Hortus Inclusus | Page 5

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ROME, 24th May, 1874 (Whit-Sunday).
I have to-day, to make the day whiter for me, your lovely letter of the
15th,[8] telling me your age. I am so glad it is no more; you are only
thirteen years older than I, and much more able to be my sister than
mamma, and I hope you will have many years of youth yet. I think I
must tell you in return for this letter what Dr. John Brown said, or part

of it at least. He said you had the playfulness of a lamb without its
selfishness. I think that perfect as far as it goes. Of course my Susie's
wise and grave gifts must be told of afterwards. There is no one I know,
or have known, so well able as you are to be in a degree what my
mother was to me. In this chief way (as well as many other ways) (the
puzzlement I have had to force that sentence into grammar!), that I
have had the same certainty of giving you pleasure by a few words and
by any little account of what I am doing. But then you know I have just
got out of the way of doing as I am bid, and unless you can scold me
back into that, you can't give me the sense of support.
Tell me more about yourself first, and how those years came to be
"lost." I am not sure that they were; though I am very far from holding
the empty theory of compensation; but much of the slighter pleasure
you lost then is evidently still open to you, fresh all the more from
having been for a time withdrawn.
The Roman peasants are very gay to-day, with roses in their hair;
legitimately and honorably decorated, and looking lovely. Oh me, if
they had a few Susies to take human care of them what a glorious
people they would be!
[Footnote 8: See page 99.]
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THE LOST CHURCH IN THE CAMPAGNA.
ROME, 2d June, 1874.
Ah if you were but among the marbles here, though there are none finer
than that you so strangely discerned in my study; but they are as a
white company innumerable, ghost after ghost. And how you would
rejoice in them and in a thousand things besides, to which I am dead,
from having seen too much or worked too painfully--or, worst of all,
lost the hope which gives all life.

Last Sunday I was in a lost church found again,--a church of the second
or third century, dug in a green hill of the Campagna, built
underground;--its secret entrance like a sand-martin's nest. Such the
temple of the Lord, as the King Solomon of that time had to build it;
not "the mountains of the Lord's house shall be established above the
hills," but the cave of the Lord's house as the fox's hole, beneath them.
And here, now lighted by the sun for the first time (for they are still
digging the earth from the steps), are the marbles of those early
Christian days; the first efforts of their new hope to show itself in
enduring record, the new hope of a Good Shepherd:--there they carved
Him, with a spring flowing at His feet, and round Him the cattle of the
Campagna in which they had dug their church, the very self-same goats
which this morning have been trotting past my window through the
most populous streets of Rome, innocently following their shepherd,
tinkling their bells, and shaking their long spiral horns and white beards;
the very same dew-lapped cattle which were that Sunday morning
feeding on the hillside above, carved on the tomb-marbles sixteen
hundred years ago.
How you would have liked to see it, Susie!
And now to-day I am going to work in an eleventh century church of
quite proud and victorious Christianity, with its grand bishops and
saints lording it over Italy. The bishop's throne all marble and mosaic
of precious colors and of gold, high under the vaulted roof at the end
behind the altar; and line upon line of pillars of massive porphyry and
marble, gathered out of the ruins of the temples of the great race who
had persecuted them, till they had said to the hills, Cover us, like the
wicked. And then their proud time came, and their enthronement on the
seven hills; and now, what is to be their fate once more?--of pope and
cardinal and dome, Peter's or Paul's by name only,--"My house, no
more a house of prayer, but a den of thieves."
I can't write any more this morning. Oh me, if one could only write and
draw all one wanted, and have our Susies and be young