halo of the dome must also exalt her form.  When he answered her:  “Very good!  But in Shakespeare, Sophocles also is contained, not, however, Shakespeare in Sophocles—­and upon Peter’s Church stands Angelo’s Rotunda!”, just then the lofty cloud, all at once, as by the blow of a hand out of the ether, broke in two, and the ravished Sun, like the eye of a Venus floating through her ancient heavens—­for she once stood even here—­looked mildly in from the upper deep; then a holy radiance filled the temple, and burned on the porphyry of the pavement, and Albano looked around him in an ecstasy of wonder and delight, and said with low voice:  “How transfigured at this moment is everything in this sacred place!  Raphael’s spirit comes forth from his grave in this noontide hour, and everything which its reflection touches brightens into godlike splendor!” The Princess looked upon him tenderly, and he lightly laid his hand upon hers, and said, as one vanquished, “Sophocles!”

On the next moonlit evening, Gaspard bespoke torches, in order that the Coliseum, with its giant-circle, might the first time stand in fire before them.  The knight would fain have gone around alone with his son, dimly through the dim work, like two spirits of the olden time, but the Princess forced herself upon him, from a too lively wish to share with the noble youth his great moments, and perhaps, in fact, her heart and his own.  Women do not sufficiently comprehend that an idea, when it fills and elevates man’s mind, shuts it, then, against love, and crowds out persons; whereas with woman all ideas easily become human beings.

They passed over the Forum, by the Via Sacra, to the Coliseum, whose lofty, cloven forehead looked down pale under the moonlight.  They stood before the gray rock-walls, which reared themselves on four colonnades one above another, and the torchlight shot up into the arches of the arcades, gilding the green shrubbery high overhead, and deep in the earth had the noble monster already buried his feet.  They stepped in and ascended the mountain, full of fragments of rock, from one seat of the spectators to another.  Gaspard did not venture to the sixth or highest, where the men used to stand, but Albano and the Princess did.  Then the youth gazed down over the cliffs, upon the round, green crater of the burnt-out volcano, which once swallowed nine thousand beasts at once, and which quenched itself with human blood.  The lurid glare of the torches penetrated into the clefts and caverns, and among the foliage of the ivy and laurel, and among the great shadows of the moon, which, like departed spirits, hovered in caverns.  Toward the south, where the streams of centuries and barbarians had stormed in, stood single columns and bare arcades.  Temples and three palaces had the giant fed and lined with his limbs, and still, with all his wounds, he looked out livingly into the world.