._ And all the while they have
been having the sublime impudence to keep an army in Spain
conquering there. How to account for this unsubduability? Well;
there is Numa's teaching; and what you might call a latent habit
of _Caput-Mundi-ship:_ imperial seeds in the soil.

There is that indestructible god-side to everything; especially,
behind and above this city on the seven hills, there is divine
eternal ROME. So, after the Gaulish conquest, they rejected
proffered and more desirable Etruscan sites, and came back and
provided _Dea Roma_ with a new out-ward being; the imperial
seeds, molds of empire, were on the Seven Hills, not at Veii.
So, when this still greater peril of Hannibal so nearly submerged
them, they took final victory for granted,--could conceive of no
other possibility,--and placidly went forward while being whipped
in Italy with the adventure in Spain. There was one thing they
could not imagine: ultimate defeat. It was a kind of stupidity
with them. They were a stupid people. You might thrash them;
you might give them their full deserts (which were bad), and
fairly batter them to bits; all the world might think them dead;
dozens of doctors might write death-certificates; you might have
Rome coffined and nailed down, and be riding gaily to the
funeral;--but you could not convince _her_ she was dead; and at
the very graveside, sure enough, the 'pesky critter' (as they
say) would be bursting open the coffin lid; would finish the
ceremony with you for the corpse, and then ride home smiling to
enjoy her triumph, thank God for his mercies,--and get back to
her hoe and her cabbages as quickly as might be.

It is this that to my mind makes it philosophically certain that
she had had a vast antiquity as the seat of empire; I mean,
before the Etruscan domination. _Dea Roma,_--the Idea of Rome,--
was an astral mold almost cast in higher than astral stuff: it
was so firmly fixed, so unalterably there, that I cannot imagine
a few centuries of peasant-bandits building it,--unimaginative
tough creatures at the best. No; it was a heritage; it was
built in thousands of years, and founded upon forgotten facts.
There was something in the ideal world, the deposit of long ages
of thinking and imagining. How, pray, are nations brought
into being?

By men thinking and willing and imagining them into being. Such
men create an astral matrix; with walls faint and vague at
first, but ever growing stronger as mor