billows of green, and girded
on all sides by blue mountains, whose silver crests gleaming in the
setting sunlight tell that the winter yet lingers on their tops, though
spring has decked all the plain. So silent, so lonely, so fair is this
waving expanse with its guardian mountains, it might be some wild
solitude, an American prairie or Asiatic steppe, but that in the midst
thereof, on some billows of rolling land, we discern a city, sombre,
quaint, and old,--a city of dreams and mysteries,--a city of the living
and the dead. And this is Rome,--weird, wonderful, ancient, mighty
Rome,--mighty once by physical force and grandeur, mightier now in
physical decadence and weakness by the spell of a potent moral
enchantment.

As the sun is moving westward, the whole air around becomes flooded with
a luminousness which seems to transfuse itself with pervading presence
through every part of the city, and make all its ruinous and mossy age
bright and living. The air shivers with the silver vibrations of
hundreds of bells, and the evening glory goes up and down, soft-footed
and angelic, transfiguring all things. The broken columns of the Forum
seem to swim in golden mist, and luminous floods fill the Coliseum as it
stands with its thousand arches looking out into the city like so many
sightless eye-holes in the skull of the past. The tender light pours up
streets dank and ill-paved,--into noisome and cavernous dens called
houses, where the peasantry of to-day vegetate in contented
subservience. It illuminates many a dingy court-yard, where the moss is
green on the walls, and gurgling fountains fall into quaint old
sculptured basins. It lights up the gorgeous palaces of Rome's modern
princes, built with stones wrenched from ancient ruins. It streams
through a wilderness of churches, each with its tolling prayer-bell, and
steals through painted windows into the dazzling confusion of pictured
and gilded glories that glitter and gleam from roof and wall within. And
it goes, too, across the Tiber, up the filthy and noisome Ghetto, where,
hemmed in by ghostly superstition, the sons of Israel are growing up
without vital day, like wan white plants in cellars; and the black
mournful obelisks of the cypresses in the villas around, it touches with
a solemn glory. The castle of St. Angelo looks like a great translucent,
luminous orb, and the statues of saints and apostles on the top of St.
John Lateran glow as if made of living fire, and see