There is the moral of all human tales; 'Tis but the same rehearsal of the past. First Freedom and then Glory—when that fails, Wealth, vice, corruption—barbarism at last. --Lord Byron In the summer of 1835, Thomas Cole was in the middle of painting The Course of Empire, his grand five-part cycle of the rise and fall of an imaginary Greco-Roman civilization. He had traveled to Rome in the early 1830s, pondered the ruins, and read the romantic literature. There was more on his mind, however, than Byron and Gibbon. America was experiencing growing pains in the 1830s. By the middle of the decade, ...
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