those of an empire and the remains of the world."

Ambrosio, to whom the conversation seemed disagreeable, put us in mind of
an engagement we had made to spend the evening at the conversazione of a
celebrated lady, and proposed to call the carriage. The reflections
which the conversation and the scene had left in my mind little disposed
me for general society. I requested them to keep their engagement, and
said I was resolved to spend an hour amidst the solitude of the ruins,
and desired them to send back the carriage for me. They left me,
expressing a hope that my poetical or melancholy fancy might not be the
occasion of a cold, and wished me the company of some of the spectres of
the ancient Romans.

When I was left alone, I seated myself in the moonshine, on one of the
steps leading to the seats supposed to have been occupied by the
patricians in the Colosaeum at the time of the public games. The train
of ideas in which I had indulged before my friends left me continued to
flow with a vividness and force increased by the stillness and solitude
of the scene; and the full moon has always a peculiar effect on these
moods of feeling in my mind, giving to them a wildness and a kind of
indefinite sensation, such as I suppose belong at all times to the true
poetical temperament. It must be so, I thought to myself; no new city
will rise again out of the double ruins of this; no new empire will be
founded upon these colossal remains of that of the old Romans. The
world, like the individual, flourishes in youth, rises to strength in
manhood, falls into decay in age; and the ruins of an empire are like the
decrepit frame of an individual, except that they have some tints of
beauty which nature bestows upon them. The sun of civilisation arose in
the East, advanced towards the West, and is now at its meridian; in a few
centuries more it will probably be seen sinking below the horizon even in