We could safely have stayed longer, for the evening damp no longer
brings danger of Roman fever, which people used to take in the
Colosseum, unless I am thinking of the signal case of Daisy Miller. She,
indeed, I believe, got it there by moonlight; but now people visit the
place by moonlight in safety; and there are even certain nights of the
season advertised when you may see it by the varicolored lights of the
fireworks set off in it. My impression of it was quite vivid enough
without that, and the vision of the Colosseum remained, and still
remains, the immense skeleton of the stupendous form stripped of all
integumental charm and broken down half one side of its vast oval, so
that wellnigh a quarter of the structural bones are gone.
With its image there persisted and persists the question constantly
recurrent in the presence of all the imperial ruins, whether imperial
Rome was not rather ugly than otherwise. The idea of those
world-conquerors was first immensity and then beauty, as much as could
survive consistently with getting immensity into a given space.
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