Go back, my dear friend, to your home among the hills, where (as I gather from what you have told me) your days were filled with simple and blameless delights.

Have you found aught in the world that is worth' what you there enjoyed?
Tell me truly, Donatello!" "Yes!" replied the young man.
"And what, in Heaven's name ?" asked she.
"This burning pain in my heart," said Donatello; "for you are in the midst of it." By this time, they had left the Fountain of Trevi considerably behind them.

Little further allusion was made to the scene at its margin; for the party regarded Miriam's persecutor as diseased in his wits, and were hardly to be surprised by any eccentricity in his deportment.
Threading several narrow streets, they passed through the Piazza of the Holy Apostles, and soon came to Trajan's Forum.

All over the surface of what once was Rome, it seems to be the effort of Time to bury up the ancient city, as if it were a corpse, and he the sexton; so that, in eighteen centuries, the soil over its grave has grown very deep, by the slow scattering of dust, and the accumulation of more modern decay upon older ruin.
This was the fate, also, of Trajan's Forum, until some papal antiquary, a few hundred years ago, began to hollow it out again, and disclosed the full height of the gigantic column wreathed round with bas-reliefs of the old emperor's warlike deeds.

In the area before it stands a grove of stone, consisting of the broken and unequal shafts of a vanished temple, still keeping a majestic order, and apparently incapable of further demolition.