Perhaps there is no more impressive scene on earth than the solitary
extent of the Campagna of Rome under evening light. Let the reader
imagine himself for a moment withdrawn from the sounds and motion of the
living world, and sent forth alone into this wild and wasted plain. The
earth yields and crumbles beneath his foot, tread he never so lightly,
for its substance is white, hollow, and carious, like the dusty wreck of
the bones of men. The long, knotted grass waves and tosses feebly in the
evening wind, and the shadows of its motion shake feverishly along the
banks of rivers that lift themselves to the sunlight. Hillocks of
moldering earth heave around him, as if the dead beneath were struggling
in their sleep; scattered blocks of black stone, four square, remnants
of mighty edifices, not one left upon another, lie upon them to keep
them down. A dull purple, poisonous haze stretches level along the
desert, vailing its spectral wrecks of massy ruins, on whose rents the
red light rests like dying fire on defiled altars. The blue ridge of the
Alban mount lifts itself against a solemn space of green, clear, quiet
sky. Watch-towers of dark clouds stand steadfastly along the
promontories of the Apennines. From the plain to the mountains, the
shattered aqueducts, pier beyond pier, melt into the darkness, like
shadowy and countless troops of funeral mourners passing from a nation’s
grave.