grounds, walled in like any other estate, but with the fearsome rampart
of the fourth Leo, which yet retained its fortress-like aspect. However,
Pierre took his way round the narrow gallery and abruptly found himself
in front of Rome, a sudden and immense expanse, with the distant sea on
the west, the uninterrupted mountain chains on the east and the south,
the Roman Campagna stretching to the horizon like a bare and greenish
desert, while the city, the Eternal City, was spread out at his feet.
Never before had space impressed him so majestically. Rome was there, as
a bird might see it, within the glance, as distinct as some geographical
plan executed in relief. To think of it, such a past, such a history, so
much grandeur, and Rome so dwarfed and contracted by distance! Houses as
lilliputian and as pretty as toys; and the whole a mere mouldy speck upon
the earth's face! What impassioned Pierre was that he could at a glance
understand the divisions of Rome: the antique city yonder with the
Capitol, the Forum, and the Palatine; the papal city in that Borgo which
he overlooked, with St. Peter's and the Vatican gazing across the city of
the middle ages--which was huddled together in the right angle described
by the yellow Tiber--towards the modern city, the Quirinal of the Italian
monarchy. And particularly did he remark the chalky girdle with which the
new districts encompassed the ancient, central, sun-tanned quarters, thus
symbolising an effort at rejuvenescence, the old heart but slowly mended,
whereas the outlying limbs were renewed as if by miracle.

In that ardent noontide glow, however, Pierre no longer beheld the pure
ethereal Rome which had met his eyes on the morning of his arrival in the
delightfully soft radiance of the rising sun. That smiling, unobtrusive
city, half veiled by golden mist, immersed as it were in some dream of
childhood, now appeared to him flooded with a crude light, motionless,
hard of outline and silent like death. The distance was as if devoured by
too keen a flame, steeped in a luminous dust in which it crumbled. And