owards the west, are the craggy and romantic
Apennines. Such was the stage on which sat invincible, eternal Rome.
This plain was traversed, moreover, by thirty-three highways, which
connected the city with every quarter of the habitable globe. Its
surface exhibited the richest cultivation. From side to side it was
covered with gardens and vineyards, in the verdure and blossoms of an
almost perpetual spring; amid which rose the temples of the gods of
Rome, the trophies of her warriors, the tombs and monuments of her
legislators and orators, and the villas and rural retreats of her
senators and merchants. Indeed, this plain would seem, in imperial
times, to have been one vast city, stretching out from the white strand
of the Mediterranean to the summit of the Volscian hills.

But in proportion to its GRANDEUR then is its DESOLATION now. From the
sea to the mountains it lies silent, waste, unploughed, unsown,--a
houseless, treeless, blackened wilderness. "Where," you exclaim, "are
its highways?" They are blotted out. "Where are its temples, its
palaces, its vineyards?" All swept away. Scarce a heap remains, to tell
of its numerous and magnificent structures. Their very ruins are ruined.
The land looks as if the foot of man had never trodden it, and the hand
of man never cultivated it. Here it rises into melancholy mounds; there
it sinks into hollows and pits: like that plain which God overthrew, it
neither is sown nor beareth. It is inhabited by the fox, haunted by the
brigand, and frequented in spring and autumn by a few herdsmen, clad in
goats'-skins, and living in caves and wigwams, and reminding one, by
their savage appearance, of the satyrs of ancient mythology. It is
silent as a sepulchre. John Bunyan might have painted it for his "Valley
of the Shadow of Death."

I shall suppose that you are approaching Rome from the north. You have
disengaged yourself from the Apennines,--the picturesque Apennines,--in
whose sunny vales the vine still ripens, and on whose sides the olive
still lingers. You are advancing along a high plateau which rises here
and there into conical mounts, on which sits some ancient and renowned
city, dwindled now into a poor village, whose inhabitants are
husbandmen, and who move about oppressed by the languor that weighs upon
this whole land. Beneath your feet are subterranean chambers, in which
mailed warriors sleep,--for it is the ancient land of Etruria over which
your track lies. Before the wo