The theater has a voice as well, but it lingers on the ear of time with a
different music. The Roman theater at Arles seemed to me one of the most
charming and touching ruins I had ever beheld; I took a particular fancy
to it. It is less than a skeleton--the arena may be called a skeleton; for
it consists only of half a dozen bones. The traces of the row of columns
which formed the scene--the permanent back-scene--remain; two marble
pillars--I just mentioned them--are upright, with a fragment of their
entablature. Before them is the vacant space which was filled by the
stage, with the line of the proscenium distinct, marked by a deep groove,
imprest upon slabs of stone, which looks as if the bottom of a high screen
had been intended to fit into it. The semicircle formed by the seats--half
a cup--rises opposite; some of the rows are distinctly marked. The floor,
from the bottom of the stage, in the shape of an arc of which the chord is
formed by the line of the orchestra, is covered by slabs of colored
marble--red, yellow, and green--which, tho terribly battered and cracked
to-day, give one an idea of the elegance of the interior.
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