forth to the traveller its merits connected with Nero, and I
think Coriolanus--Nero and Coriolanus as elements of _reclame_!

But here it seems all right; becoming only one of those immense
ironies of Time, more dignified than any of Time's paltry creatures of
which this place is full. Time, whose presence, whose very cruelties
and gigantic jests, brings such peace to the soul in this place. Peace
because hope. This litter, this dust-heap (for it is after all not
much better, few great or precious or perfect things remaining),
dust-heap or rag-fair symbolised by its own most barbarous and vilest
and most venerable parts along the Tiber and under the Capitoline,--this
Rome accustoms one to take patience and heart of grace. It helps one
to conceive the fact that life comes everywhere out of death and
subdues it; to feel that, as there are centuries in the Past, so there
will be centuries and centuries in the Future. It helps the
imagination with its remnants of old, used-up theatre scenes, to guess
at all the scene-shifting that will be accomplished, and to take its
stand, be it only in the emotion of an instant, as witness of the
vague phantasmagoria of the future. Why despair? Why be impatient?
only give time, only secure all the possible tickets in the lottery
of chance, and our hopes must at last be realised, all will be all
right. 'Tis only our miserable impatience, our miserable sense of our
own impotent mortality, which makes us fret: and Rome bids us take
patience and comfort.

We despair of the future, for one reason, because we attribute to the
future our own growing sense of fatigue, the feelings of evening. But
the future will, for those to whom it belongs, be morning, with the
vigour and buoyancy of the awakening. Our ideal would be to preserve
in the future the beautiful things--certain flowers of tradition and
privilege--of the past. 'Tis a delusion. We might as well hope to keep
the old leaves on the trees into next summer. But after the old leaves
have fallen and the trees have stood bare, new ones will come, not the
same, but similar.

_March_ 11.

II.

LATTER-DAY ROME.

As a matter of fact Rome has never been so much Rome, never expressed
its full meaning so completely, as nowadays. This change and
desecration, this inroad of modernness, merely completes its eternity.
Goethe has an epigram of a Chinese he met here; but a Chinese of the
eighteenth century completed Rome less than an Amer