Dian could not comprehend it at all; he said in Italian:  “But it surely cannot be you; you look old.”  He thought he was speaking German all the time, till he heard Albano answer in Italian.  Both gave and received only questions.  Albano found the architect merely browner, but there was the lightning of the eyes and every faculty in its old glory.  With three words he related to him the journey, and who the company were.  “How does Rome strike you?” asked Dian, pleasantly.  “As life does,” replied Albano, very seriously, “it makes me too soft and too hard.”  “I recognize here absolutely nothing at all,” he continued; “do those columns belong to the magnificent temple of Peace?” “No,” said Dian, “to the temple of Concord; of the other there stands yonder nothing but the vault.”  “Where is Saturn’s temple?” asked Albano.  “Buried in St. Adrian’s church,” said Dian, and added hastily:  “Close by stand the ten columns of Antonine’s temple; over beyond there the baths of Titus; behind us the Palatine hill; and so on.  Now tell me—!”

They walked up and down the Forum, between the arches of Titus and Severus.  Albano (being near the teacher who, in the days of childhood, had so often conducted him hitherward) was yet full of the stream which had swept over the world, and the all-covering water sunk but slowly.  He went on and said:  “Today, when he beheld the Obelisk, the soft, tender brightness of the moon had seemed to him eminently unbecoming for the giant city; he would rather have seen a sun blazing on its broad banner; but now the moon was the proper funeral-torch beside the dead Alexander, who, at a touch, collapses into a handful of dust.”  “The artist does not get far with feelings of this kind,” said Dian, “he must look upon everlasting beauties on the right hand and on the left.”  “Where,” Albano went on asking, “is the old lake of Curtius—­the Rostrum—­the pila Horatia—­the temple of Vesta—­of Venus, and of all those solitary columns?” “And where is the marble Forum itself?” said Dian; “it lies thirty span deep below our feet.”  “Where is the great, free people, the senate of kings, the voice of the orators, the procession to the Capitol?  Buried under the mountain of potsherds!  O Dian, how can a man who loses a father, a beloved, in Rome shed a single tear or look round him with consternation, when he comes out here before this battle-field of time and looks into the charnel-house of the nations?  Dian, one would wish here an iron heart, for fate has an iron hand!”

Dian, who nowhere stayed more reluctantly than upon such tragic cliffs hanging over, as it were, into the sea of eternity, almost leaped off from them with a joke; like the Greeks, he blended dances with tragedy!  “Many a thing is preserved here, friend!” said he; “in Adrian’s church yonder they will still show you the bones of the three men that walked in the fire.”  “That is just the frightful play of destiny,” replied Albano, “to occupy the heights of the mighty ancients with monks shorn down into slaves.”