a little hand-light, now toward a white statue, now toward the child,
and so, alternately, illuminated each. This friendly group made its
way to the very centre of his soul, now so highly exalted, and brought
with it, to him, many a recollection; particularly was a Roman child
to him a wholly new and mighty idea.

They alighted at last at the Prince _di Lauria's_--Gaspard's
father-in-law and old friend. * * * Albano, dissatisfied with all, kept
his inspiration sacrificing to the unearthly gods of the past round
about him, after the old fashion, namely, with silence. Well might he
and could he have discussed, but otherwise, namely in odes, with the
whole man, with streams which mount and grow upward. He looked even more
and more longingly out of the window at the moon in the pure rain-blue,
and at single columns of the Forum; out of doors there gleamed for him
the greatest world. At last he rose up, indignant and impatient, and
stole down into the glimmering glory, and stepped before the Forum; but
the moonlit night, that decoration-painter, which works with irregular
strokes, made almost the very stage of the scene irrecognizable to him.

What a dreary, broad plain, loftily encompassed with ruins, gardens
and temples, covered with prostrate capitals of columns, and with
single, upright pillars, and with trees and a dumb wilderness! The
heaped-up ashes out of the emptied urn of Time! And the potsherds of a
great world flung around! He passed by three temple columns,[4] which
the earth had drawn down into itself even to the breast, and along
through the broad triumphal arch of Septimius Severus; on the right,
stood a chain of columns without their temple; on the left, attached
to a Christian church, the colonnade of an ancient heathen temple,
deep sunken into the sediment of time; at last the triumphal arch of
Titus, and before it, in the middle of the woody wilderness, a