day by day to the site of the Circus Maximus, the Baths of Caracalla, the ruins of Hadrian’s Villa, the Castle of St. Angelo, the Forum, the Palatine and the Colosseum, one can have no true conception of that ancient world. When you realize, by standing on the ground and contemplating these ancient ruins and their present fragments, that the rumored immensity of them in their heyday and youth is really true, you undergo an ecstasy of wonder; or if you are of a morbid turn you indulge in sad speculations as to the drift of life. I cannot tell you how the mosaics from the palace of Germanicus on the Palatine affected me, or how strange I felt when the intricacies of the houses of Caligula and Tiberius were made clear. To walk through the narrow halls which they trod, to know truly that they ruled in terror and with the force of murder, that Caligula waylaid and assaulted and killed, for his personal entertainment, in these narrow alleys which were then the only streets, and where torches borne by hand furnished the only light, is something. A vision of the hugeness and audacity of Hadrian’s villa which now stretches apparently, one would say, for miles, the vast majority of its rooms still unexcavated and containing what treasures Heaven only knows, is one of the strangest of human experiences. I marveled at this vast series of rooms, envying the power, the subtlety and the genius which could command it. Truly it is unbelievable--one of those things which stagger the imagination. One can hardly conceive how even an emperor of Rome would build so beautifully and so vastly. Rome is so vast in its suggestion that it is really useless to apostrophize. That vast empire that stretched from India to the Arctic was surely fittingly represented here; and while we may rival the force and subtlety and genius and imagination of these men in our day, we will not truly outstrip them. Mind was theirs--vast, ardent imagination; and if they achieved crudely it was because the world was still young and the implements and materials of life were less understood. They were the great ones--the Romans. We must still learn from them. CHAPTER XXXIV AN AUDIENCE AT THE VATICAN