assembled, but whose solitude now
is undisturbed, save by the clank of the Croat's sabre, or the
wine-flagon of the friar. You shall visit cells dim and dank, around
which genius has thrown a halo which draws thither the pilgrim, who
would rather muse in the twilight of the naked vault, than wander amid
the marble glories of the palace that rises proudly in its
neighbourhood. You shall go with me, at the hour of vespers, to aisled
cathedrals, which were ages a-building, and the erection of which
swallowed up the revenues of provinces,--beneath whose roof, ample
enough to cover thousands and tens of thousands, you may see a solitary
priest, singing a solemn dirge over a "Religion" fallen as a dominant
belief, and existing only as a military organization; while statues,
mute and solemn, of mailed warriors, grim saints, angels and winged
cherubs, ranged along the walls, are the only companions of the
surpliced man, if we except a few beggars pressing with naked knees the
stony floor. You shall see Florence,--

"The brightest star of star-bright Italy."

You shall be stirred by the craggy grandeur of the Apennines, and
soothed by the living green of the Tuscan vales, with their hoar
castles, their olives, their dark cypresses, and their forests,--

"Where beside his leafy hold
The sullen boar hath heard the distant horn,
And whets his tusks against the gnarled thorn."

You shall taste the vine of Italy, and drink the waters of the Arno. You
shall wander over ancient battle-fields, encounter the fierce Apennine
blast, and be rocked on the Mediterranean wave, which the sirocco heaps
up, huge and dark, and pours in a foaming cataract upon the strand of
Italy. Finally, we shall tread together the sackcloth plain on which
Rome sits, with the leaves of her torn laurel and the fragments of her
shivered sceptre strewn around her, waiting with discrowned and
downcast head the bolt of doom. Entering the gates of the "seven-hilled
city," we shall climb the Capitol, and survey a scene which has its
equal nowhere on the earth. Mouldering arches, fallen columns, buried
palaces, empty tombs, and slaves treading on the dust of the conquerors
of the world, are all that now remain of Imperial Rome. What a scene of
ruin and woe! When the twilight falls, and the moon begins to climb the
eastern arch, mark how the Coliseum projects, as if in pity, its mighty
shadow across the Forum, and covers with its kindly folds the mould