At last, ascending, we reach the door which faces towards the west.  We lift the great leathern curtain and push into the church.  A faint perfume of incense salutes the nostrils.  The golden sunset bursts in as the curtain sways forward, illuminates the mosaic floor, catches on the rich golden ceiling, and flashes here and there over the crowd on some brilliant costume or shaven head.  All sorts of people are thronging there,—­some kneeling before the shrine of the Madonna, which gleams with its hundreds of silver votive hearts, legs, and arms,—­some listening to the preaching,—­some crowding round the chapel of the Presepio,—­old women, haggard and wrinkled, come tottering along with their scaldini of coals, drop down on their knees to pray, and, as you pass, interpolate in their prayers a parenthesis of begging.  The church is not architecturally handsome; but it is eminently picturesque, with its relics of centuries, its mosaic pulpits and floor, its frescoes of Pinturicchio and Pesaro, its antique columns, its rich golden ceiling, its Gothic mausoleum to the Savelli, and its medieval tombs.  A dim, dingy look is over all,—­but it is the dimness of faded splendor; and one cannot stand there, knowing the history of the church, its exceeding antiquity, and the changes it has undergone since it was a Roman temple, without a peculiar sense of interest and pleasure.

It was here that Romulus, in the gray dawning of Rome, built the temple of Jupiter Feretrius.  Here the spolia opima were deposited.  Here the triumphal processions of the Emperors and generals ended.  Here the victors paused before making their vows, until the message came from the Mamertine Prisons below to announce that their noblest prisoner and victim, while the clang of their triumph and his defeat rose ringing in his ears as the procession ascended the steps, had expiated with death the crime of being the enemy of Rome.  Over these very steps,—­nineteen centuries ago, the first great Caesar climbed on his knees after his first triumph.  At their base, Rienzi, “last of the Roman tribunes,” fell.  And, if the tradition of the Church is to be trusted, it was on the site of the present high altar that Augustus erected the “Ara primogenito Dei” to commemorate the Delphic prophecy of the coming of our Saviour.  Standing on a spot so thronged with memories, the dullest imagination takes fire.  The forms and scenes of the past rise from their graves and pass before us, and the actual and visionary are mingled together in strange poetic confusion.  Truly, as Walpole says, “memory sees more than our eyes in this country.”