The evening telegraph. [volume] (Philadelphia [Pa.]) 1864-1918, 1871-02-02
ST. ANGELO.

Among the massive remains OF imperial
Rome, one of the most imposing is the ancient
Mausoleum or Mole of Hadrian, now known
as the Castle st. Angelo. 1t stands on the
site where once were the gardene of Domita
overlooking the undulsting plains of the Cam
pagna in its rear, and stretching out its long
covered corridor to the Vatican. Poised on
its summit, and dark against the blue italian
sky, towers the bronze figure of the Archangel
Michael, as if he had Just alighted with
outspread wings and floating MANTLE and
paused there in the act of sheathing his
sword Beneath it flows the Tiber in whose
tawny and troubled waters it had cast its
wavering reflection for nearly eight cen CEN
turies. There, standing apart from all other
buildings, it lifts its battlemented towers and
bastioDs like a guard or q menace to the
closely-built city lying across the river before
it, and challenges every passenger who,
crossing the HGlian Bridge, passes
before it on his way to the great
Basilica Of st. Peter. The bridge has
changed its name as well as the Mausoleum,
and is now called the Ponte st. Angelo The
statues of gods and heroes placed there by
Hadrian have disappeared, and on their pc
destals stand the sculptured saints of Ber-
mini, fantastic in their draperies and gro
tesqUe in their attitudes, but picturesque in
their general effect. The funeral professions,
which in the great days of Rome bore the
ashes Of her pagan emperors across that
bridge to the sounding chambers of the
mighty Mausoleum, have vanished, and q
motley Christian crowd now passes over
these ancient arches, through which the swift
river has whirled its turbulent current for so
many generations; swift, like the river of
time; turbulent, like the history of the place;
feeting, never to return, like the generations
that have passed.
What change has come over men and
things since first the stones of this great
Mausoleum were laid I! Could they speak,
however, how terrible a history they might
reveal of human baseness, tyranny, hypo-
crisy; of human arrogance and misery; and
let us hope, somewhat too of noble endurance,
of heroic patience, of uncorrupted virtue
and patriotism. Within those walls what
crimes have been committed, what agonies
have been endured? Without those
walls what tumult of seething battle,
what clashiDg of arms and shrieks of
pain and fury, what glaring of wild flames,
what raging of wilder passions wreakinp
themselves in murder, rapine, and horrors
without name? In its secret cells popes
have been strengled, starved, and sent to a
bloody end; philosophers and thinkers have
perished, vainly struggling against bigotry
and superstition patriots have fought and
died for liberty. On the foul walls of its
Nub5SODo ohtAS'o anu POSto haNO oCldWl6u
their names, their verses, and their pictures,
longing for the light of day. beauty and
youth have perished in the dark,
vainly praying for help; innocent
men have falsely confessed crimes under the
torture Of the rack. In its frescoed halls em-
perors and popes have held their courts, and
banqueted and trampled on the rights of
man; and the ashes of emperors have filed
the vases of its sepulchral chamber The
silent statues which gathered once around
its colonnades and looked upon the glory
and pageant of ancient Rome, saw also tho
storm and fury of barbarian battle, ann
the desolation by the Goths, before thsd
were toppled down upon the heads of ey
infuriated soldiery. These walls, too, have
seen the dreary professions of the plague
pass under them. They have shaken with the
awful heave of the earthquake and the sudden
explosion of powder. They have been the
silent witnesses of the history of the Church
in its blackest moments and at the zenith of
its pride and power; and they still stand, a
part Of the present as of the past.