What a broad, dreary plain, loftily encompassed with ruins, gardens and temples, covered with prostrate capitals of columns, and with single upright pillars, and with trees and a dumb wilderness! The heaped-up ashes out of the emptied urn of time, and the potshards of a great world flung around! He passed by three temple columns,[76] which the earth had drawn down into itself even to the breast, and along through the broad triumphal arch of Septimius Severus; on the right stood a chain of columns without their temple; on the left, attached to a Christian church, the colonnade of an ancient heathen temple deep sunk into the sediment of time; at last the triumphal arch of Titus, and before it, in the middle of the woody wilderness, a fountain gushing into a granite basin. He went up to this fountain, in order to survey the plain out of which the thunder-months of the earth once arose; but he went along as over a burnt-out sun, hung round with dark, dead earths. "O man, O the dreams of man!" something within him unceasingly cried. He stood on the granite margin turning toward the Colosseum, whose mountain-ridges of wall stood high in the moonlight, with the deep gaps which had been hewn in them by the scythe of Time. Sharply stood the rent and jagged arches of Nero's golden house hard by, like murderous cutlasses. The palatine hill lay full of green gardens, and on crumbling temple-roofs the blooming death-garland of ivy was gnawing, and living Ranunculæ still glowed around sunken capitals. The fountain murmured babblingly and eternally, and the stars gazed steadfastly down with imperishable rays upon the still battle-field, over which the winter of time had passed without bringing after it a spring,--the fiery soul of the world had flown up, and the cold, crumbling giant lay around;--torn asunder were the gigantic spokes of the fly-wheel which once the very stream of ages drove. And in addition to all this, the moon shed down her light like eating silver-water upon the naked columns, and would fain dissolve the Colosseum and the temples and all into their own shadows! Then Albano stretched out his arms into the air, as if he could therewith embrace and flow away, as with the arms of a stream, and exclaimed: "O ye mighty shades, you who once strove and lived here, ye are looking down from heaven, but scornfully, not sadly, for your great fatherland has died and gone after you! Ah, had I on the insignificant earth (full of old eternity), which you have made great, only done one action worthy of you! Then were it to me a sweet privilege to open my heart by a wound, and to mix earthly blood with the hallowed soil, and to hasten away out of the world of graves to you, eternal and immortal ones! But I am not worthy of it!"