They passed over the Forum by the _Via Sacra_ to the Colosseum, whose lofty, cloven forehead looked down pale under the moonlight. They stood before the gray rock-walls, which reared themselves on four colonnades, one above another, and the flames shot up into the arches of the arcades, gilding the green shrubbery high overhead; and deep in the earth had the noble monster already buried his feet. They stepped in, and ascended the mountain full of fragments of rock, from one seat of the spectators to another; Gaspard did not venture to the sixth, or highest, where the men used to stand, but Albano and the Princess did. Then the youth gazed down over the cliffs, upon the round, green crater of the burnt-out volcano, which once swallowed nine thousand beasts at once, and which quenched itself with human blood; the lurid glare of the flames penetrated into the clefts and caverns, and among the foliage of the ivy and laurel, and among the great shadows of the moon, which, like recluses, kept themselves in cells; toward the south, where the streams of centuries and barbarians had stormed in, stood single columns and bare arcades,--temples and three palaces had the giant fed and lined with his limbs, and still, with all his wounds, he looked out livingly into the world. "What a world!" said Albano. "Here coiled the giant snake five times about Christianity! Like a smile of scorn lies the moonlight down below there upon the green arena, where once stood the colossus of the sun-god. The star of the north[82] glimmers low through the windows, and the serpent and the bear crouch. What a world has gone by!" The Princess answered, that twelve thousand prisoners built this theatre, and that a great many more had bled in it. "O, we too have building prisoners," said he, "but for fortifications; and blood, too, still flows, but with sweat! No, we have no present; the past without it must bring forth a future." The Princess went off to break a laurel-twig and pluck a blooming wall-flower. Albano sank away into musing,--the autumnal wind of the past swept over the stubble,--on this holy eminence he saw the constellations, Rome's green hills, the glimmering city, the Pyramid of Cestius; but all became past, and on the twelve hills dwelt, as upon graves, the lofty old spirits, and looked sternly into the age as if they were still its kings and judges. "This in remembrance of the place and the time!" said the Princess, returning and handing him the laurel and the flower. "Thou mighty one, a colosseum is thy flower-pot; for thee nothing is too great, and nothing too small!" said he, and threw the Princess into considerable confusion, till she observed that he meant not her, but Nature. His whole being seemed newly and painfully moved, and as it were removed to a distance,--he looked down after his father and went to find him,--he looked at him sharply, and spoke of nothing more this evening. 105. CYCLE.