my lure, while he, depressing his head, rushed at me with his horns. I was

a very fool; I knew it, yet I yielded to my rage. I snatched up a huge

fragment of rock; it would have crushed my rash foe. I poized it--aimed

it--then my heart failed me. I hurled it wide of the mark; it rolled

clattering among the bushes into dell. My little visitants, all aghast,

galloped back into the covert of the wood; while I, my very heart bleeding

and torn, rushed down the hill, and by the violence of bodily exertion,

sought to escape from my miserable self.

No, no, I will not live among the wild scenes of nature, the enemy of all

that lives. I will seek the towns--Rome, the capital of the world, the

crown of man's achievements. Among its storied streets, hallowed ruins, and

stupendous remains of human exertion, I shall not, as here, find every

thing forgetful of man; trampling on his memory, defacing his works,

proclaiming from hill to hill, and vale to vale,--by the torrents freed

from the boundaries which he imposed--by the vegetation liberated from

the laws which he enforced--by his habitation abandoned to mildew and

weeds, that his power is lost, his race annihilated for ever.

I hailed the Tiber, for that was as it were an unalienable possession of

humanity. I hailed the wild Campagna, for every rood had been trod by man;

and its savage uncultivation, of no recent date, only proclaimed more

distinctly his power, since he had given an honourable name and sacred

title to what else would have been a worthless, barren track. I entered

Eternal Rome by the Porta del Popolo, and saluted with awe its

time-honoured space. The wide square, the churches near, the long extent of

602

The Last Man