an produce. If you will think of individualism gone mad, and each
successive personality crushing out and oversloughing some other,
without that regard for proportion and propriety which only the sense of
a superior collective right can inspire, you will imagine the Palatine.
Mount Morris, at One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street, if unscrupulously
built upon by the multimillionaires thronging to New York and seeking to
house themselves each more splendidly and spaciously than the other,
would offer a suggestion in miniature of what the Palatine seems to have
been like in its glory. But the ruined Mount Morris, even allowing for
the natural growth of the landscape in two thousand years, could show no
such prospect twenty centuries hence as we got that morning from a bit
of wilding garden near the Convent of San Bonaventura, on the brow of
the Palatine. Some snowy tops pillowed themselves on the utmost horizon,
and across the Campagna the broken aqueducts stalked and fell down and
stumbled to their legs again. The Baths of Caracalla bulked up in
rugged, monstrous fragments, and then in the foreground, filling the
whole eye, the Colosseum rose and stood, and all Rome sank round it. The
Forum lay deep under us, vainly struggling with the broken syllables of
its demolition to impart a sense of its past, and at our feet in that
bit of garden where the roses were blooming and the plum-trees were
blowing and the birds were singing, there stretched itself in the grass
a fallen pillar wreathed with the folds of a marble serpent, the emblem
of the oldest worship under the sun, as I was proud to remember without
present help. It was the same immemorial, universal faith which the
Mound Builders of our own West symbolized in the huge earthen serpents
they shaped uncounted ages before the red savages came to wonder at
them, and doubtless it had been welcomed by Rome in her large, loose,
cynical toleration, together with cults which, like that of Isis and
Osiris, were fads of yesterday beside it. Somehow it gave the humanest
touch in the complex impression of the overhistoried scene. It made one
feel very old, yet very young--old with the age and young with the youth
of the world--and very much at home.

VI. PERSONAL RELATIONS WITH THE PAST

I was myself part of the antiquity with which I have been trying to be
honest; and, though my date was no earlier than the seventh decade of
the nineteenth century, still so many and such c