The ruined Roman sits among the ruins; he flies to no green garden; he does not look to heaven; if his intent is defeated, if he is less than he meant to be, he lives no more.  The names which end in “us,” seem to speak with lyric cadence.  That measured cadence,—­that tramp and march,—­which are not stilted, because they indicate real force, yet which seem so when compared with any other language,—­make Latin a study in itself of mighty influence.  The language alone, without the literature, would give one the thought of Rome.  Man present in nature, commanding nature too sternly to be inspired by it, standing like the rock amid the sea, or moving like the fire over the land, either impassive, or irresistible; knowing not the soft mediums or fine flights of life, but by the force which he expresses, piercing to the centre.

’We are never better understood than when we speak of a “Roman virtue,” a “Roman outline.”  There is somewhat indefinite, somewhat yet unfulfilled in the thought of Greece, of Spain, of modern Italy; but Rome! it stands by itself, a clear Word.  The power of will, the dignity of a fixed purpose is what it utters.  Every Roman was an emperor.  It is well that the infallible church should have been founded on this rock, that the presumptuous Peter should hold the keys, as the conquering Jove did before his thunderbolts, to be seen of all the world.  The Apollo tends flocks with Admetus; Christ teaches by the lonely lake, or plucks wheat as he wanders through the fields some Sabbath morning.  They never come to this stronghold; they could not have breathed freely where all became stone as soon as spoken, where divine youth found no horizon for its all-promising glance, but every thought put on, before it dared issue to the day in action, its toga virilis.

’Suckled by this wolf, man gains a different complexion from that which is fed by the Greek honey.  He takes a noble bronze in camps and battle-fields; the wrinkles of council well beseem his brow, and the eye cuts its way like the sword.  The Eagle should never have been used as a symbol by any other nation:  it belonged to Rome.

’The history of Rome abides in mind, of course, more than the literature.  It was degeneracy for a Roman to use the pen; his life was in the day.  The “vaunting” of Rome, like that of the North American Indians, is her proper literature.  A man rises; he tells who he is, and what he has done; he speaks of his country and her brave men; he knows that a conquering god is there, whose agent is his own right hand; and he should end like the Indian, “I have no more to say.”

’It never shocks us that the Roman is self-conscious.  One wants no universal truths from him, no philosophy, no creation, but only his life, his Roman life felt in every pulse, realized in every gesture.  The universal heaven takes in the Roman only to make us feel his individuality