How exceedingly absurd! All men, from the date of the earliest
obelisk,--and of the whole world, moreover, since that far epoch, and
before,--have made a similar demand, and seldom had their wish. If they
had it, what are they the better now? But, even while you taunt yourself
with this sad lesson, your heart cries out obstreperously for its small
share of earthly happiness, and will not be appeased by the myriads of
dead hopes that lie crushed into the soil of Rome. How wonderful
that this our narrow foothold of the Present should hold its own so
constantly, and, while every moment changing, should still be like a
rock betwixt the encountering tides of the long Past and the infinite
To-come!
Man of marble though he was, the sculptor grieved for the Irrevocable.
Looking back upon Hilda's way of life, he marvelled at his own blind
stupidity, which had kept him from remonstrating as a friend, if with no
stronger right against the risks that she continually encountered. Being
so innocent, she had no means of estimating those risks, nor even a
possibility of suspecting their existence. But he--who had spent
years in Rome, with a man's far wider scope of observation and
experience--knew things that made him shudder. It seemed to Kenyon,
looking through the darkly colored medium of his fears, that all modes
of crime were crowded into the close intricacy of Roman streets, and
that there was no redeeming element, such as exists in other dissolute
and wicked cities.
For here was a priesthood, pampered, sensual, with red and bloated
cheeks, and carnal eyes. With apparently a grosser development of animal
life than most men, they were placed in an unnatural relation with
woman, and thereby lost the healthy, human conscience that pertains to
other human beings, who own the sweet household ties connecting them
with wife and daughter. And here was an indolent nobility, with no high
aims or opportunities, but cultivating a vicious way of life, as if
it were an art, and the only one which they cared to learn. Here was a
population, high and low, that had no genuine belief in virtue; and
if they recognized any act as criminal, they might throw off all
care, remorse, and memory of it, by kneeling a little while at the
confessional, and rising unburdened, active, elastic, and incited by
fresh appetite for the next ensuing sin. Here was a soldiery who felt
Rome to be their conquered city, and doubtless considered themselves the
legal inheritors of the foul license which Gaul, Goth, and Vandal have
here exercised in days gone by.
And what localities for new crime existed in those guilty sites,
where the crime of departed ages used to be at home, and had its long,
hereditary haunt! What street in Rome, what ancient ruin, what one place
where man had standing-room, what fallen stone was there, unstained with
one or another kind of guilt! In some of the vicissitudes of the city's
pride or its calamity, the dark tide of human evil had swelled over it,
far higher than the Tiber ever rose against the acclivities of the
seven hills. To Kenyon's morbid view, there appeared to be a contagious
element, rising fog-like from the ancient depravity of Rome, and
brooding over the dead and half-rotten city, as nowhere else on earth.
It prolonged the tendency to crime, and developed an instantaneous
growth of it, whenever an opportunity was found; And where could it be
found so readily as here! In those vast palaces, there were a hundred
remote nooks where Innocence might shriek in vain. Beneath meaner houses
there were unsuspected dungeons that had once been princely chambers,
and open to the daylight; but, on account of some wickedness there
perpetrated, each passing age had thrown its handful of dust upon the
spot, and buried it from sight. Only ruffians knew of its existence, and
kept it for murder, and worse crime.