the warm sun of an amiable
February morning. On my first visit to Rome I could hardly wait for day
to dawn after my arrival before rushing to the Cow Field, as it was then
called, and seeing the wide-horned cattle chewing the cud among the
broken monuments now so carefully cherished and, as it were, sedulously
cultivated. It is doubtful whether all that has since been done, and
which could not but have been done, by the eager science as much
involuntarily as voluntarily applied to the task, has resulted in a more
potent suggestion of what the Forum was in the republican or imperial
day than what that simple, old, unassuming Cow Field afforded. There
were then as now the beautiful arches; there were the fragments of the
temple porches, with their pillars; there was the "unknown column with
the buried base"; there were all the elements of emotion and meditation;
and it is possible that sentiment has only been cumbered Avith the
riches which archaeology has dug up for it by lowering the surface of
the Cow Field fifteen or twenty feet; by scraping clean the buried
pavements; by identifying the storied points; by multiplying the
fragments of basal or columnar marbles and revealing the plans of
temples and palaces and courts and tracing the Sacred Way on which the
magnificence of the past went to dusty death. After all, the imagination
is very childlike, and it prefers the elements of its pleas-ures simple
and few; if the materials are very abundant or complex, it can make
little out of them; they embarrass it, and it turns critical in
self-defence. The grandeur that was Rome as visioned from the Cow Field
becomes in the mind's eye the kaleidoscopic clutter which the
resurrection of the Forum Romanum must more and more realize.

If the visitor would have some rash notion of what the ugliness of the
place was like when it was in its glory, he may go look at the plastic
reconstruction of it, indefinitely reduced, in the modest building
across the way from the official entrance to the Forum. One cannot say
but this is intensely interesting, and it affords the consolation which
the humble (but not too humble) spirit may gather from witness of the
past, that the fashion of this world and the pride of the eyes and all
ruthless vainglory defeated themselves in ancient Rome, as they must
everywhere when they can work their will. If one had thought that in
magnitude and multitude some entire effect of beauty was latent, one had
but