On my visit to the Blue Grotto at Capri, it required the utmost obstinancy to refuse the demand of my boatman for a two-franc piece. He wanted me to throw it into the water, and see him dive and bring it up from the bottom. If I had accepted his offer, he would have whisked off his coat and shirt (if he had one), and gone down fifty feet for the piece, and recovered it for himself without fail. But I was anxious to get back to the steamer which was waiting for us, and resolutely declined to be amused at that price. At Sorrento, the hotel guests standing out on the balconies overlooking the sea were constantly importuned for “pennies” by boys in the boats below. When the money was thrown down, the little fellows would watch its course through the air, and, the moment it struck the water, they would dive into the pellucid depths and in a flash reappear with it, holding it aloft between thumb and finger. These are but a few out of the hundred methods in which money is extracted from you, under the pretense of some service rendered or amusement supplied. And still I say that it pays to humor all these people to a moderate extent. And, furthermore, I would not refuse a very modest coin to the ragged but picturesque creature who stands at every church-door and lies in wait for me at every bit of rising ground. He does not pretend to give any equivalent for the money received. He is a beggar pure and simple. He has been begging for thirty, forty, or fifty years. In all that time he imagines that he has acquired “rights,” and I confess I almost feel ashamed of myself when I drop my insignificant alms into his dirty hand.
“Shelley?” asked the man in charge of the Protestant Cemetery at Rome, when we appeared at the gate, one beautiful afternoon in May. It is the only English word except “Keats” that he can pronounce correctly. Three years before the same man put the same question to us. We again answered “Yes.” For, with many others of the English-speaking race, we took a sad pleasure in visiting the graves of those two most gifted and unhappy beings. Shelley’s heart alone rests in the cypress-shaded inclosure, which is now full of graves. The rest of his body, we remember, was reduced to ashes on a funeral-pyre, in the presence of Byron and some others, at that spot on the shore of Spezzia Bay where the drowned poet had been cast up by the waves. As this is an age of monuments to neglected genius, I was curious to see if anything had been done for Shelley by his ardent admirers since 1883. No! there is the old small stone flat on the earth, looking moldier than ever. The inscription “_Cor Cordium_” is filled in with dirt. A weed, looking like burdock, grows rankly about the grave. There is not a flower near it, unless one should count in a withered and blackened rose which some pitying soul had thrown down on the center of the dingy marble slab. This may have been lying there for two or three months. I dare say fragments of it will be found there a year hence, unless the wind blows them away. For it is evident that Shelley’s tombstone is never swept and cleaned except by the elements. Trelawney, the life-long friend and stanch defender of the poet, rests beside him. He died at the age of eighty-eight, and Shelley at thirty. In standing beside these two graves, equally destitute of human care, one pays a tribute to friendship as well as to genius.