Page:The marble faun; or, The romance of Monte Beni (IA marblefaunorroma01hawtrich).pdf/197



usual of a moonlight evening, several carriages stood at the entrance of this famous ruin, and the precincts an interior were anything but a solitude. The French sentinel on duty beneath the principal archway eyed our part curiously, but offered no obstacle to their admission. Within the moonlight filled and flooded the great empty space; it glowed upon tier above tier of ruined, grass-grown arches and made them even too distinctly visible. The splendor of the revelation took away that inestimable effect of dimness and mystery by which the imagination might be assisted to build a grander structure than the Coliseum, and to shatter it with a more picturesque decay. Byron's celebrated description is better than the reality. He beheld the scene in his mind's eye, through the witchery of many intervening years, and faintly illuminated it as if with starlight instead of this broad glow of moonshine.

The party of our friends sat down, three or four of them on a prostrate column, another on a shapeless lump of marble, once a Roman altar; others on the steps of