From the first periods of the siege, while all around him in the city
moved gloomily onward through darker and darker changes, while famine
rapidly merged into pestilence and death, while human hopes and purposes
gradually diminished and declined with each succeeding day, he alone
remained ever devoted to the same labour, ever animated by the same
object--the only one among all his fellow-citizens whom no outward event
could influence for good or evil, for hope or fear.
In every street of Rome, at all hours, among all ranks of people, he was
still to be seen constantly pursuing the same hopeless search. When the
mob burst furiously into the public granaries to seize the last supplies
of corn hoarded for the rich, he was ready at the doors watching them as
they came out. When rows of houses were deserted by all but the dead,
he was beheld within, passing from window to window, as he sought
through each room for the treasure that he had lost. When some few
among the populace, in the first days of the pestilence, united in the
vain attempt to cast over the lofty walls the corpses that strewed the
street, he mingled with them to look on the rigid faces of the dead.
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