dart their projections threateningly
upward in the air. The courts are strewed with various fragments, and
blocks of brick welded together by the action of time, like stones
incrusted with the deposits of the sea. Elsewhere are arcades quite
intact, piled up story upon story, the bright sky appearing behind them,
and above, along the dull red brickwork is a verdant head-dress of
plants, waving and rustling in the midst of the ethereal blue.

Here are mystic depths, wherein the bedewed shade prolongs itself among
mysterious shadows. Into these the ivy descends, and anemones, fennel,
and mallows fringe their brinks. Shafts of columns lie half-buried under
climbing vines and heaps of rubbish, while luxuriant clover carpets the
surrounding slopes. Small green oaks, with round tops, innumerable green
shrubs, and myriads of gillyflowers cling to the various projections,
nestle in the hollows, and deck its crest with their yellow clusters.
All these murmur in the breeze, and the birds are singing in the midst
of the imposing silence....

You ascend, I know not how many stories, and, on the summit, find the
pavement of the upper chambers to consist of checkered squares of
marble; owing to the shrubs and plants that have taken root among them,
these are disjoined in places, a fresh bit of mosaic sometimes appearing
intact on removing a layer of earth. Here were sixteen hundred seats of
polished marble. In the Baths of Diocletian there were places for three
thousand two hundred bathers. From this elevation, on casting your eyes
around, you see, on the plain, lines of ancient aqueducts radiating in
all directions and losing themselves in the distance, and, on the side
of Albano, three other vast ruins, masses of red and black arcades,
shattered and disintegrated brick by brick, and corroded by time.

You descend and take another glance. The hall of the "piscine" is a
hundred and twenty paces long; that in which the bathers disrobed is
eighty feet in height; the whole is covered with marble, and with such
beautiful marble that mantel ornaments are now made of its fragments. In
the sixteenth century the Farnese Hercules was discovered here, and the
Torso and Venus Callipygis, and I know not how many other masterpieces;
and in the seventeenth century hundreds of statues. No people, probably,
will ever again display the same luxurious conveniences, the same
diversions, and especially the same order of beauty, as that which the
Roman