Even if they seem endowed with little imagination individually, yet there is a property, a gift, a talisman, common to their class, entitling them to partake somewhat more bountifully than other people in the thin delights of moonshine and romance.
"How delightful this is!" said Hilda; and she sighed for very pleasure.
"Yes," said Kenyon, who sat on the column, at her side.

"The Coliseum is far more delightful, as we enjoy it now, than when eighty thousand persons sat squeezed together, row above row, to see their fellow creatures torn by lions and tigers limb from limb.

What a strange thought that the Coliseum was really built for us, and has not come to its best uses till almost two thousand years after it was finished!" "The Emperor Vespasian scarcely had us in his mind," said Hilda, smiling; "but I thank him none the less for building it." "He gets small thanks, I fear, from the people whose bloody instincts he pampered," rejoined Kenyon.

"Fancy a nightly assemblage of eighty thousand melancholy and remorseful ghosts, looking down from those tiers of broken arches, striving to repent of the savage pleasures which they once enjoyed, but still longing to enjoy them over again." "You bring a Gothic horror into this peaceful moonlight scene," said Hilda.
"Nay, I have good authority for peopling the Coliseum with phantoms," replied the sculptor.

"Do you remember that veritable scene in Benvenuto Cellini's autobiography, in which a necromancer of his acquaintance draws a magic circle--just where the black cross stands now, I suppose--and raises myriads of demons?
Benvenuto saw them with his own eyes,--giants, pygmies, and other creatures of frightful aspect, capering and dancing on yonder walls.