ur self-consciousness leaves
us and we speedily make ourselves at home. We take things for granted,
and are not careful about trifles. A great many things are going on,
but the multiplicity does not distract us. We do not need to
understand.

For we have primal sympathies which are very good substitutes for
intelligence. We do not worry because nature does not get on faster
with her work. When we go out on the hills on a spring morning, as our
forbears did ten thousand years ago, it does not fret us to consider
that things are going on very much as they did then. The sap is
mounting in the trees; the wild flowers are pushing out of the sod;
the free citizens of the woods are pursuing their vocations without
regard to our moralities. A great deal is going on, but nothing has
come to a dramatic culmination.

Our innate rusticity makes us accept all this in the spirit in which
it is offered to us. It is nature's way and we like it, because we are
used to it. We take what is set before us and ask no questions. It is
spring. We do not stop to inquire as to whether this spring is an
improvement on last spring or on the spring of the year 400 B.C. There
is a timelessness about our enjoyment. We are not thinking of events
set in a chronological order, but of a process which loses nothing by
reason of repetition.

Our attitude toward a city is usually quite different. We are not at
our ease. We are querulous and anxious, and our interest takes a
feverish turn. For the cities of our Western world are new-fangled
contrivances which we are not used to, and we are worried as we try to
find out whether they will work. These aggregations of humanity have
not existed long enough to seem to belong to the nature of things. It
is exciting to be invited to "see Seattle grow," but the exhibition
does not yield a "harvest of a quiet eye." If Seattle should cease to
grow while we are looking at it, what should we do then?

But with Rome it is different. Here is a city which has been so long
in existence that we look upon it as a part of nature. It is not
accidental or artificial. Nothing can happen to it but what has
happened already. It has been burned with fire, it has been ravaged by
the sword, it has been ruined by luxury, it has been pillaged by
barbarians and left for dead. And here it is to-day the scene of eager
life. Pagans, Christians, reformers, priests, artists, soldiers,
honest workmen, idlers, philosophers, saints, were her