We passed out of the city by a gate where in a little coign of vantage a
cobbler was thoughtfully hammering away in the tumult at a shoe-sole,
and then suddenly on our right we had the Julian wall: not a mere
fragment, but a good long stretch of it. The Moors had built upon it and
characterized it, but had not so masked it as to hide the perdurable
physiognomy of the Roman work. It was vastly more Roman wall than you
see at Rome; but far better than this heroic image of war and waste was
the beautiful old aqueduct, perfectly Roman still, with no visible touch
from Moor, or from Christian. before or after the Moor, and performing
its beneficent use after two thousand years as effectively as in the
years before Christ came to bless the peacemakers. Nine miles from its
mountain source the graceful arches bring the water on their shoulders;
and though there is now an English company that pipes other streams to
the city through its underground mains, the Roman aqueduct, eternally
sublime in its usefulness, is constant to the purpose of the forgotten
men who imagined it. The outer surfaces of the channel which it lifted
to the light and air were tagged with weeds and immemorial mosses, and
dripped as with the sweat of its twenty-centuried toil.
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