For the moment its immensity dwarfed the
image of all the other fragments of the Roman world and set definite
bounds to their hugeness in the mind. It seemed to have been not so much
a single edifice as a whole city, the dwelling instead of the resort of
the multitudes that once thronged it. The traces of the ornamentation
which had enriched it everywhere and which it had taken ages of ravage
to strip from it, accented its savage majesty, and again the sentiment
of spring in the fresh afternoon breeze and sunshine, and the innocent
beauty of the blooming peach and cherry in the orchards around, imparted
to it a pathos in which one's mere brute wonder was lost. But it was a
purely adventitious pathos, and it must be owned here, at the end, that
none of the relics of ancient Rome stir a soft emotion in the beholder,
and, as for beauty, there is more of it in some ivy-netted fragment of
some English abbey which Henry's Cromwell "hammered down" than in the
ruin of all the palaces and temples and theatres and circuses and baths
of that imperial Rome which the world is so well rid of.
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