This moral unfitted young men for every sort of
useful activity; it made Rome a gospel of anarchy and vice; the
last place under the sun for educating the young; yet it was, by
common consent, the only spot that the young -- of either sex and
every race -- passionately, perversely, wickedly loved.
Boys never see a conclusion; only on the edge of the grave can
man conclude anything; but the first impulse given to the boy is
apt to lead or drive him for the rest of his life into conclusion
after conclusion that he never dreamed of reaching. One looked
idly enough at the Forum or at St. Peter's, but one never forgot
the look, and it never ceased reacting. To a young Bostonian,
fresh from Germany, Rome seemed a pure emotion, quite free from
economic or actual values, and he could not in reason or common
sense foresee that it was mechanically piling up conundrum after
conundrum in his educational path, which seemed unconnected but
that he had got to connect; that seemed insoluble but had got to
be somehow solved. Rome was not a beetle to be dissected and
dropped; not a bad French novel to be read in a railway train and
thrown out of the window after other bad French novels, the
morals of which could never approach the immorality of Roman
history. Rome was actual; it was England; it was going to be
America. Rome could not be fitted into an orderly, middle-class,
Bostonian, systematic scheme of evolution.
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