But The Ruined Mount Morris, Even Allowing For The Natural Growth Of The Landscape In Two Thousand Years, Could Show No Such Prospect Twenty Centuries Hence As We Got That Morning From A Bit Of Wilding Garden Near The Convent Of San Bonaventura, On The Brow Of The Palatine.

Some snowy tops pillowed themselves on the utmost horizon, and across the Campagna the broken aqueducts stalked and fell down and stumbled to their legs again.

The Baths of Caracalla bulked up in rugged, monstrous fragments, and then in the foreground, filling the whole eye, the Colosseum rose and stood, and all Rome sank round it. The Forum lay deep under us, vainly struggling with the broken syllables of its demolition to impart a sense of its past, and at our feet in that bit of garden where the roses were blooming and the plum-trees were blowing and the birds were singing, there stretched itself in the grass a fallen pillar wreathed with the folds of a marble serpent, the emblem of the oldest worship under the sun, as I was proud to remember without present help. It was the same immemorial, universal faith which the Mound Builders of our own West symbolized in the huge earthen serpents they shaped uncounted ages before the red savages came to wonder at them, and doubtless it had been welcomed by Rome in her large, loose, cynical toleration, together with cults which, like that of Isis and Osiris, were fads of yesterday beside it. Somehow it gave the humanest touch in the complex impression of the overhistoried scene. It made one feel very old, yet very young - old with the age and young with the youth of the world - and very much at home.

VI

PERSONAL RELATIONS WITH THE PAST

I was myself part of the antiquity with which I have been trying to be honest; and, though my date was no earlier than the seventh decade of the nineteenth century, still so many and such cataclysmal changes had passed over Rome since my time that I was, as far as concerned my own consciousness, practically of the period of the Pantheon, say. The Pantheon, in fact, was among my first associations with Rome. I lodged very near it, in the next piazza, so that, if we were not contemporaries, we were companions, and I could not go out of my hotel to look up a more permanent sojourn without passing by it. Perhaps I wished to pass by it, and might really have found my way to the Corso without the Pantheon's help.

I have no longer a definite idea why I should have made my sojourn in the very simple and modest little street called Via del Gambero, which runs along behind the Corso apparently till it gets tired and then stops. But very possibly it was because the Via del Gambero was so simple and modest that I chose it as the measure of my means; or possibly I may have heard of the apartment I took in it from wayfarers passing through Venice, where I then lived, and able to commend it from their own experience of it; people in that kind day used to do such things.

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