I am half convinced that the reflection is indeed
the reality, the real thing which Nature imperfectly images to our
grosser sense. At any rate the disembodied shadow is nearest to the
soul.
* * * * *
From the "French and Italian Note Books."
=_302._= A DUNGEON OF ANCIENT ROME.
We were now in the deepest and ugliest part of the old Mamertine Prison,
one of the few remains of the kingly period of Rome, and which served
the Romans as a state prison for hundreds of years before the Christian
era. A multitude of criminals or innocent persons, no doubt, have
languished here in misery, and perished in darkness. Here Jugurtha
starved; here Catiline's adherents were strangled; and methinks, there
can not be in the world another such an evil den, so haunted with black
memories and indistinct surmises of guilt and suffering. In old Rome, I
suppose, the citizens never spoke of this dungeon above their breath.
It looks just as bad as it is; round, only seven paces across, yet so
obscure that our tapers could not illuminate it from side to side,--the
stones of which it is constructed being as black as midnight. The
custode showed us a stone post at the side of the cell, with the hole in
the top of it, into which, he said, St.
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