mystery. Here, later, were
preserved the public documents of Roman grandeur inscribed on tablets of
brass; hither climbed the heroes of the triumphs; and here the emperors
became gods, erect in statues of marble. And nowadays the eye inquires
wonderingly how so much history and so much glory can have had for their
scene so small a space, such a rugged, jumbled pile of paltry buildings,
a mole-hill, looking no bigger, no loftier than a hamlet perched between
two valleys.

Then another surprise for Pierre was the Forum, starting from the Capitol
and stretching out below the Palatine: a narrow square, close pressed by
the neighbouring hills, a hollow where Rome in growing had been compelled
to rear edifice close to edifice till all stifled for lack of breathing
space. It was necessary to dig very deep--some fifty feet--to find the
venerable republican soil, and now all you see is a long, clean, livid
trench, cleared of ivy and bramble, where the fragments of paving, the
bases of columns, and the piles of foundations appear like bits of bone.
Level with the ground the Basilica Julia, entirely mapped out, looks like
an architect's ground plan. On that side the arch of Septimius Severus
alone rears itself aloft, virtually intact, whilst of the temple of
Vespasian only a few isolated columns remain still standing, as if by
miracle, amidst the general downfall, soaring with a proud elegance, with
sovereign audacity of equilibrium, so slender and so gilded, into the
blue heavens. The column of Phocas is also erect; and you see some
portions of the Rostra fitted together out of fragments discovered near
by. But if the eye seeks a sensation of extraordinary vastness, it must
travel beyond the three columns of the temple of Castor and Pollux,
beyond the vestiges of the house of the Vestals, beyond the temple of
Faustina, in which the Christian Church of San Lorenzo has so composedly
installed itself, and even beyond the round temple of Romulus, to light
upon the Basilica of Constantine with its three colossal, gaping
archways. From the Palatine they look like porches built for a nation of
giants, so massive that a fallen fragment resembles some huge rock hurled
by a whirlwind from a mountain summit. And there, in that illustrious,
narrow, overflowing Forum the history of the greatest of nations held for
centuries, from the legendary time of the Sabine women, reconciling their
relatives and their ravishers, to that of the proclamati