How Often Has The
Train Of Captives Looked, With Sinking Hearts, Upon The Distant
City, And Beheld Its Population Pouring Out, To Hail The Return Of
Their Conqueror!
What riot, sensuality and murder, have run mad in
the vast palaces now heaps of brick and shattered marble!
What
glare of fires, and roar of popular tumult, and wail of pestilence
and famine, have come sweeping over the wild plain where nothing is
now heard but the wind, and where the solitary lizards gambol
unmolested in the sun!
The train of wine-carts going into Rome, each driven by a shaggy
peasant reclining beneath a little gipsy-fashioned canopy of sheep-
skin, is ended now, and we go toiling up into a higher country
where there are trees. The next day brings us on the Pontine
Marshes, wearily flat and lonesome, and overgrown with brushwood,
and swamped with water, but with a fine road made across them,
shaded by a long, long avenue. Here and there, we pass a solitary
guard-house; here and there a hovel, deserted, and walled up. Some
herdsmen loiter on the banks of the stream beside the road, and
sometimes a flat-bottomed boat, towed by a man, comes rippling idly
along it. A horseman passes occasionally, carrying a long gun
cross-wise on the saddle before him, and attended by fierce dogs;
but there is nothing else astir save the wind and the shadows,
until we come in sight of Terracina.
How blue and bright the sea, rolling below the windows of the inn
so famous in robber stories!
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