f luceoli or fire-flies which were dancing around
me and that appeared flitting and sparkling amidst the gloom and darkness
of the ruins, but which were no longer visible when they rose above the
horizon, their feeble light being lost and utterly obscured in the
brightness of the moonbeams in the heavens."

Onuphrio said: "I am not sorry that you have changed the conversation.
You have given us the history of a most interesting recollection and well
expressed a solemn though humiliating feeling. In such moments and among
such scenes it is impossible not to be struck with the nothingness of
human glory and the transiency of human works. This, one of the greatest
monuments on the face of the earth, was raised by a people, then its
masters, only seventeen centuries ago; in a few ages more it will be but
as dust, and of all the testimonials of the vanity or power of man,
whether raised to immortalise his name, or to contain his decaying bones
without a name, no one is known to have a duration beyond what is
measured by the existence of a hundred generations; and it is only to
multiply centuple for instance the period of time, and the memorials of a
village and the monuments of a country churchyard may be compared with
those of an empire and the remains of the world."

Ambrosio, to whom the conversation seemed disagreeable, put us in mind of
an engagement we had made to spend the evening at the conversazione of a
celebrated lady, and proposed to call the carriage. The reflections
which the conversation and the scene had left in my mind little disposed
me for general society. I requested them to keep their engagement, and
said I was resolved to spend an hour amidst the solitude of the ruins,
and desired them to send back the carriage for me. They left me,
expressing a hope that my poetical or melancholy fancy might not be the
occasion of a cold, and wished me the company of some of the spectres of
the ancient Romans.

When I was left alone, I seated myself in the moonshine, on one of the
steps leading to the seats supposed to have been occupied by the
patricians in the Colosaeum at the time of the public games. The train
of ideas in which I had indulged before my friends left me continued to
flow with a vividness and force increased by the stillness and solitude
of the scene; and the full moon has always a peculiar effect on these
moods of feeling in my mind, giving to them a wildness and a kind of
indefinite sensatio