I repeated to myself,--I am in Rome! I behold, and as it were, familiarly

converse with the wonder of the world, sovereign mistress of the

imagination, majestic and eternal survivor of millions of generations of

extinct men. I endeavoured to quiet the sorrows of my aching heart, by even

now taking an interest in what in my youth I had ardently longed to see.

Every part of Rome is replete with relics of ancient times. The meanest

streets are strewed with truncated columns, broken capitals--Corinthian

and Ionic, and sparkling fragments of granite or porphyry. The walls of the

most penurious dwellings enclose a fluted pillar or ponderous stone, which

once made part of the palace of the Caesars; and the voice of dead time, in

still vibrations, is breathed from these dumb things, animated and

glorified as they were by man.

I embraced the vast columns of the temple of Jupiter Stator, which survives

in the open space that was the Forum, and leaning my burning cheek against

its cold durability, I tried to lose the sense of present misery and

present desertion, by recalling to the haunted cell of my brain vivid

memories of times gone by. I rejoiced at my success, as I figured Camillus,

the Gracchi, Cato, and last the heroes of Tacitus, which shine meteors of

surpassing brightness during the murky night of the empire;--as the

verses of Horace and Virgil, or the glowing periods of Cicero thronged into

the opened gates of my mind, I felt myself exalted by long forgotten

enthusiasm. I was delighted to know that I beheld the scene which they

beheld--the scene which their wives and mothers, and crowds of the

unnamed witnessed, while at the same time they honoured, applauded, or wept

604

The Last Man