It had become almost dark, when the last candle but one was extinguished in the symbolical pyramid, and the first almost painful note of the _miserere_ wailed out into the vast church of St. Peter. For the next half hour, the kneeling listeners, around the door of the chapel, seemed spell-bound in their motionless attitudes. The darkness thickened, the hundred lamps at the far-off sepulchre of the saint, looked like a galaxy of twinkling points of fire, almost lost in the distance; and from the now perfectly obscured choir, poured, in ever-varying volume, the dirge-like music, in notes inconceivably plaintive and affecting. The power, the mingled mournfulness and sweetness, the impassioned fulness, at one moment, and the lost, shrieking wildness of one solitary voice, at another, carry away the soul like a whirlwind. I have never been so moved by anything. It is not in the scope of language to convey an idea to another of the effect of the _miserere_. It was not till several minutes after the music had ceased, that the dark figures rose up from the floor about me. As we approached the door of the church, the full moon, about three hours risen, poured broadly under the arch of the portico, inundating the whole front of the lofty dome with a flood of light, such as falls only on Italy. There seemed to be no atmosphere between. Daylight is scarce more intense. The immense square, with its slender obelisk and embracing crescents of colonnade, lay spread out as definitely to the eye as at noon, and the two famous fountains shot up their clear waters to the sky, the moonlight streamed through the spray, and every drop as visible and bright as a diamond. I got out of the press of carriages, and took a by-street along the Tiber, to the Coliseum. Passing the Jews' quarter, which shuts at dark by heavy gates, I found myself near the Tarpeian rock, and entered the Forum, behind the ruins of the temple of Fortune. I walked toward the palace of the Cesars, stopping to gaze on the columns, whose shadows have fallen on the same spot, where I now saw them, for sixteen or seventeen centuries. It checks the blood at one's heart, to stand on the spot and remember it. There was not the sound of a footstep through the whole wilderness of the Forum. I traversed it to the arch of Titus in a silence, which, with the majestic ruins around, seemed almost supernatural--the mind was left so absolutely to the powerful associations of the place.