thunder, seemed old friends, and I shuddered to think of plunging
into that black silent wilderness on the left. At the gate of Civita
Vecchia the desolation begins; and such desolation! I had often read
that the Campagna was desolate; I had come there expecting to find it
desolate; but when I saw that desolation I was confounded. I cannot
describe it; it must be seen to be conceived of. It is not that it is
silent;--the Highlands of Scotland are so. It is not that it is
barren;--the sands of Arabia are so. They are as they were and should
be. But not so the Campagna. There is something frightfully unnatural
about its desolation. A statue is as still, as silent, and as cold, as
the corpse; but then it never had life; and while you love to gaze on
the one, the other chills you to the heart. So is it with the Campagna.
While the sands of the desert exhilarate you, and the silence of the
Swiss or Scottish Highlands is felt to be sublime, the desolation of the
Campagna is felt to be unnatural: it overawes and terrifies you. Such a
void in the heart of Europe, and that, too, in a land which was the home
of art,--where war accumulated her spoils, and wealth her
treasures,--and which gave letters and laws to the surrounding
world,--is unspeakably confounding. One's faith is staggered in the past
history of the country. The first glance of the blackened bosom of the
Campagna makes one feel as if he had retrograded to the barbarous ages,
or had been carried thousands and thousands of miles from home, and set
down in a savage country, where the arts had not yet been invented, or
civilization dawned. Its surface is rough and uneven, as if it had been
tumbled about at some former period; it is dotted with wild bushes; and
here and there lonely mounds rise to diversify it. There are no houses
on it, save the post-houses, which are square, tower-like buildings,
having the stables below and the dwellings above. It has its patches of
grass, on which herds depasture, followed by men clothed in sheepskins
and goatskins, and looking as savage almost as the animals they tend. It
is, in short, a wilderness, and more frightful than the other
wildernesses of the earth, because the traveller feels that here there
is the hand of doom. The land lies scathed and blackened under the curse
of the Almighty. To Rome the words of the prophet are as applicable as
to Babylon, whom she resembled in sin, and with whom she is now joined
in punishment: "Beca