ens of a great trouble. There had long
been an impulse upon her--amounting, at last, to a necessity to shriek
aloud; but she had struggled against it, till the thunderous anthem gave
her an opportunity to relieve her heart by a great cry.

They passed the solitary Column of Phocas, and looked down into the
excavated space, where a confusion of pillars, arches, pavements, and
shattered blocks and shafts--the crumbs of various ruin dropped from the
devouring maw of Time stand, or lie, at the base of the Capitoline Hill.
That renowned hillock (for it is little more) now arose abruptly above
them. The ponderous masonry, with which the hillside is built up, is as
old as Rome itself, and looks likely to endure while the world retains
any substance or permanence. It once sustained the Capitol, and now
bears up the great pile which the mediaeval builders raised on the
antique foundation, and that still loftier tower, which looks abroad
upon a larger page of deeper historic interest than any other scene
can show. On the same pedestal of Roman masonry, other structures will
doubtless rise, and vanish like ephemeral things.

To a spectator on the spot, it is remarkable that the events of Roman
history, and Roman life itself, appear not so distant as the Gothic ages
which succeeded them. We stand in the Forum, or on the height of the
Capitol, and seem to see the Roman epoch close at hand. We forget that
a chasm extends between it and ourselves, in which lie all those dark,
rude, unlettered centuries, around the birth-time of Christianity, as
well as the age of chivalry and romance, the feudal system, and the
infancy of a better civilization than that of Rome. Or, if we remember
these mediaeval times, they look further off than the Augustan age. The
reason may be, that the old Roman literature survives, and creates for
us an intimacy with the classic ages, which we have no means of forming
with the subsequent ones.

The Italian climate, moreover, robs age of its reverence and makes it
look newer than it is. Not the Coliseum, nor the tombs of the Appian
Way, nor the oldest pillar in the Forum, nor any other Roman ruin, be
it as dilapidated as it may, ever give the impression of venerable
antiquity which we gather, along with the ivy, from the gray walls of an
English abbey or castle. And yet every brick or stone, which we pick up
among the former, had fallen ages before the foundation of the latter
was begun. This is owing to the k