For a lesson in
anarchy, without a shade of sequence, Sicily stands alone and
defies evolution. Syracuse teaches more than Rome. Yet even Rome
was not mute, and the church of Ara Coeli seemed more and more to
draw all the threads of thought to a centre, for every new
journey led back to its steps -- Karnak, Ephesus, Delphi,
Mycencae, Constantinople, Syracuse -- all lying on the road to
the Capitol. What they had to bring by way of intellectual riches
could not yet be discerned, but they carried camel-loads of
moral; and New York sent most of all, for, in forty years,
America had made so vast a stride to empire that the world of
1860 stood already on a distant horizon somewhere on the same
plane with the republic of Brutus and Cato, while schoolboys read
of Abraham Lincoln as they did of Julius Caesar. Vast swarms of
Americans knew the Civil War only by school history, as they knew
the story of Cromwell or Cicero, and were as familiar with
political assassination as though they had lived under Nero. The
climax of empire could be seen approaching, year after year, as
though Sulla were a President or McKinley a Consul.
Nothing annoyed Americans more than to be told this simple and
obvious -- in no way unpleasant -- truth; therefore one sat
silent as ever on the Capitol; but, by way of completing the
lesson, the Lodges added a pilgrimage to Assisi and an interview
with St.
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