The story of my life ; or, The sunshine and shadow of seventy years / by Mary A. Livermore ... with hitherto unrecorded incidents and recollections of three years' experience as an army nurse in the great Civil War, and reminiscences of twenty-five years' experiences on the lecture platform ... to which is added six of her most popular lectures ... with portraits and one hundred and twenty engravings from designs by eminent artists ...

THE MUSEUM OF ALL AQE5.52

523

liant transparency of atmosphere, all blent together in soft
gradations of -tone.
Rome is the center of interest, because it is the center of
European history. That is made up of two parts,- the
first, narrating the conquest by Rome, of the old nations
which she subjugated, and brought under her government;
and secondly, the formation of the European nations of our
own days, which were slowly constructed from the ruin of
the Roman Empire. When the progenitors of the great
Teutonic race, from which are descended the English, Geriman, and American people, had conquered Rome, they set-.
tled within her dominions, and learned from the fallen
mistress of the world, arts, laws, manners, language, and
religion. Rome is the enthralling city of all Europe,- it is
the museum of all the ages,- it is to-day a world in itself;
for whatever has possessed greatness in the western world
of the past, has left its traces in this city, in a crowd of
monuments.
As we walked the streets of this fascinating city, we continually met monuments of a still older civilization, compared with which that of Rome seems modern. The
Roman emperors brought as spoils from the nations they
conquered, works of art, and monuments of antiquity that
still adorn the city. And as we stood before the obelisk of
the Lateran, the largest obelisk of the world, cut in red
granilie, in honor of the Pharaoh Thotmes IV, 1740 B.C.,
which once stood in front of the Temple of the Sun, in
Thebes, Egypt, we realized that we were indeed in the presence of antiquity. As our stay in Rome was to be a matter
of a few weeks only, we would not waste them in an