Page:How to See the Vatican, Sladen, 1914.djvu/38

 his Eden. The allusion is inevitable for at the very gates of the Vatican, on the pinnacle of the Castle of Sant' Angelo, is the great Bronze Angel with the drawn sword, whom the Pope will not pass, because the tomb of the heathen Emperor below is filled with the soldiers of the re-born Rome, which dispossessed the Church of the kingdom of this world. Once past this cordon, he would be out of his dominions.

But the simile is incomplete, because the World without, and not the Garden within, is the Eden to which the Angel bars the way. Yet the garden must be a very Paradise to the Popes, because it is the only spot where they may listen, as Numa Pompilius listened on this very hill, to the vaticinations of Nature, the wise counsellor of the weary brain.

In these narrow limits are wood and vineyard—a classic garden buried from the wind and open to the sun; the voices of falling waters; and the garden-pavilion of the fourth Pius, with its haunting beauty in the image of a Roman Emperor's pleasure house. It is full of memories of the saintly Carlo Borromeo—but it is easier to credit it with the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius.

How thankful must he be, whose feet never pass beyond his gates, that in Italy the flowers of the field assert their right-of-way to every nook 2