"Jerusalem fiddlesticks! Why, there's no such gate!"
"There the very spirit of Antiquity sits enthroned to welcome the traveller, and all the solemn Past sheds her influences over his soul--"
"Excuse me; there is a Jerusalem Gate."
"Perhaps so--in Joppa."
"There the Imperial City lies in the sublimity of ruin. It is the Rome of our dreams--the ghost of a dead and buried Empire hovering over its own neglected grave!"
"Dick, it's not fair to work off an old college essay as European correspondence."
"Nothing may be seen but desolation. The waste Campagna stretches its arid surface away to the Alban mountains, uninhabited, and forsaken of man and beast. For the dust and the works and the monuments of millions lie here, mingled in the common corruption of the tomb, and the life of the present age shrinks away in terror. Long lines of lofty aqueducts come slowly down from the Alban hills, but these crumbled stones and broken arches tell a story more eloquent than human voice.
"The walls arise before us, but there is no city beyond. The desolation that reigns in the Campagna has entered here. The palace of the noble, the haunts of pleasure, the resorts of the multitude, the garrison of the soldier, have crumbled to dust, and mingled together in one common ruin. The soil on which we tread, which gives birth to trees, shrubs, and wild flowers without number, is but an assemblage of the disintegrated atoms of stones and mortar that once arose on high in the form of palace, pyramid, or temple."
"Dick, I advise you to write all your letters before you see the places you speak of. You've no idea how eloquent you can be!"
"Now if we pass on in this direction, we soon come to a spot which is the centre of the world--the place where most of all we must look when we search for the source of much that is valuable in our age.