They walked up and down the Forum, between the arches of Titus and Severus. Albano--especially beside the teacher who in the days of childhood had so often conducted him hitherward--was yet full of the stream which had swept over the world, and the all-covering water sank but slowly. He went on to say, "To-day, when he beheld the obelisk, the soft, tender brightness of the moon had seemed to him eminently unbecoming the giant city; he would rather have seen a sun blazing on its broad banner; but now the moon was the proper funeral torch beside the dead Alexander, who at a touch collapses into a handful of dust." "The artist does not get far with feelings of this kind," said Dian; "he must look upon everlasting beauties on the right hand and on the left." "Where," Albano went on asking, "is the old Lake of Curtius, the Rostrum, the _pila Horatia_, the Temple of Vesta, of Venus, and of all those solitary columns?" "And where is the marble Forum itself?" said Dian; "it lies thirty span deep under our feet." "Where is the great, free people, the senate of kings, the voice of the orators, the procession to the Capitol? Buried under the mountain of potshards. O Dian, how can a man, who loses a father, a beloved in Rome, shed a single tear, or look round him with consternation, when he comes out here before this battle-field of time, and looks into the charnel-house of the nations? Dian, one would wish here an iron heart, for fate has an iron hand!" Dian, who nowhere stayed more reluctantly than upon such tragic cliffs, hanging over, as it were, into the sea of eternity, always leaped off from them with a jest. Like the Greeks, he blended dances with tragedy. "Many a thing is conserved here, friend," said he; "in Adrian's church yonder they will still show you the bones of the three men that walked in the fire." "That is just the frightful play of destiny," replied Albano, "to occupy the heights of the mighty ancients with monks shorn down into slaves."