my right hand extensive piles of ruin, in strange shapes or
shapelessness, built of the broad and thin old Roman bricks, such as may
be traced everywhere, when the stucco has fallen away from a modern Roman
house; for I imagine there has not been a new brick made here for a
thousand years. On my left, I think, was a high wall, and before me,
grazing in the road . . . . [the buffalo calf of the Marble Faun.--ED.].
The road went boldly on, with a well-worn track up to the very walls of
the city; but there it abruptly terminated at an ancient, closed-up
gateway. From a notice posted against a door, which appeared to be the
entrance to the ruins on my left, I found that these were the remains of
Columbaria, where the dead used to be put away in pigeon-holes. Reaching
the paved road again, I kept on my course, passing the tomb of the
Scipios, and soon came to the gate of San Sebastiano, through which I
entered the Campagna. Indeed, the scene around was so rural, that I had
fancied myself already beyond the walls. As the afternoon was getting
advanced, I did not proceed any farther towards the blue hills which I
saw in the distance, but turned to my left, following a road that runs
round the exterior of the city wall. It was very dreary and solitary,--
not a house on the whole track, with the broad and shaggy Campagna on one
side, and the high, bare wall, looking down over my head, on the other.
It is not, any more than the other objects of the scene, a very
picturesque wall, but is little more than a brick garden-fence seen
through a magnifying-glass, with now and then a tower, however, and
frequent buttresses, to keep its height of fifty feet from toppling over.
The top was ragged, and fringed with a few weeds; there had been
embrasures for guns and eyelet-holes for musketry, but these were
plastered up with brick or stone. I passed one or two walled-up gateways
(by the by, the Parts, Latina was the gate through which Belisarius first
entered Rome), and one of these had two high, round towers, and looked
more Gothic and venerable with antique strength than any other portion of