On the next moonlit evening, Gaspard bespoke torches, in order that
the Coliseum, with its giant-circle, might the first time stand in
fire before them. The knight would fain have gone around alone with
his son, dimly through the dim work, like two spirits of the olden
time, but the Princess forced herself upon him, from a too lively wish
to share with the noble youth his great moments, and perhaps, in fact,
her heart and his own. Women do not sufficiently comprehend that an
idea, when it fills and elevates man's mind, shuts it, then, against
love, and crowds out persons; whereas with woman all ideas easily
become human beings.

They passed over the Forum, by the _Via Sacra_, to the Coliseum, whose
lofty, cloven forehead looked down pale under the moonlight. They
stood before the gray rock-walls, which reared themselves on four
colonnades one above another, and the torchlight shot up into the
arches of the arcades, gilding the green shrubbery high overhead, and
deep in the earth had the noble monster already buried his feet. They
stepped in and ascended the mountain, full of fragments of rock, from
one seat of the spectators to another. Gaspard did not venture to the
sixth or highest, where the men used to stand, but Albano and the
Princess did. Then the youth gazed down over the cliffs, upon the
round, green crater of the burnt-out volcano, which once swallowed
nine thousand beasts at once, and which quenched itself with human
blood. The lurid glare of the torches penetrated into the clefts and
caverns, and among the foliage of the ivy and laurel, and among the
great shadows of the moon, which, like departed spirits, hovered in
caverns. Toward the south, where the streams of centuries and
barbarians had stormed in, stood single columns and bare arcades.
Temples and three palaces had the giant fed and lined with his limbs,