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VII.
THE DEATH OF THE APOSTLES.
FEW, doubtless, are the strangers in Rome, who have
not made an excursion to the church of S. Paolo
fuori le mura. Everyone knows that, if St. Peter’s is
Rome’s largest Christian temple, the church of St. Paul
is its most magnificent. If the immense size of the
former cannot at once be grasped by him who enters
—
for the standard of measurement is so to speak already
lost in the vestibule—the solemn splendor of the latter,
on the contrary, makes itself fully felt at the first view.
From the dusty and sun-scorched road to Ostia, one finds
himself transported, as if by the enchanter’s wand, into
an architectural garden, from the ground of which, clear
as a mirror, rises a grove of graceful granite columns, and
in the cool vaulting of which, shining with gold and
mosaics, daylight struggles with the broken lights from
the stained glass of the side windows.
Under the high altar is the grave of the apostle Paul,
and the road leading to and past this church, is the road
he went, to receive the martyr’s crown.
When one has left the half-ruined old Roman towers
of the Porta S. Paolo behind, and the beautiful group
that the Cestius pyramid and the city walls make with
the pines, cypresses and marble tablets of the Protestant
cemetery, one comes, after a quarter of an hour’s walk to
the Chapel of the Farewell. Small, unpretending, and
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