ensely 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.

Yes; its unknown dead! For, except in one or two doubtful instances,
these mountainous sepulchral edifices have not availed to keep so much
as the bare name of an individual or a family from oblivion. Ambitious
of everlasting remembrance, as they were, the slumberers might just
as well have gone quietly to rest, each in his pigeon-hole of a
columbarium, or under his little green hillock in a graveyard, without a
headstone to mark the spot. It is rather satisfactory than otherwise, to
think that all these idle pains have turned out so utterly abortive.

About two miles, or more, from the city gate, and right upon the
road