hus makes immortal all that is best and most beautiful in the
world; it arrests the vanishing apparitions which haunt the
interlunations of life, and veiling them, or in language or in form,
sends them forth among mankind, bearing sweet news of kindred joy to
those with whom their sisters abide--abide, because there is no portal
of expression from the caverns of the spirit which they inhabit into
the universe of things. Poetry redeems from decay the visitations of
the divinity in man.

II

THE BATHS OF CARACALLA[38]

The next most considerable relic of antiquity, considered as a ruin,
is the Thermae of Caracalla. These consist of six enormous chambers,
above 200 feet in height, and each enclosing a vast space like that of
a field. There are in addition a number of towers and labyrinthine
recesses, hidden and woven over by the wild growth of clinging ivy.
Never was any desolation more sublime and lovely. The perpendicular
wall of ruin is cloven into steep ravines, filled up with flowering
shrubs, whose thick twisted roots are knotted in the rifts of the
stone, and at every step the aerial pinnacles of shattered stone group
into new combinations of effect, towering above the lofty yet level
walls, as the distant mountains change their aspect to one traveling
rapidly toward the skirts by masses of the fallen ruins, overturned
with the broad leaves of the creeping weeds. The blue sky canopies it,
and is as the everlasting roof of these enormous halls. But the most
interesting effect remains.

In one of the buttresses that supports an immense and lofty arch
"which bridges the very wings of heaven" are the crumbling remains of
an antique winding staircase, whose sides are open in many places to
the precipice. This you ascend and arrive on the summit of these
piles. There grow on every side thick entangled wildernesses of
myrtle, and the myrletus and bay and the flowering laurestinus, whose
white blossoms are just developed, the white fig and a thousand
nameless plants sown by the wandering winds. These woods are
intersected on every side by paths, like sheep tracks through the
copse wood of steep mountains, which wind to every part of the immense
labyrinth. From the midst rise those pinnacles and masses, themselves
like masses which have been seen far below. In one place you wind
along a narrow strip of weed-grown ruin: on one side is the immensity
of earth and sky, on the other a narrow chasm, which is bounded b