The next most considerable relic of antiquity, considered as a ruin, is the Thermae of Caracalla. These consist of six enormous chambers, above 200 feet in height, and each enclosing a vast space like that of a field. There are in addition a number of towers and labyrinthine recesses, hidden and woven over by the wild growth of clinging ivy. Never was any desolation more sublime and lovely. The perpendicular wall of ruin is cloven into steep ravines, filled up with flowering shrubs, whose thick twisted roots are knotted in the rifts of the stone, and at every step the aerial pinnacles of shattered stone group into new combinations of effect, towering above the lofty yet level walls, as the distant mountains change their aspect to one traveling rapidly toward the skirts by masses of the fallen ruins, overturned with the broad leaves of the creeping weeds. The blue sky canopies it, and is as the everlasting roof of these enormous halls. But the most interesting effect remains. In one of the buttresses that supports an immense and lofty arch "which bridges the very wings of heaven" are the crumbling remains of an antique winding staircase, whose sides are open in many places to the precipice. This you ascend and arrive on the summit of these piles. There grow on every side thick entangled wildernesses of myrtle, and the myrletus and bay and the flowering laurestinus, whose white blossoms are just developed, the white fig and a thousand nameless plants sown by the wandering winds. These woods are intersected on every side by paths, like sheep tracks through the copse wood of steep mountains, which wind to every part of the immense labyrinth. From the midst rise those pinnacles and masses, themselves like masses which have been seen far below. In one place you wind along a narrow strip of weed-grown ruin: on one side is the immensity of earth and sky, on the other a narrow chasm, which is bounded by an arch of enormous size, tinged by the many colored foliage and blossoms and supporting an irregular pyramid overgrown like itself with the all-pervading vegetation. Around rise other crags and other peaks, all arrayed and the deformity of their vast desolation softened down by the undecaying investiture of nature. Come to Rome--it is a scene by which expression is overpowered, which words can not convey.