le glory. The fountain, on the other hand, is the
child of lands whose mountains kiss the clouds and gleam with the
purity of everlasting snows, and where each day brings out new
beauties, and each season reveals a fresh and ever-varying charm. But
although there is no geographical reason why these two objects should
be associated, there is a poetical fitness. The obelisk is the symbol
of the perpetual past, holding in its changeless unity, as on its
carved sides, the memories of former ages; the fountain is the symbol
of the perpetual present, ever changing, ever new. The one speaks to
us of a petrified old age; the other of an immortal youth. And thus it
is in life, each passing moment flowing on with all its changes beside
the stern, hard, enduring monument of the irrevocable past on which
what is written is changelessly written. How different too are the
bright sparkling fountains that leap with ever-varying beauty at the
foot of the Flaminian obelisk now, from the dull, sleepy monotonous
river that, like a Lethe flood, flowed past it in the old days at
Heliopolis! Are they not both symbolical of the new and the old world,
of the Christian faith, with its progressive thought and varied
expanding life, and the stagnant pagan creed, which impressed the soul
with the sense of human helplessness in the face of an unchangeable
iron order alike of nature and of society?

Another of the great obelisks of Rome is that which stands on Monte
Citorio, in front of the present Parliament House. It was brought to
Rome by Augustus, who dedicated it anew to the sun, and placed it as
the gnomon of a meridian in the midst of the Campus Martius.
Originally it had been erected at Heliopolis in honour of Psammeticus
I., who reigned about seven hundred years before Christ. This monarch
lived during a time when the national religion had become corrupted,
and the whole land had come under the influence of Greek thought and
Greek customs. But the obelisk which he erected is worthy of the best
period of Egyptian art. It is universally admired for the remarkable
beauty of its hieroglyphics. The anonymous pilgrim of Einsiedlen
mentions that this obelisk was still erect when he visited Rome about
the beginning of the ninth century. It seems, however, to have fallen
and to have been broken in pieces, nearly three hundred years later,
during the terrible conflagration caused by the Norman troops of
Robert Guiscard. Several fragments of it were du