thousand--as many as
could be seated on the tiers in the Colosseum. Such a concourse was
there at the opening of the Oecumenical Council in December, 1869, and
at the jubilees celebrated by Leo the Thirteenth; and on all those
occasions there was plenty of room in the aisles, besides the broad
spaces which were required for the functions themselves.

To feel one's smallness and realize it, one need only go and stand
beside the marble cherubs that support the holy-water basins against the
first pillar. They look small, if not graceful; but they are of heroic
size, and the bowls are as big as baths. Everything in the place is
vast; all the statues are colossal, all the pictures enormous; the
smallest detail of the ornamentation would dwarf any other building in
the world, and anywhere else even the chapels would be churches. The eye
strains at everything, and at first the mind is shocked out of its power
of comparison.

But the strangest, most extravagant, most incomprehensible, most
disturbing sight of all is to be seen from the upper gallery in the
cupola looking down to the church below. Hanging in mid-air, with
nothing under one's feet, one sees the church projected in perspective
within a huge circle. It is as though one saw it upside down and inside
out. Few men could bear to stand there without that bit of iron railing
between them and the hideous fall; and the inevitable slight dizziness
which the strongest head feels may make one doubt for a moment whether
what is really the floor below may not be in reality a ceiling above,
and whether one's sense of gravitation be not inverted in an
extraordinary dream. At that distance human beings look no bigger than
flies, and the canopy of the high altar might be an ordinary table.

And thence, climbing up between the double domes, one may emerge from
the almost terrible perspective to the open air, and suddenly see all
Rome at one's feet, and all the Roman mountains stretched out to south
and east, in perfect grace of restful outline, shoulder to shoulder,
like shadowy women lying side by side and holding hands.

And the broken symmetry of the streets and squares ranges below, cut by
the winding ribbon of the yellow Tiber; to the right the low Aventine,
with the dark cypresses of the Protestant cemetery beyond, and the
Palatine, crested with trees and ruins; the Pincian on the left, with
its high gardens, and the mass of foliage of the Villa Medici behind it;
the loft