It is all infinitely touching, and after two thousand years the
heart aches for the fathers and mothers who laid their little
ones away in these hard cradles for their last sleep. Faith
changes, but constant death remains the same, and life is not
very different in any age, when it comes to the end. The Roman
exiles who had come so far to hold my British ancestors in
subjection to their alien rule seemed essentially not only of the
same make as me, but the same civilization. Their votive altars
and inscriptions to other gods expressed a human piety of like
anxiety and helplessness with ours, and called to a like
irresponsive sky. A hundred witnesses of their mortal state--jars
and vases and simple household utensils--fill the shelves of the
museum; but the most awful, the most beautiful appeal of the past
is in that mass of dark auburn hair which is kept here in a
special urn and uncovered for your supreme emotion. It is equally
conjectured to be the hair of a Roman lady or of a British
princess, but is of a young girl certainly, dressed twenty
centuries ago for the tomb in which it was found, and still
faintly lucent with the fashionable unguent of the day, and kept
in form by pins of jet.
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