“The oracles are dumb; No voice or hideous hum Rolls through the arched roof in words deceiving. Apollo from his shrine Can no more divine, With hollow shriek the steep of Delphos leaving. No nightly trance or breathed spell, Inspires the pale-eyed priest from the prophetic cell.” * * * * * “In consecrated earth And on the holy hearth, The Lars and Lemures moan with midnight plaint; In urns and altars round, A drear and dying sound, Affrights the Flamens at their service quaint; And the chill marble seems to sweat, While each peculiar power foregoes his wonted seat.” Thus were the mighty labors of human ambition made subservient to the still greater achievements of divine benevolence; thus did the unholy triumphs of the hosts of heathenism become, in the hands of the All-wise, the surest means of spreading the holy and peace-making truths of Christianity, to the ends of the earth,――otherwise unapproachable without a miracle. The dominion which thus grew upon and over the vast empire of Rome, though growing with her growth and strengthening with her strength, sunk not with her weakness, but, stretching abroad fresh branches, whose leaves were for the healing of nations then unknown, showed its divine origin by its immortality; while, alas! its human modifications betrayed themselves in its diminished grace and ill-preserved symmetry. Yet in spite of these, rather than by means of them, it rose still mightier above the ruins of the empire, under whose shadow it had grown, till, at last, supplanting Roman and Goth alike, it fixed its roots on the seven hills of the Eternal city; where, thenceforth, for hundreds of years, the head of Christendom, ruling with a power more absolute than her imperial sway, saw more than the Roman world beneath him. Even to this day, vast and countless “regions, Caesar never knew,” own him of Rome as “the center of unity;” and lands “farther west Than the Greek’s islands of the blest,” and farther east than the long unpassed bounds of Roman conquest, turn, with an adoration and awe immeasurably greater than the most exalted of the apotheosized Caesars ever received, to him who claims the name of the successor of the poor fisherman of Galilee. * * * * *