It was a bright forenoon of February; a month in which the brief

severity of a Roman winter is already past, and when violets and daisies

begin to show themselves in spots favored by the sun. The sculptor came

out of the city by the gate of San Sebastiano, and walked briskly along

the Appian Way.

For the space of a mile or two beyond the gate, this ancient and famous

road is as desolate and disagreeable as most of the other Roman avenues.

It extends over small, uncomfortable paving-stones, between brick and

plastered walls, which are very solidly constructed, and so high as

almost to exclude a view of the surrounding country. The houses are of

most uninviting aspect, neither picturesque, nor homelike and social;

they have seldom or never a door opening on the wayside, but are

accessible only from the rear, and frown inhospitably upon the traveller

through iron-grated windows. Here and there appears a dreary inn or a

wine-shop, designated by the withered bush beside the entrance, within

which you discern a stone-built and sepulchral interior, where guests

refresh themselves with sour bread and goats'-milk cheese, washed down

with wine of dolorous acerbity.

At frequent intervals along the roadside up-rises the ruin of an ancient

tomb. As they stand now, these structures are immensely high and broken

mounds of conglomerated brick, stone, pebbles, and earth, all molten

by time into a mass as solid and indestructible as if each tomb were

composed of a single boulder of granite. When first erected, they were

cased externally, no doubt, with slabs of polished marble, artfully

wrought bas-reliefs, and all such suitable adornments, and were rendered

majestically beautiful by grand architectural designs. This antique

splendor has long since been stolen from the dead, to decorate the

palaces and churches of the living. Nothing remains to the dishonored

sepulchres, except their massiveness.

Even the pyramids form hardly a stranger spectacle, or are more alien

from human sympathies, than the tombs of the Appian Way, with their

gigantic height, breadth, and solidity, defying time and the elements,

and far too mighty to be demolished by an ordinary earthquake. Here you

may see a modern dwelling, and a garden with its vines and olive-trees,

perched on the lofty dilapidation of a tomb, which forms a precipice of

fifty feet in depth on each of the four sides. There is a home on

that funereal mound, where generations of children have been born, and

successive lives been spent, undisturbed by the ghost of the stern Roman

whose ashes were so preposterously burdened. Other sepulchres wear a

crown of grass, shrubbery, and forest-trees, which throw out a broad

sweep of branches, having had time, twice over, to be a thousand years

of age. On one of them stands a tower, which, though immemorially more

modern than the tomb, was itself built by immemorial hands, and is

now rifted quite from top to bottom by a vast fissure of decay; the

tomb-hillock, its foundation, being still as firm as ever, and likely to

endure until the last trump shall rend it wide asunder, and summon forth

its unknown dead.




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