CHAPTER I
MIRIAM, HILDA, KENYON, DONATELLO
Four individuals, in whose fortunes we should be glad to interest the
reader, happened to be standing in one of the saloons of the sculpturegallery
in the Capitol at Rome. It was that room (the first, after
ascending the staircase) in the centre of which reclines the noble and most
pathetic figure of the Dying Gladiator, just sinking into his death-swoon.
Around the walls stand the Antinous, the Amazon, the Lycian Apollo, the
Juno; all famous productions of antique sculpture, and still shining in the
undiminished majesty and beauty of their ideal life, although the marble
that embodies them is yellow with time, and perhaps corroded by the
damp earth in which they lay buried for centuries. Here, likewise, is seen
a symbol (as apt at this moment as it was two thousand years ago) of the
Human Soul, with its choice of Innocence or Evil close at hand, in the
pretty figure of a child, clasping a dove to her bosom, but assaulted by a
snake.
From one of the windows of this saloon, we may see a flight of broad
stone steps, descending alongside the antique and massive foundation of
the Capitol, towards the battered triumphal arch of Septimius Severus,
right below. Farther on, the eye skirts along the edge of the desolate
Forum (where Roman washerwomen hang out their linen to the sun),
passing over a shapeless confusion of modern edifices, piled rudely up
with ancient brick and stone, and over the domes of Christian churches,
built on the old pavements of heathen temples, and supported by the very
pillars that once upheld them. At a distance beyond--yet but a little way,
considering how much history is heaped into the intervening space--rises
the great sweep of the Coliseum, with the blue sky brightening through its
upper tier of arches. Far off, the view is shut in by the Alban Mountains,
looking just the same, amid all this decay and change, as when Romulus
gazed thitherward over his half finished wall.