of the structure, until it stood like a star where the blue sky
rested against the Coliseum's topmost wall. It indicated a party of
English or Americans paying the inevitable visit by moonlight, and
exalting themselves with raptures that were Byron's, not their own.

Our company of artists sat on the fallen column, the pagan altar, and
the steps of the Christian shrine, enjoying the moonlight and shadow,
the present gayety and the gloomy reminiscences of the scene, in almost
equal share. Artists, indeed, are lifted by the ideality of their
pursuits a little way off the earth, and are therefore able to catch
the evanescent fragrance that floats in the atmosphere of life above
the heads of the ordinary crowd. Even if they seem endowed with little
imagination individually, yet there is a property, a gift, a talisman,
common to their class, entitling them to partake somewhat more
bountifully than other people in the thin delights of moonshine and
romance.

"How delightful this is!" said Hilda; and she sighed for very pleasure.

"Yes," said Kenyon, who sat on the column, at her side. "The Coliseum
is far more delightful, as we enjoy it now, than when eighty thousand
persons sat squeezed together, row above row, to see their fellow
creatures torn by lions and tigers limb from limb. What a strange
thought that the Coliseum was really built for us, and has not come to
its best uses till almost two thousand years after it was finished!"

"The Emperor Vespasian scarcely had us in his mind," said Hilda,
smiling; "but I thank him none the less for building it."

"He gets small thanks, I fear, from the people whose bloody instincts
he pampered," rejoined Kenyon. "Fancy a nightly assemblage of eighty
thousand melancholy and remorseful ghosts, looking down from those tiers
of broken arches, striving to repent of the savage pleasures which they
once enjoyed, but still longing to enjoy them over again."

"You bring a Gothic horror into this peaceful moonlight scene," said
Hilda.

"Nay, I have good authority for peopling the Coliseum with phantoms,"
replied the sculptor. "Do you remember that veritable scene in Benvenuto
Cellini's autobiography, in which a necromancer of his acquaintance
draws a magic circle--just where the black cross stands now, I
suppose--and raises myriads of demons? Benvenuto saw them with his
own eyes,--giants, pygmies, and other creatures of frightful aspect,
capering and dancing on yonder walls. Those s