Browning might have sat with
Gibbon, among the ruins, and few Romans would have smiled.
Yet Browning never revealed the poetic depths of Saint Francis;
William Story could not touch the secret of Michael Angelo, and
Mommsen hardly said all that one felt by instinct in the lives of
Cicero and Caesar. They taught what, as a rule, needed no
teaching, the lessons of a rather cheap imagination and cheaper
politics. Rome was a bewildering complex of ideas, experiments,
ambitions, energies; without her, the Western world was pointless
and fragmentary; she gave heart and unity to it all; yet Gibbon
might have gone on for the whole century, sitting among the ruins
of the Capitol, and no one would have passed, capable of telling
him what it meant. Perhaps it meant nothing.
So it ended; the happiest month of May that life had yet
offered, fading behind the present, and probably beyond the past,
somewhere into abstract time, grotesquely out of place with the
Berlin scheme or a Boston future. Adams explained to himself that
he was absorbing knowledge. He would have put it better had he
said that knowledge was absorbing him. He was passive. In spite
of swarming impressions he knew no more when he left Rome than he
did when he entered it. As a marketable object, his value was
less. His next step went far to convince him that accidental
education, whatever its economical return might be, was
prodigiously successful as an object in itself.
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