In walking the streets of Rome, one has a strange and melancholy sense of the traditions and memories which cluster about every ruin and every spot. But around the myriad facts and forces of civilization there hang associations more pathetic still. Here we walk, not amid the ruins of the past, but amid the achievements, the victories, and the glories of the past. Achievements, victories, and glories not associated with broken columns, defaced monuments and moldering ruins, but with the laws and institutions of living men. We have here, in ten thousand embodied forms, the travails of the souls of our fathers. Their spirits live in the words we use, their consciences bind in the laws we observe, their visions bless in the pictures we see, and their devotion sanctifies in the religion we love. All the blood ever shed in sacrifice, all the eloquence that ever thrilled senates and peoples in defense of the right, all the protests ever in silence felt or in public uttered against the wrong, are here held in everlasting form. Are we to regard civilization, the manifold and complicated sum in which man’s social nature has expressed itself, as nothing more than a natural product? Are we to account for this by the same physical principles in accordance with which the bee builds his cell, the monkey hangs his bridge, and the beaver erects his dam? Does this stately projection of man’s social nature mean no more than some lofty Alpine Matterhorn, pushed into the heavens by the unconscious fires in the earth’s bosom? Is this only like some mighty Giants’ Causeway, lifted up by the same physical forces and by the same natural processes? If this is so, why is it that when we turn away from civilization as a whole, to view it in some of its national forms, we see the spiritual ups and downs of history in such striking contrast with the uniform face which nature wears? If the radiant civilization of Greece, that filled the earth with the eloquence of thought and the melody of song, with the Republic of Plato and the Ethics of Aristotle, that clothed itself in the Parthenon of Phidias and the Iliad of Homer, was as natural among the nations as the uprising of Gibraltar among the mountains, why is it that Gibraltar still stands as the solemn sentinel of the Ocean and the Sea, while the civilization of Greece is but a memory of the past? The same sky and earth, and Mar’s Hill are there. Around her classic coast there still murmurs the same heaving sea. But while ships may still sail to Gibraltar, never more can they draw up to the Piræus of worthy representatives of Plato and Aristotle. Not again do men, with noble brows, deep eyes, and never dying thought, look into the Ægean from that memorable meeting place of the world’s ships.