None venture to tread their once-crowded colonnades.

No priest appears to give the oracles from their doors; no sacrifices reek upon their naked altars.

Under their roofs, visited only by the light that steals through their narrow entrances, stand unnoticed, unworshipped, unmoved, the mighty idols of old Rome.

Human emotion, which made them Omnipotence once, has left them but stone now.

The 'Star in the East' has already dimmed the fearful halo which the devotion of bloodshed once wreathed round their forms.