I repeated to myself,—­I am in Rome!  I behold, and as it were, familiarly converse with the wonder of the world, sovereign mistress of the imagination, majestic and eternal survivor of millions of generations of extinct men.  I endeavoured to quiet the sorrows of my aching heart, by even now taking an interest in what in my youth I had ardently longed to see.  Every part of Rome is replete with relics of ancient times.  The meanest streets are strewed with truncated columns, broken capitals—­Corinthian and Ionic, and sparkling fragments of granite or porphyry.  The walls of the most penurious dwellings enclose a fluted pillar or ponderous stone, which once made part of the palace of the Caesars; and the voice of dead time, in still vibrations, is breathed from these dumb things, animated and glorified as they were by man.

I embraced the vast columns of the temple of Jupiter Stator, which survives in the open space that was the Forum, and leaning my burning cheek against its cold durability, I tried to lose the sense of present misery and present desertion, by recalling to the haunted cell of my brain vivid memories of times gone by.  I rejoiced at my success, as I figured Camillus, the Gracchi, Cato, and last the heroes of Tacitus, which shine meteors of surpassing brightness during the murky night of the empire;—­as the verses of Horace and Virgil, or the glowing periods of Cicero thronged into the opened gates of my mind, I felt myself exalted by long forgotten enthusiasm.  I was delighted to know that I beheld the scene which they beheld—­the scene which their wives and mothers, and crowds of the unnamed witnessed, while at the same time they honoured, applauded, or wept for these matchless specimens of humanity.  At length, then, I had found a consolation.  I had not vainly sought the storied precincts of Rome—­I had discovered a medicine for my many and vital wounds.

I sat at the foot of these vast columns.  The Coliseum, whose naked ruin is robed by nature in a verdurous and glowing veil, lay in the sunlight on my right.  Not far off, to the left, was the Tower of the Capitol.  Triumphal arches, the falling walls of many temples, strewed the ground at my feet.  I strove, I resolved, to force myself to see the Plebeian multitude and lofty Patrician forms congregated around; and, as the Diorama of ages passed across my subdued fancy, they were replaced by the modern Roman; the Pope, in his white stole, distributing benedictions to the kneeling worshippers; the friar in his cowl; the dark-eyed girl, veiled by her mezzera; the noisy, sun-burnt rustic, leading his heard of buffaloes and oxen to the Campo Vaccino.  The romance with which, dipping our pencils in the rainbow hues of sky and transcendent nature, we to a degree gratuitously endow the Italians, replaced the solemn grandeur of antiquity.  I remembered the dark monk, and floating figures of “The Italian,” and how my boyish blood had thrilled at the description.  I called to mind Corinna ascending the Capitol to be crowned, and, passing from the heroine to the author, reflected how the Enchantress Spirit of Rome held sovereign sway over the minds of the imaginative, until it rested on me—­sole remaining spectator of its wonders.