me--!"

They walked up and down the Forum, between the arches of Titus and
Severus. Albano (being near the teacher who, in the days of childhood,
had so often conducted him hitherward) was yet full of the stream
which had swept over the world, and the all-covering water sunk but
slowly. He went on and said: "Today, when he beheld the Obelisk, the
soft, tender brightness of the moon had seemed to him eminently
unbecoming for the giant city; he would rather have seen a sun blazing
on its broad banner; but now the moon was the proper funeral-torch
beside the dead Alexander, who, at a touch, collapses into a handful
of dust." "The artist does not get far with feelings of this kind,"
said Dian, "he must look upon everlasting beauties on the right hand
and on the left." "Where," Albano went on asking, "is the old lake of
Curtius--the Rostrum--the pila Horatia--the temple of Vesta--of Venus,
and of all those solitary columns?" "And where is the marble Forum
itself?" said Dian; "it lies thirty span deep below our feet." "Where
is the great, free people, the senate of kings, the voice of the
orators, the procession to the Capitol? Buried under the mountain of
potsherds! O Dian, how can a man who loses a father, a beloved, in
Rome shed a single tear or look round him with consternation, when he
comes out here before this battle-field of time and looks into the
charnel-house of the nations? Dian, one would wish here an iron heart,
for fate has an iron hand!"

Dian, who nowhere stayed more reluctantly than upon such tragic cliffs
hanging over, as it were, into the sea of eternity, almost leaped off
from them with a joke; like the Greeks, he blended dances with
tragedy! "Many a thing is preserved here, friend!" said he; "in
Adrian's church yonder they will still show you the bones of the three