If you will think of individualism gone mad, and each
successive personality crushing out and oversloughing some other,
without that regard for proportion and propriety which only the sense of
a superior collective right can inspire, you will imagine the Palatine.
Mount Morris, at One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street, if unscrupulously
built upon by the multimillionaires thronging to New York and seeking to
house themselves each more splendidly and spaciously than the other,
would offer a suggestion in miniature of what the Palatine seems to have
been like in its glory. But the ruined Mount Morris, even allowing for
the natural growth of the landscape in two thousand years, could show no
such prospect twenty centuries hence as we got that morning from a bit
of wilding garden near the Convent of San Bonaventura, on the brow of
the Palatine. Some snowy tops pillowed themselves on the utmost horizon,
and across the Campagna the broken aqueducts stalked and fell down and
stumbled to their legs again.
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