“The stream of time drives new wheels,” said Dian “yonder lies Raphael twice buried.[5]” * * * And so they climbed silently and speedily over rubbish and torsos of columns, and neither gave heed to the mighty emotion of the other.

Rome, like the Creation, is an entire wonder, which gradually dismembers itself into new wonders, the Coliseum, the Pantheon, St. Peter’s church, Raphael, etc.

With the passage through the church of St. Peter, the knight began the noble course through Immortality.  The Princess let herself, by the tie of Art, be bound to the circle of the men.  As Albano was more smitten with edifices than with any other work of man, so did he see from afar, with holy heart, the long mountain-chain of Art, which again bore upon itself hills, so did he stop before the plain, around which the enormous colonnades run like Corsos, bearing a people of statues.  In the centre shoots up the Obelisk, and on its right and left an eternal fountain, and from the lofty steps the proud Church of the world, inwardly filled with churches, rearing upon itself a temple toward Heaven, looks down upon the earth.  But how wonderfully, as they drew near, had its columns and its rocky wall mounted up and flown away from the vision!

He entered the magic church, which gave the world blessings, curses, kings and popes, with the consciousness, that, like the world-edifice, it was continually enlarging and receding more and more the longer one remained in it.  They went up to two children of white marble who held an incense-muscle-shell of yellow marble; the children grew by nearness till they were giants.  At length they stood at the main altar and its hundred perpetual lamps.  What a place!  Above them the heaven’s arch of the dome, resting on four inner towers; around them an over-arched city of four streets in which stood churches.  The temple became greatest by walking in it; and, when they passed round one column, there stood a new one before them, and holy giants gazed earnestly down.

Here was the youth’s large heart, after so long a time, filled.  “In no art,” said he to his father, “is the soul so mightily possessed with the sublime as in architecture; in every other the giant stands within and in the depths of the soul, but here he stands out of and close before it.”  Dian, to whom all images were more clear than abstract ideas, said he was perfectly right.  Fraischdoerfer replied, “The sublime also here lies only in the brain, for the whole church stands, after all, in something greater, namely, in Rome, and under the heavens; in the presence of which latter we certainly should not feel anything.”  He also complained that “the place for the sublime in his head was very much narrowed by the innumerable volutes and monuments which the temple shut up therein at the same time with itself.”  Gaspard, taking everything in a large sense, remarked, “When the sublime once really appears, it then, by its very nature, absorbs and annihilates all little circumstantial ornaments.”  He adduced as evidence the tower of the Minster,[6] and Nature itself, which is not made smaller by its grasses and villages.