this enchanted ground. The day
was warm and bright, though a little breeze, like the murmur of a
child's sleep, occasionally stirred the languid calm. April had just
come in; but in this Southern clime spring, having no storms or
frosts to fear, lingers in a strange way and unfolds, with slow,
patient tenderness, her beauties; not like our Northern spring, which
rushes to verdure and bloom as soon as the winter snows have
disappeared. And hence, though the few trees along the road had only
put forth their first leaves, tender and flaccid as butterfly's wings,
the grass was ready to be cut down and was thickly starred with wild
flowers. Horace of old said that one could not travel rapidly along
the Appian Way, on account of the number and variety of its objects of
interest; and the same remark holds good at the present day. It would
take months to go over in detail all its wonderful relics of the past.
At every step you are arrested by something that opens up a
fascinating vista into the old family life of the imperial city. At
every step you "set your foot upon some reverend history." From
morning to sunset I lingered on this haunted path, and tried to enter
into sympathy with old-world sorrows that have left behind no
chronicles save these silent stones. It is indeed a path sacred to
meditation! One has there an overpowering sense of waste--a depressing
feeling of vanity. On every side are innumerable tokens of a vast
expenditure of human toil, and love, and sorrow; and it seems as if it
had been all thrown away. For two miles and a half from the tomb of
Caecilia Metella I counted fifty-three tombs on the right and
forty-eight on the left. The margin of the road on either side is
strewn with fragments of hewn marble, travertine, and peperino. Broken
tablets, retaining a few letters of the epitaphs of the dead;
mutilated statues and alto-relievos; drums and capitals of pillars; a
hand or a foot, or a fold of marble drapery,--every form and variety
of sculpture, the mere crumbs that had fallen from a profuse feast of
artistic beauty, which nobody considers it worth while to pick up, lie
mouldering among the grass. At frequent intervals, facing the road,
you see with mournful interest the exposed interiors of tombs, showing
that beautiful and curious _opus reticulatum_, or reticulated
arrangement of bricks or tufa blocks, which is so characteristic of
the imperial period, and rows upon rows of neat pigeon-holes in the
br