boys played with lupins or with hazel-nuts
then, or old women roasted chestnuts in the streets, or whether such
unloving spirits should be supposed to visit one man in one vision. The
traveller has had an impression which has not been far removed from
emotion, and his day has not been lost, if it be true that emotion is
the soul's only measure of time. There, if anywhere, lies Rome's secret.
The place, the people, the air, the crystal brightness of winter, the
passion-stirring scirocco of autumn, the loveliness of the long spring,
the deep, still heat of summer, the city, the humanity, the memories of
both, are all distillers of emotion in one way or another.

Above all, the night is beautiful in Rome, when the moon is high and all
is quiet. Go down past the silver Forum to the Colosseum and see what it
is then, and perhaps you will know what it was in the old days. Such
white stillness as this fell then also, by night, on all the broad space
around the amphitheatre of all amphitheatres, the wonder of the world,
the chief monument of Titus, when his hand had left of Jerusalem not one
stone upon another. The same moonbeams fell slanting across the same
huge walls, and whitened the sand of the same broad arena when the great
awning was drawn back at night to air the place of so much death. In the
shadow, the steps are still those up which Dion the Senator went to see
mad Commodus play the gladiator and the public fool. On one of those
lower seats he sat, the grave historian, chewing laurel leaves to steady
his lips and keep down his laughter, lest a smile should cost his head;
and he showed the other Senators that it was a good thing for their
safety, and there they sat, in their rows, throughout the long
afternoon, solemnly chewing laurel leaves for their lives, while the
strong madman raved on the sand below, and slew, and bathed himself in
the blood of man and beast. There is a touch of frightful humour in the
tale.

And one stands there alone in the stillness and remembers how, on that
same night, when all was over, when the corpses had been dragged away,
it may have been almost as it is now. Only, perhaps, far off among the
arches and on the tiers of seats, there might be still a tiny light
moving here and there; the keepers of that terrible place would go their
rounds with their little earthen lamps; they would search everywhere in
the spectators' places for small things that might have been lost in the
press--a s