There Are Statues On This Bridge (Execrable
Works), And, Among Them, Great Vessels Full Of Burning Tow Were
Placed:
Glaring strangely on the faces of the crowd, and not less
strangely on the stone counterfeits above them.
The show began with a tremendous discharge of cannon; and then, for
twenty minutes or half an hour, the whole castle was one incessant
sheet of fire, and labyrinth of blazing wheels of every colour,
size, and speed: while rockets streamed into the sky, not by ones
or twos, or scores, but hundreds at a time. The concluding burst--
the Girandola--was like the blowing up into the air of the whole
massive castle, without smoke or dust.
In half an hour afterwards, the immense concourse had dispersed;
the moon was looking calmly down upon her wrinkled image in the
river; and half-a-dozen men and boys, with bits of lighted candle
in their hands: moving here and there, in search of anything worth
having, that might have been dropped in the press: had the whole
scene to themselves.
By way of contrast we rode out into old ruined Rome, after all this
firing and booming, to take our leave of the Coliseum. I had seen
it by moonlight before (I could never get through a day without
going back to it), but its tremendous solitude that night is past
all telling. The ghostly pillars in the Forum; the Triumphal
Arches of Old Emperors; those enormous masses of ruins which were
once their palaces; the grass-grown mounds that mark the graves of
ruined temples; the stones of the Via Sacra, smooth with the tread
of feet in ancient Rome; even these were dimmed, in their
transcendent melancholy, by the dark ghost of its bloody holidays,
erect and grim; haunting the old scene; despoiled by pillaging
Popes and fighting Princes, but not laid; wringing wild hands of
weed, and grass, and bramble; and lamenting to the night in every
gap and broken arch--the shadow of its awful self, immovable!
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