ly 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
for these matchless specimens of humanity. At length, then, I had found a
consolation. I had not vainly sought the storied precincts of Rome--I had
discovered a medicine for my many and vital wounds.

I sat at the foot of these vast columns. The Coliseum, whose naked ruin is
robed by nature in a verdurous and glowing veil, lay in the sunlight on my
right. Not far off, to the left, was the Tower of the Capitol. Triumphal
arches, the falling walls of many temples, strewed the ground at my feet. I
strove, I resolved, to force myself to see the Plebeian multitude and lofty
Patrician forms congregated around; and, as the Diorama of ages passed
across my subdued fancy, they were replaced by the modern Roman; the Pope,
in his white stole, distributing benedictions to the kneeling worshippers;
the friar in his cowl; the dark-eyed girl, veiled by her mezzera; the
noisy, sun-burnt rustic, leading his heard of buffaloes and oxen to the
Campo Vaccino. The romance with which, dipping our pencils in the rainbow
hues of sky and transcendent nature, we to a degree gratuitously endow the
Italians, replaced t