Proscenium arch

“ In front is the Arch of Titus, with its well-known sculptures of the spoils from the Temple of Jerusalem, spanning the highest point of the Via Sacra. And closing up the view is the grandest ruin in the world, the stupendous broken circle of the Colosseum, rising tier above tier into the blue sky, burnt deep [178] brown by the suns of ages, holding the spectator breathless with wonder, and thrilling the mind with the awful associations connected with it.
The Forum lies like an open sepulchre in the heart of old Rome. ”

“ Now brightly blue as the most azure depth of a southern sky—now of a livid and snakelike green, darting restlessly to and fro as the folds of an enormous serpent—now of a lurid and intolerable crimson, gushing forth through the columns of smoke, far and wide, and lighting up the whole city from arch to arch—then suddenly dying into a sickly paleness, like the ghost of their own life! ”

“ The lofty towers, like ponderous obelisks, truncated—the tall archway recessed between them—the frieze of shields and colonnettes above it—the second arch soaring over all, a gallery, it may be, whence to annoy the foe—the venerable masonry overgrown with moss, or dark with the breath of ages—form a whole which carries the mind most forcibly into the past. ”

“ Then there is a second arch, after which come the mysteries of grief—the Agony in the Garden, the Flagellation, the Crowning with Thorns, the Ascent to Calvary, and the Crucifixion. Passing through a third arch, we come to the mysteries of glory—the Resurrection, the Ascension, the Descent of the Holy Ghost, and the Assumption of the Virgin Mary. The Dispute in the Temple is the chapel which left the deepest impression upon us. ”

“ To learn that these very monuments have been turned to base uses by barbarous prince-bishops—the arch converted into a fortified Château de l'Arc, the theatre into an outwork of the main fortress—adds impressiveness to their mutilated splendour, awing one with the image of a whole reconstructed from such fragments. ”

“ In the dimness of the cave-like church built to serve the purpose of a tomb and keep men's ideas familiar with the thought of death, these frescoes are glimpses into the heaven of the blest. Watch them at all hours of the day and there will be some new wonder to be noted, a face among the crowd which seems fairer than the rest, or, as the sunshine moves across, a flash of colours in an angel's wing like the sudden coming of a rainbow in a cloudy sky. ”

“ On the removal of the plaster from the east wall during the restoration in 1875, the remains of a fresco of “the Doom” were discovered, and here are depicted the Judge of all mankind in the scarlet robes of majesty, the Virgin as intercessor, S. Michael the Archangel, presiding over the balances in which souls are weighed, the Apostles as assessors, bishops and abbots with the keys of S. Peter, admitting the faithful into the Holy Catholic Church, human forms emerging from the grave, the path of life, the chains of everlasting darkness, demons clothed in flames, and the jaws of hell. ”

“ Beyond the tawny desert-tomb 126
Of Time; beyond tradition, loom
And lift ghostlike from out the gloom
Her thousand cities, battle-torn
And gray with story and with time.
Her very ruins are sublime,
Her thrones with mosses overborne
Make velvets for the feet of Time.
She points a hand and cries: "Go read
The letter'd obelisks that lord
Old Rome, and know my name and deed.
My archives these, and plunder'd when
I had grown weary of all men."
We turn to these; we cry: "Abhorr'd
Old Sphinx, behold, we cannot read!" ”

“ The earth beneath these falling groups of figures is rocky and burning, and seems as if convulsed by earthquakes. A great city, on fire, is seen in the distance. The armies (?) are fleeing upon the mountains. On the foreground Hell is opened, and many figures are descending into it down stone steps, and beside a gate beneath a rock, where Sin and Death are to be closed eternally by that fiend who carries the key in one hand, and drags them down with the other. On the rock, and above the gate, a fiend with wings urges the wicked onward with fiery darts. ”

“ The ghostly pillars in the Forum; the triumphal arches of Old Emperors; those enormous masses of ruin which were once their palaces; the grass-grown mounds that mark the graves of ruined temples; the stones of the Via Sacra, smooth with the tread of feet in ancient Rome; even these were dimmed, in their transcendent melancholy, by the dark ghost of its bloody holidays, erect and grim; haunting the old scene; despoiled by pillaging Popes and fighting Princes, but not laid; wringing wild hands of weed, and grass, and bramble ”

