It was some time subsequent to this conference that Rienzi quitted the sacred edifice.  As he stood on the steps of the church—­now silent and deserted—­the hour that precedes the brief twilight of the South lent its magic to the view.  There he beheld the sweeping arches of the mighty Aqueduct extending far along the scene, and backed by the distant and purpled hills.  Before—­to the right—­rose the gate which took its Roman name from the Coelian Mount, at whose declivity it yet stands.  Beyond—­from the height of the steps—­he saw the villages scattered through the grey Campagna, whitening in the sloped sun; and in the furthest distance the mountain shadows began to darken over the roofs of the ancient Tusculum, and the second Alban (The first Alba—­the Alba Longa—­whose origin Fable ascribes to Ascanius, was destroyed by Tullus Hostilius.  The second Alba, or modern Albano, was erected on the plain below the ancient town, a little before the time of Nero.) city, which yet rises, in desolate neglect, above the vanished palaces of Pompey and Domitian.

The Roman stood absorbed and motionless for some moments, gazing on the scene, and inhaling the sweet balm of the mellow air.  It was the soft springtime—­the season of flowers, and green leaves, and whispering winds—­the pastoral May of Italia’s poets:  but hushed was the voice of song on the banks of the Tiber—­the reeds gave music no more.  From the sacred Mount in which Saturn held his home, the Dryad and the Nymph, and Italy’s native Sylvan, were gone for ever.  Rienzi’s original nature—­its enthusiasm—­its veneration for the past—­its love of the beautiful and the great—­that very attachment to the graces and pomp which give so florid a character to the harsh realities of life, and which power afterwards too luxuriantly developed; the exuberance of thoughts and fancies, which poured itself from his lips in so brilliant and inexhaustible a flood—­all bespoke those intellectual and imaginative biasses, which, in calmer times, might have raised him in literature to a more indisputable eminence than that to which action can ever lead; and something of such consciousness crossed his spirit at that moment.

“Happier had it been for me,” thought he, “had I never looked out from my own heart upon the world.  I had all within me that makes contentment of the present, because I had that which can make me forget the present.  I had the power to re-people—­to create:  the legends and dreams of old—­the divine faculty of verse, in which the beautiful superfluities of the heart can pour themselves—­these were mine!  Petrarch chose wisely for himself!  To address the world, but from without the world; to persuade—­to excite—­to command,—­for these are the aim and glory of ambition;—­but to shun its tumult, and its toil!  His the quiet cell which he fills with the shapes of beauty—­the solitude, from which he can banish the evil times whereon we are fallen, but in which he can dream back