pportunity of heating the furnace. And some have been found,
here and there, piled up in little vaults, most generally near the
Tiber, by which it was always easy to ship the metal away. Already
temples had been turned into churches, in a travesty only saved from the
ridiculous by the high solemnity of the Christian faith. Other temples
and buildings, here and there, had been partly stripped of columns and
marble facings to make other churches even more nondescript than the
first. Much of the old was still standing, but nothing of the old was
whole. The Colosseum had not yet been turned into a quarry. The
Septizonium of Septimius Severus, with its seven stories of columns and
its lofty terrace, nearly half as high as the dome of Saint Peter's,
though beginning to crumble, still crowned the south end of the
Palatine; Minerva's temple was almost entire, and its huge architrave
had not been taken to make the high altar of Saint Peter's; and the
triumphal arch of Marcus Aurelius was standing in what was perhaps not
yet called the Corso in those days, but the Via Lata--'Broad Street.'

The things that had not yet fallen, nor been torn down, were the more
sadly grand by contrast with the chaos around them. There was also the
difference between ruins then, and ruins now, which there is between a
king just dead in his greatness, in whose features lingers the smile of
a life so near that it seems ready to come back, and a dried mummy set
up in a museum and carefully dusted for critics to study.

In even stronger and rougher contrast, in the wreck of all that had
been, there was the fierce reality of the daily fight for life amid the
seething elements of the new things that were yet to be; the preparation
for another time of domination and splendour; the deadly wrestling of
men who meant to outlive one another by sheer strength and grim power of
killing; the dark ignorance, darkest just before the waking of new
thought, and art, and learning; the universal cruelty of all living
things to each other, that had grown out of the black past; and, with
all this, the undying belief in Rome's greatness, in Rome's future, in
Rome's latent power to rule the world again.

That was the beginning of the new story, for the old one was ended, the
race of men who had lived it was gone, and their works were following
them, to the universal dust. Out of the memories they left and the
departed glory of the places wherein they had dwelt, the magic