“ In the death-like stillness of the church, the visitor who, for the first time, contemplates this tomb and its gloomy guard, is struck by a feeling of awe, approaching to terror. The statues, with life-like individuality of attitude and expression—each solemn, mournful, dignified, and graceful; and all seeming to dilate before the eye into enormous dimensions, and, as if framed to scare intruders, endowed by [Pg 591] a power more than mortal, to keep watch and ward round the mighty dead. ”

“ The temple is in itself a city, and no feet but those of worshippers may pass even the strong outward walls. Very glorious are the carvings that adorn it. Terrible figures of Gods, many-headed, many-armed, bending giant bows, trampling giant enemies, brandishing awful weapons, dandling on their knees great Goddesses with slender loins and full breasts that overweight their swaying grace. Very awful are these figures, with clustering hair and crowns above their long eyes, and suns and moons rising and setting on their brows, and the symbols of their might scattered about them. ”

“ Few Masons realize that this Holy Sepulchre, or tomb, is in reality negation and crystallization - matter that has sealed within itself the Spirit of Life which must remain in darkness until the growth of each individual being gives it walls of glowing gold and changes its stones into windows. ”

“ On the lowest earth, with dark shadows settling over them, lay scattered and broken, in dishonor and dust, the emblems of all the religions of the world, their temples fallen and in ruins. Among them, in the front ground of the picture, was the prostrate cross, shattered as if dashed from the church, whose dilapidated walls and wide-spread fragments bore testimony not so much to the wasting power of time as to the rude hand of popular violence ”

“ Old Time heaved a mouldy sigh from tomb and arch and vault; and gloomy shadows began to deepen in corners; and damps began to rise from green patches of stone; and jewels, cast upon the pavement of the nave from stained glass by the declining sun, began to perish. Within the grill-gate of the chancel, up the steps surmounted loomingly by the fast-darkening organ, white robes could be dimly seen, and one feeble voice, rising and falling in a cracked, monotonous mutter, could at intervals be faintly heard. ”

“ Tragedy generally employed a temple or palace-front, though even in the extant thirty-two there are exceptions—the rock of Prometheus, the tent of Ajax, the cave of Philoctetes, and so forth. In a façade there were three doors, corresponding to the three permanent doors in the buildings; when a cave or tent was depicted, its opening was in front of the central door. Statues were placed before the temple or palace—those of the deities, for instance, in the Agamemnon to whom the Herald utters his magnificent address. Individuality would be given to a temple by the statue of a particular god. ”

“ To reach the smaller temple from the larger one, you must cross trunks of columns, heaps of stone, and a ruinous wall. After surmounting these obstacles, you arrive at the gate, where you may survey the enclosure, which was once the habitation of a god; but instead of the awful scene of a prostrate people, and sacrifices offered by a multitude of priests, the sky, which is open from the falling in of the roof, only lets in light [Pg 174] to show a chaos of ruins covered with dust and weeds. The walls, which supported the roof, are thirty-one feet high, and without a window. ”

“ Earth yawns, and the graves give up their dwellers. The dead and the living are mingled together in unnatural conjunction and hurry through the holy city. New prodigies await them there. The veil of the temple--the unpierceable veil--is rent asunder from top to bottom, and that dreaded recess containing the Hebrew mysteries-- the fatal ark with the tables and seven-branched candelabrum--is disclosed by the light of unearthly flames to the God-deserted multitude. ”

“ Granted a Church, Saint Thomas's Church was the most expressive that man has made, and the great Gothic cathedrals were its most complete expression.
Perhaps the best proof of it is their apparent instability. Of all the elaborate symbolism which has been suggested for the Gothic cathedral, the most vital and most perfect may be that the slender nervure, the springing motion of the broken arch, the leap downwards of the flying buttress,—the visible effort to throw off a visible strain,—never let us forget that Faith alone supports it, and that, if Faith fails, Heaven is lost. ”

“ The opening of the temple in heaven, and the presentation of the Ark of the Covenant, symbolize the unfolding of the mystery, in which the administration of God may have been shrouded, making apparent all which may have been inexplicable in his dealings with men; and rendering evident the verity of his promises to his chosen ones.
The voices, lightnings, thunders, earthquake, and hail, are appropriate symbols of the plagues which will fall upon the wicked. These are fearfully depicted in the Scriptures. ”

