Consolations in Travel | Page 6

masses
appeared grander and more gigantic; and when the twilight had entirely
disappeared, the contrast of light and shade in the beams of the full
moon and beneath a sky of the brightest sapphire, but so highly
illuminated that only Jupiter and a few stars of the first magnitude were
visible, gave a solemnity and magnificence to the scene which
awakened the highest degree of that emotion which is so properly
termed the sublime. The beauty and the permanency of the heavens and
the principle of conservation belonging to the system of the universe,
the works of the Eternal and Divine Architect, were finely opposed to
the perishing and degraded works of man in his most active and
powerful state. And at this moment so humble appeared to me the
condition of the most exalted beings belonging to the earth, so feeble
their combinations, so minute the point of space, and so limited the
period of time in which they act, that I could hardly avoid comparing
the generations of man, and the effects of his genius and power, to the
swarms of luceoli or fire-flies which were dancing around me and that
appeared flitting and sparkling amidst the gloom and darkness of the
ruins, but which were no longer visible when they rose above the
horizon, their feeble light being lost and utterly obscured in the
brightness of the moonbeams in the heavens."
Onuphrio said: "I am not sorry that you have changed the conversation.
You have given us the history of a most interesting recollection and
well expressed a solemn though humiliating feeling. In such moments
and among such scenes it is impossible not to be struck with the
nothingness of human glory and the transiency of human works. This,
one of the greatest monuments on the face of the earth, was raised by a
people, then its masters, only seventeen centuries ago; in a few ages
more it will be but as dust, and of all the testimonials of the vanity or
power of man, whether raised to immortalise his name, or to contain his

decaying bones without a name, no one is known to have a duration
beyond what is measured by the existence of a hundred generations;
and it is only to multiply centuple for instance the period of time, and
the memorials of a village and the monuments of a country churchyard
may be compared with those of an empire and the remains of the
world."
Ambrosio, to whom the conversation seemed disagreeable, put us in
mind of an engagement we had made to spend the evening at the
conversazione of a celebrated lady, and proposed to call the carriage.
The reflections which the conversation and the scene had left in my
mind little disposed me for general society. I requested them to keep
their engagement, and said I was resolved to spend an hour amidst the
solitude of the ruins, and desired them to send back the carriage for me.
They left me, expressing a hope that my poetical or melancholy fancy
might not be the occasion of a cold, and wished me the company of
some of the spectres of the ancient Romans.
When I was left alone, I seated myself in the moonshine, on one of the
steps leading to the seats supposed to have been occupied by the
patricians in the Colosaeum at the time of the public games. The train
of ideas in which I had indulged before my friends left me continued to
flow with a vividness and force increased by the stillness and solitude
of the scene; and the full moon has always a peculiar effect on these
moods of feeling in my mind, giving to them a wildness and a kind of
indefinite sensation, such as I suppose belong at all times to the true
poetical temperament. It must be so, I thought to myself; no new city
will rise again out of the double ruins of this; no new empire will be
founded upon these colossal remains of that of the old Romans. The
world, like the individual, flourishes in youth, rises to strength in
manhood, falls into decay in age; and the ruins of an empire are like the
decrepit frame of an individual, except that they have some tints of
beauty which nature bestows upon them. The sun of civilisation arose
in the East, advanced towards the West, and is now at its meridian; in a
few centuries more it will probably be seen sinking below the horizon
even in the new world, and there will be left darkness only where there
is a bright light, deserts of sand where there were populous cities, and

stagnant morasses where the green meadow or the bright cornfield once
appeared. I called up images of this kind in