Hence, too, the efficacy of solitary confinement in the gloomy walls of the prison, and the very deleterious influence of all prison discipline not based on the principle of solitary confinement. Again, any scene of distress, any monuments or associations, which remind us of the instability of the boasted works of man; anything which forces a comparison in the mind between the transitory character and nothingness of the things of earth, when compared with the eternity of ages that are to follow, or with the perfections and immutability of God; all such reflections as these are calculated to make a deep religious impression upon the mind. What classic scholar, for example, can stand upon the Capitol on the Capitoline Mount, in Modern Rome, and look over the mouldering but still magnificent ruins of the imperial city, as they lie scattered and confused over the vallies and the seven hills, and cast a retrospective glance at the ages which have gone by, without a deep feeling of religious awe and of veneration towards the God of nature? When he reflects that the poet of antiquity describes this classic ground, over which the eye of the traveller is now wandering in pensive and bewildering gaze, as a solitary wilderness; when Evander, and afterwards when Æneas came to the Latian Coast; that the brier and the bramble then grew together in wild luxuriance on the Tarpeian Hill; that the foxes had their holes and the birds their nests on the Palatine and the Aventine. When he looks again to the time of the poet, and beholds the proud imperial city, the mistress of the world, enthroned in all her gorgeous splendor and costly magnificence upon the seven hills, wielding the sceptre of her dominion over the earth, "Until the o'ercanopied horizon fail'd," and sees upon the Tarpeian hill, the splendid temple with its golden ornaments and its stately columns, instead of the brier and the bramble, and beholds, "Pretors, proconsuls to their provinces Hasting, or on return, in robes of state, Lictors and rods, the ensigns of their power, Legions and cohorts, turms of horse and wings: Or embassies from regions far remote, In various habits on the Appian road, Or on the Emilian." And then looks to her again--when in the awful language of the poet, "The Goth, the Christian, time, war, flood and fire Have dealt upon the seven hill'd city's pride," and sees that the temple upon the Tarpeian mount has been overthrown and rifled, and the brier and the bramble have come back again, that owl answers owl upon the Palatine, that the din of arms and the active bustle and hum of citizens and functionaries of imperial Rome, have ceased forever on the Appian and Emilian ways, that no stately triumph mounts the Capitoline hill, to administer to the insatiate ambition of the rapacious and remorseless Roman, that