By way of contrast we rode out into old ruined Rome, after all this
firing and booming, to take our leave of the Coliseum. I had seen
it by moonlight before (I could never get through a day without
going back to it), but its tremendous solitude that night is past
all telling. The ghostly pillars in the Forum; the Triumphal
Arches of Old Emperors; those enormous masses of ruins which were
once their palaces; the grass-grown mounds that mark the graves of
ruined temples; the stones of the Via Sacra, smooth with the tread
of feet in ancient Rome; even these were dimmed, in their
transcendent melancholy, by the dark ghost of its bloody holidays,
erect and grim; haunting the old scene; despoiled by pillaging
Popes and fighting Princes, but not laid; wringing wild hands of
weed, and grass, and bramble; and lamenting to the night in every
gap and broken arch--the shadow of its awful self, immovable!
As we lay down on the grass of the Campagna, next day, on our way
to Florence, hearing the larks sing, we saw that a little wooden
cross had been erected on the spot where the poor Pilgrim Countess
was murdered.
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