gloom of a sad and stormy sky; either amidst
the sympathetic moans of an autumnal tempest, or the waning and
mournful glimpses of an autumnal twilight."

THE COLOSSEUM.

"It was the twilight, that brief, that exquisite interval, which
flings its purporoseate veil between the palace gates of day and
night. You might have fancied it the car of Diana rolling on to
some Olympian festival, and preceded by Venus, the only other
planet visible in the sky. What a canopy!--Not the gaudiest
velabrum that the ostentatious munificence of her Caesars extended
above its gilded cordage, ever equalled the empyrean pomp of this
soft sky. Never could the artificial rains of perfumed water
surpass the dewy fragrance that steals around from evening's
thousand urns.

"I say it was the twilight when we entered these gloomy corridors,
whose solemn circuit uncoils its colonnades around the lordly pile;
but before we had traversed half their extent night began her
reign, and when we entered the arena it was difficult to say
whether those faintly flushed skies, that single sparkling star, or
the pallid hectic of the youthful moon produced the pathetic light
that illuminated this enormous architecture.

"As it now stands, the Colosseum is _indeed_ a wreck, rendered
absolutely frightful by repair; and whether by sunlight or
moonlight, compels you to lament the 'melancholy activity' which,
utterly inadequate to the restoration of its pristine glory, has
deprived it of all those adventitious ornaments, trees, and
herbage, and a thousand beautiful flowers, which, if they could not
conceal, at least served to soften its injuries, and which
mitigated the desolation they were unable to repair.

"Of course a thousand imaginations and memories hunt each other
through one's head and heart in such a place and at such an hour as
this, but to-night there were realities, which, where they do not
dispel, must always reinforce such phantasies.

"Before the steps of the great cross in the centre, garnished with
all the emblems of the passion, knelt a respectably dressed group,
apparently father, mother, and daughter, absorbed in a rapture of
devotion. The lamps were lighted before the fourteen shrines, which
Benedict the Fourteenth erected around the arena, and flung a dusky