One word more, and we shall let the story itself begin to be heard. The epoch of _Dion_ was the turning-point of all human history--the hinge of the fateful gates, the moment of the mightiest and most stupendous transition our world has ever known, the transition of transitions; the moment on this earth of a superplanetary, supercosmic drama. There were two suns in the heavens; one rising, never to set; the other going down to rise no more. At no epoch had human genius blazed so luminous, or human pride poised itself on wings so wide, in a sphere so sublime; but this genius was for the first time confronted in its own sphere by divine inspiration and a supernatural authority. The setting of a classic though pagan day saw the dawning day of Christianity. There were two suns in one sky at the same moment. The doubtful cross-lights of two civilizations over-arched the world with a vault of shifting, contending, contrary, and awful splendors--those of one order in the utmost intensity of their radiance, those of the other in their first, glimmering beginnings; a seeming confusion; an internecine war; a hazy mingling of embattled glories as full of meaning as it was of mystery. ED. CATH. WORLD. CHAPTER I. It was a fair evening in autumn, toward the end of the year eleven of our Lord. Augustus Cæsar was a white-haired, olive-complexioned, and somewhat frail-featured, though stately man of more than seventy-three. At the beginning of the century in which this was written, the face of the first Napoleon recalled to the minds of antiquaries and students of numismatic remains the lineaments, engraved upon the extant coins of Augustus. Indeed, at this moment there is in the Vatican a beautiful marble bust in excellent preservation, representing one of these two emperors as he was while yet young; and this bust almost invariably produces a curious effect upon the stranger who contemplates it for the first time. "That is certainly a beautiful artistic work," he says, "but the likeness is hardly perfect." "Likeness of whom?" replies some Italian friend. "Of the emperor," says the stranger. "_Sicuro!_ But which emperor?" asks the Italian, smiling. "Of course, the first," says the visitor; "_not this_ one." "But that represents Augustus Cæsar, not Napoleon Bonaparte," is the answer. Whereupon the stranger, who, a moment before had very justly pronounced the resemblance to Bonaparte to be hardly perfect, exclaims, not less justly, What an amazing likeness to Napoleon! That sort of admiring surprise is intelligible. Had the bust been designed as an image of the great modern conqueror, there had been something to censure. But the work which, at one and the same time, delineates the second Cæsar, and yet now after 1800 years recalls to mind the first Napoleon, has become a curious monument indeed.