The Roman senators, generals and magnates were seen heading the different divisions of this vast multitude, riding in blazing chariots drawn by superb horses richly caparisoned. On both sides of the captives marched the victorious armies of Rome; so that the very air above them was golden with the flash of helmets, spears and shields, and the gleam of Roman eagles. These were the spirits of that vain-glorious and indomitable race who had changed the geography of the natural world, and were now celebrating their victories with transcendent magnificence in the intermediate state. The sphere of their interior character was wafted to my spiritual perceptions, and I felt as I did in the Hall of Apollo when Hortensius and his guests fixed their haughty and contemptuous gaze upon Anthony and myself. “How unutterably base, cruel and sensual,” exclaimed my father, “is the spirit of man when he loves himself supremely, and overreaches and overrides his fellow-creatures. Behold the spiritual side to this magnificent exterior!” Thereupon the light from a higher sphere streamed down, and the pomp, the glory, the beauty of the whole scene disappeared. We beheld a vast crowd of beggars in filthy rags, and a confused heap of low buildings made of mud and straw. The proud and fierce Romans were all slaves themselves, wearing long chains and driven by infernal spirits in the shape of grinning apes. Where the Capitol had stood, appeared a pool of blood-colored water, in which a dragon of hideous dimensions lay, spouting from his mouth a stream of fire. A lurid twilight hung over all, prognosticating a wild and tempestuous night. “Such,” said my father, “will be the fate of ambition when the Lord comes in judgment. Let us now descend to a lower region, and see a people greater than these, but who have sunk into darker depths; a people now destitute of spiritual pride or civil ambition; a degenerate, effeminate, corrupt race, dead to all genuine and ennobling aspirations, and immersed like beasts in the life of the senses.” We seemed to go down to the sea-coast—for the blue ocean girdles also the world of spirits. Soon we came into the sphere of the Grecian souls who had risen from the dead, and who had reconstructed about them, according to spiritual laws, their own charming and ethereal country. The scene was not far from Athens, whose marble-crowned Acropolis gleamed in the distance, with clouds more beautiful than itself floating above it. The poetic faculty, full of the inspiration of Grecian art, can alone appreciate what I next witnessed. The Hall of Apollo in the palace of Hortensius was a beggarly chamber in comparison with this great hall of nature in which Pan presided, and in which earth, sky and ocean had each its part. The guests also of the luxurious Roman were mere schoolboys in comparison with the august assembly before us, which was gathered to a feast in the imaginary heaven of the Greeks.