with ruins, gardens
and temples, covered with prostrate capitals of columns, and with
single, upright pillars, and with trees and a dumb wilderness! The
heaped-up ashes out of the emptied urn of Time! And the potsherds of a
great world flung around! He passed by three temple columns,[4] which
the earth had drawn down into itself even to the breast, and along
through the broad triumphal arch of Septimius Severus; on the right,
stood a chain of columns without their temple; on the left, attached
to a Christian church, the colonnade of an ancient heathen temple,
deep sunken into the sediment of time; at last the triumphal arch of
Titus, and before it, in the middle of the woody wilderness, a
fountain gushing into a granite basin.

He went up to this fountain, in order to survey the plain out of which
the thunder months of the earth once arose; but he went along as over
a burnt-out sun, hung round with dark, dead earths. "O Man, O the
dreams of Man!" something within him unceasingly cried. He stood on
the granite margin, turning toward the Coliseum, whose mountain ridges
of wall stood high in the moonlight, with the deep gaps which had been
hewn in them by the scythe of Time. Sharply stood the rent and ragged
arches of Nero's golden house close by, like murderous cutlasses. The
Palatine Hill lay full of green gardens, and, in crumbling
temple-roofs, the blooming death-garland of ivy was gnawing, and
living ranunculi still glowed around sunken capitals. The fountain
murmured babblingly and forever, and the stars gazed steadfastly down,
with transitory rays, upon the still battlefield over which the winter
of time had passed without bringing after it a spring; the fiery soul
of the world had flown up, and the cold, crumbling giant lay around;
torn asunder were the gigantic spokes of the main-wheel, which once
the very stream of ages drove. And in addition to all this, the moon
shed down her light like eating silver-water upon the naked columns,
and would fain have dissolved the Coliseum and the temples and all
into their own shadows!

Then Albano stretched out his arm into the air, as if he were giving
an embrace and flowing away as in the arms of a stream, and exclaimed,
"O ye mighty shades, ye, who once strove and lived here, ye are
looking down from Heaven, but scornfully, not sadly, for your great
fatherland has died and gone after you! Ah, had I, on the
insignificant earth, full of old eternity which you have made gre