The higher ridge very early took on the name of Mons Janiculum; the further hills were more or less nameless till the Renaissance: but the bosky stretch between the two was regarded from the first as sacred ground. Why, one can scarcely say, except for its solitude and its cloistered verdure. Looking towards it now, one asks oneself if there was indeed a time when those who gazed westward from the city’s ramparts at evening, did not behold, across the sea of mist that lays twilight on the streets while the heights are still bathed in gold, that immortal outline of a dome, dark, delicate, and definite, between them and the setting sun? A time when the soil that bears it held only the oaks and ilexes of the grove where the “Vates,” the unapproachable hierophants of high, half-known gods, prayed and prophesied according to their lights? Where the common people came, not too close, and paused, hushed and trembling, under the great trees, to learn the wills and ways of the gods? How gladly they must have sped back, ere night fell, across the one bridge, to their safe, crowded homes within the walls, to lean together across the olive-wood fire and speak in whispers of the oracles they had heard, while the baby rolled naked on the soft goatskin, and the brown-legged youngsters sat on their haunches, sniffing at the goat’s meat bubbling in the caldron on the hook, and the good wife brought out the fern basket of snowy cheese and washed the crisp fennel roots on the doorstep! Were they merely men of their hands, those first Romans, thinking more of comfort and safety than of anything else? A writer who could surely speak with authority tells us that from the first the people of Rome itself have been innately religious, always conscious or subconscious of their city’s destiny. Surely to one, here and there, in some portentous dawn or brooding twilight, the figure of things to be was cast up against the sky! Did not the slowly-moving clouds sometimes pause over that low ridge in the west, to mass themselves in the likeness of a dome, the stars sink down from their courses to foreshadow the gold of a cross?