton, who began to speak.

"Luke will never come back," said he, gently expostulating.

"But I shall go to him," was the quiet reply.

Then the old people, whose hearts were in the wooing, broke out
together,--and by their voices, if one should argue with them, strife
was not far off. Clarice staid one moment, as if to take in the burden
of each eager voice; then she shook her head:--

"I am married already," she said; "I gave him my heart and my hand. You
would not rob Luke Merlyn?"

When she had so spoken, calmly, firmly, as if it were impossible that
she should be moved or agitated by such speech as this she had heard,
Clarice walked away to the beach, unmoored her father's boat, and rowed
out into the Bay.

Bondo Emmins stood with the old people and gazed after her.

"Odd fish!" he muttered.

"Never mind," said Old Briton, hobbling up and down the sand; "it's the
first time she's been spoke to. She'll come round. I know Clarice."

"You know Clarice?" broke in Dame Briton. "You don't know her! She isn't
Clarice,--she's somebody else. Who, I don't know."

"Hush!" said Bondo, who had no desire that the couple should fall into
a quarrel. "I know who she is. Don't plague her. It will all come out
right yet. I'll wait. But don't say anything to her about it. Let me
speak when the time comes.--Where's my pipe, Dame Briton?"

Emmins spent a good part of the day with the old people, and did not
allow the conversation once to turn upon himself and Clarice. But he
talked of the improvements he should like to make in the old cabin, and
they discussed the market, and entertained each other with recollections
of past times, and with strange stories made up of odd imaginations and
still more uncouth facts. Supernatural influences were dwelt upon, and
many a belief in superstitions belonging to childhood was confessed in
peaceful unconsciousness of the fact that it was Clarice who had turned
all their thoughts to-day from the great prosaic highway where plain
facts have their endless procession.

VI.

Clarice went out alone in her fishing-boat, as during all the past week
she had purposed to do when this day came, if it should prove favorable.
She wished to approach the Point thus,--and her purpose in so doing was
such as no mortal could have suspected. And yet, as in the fulfilment
of this purpose she went, hastened from her delaying by the address of
Bondo Emmins, it seemed to her as if her secret must be read by the
three upon the beach.

She wore upon her neck, as she had worn since the days of her betrothal
to Luke, the cord to which the pearl ring was attached. The ring had
never been removed; but now, as Clarice came near to the Point, she
laid the oars aside, and with trembling hands untied the black cord and
disengaged the ring, and drew it on her finger, that trembled like a
leaf. She was doing now what Luke had bidden her do,--and for his
sake. Until now she had always looked upon it as a ring of betrothal;
henceforth it was her wedding-ring,--the evidence of her true marriage
with Luke Merlyn.

O unseen husband, didst thou see her as anew she gave herself to love,
to constancy, to duty?

She was floating toward the Point, when she knelt in the fishing-boat
and plunged the hand that wore the ring under the bright cold water. How
bright, how cold it was! It chilled Clarice; she shuddered; was she the
bride of Death? But she did not rise from her knees, neither withdraw
her hand, until her vow, the vow she was there to speak, was spoken.
There she knelt alone in the great universe, with God and Luke Merlyn.

When at last she stood upon the Point, she had strength to meet her
destiny, and patience to wait while it was being developed. She knew
her marriage covenant was blest, and filial duty was divested of every
thought or notion that could tempt or deceive her. Treading thus
fearlessly among the high places of imagination, no prescience of mortal
trouble could lurk among the mysterious shadows. By her faith in the
eternity of love she was greatly more than conqueror.

The day passed, and night drew near. It was the purpose of Clarice to
row home with the tide. But a strange thing happened to her ere she set
out to return. As she stood looking out upon the sea, watching the waves
as they rolled and broke upon the beach, a new token came to her from
the deep.

Almost as she might have waited for Luke, she stood watching the onward
drift; calculating the spot at which the waves would deposit their
burden, she stood there when the plank was borne inland, to save it, if
possible, from being dashed with violence on the rocks.

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