"The Colosseum [sic] of Rome" by Samuel Palmer, RWS (1805-1881) (original) (raw)

The Colosseum of Rome

Samuel Palmer, RWS (1805-1881)

Wood-engraving

6.4 cm by 7.4 cm (2 ½ by 2 ¾ inches), vignetted.

Charles Dickens's Pictures from Italy (1846), page 5.

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Scanned image and text byPhilip V. Allingham.

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Passage Anticipated: Seeing the Colosseum after the Rome of the Popes

By way of contrast we rode out into old ruined Rome, after all this firing and booming, to take our leave of the Coliseum. I had seen it by moonlight before (I could never get through a day without going back to it), but its tremendous solitude that night is past all telling. The ghostly pillars in the Forum; the Triumphal Arches of Old Emperors; those enormous masses of ruins which were once their palaces; the grass-grown mounds that mark the graves of ruined temples; the stones of the Via Sacra, smooth with the tread of feet in ancient Rome; even these were dimmed, in their transcendent melancholy, by the dark ghost of its bloody holidays, erect and grim; haunting the old scene; despoiled by pillaging Popes and fighting Princes, but not laid; wringing wild hands of weed, and grass, and bramble; and lamenting to the night in every gap and broken arch — the shadow of its awful self, immovable! [Chapter XI, "Rome," 231]

Bibliography

Dickens, Charles. "Rome." Pictures from Italy. The Vignette Illustrations on Wood, by Samuel Palmer. London: Bradbury and Evans, 1846. Pp. 165-232.

Dickens, Charles. Pictures from Italy and American Notes for General Circulation. Illustrated by Marcus Stone. The Illustrated Library Edition. London: Chapman and Hall, 1874.

Created 3 August 2007

Last modified 4 July 2023