The Marble Faun Volume 1 - Page 100/130

"Well, Hilda, it came to the same thing at last," answered Miriam

despondingly.

"Doubtless, too," resumed the sculptor (for his imagination was greatly

excited by the idea of this wondrous chasm), "all the blood that the

Romans shed, whether on battlefields, or in the Coliseum, or on the

cross,--in whatever public or private murder,--ran into this fatal gulf,

and formed a mighty subterranean lake of gore, right beneath our feet.

The blood from the thirty wounds in Caesar's breast flowed hitherward,

and that pure little rivulet from Virginia's bosom, too! Virginia,

beyond all question, was stabbed by her father, precisely where we are

standing."

"Then the spot is hallowed forever!" said Hilda.

"Is there such blessed potency in bloodshed?" asked Miriam. "Nay, Hilda,

do not protest! I take your meaning rightly."

They again moved forward. And still, from the Forum and the Via Sacra,

from beneath the arches of the Temple of Peace on one side, and the

acclivity of the Palace of the Caesars on the other, there arose singing

voices of parties that were strolling through the moonlight. Thus,

the air was full of kindred melodies that encountered one another, and

twined themselves into a broad, vague music, out of which no single

strain could be disentangled. These good examples, as well as the

harmonious influences of the hour, incited our artist friends to make

proof of their own vocal powers. With what skill and breath they had,

they set up a choral strain,--"Hail, Columbia!" we believe, which

those old Roman echoes must have found it exceeding difficult to repeat

aright. Even Hilda poured the slender sweetness of her note into her

country's song. Miriam was at first silent, being perhaps unfamiliar

with the air and burden. But suddenly she threw out such a swell and

gush of sound, that it seemed to pervade the whole choir of other

voices, and then to rise above them all, and become audible in what

would else have been thee silence of an upper region. That volume of

melodious voice was one of the tokens of a great trouble. There had long

been an impulse upon her--amounting, at last, to a necessity to shriek

aloud; but she had struggled against it, till the thunderous anthem gave

her an opportunity to relieve her heart by a great cry.

They passed the solitary Column of Phocas, and looked down into the

excavated space, where a confusion of pillars, arches, pavements, and

shattered blocks and shafts--the crumbs of various ruin dropped from the

devouring maw of Time stand, or lie, at the base of the Capitoline Hill.

That renowned hillock (for it is little more) now arose abruptly above

them. The ponderous masonry, with which the hillside is built up, is as

old as Rome itself, and looks likely to endure while the world retains

any substance or permanence. It once sustained the Capitol, and now

bears up the great pile which the mediaeval builders raised on the

antique foundation, and that still loftier tower, which looks abroad

upon a larger page of deeper historic interest than any other scene

can show. On the same pedestal of Roman masonry, other structures will

doubtless rise, and vanish like ephemeral things.