ion of mounds, and heaps, and hills of ruin. Tombs and temples,
overthrown and prostrate; small fragments of columns, friezes,
pediments; great blocks of granite and marble; moldering arches
grass-grown and decayed; ruin enough to build a spacious city from; lay
strewn about us. Sometimes loose walls, built up from these fragments by
the shepherds, came across our path; sometimes a ditch, between two
mounds of broken stones, obstructed our progress; sometimes, the
fragments themselves, rolling from beneath our feet, made it a toilsome
matter to advance; but it was always ruin. Now, we tracked a piece of
the old road above the ground; now traced it underneath a grassy
covering, as if that were its grave; but all the way was ruin.

In the distance, ruined aqueducts went stalking on their giant course
along the plain; and every breath of wind that swept toward us, stirred
early flowers and grasses, springing up, spontaneously, on miles of
ruin. The unseen larks above us, who alone disturbed the awful silence,
had their nests in ruin; and the fierce herdsmen, clad in sheepskins,
who now and then scowled out upon us from their sleeping nooks, were
housed in ruin. The aspect of the desolate Campagna in one direction,
where it was most level, reminded me of an American prairie; but what is
the solitude of a region where men have never dwelt, to that of a
desert, where a mighty race have left their footprints in the earth from
which they have vanished; where the resting-places of their dead have
fallen like their dead; and the broken hour-glass of Time is but a heap
of idle dust! Returning by the road at sunset, and looking, from the
distance, on the course we had taken in the morning, I almost felt (as I
had felt when I first saw it, at that hour) as if the sun would never
rise again, but looked its last, that night, upon a ruined world.

To come again to Rome, by moonlight, after such an expedition, is a
fitting close to such a day. The narrow streets, devoid of footways, and
choked, in every obscure corner, by heaps of dung-hill-rubbish, contrast
so strongly, in their cramped dimensions, and their filth and darkness,
with the broad square before some haughty church; in the center of
which, a hieroglyphic-covered obelisk, brought from Egypt in the days of
the Emperors, looks strangely on the foreign scene about it; or perhaps
an ancient pillar, with its honored statue overthrown, supports a
Christian saint; Marcus Aurelius gi