So, we piled some loose stones about it, as the
beginning of a mound to her memory, and wondered if we should ever
rest there again, and look back at Rome.
CHAPTER XI--A RAPID DIORAMA
We are bound for Naples! And we cross the threshold of the Eternal
City at yonder gate, the Gate of San Giovanni Laterano, where the
two last objects that attract the notice of a departing visitor,
and the two first objects that attract the notice of an arriving
one, are a proud church and a decaying ruin--good emblems of Rome.
Our way lies over the Campagna, which looks more solemn on a bright
blue day like this, than beneath a darker sky; the great extent of
ruin being plainer to the eye: and the sunshine through the arches
of the broken aqueducts, showing other broken arches shining
through them in the melancholy distance. When we have traversed
it, and look back from Albano, its dark, undulating surface lies
below us like a stagnant lake, or like a broad, dull Lethe flowing
round the walls of Rome, and separating it from all the world! How
often have the Legions, in triumphant march, gone glittering across
that purple waste, so silent and unpeopled now! How often has the
train of captives looked, with sinking hearts, upon the distant
city, and beheld its population pouring out, to hail the return of
their conqueror! What riot, sensuality and murder, have run mad in
the vast palaces now heaps of brick and shattered marble! What
glare of fires, and roar of popular tumult, and wail of pestilence
and famine, have come sweeping over the wild plain where nothing is
now heard but the wind, and where the solitary lizards gambol
unmolested in the sun!
The train of wine-carts going into Rome, each driven by a shaggy
peasant reclining beneath a little gipsy-fashioned canopy of sheep-
skin, is ended now, and we go toiling up into a higher country
where there are trees.
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