n ethereal
conglomeration of visions, and overhead is wafted the straying breath of
innumerable generations buried beneath the sod.

After a time, however, Pierre could no longer remain seated, so powerful
was the attraction of Rome, scattered all around that august summit. So
he rose and approached the balustrade of a terrace; and beneath him
appeared the Forum, and beyond it the Capitoline hill. To the eye the
latter now only presented a commingling of grey buildings, lacking both
grandeur and beauty. On the summit one saw the rear of the Palace of the
Senator, flat, with little windows, and surmounted by a high, square
campanile. The large, bare, rusty-looking walls hid the church of Santa
Maria in Ara Coeli and the spot where the temple of Capitoline Jove had
formerly stood, radiant in all its royalty. On the left, some ugly houses
rose terrace-wise upon the slope of Monte Caprino, where goats were
pastured in the middle ages; while the few fine trees in the grounds of
the Caffarelli palace, the present German embassy, set some greenery
above the ancient Tarpeian rock now scarcely to be found, lost, hidden as
it is, by buttress walls. Yet this was the Mount of the Capitol, the most
glorious of the seven hills, with its citadel and its temple, the temple
to which universal dominion was promised, the St. Peter's of pagan Rome;
this indeed was the hill--steep on the side of the Forum, and a precipice
on that of the Campus Martius--where the thunder of Jupiter fell, where
in the dimmest of the far-off ages the Asylum of Romulus rose with its
sacred oaks, a spot of infinite savage mystery. Here, later, were
preserved the public documents of Roman grandeur inscribed on tablets of
brass; hither climbed the heroes of the triumphs; and here the emperors
became gods, erect in statues of marble. And nowadays the eye inquires
wonderingly how so much history and so much glory can have had for their
scene so small a space, such a rugged, jumbled pile of paltry buildings,
a mole-hill, looking no bigger, no loftier than a hamlet perched between
two valleys.

Then another surprise for Pierre was the Forum, starting from the Capitol
and stretching out below the Palatine: a narrow square, close pressed by
the neighbouring hills, a hollow where Rome in growing had been compelled
to rear edifice close to edifice till all stifled for lack of breathing
space. It was necessary to dig very deep--some fifty feet--to find the
venerable repub