“ Praise God the enemy could not do to Arras what we did to Lens! Arras still lives, surmounting the grandeur of her ruins. The Cathedral with the top of its massive tower gnawn off by Fate is to be preserved for ever as a memorial of these days. You can climb from the grass-grown [Pg 114] rubble below to mountains of lime and broken stone and reach a high eminence against the pinky-grey fissured wall of the tower. It is sunset, and you look down upon widespread recuperative Arras standing in pink haze into which smoky air or fog is pouring. ”

“ Was there ever another ghost-story so strange, so full of marvels, a story with so thrilling a message from the unseen? Taken just as a story, is there anything in the Arabian Nights so marvellous as this ghost-story of Christmas? The world was all marble and blood and bronze, against a pitiless sky of pitiless gods. The world was Rome. No rule ever stood builded so impregnably from earth to stars—a merciless wall of power. Strength never planted upon the earth so stern a foot. ”

“ Accustoming one's eyes to the deepening twilight, one certainly sees here and there groups of men, women, and, in some cases, children huddled together in strange attitudes and gloomy corners round about the dark entry to the cathedral—horror depicted on the faces of some, perfect serenity on those of others, yet never a word do they utter. They are "in the garden of sleep." They are dead, all dead, the market-place, after a hard day's fighting, being deserted by the living—all save you and I, and that spectre-like sentry yonder on the cathedral tower "on guard." ”

“ And the huge things on the ceiling, with their prodigious thighs and toes and arms and jowls crouch and cower and scowl, and hang uneasily on arches, and strain themselves wearily on brackets, dreary, magnificent, full of inexplicable feelings all about nothing: the colossal prophetic creature in green and white over the altar, on the keystone of the vault, striking out his arms—to pull it all down or prop it all up? The very creation of the world becoming the creation of chaos, the Creator scudding away before Himself as He separates the light from the darkness. ”

“ And if past loves and hopes seem thus to give their life to the lasting walls, how fearful is the breath of terror that clings round every stone of the Colosseum. One single mangled death there made ten thousand fiends of men who sat on those benches ”

“ The spectator, who casts a mournful view over the ruins of ancient Rome, is tempted to accuse the memory of the Goths and Vandals, for the mischief which they had neither the leisure, nor power, nor perhaps the inclination, to perpetrate. The tempests of war might strike some lofty turrets to the ground ”

“ The Temple of Hercules, as it is denominated, is a ruin, not one of its massive fragments being left upon another. It was of the Doric order of architecture, and is known to have suffered severely by an earthquake some years before the fatal eruption. Not far from this temple is an extensive court or forum, where the soldiers appear to have had their quarters. In what has evidently been a prison, is an iron frame, like the modern implements of punishment, the stocks, and in this frame the skeletons of some unfortunate culprits were found. ”

“ And so, though one may curse the dusting and repairing of the ruins and the stripping of all the wild flora from the Colosseum, though one may wax indignant at sight of the hideous fortress like ramparts which imprison the Tiber, and bewail the old romantic banks with their greenery and their antique dwellings dipping into the stream, one must at the same time acknowledge that life springs from death, and that to-morrow must perforce blossom in the dust of the past. ”

“ A little to the west of the station, not far from the gateway, was recently found the slab which is here figured. Although the inscription is not deeply cut, it is very legible, and doubtless means—The lightning of the gods. When any spot was struck with lightning, it was immediately deemed sacred, and venerated as such by the Romans, being surrounded by a breastwork of masonry, similar to that put round the mouth of a well. Conscious guilt makes cowards of the most dauntless warriors! ”

“ Not even the physical horror of my position in that cramped corridor of dead reptiles and antediluvian frescoes, miles below the world I knew and faced by another world of eery light and mist, could match the lethal dread I felt at the abysmal antiquity of the scene and its soul. An ancientness so vast that measurement is feeble seemed to leer down from the primal stones and rock-hewn temples of the nameless city, while the very latest of the astounding maps in the frescoes showed oceans and continents that man has forgotten, with only here and there some vaguely familiar outline. ”