True, they are but specks in the boundless immensity, and what a gulf there is between them--how many centuries of history, how many generations that battled and suffered, how much departed greatness, and how much new seed for the mysterious future! Still, they can see one another, and they are yet waging the eternal fight, the fight as to which of them--the pontiff and shepherd of the soul or the monarch and master of the body--shall possess the people whose stream rolls beneath them, and in the result remain the absolute sovereign.

And Pierre wondered also what might be the thoughts and dreams of Leo XIII behind those window-panes where he still fancied he could distinguish his pale, ghostly figure.

On surveying new Rome, the ravaged olden districts and the new ones laid waste by the blast of disaster, the Pope must certainly rejoice at the colossal failure of the Italian Government.

His city had been stolen from him; the newcomers had virtually declared that they would show him how a great capital was created, and their boast had ended in that catastrophe--a multitude of hideous and useless buildings which they did not even know how to finish! He, the Pope, could moreover only be delighted with the terrible worries into which the usurping _regime_ had fallen, the political crisis, and the financial crisis, the whole growing national unrest amidst which that _regime_ seemed likely to sink some day; and yet did not he himself possess a patriotic soul?
was he not a loving son of that Italy whose genius and ancient ambition coursed in the blood of his veins?
Ah! no, nothing against Italy; rather everything that would enable her to become once more the mistress of the world.

And so, even amidst the joy of hope, he must have been grieved to see her thus ruined, threatened with bankruptcy, displaying like a sore that overturned, unfinished Rome which was a confession of her impotency.