I shall suppose that you are approaching Rome from the north. You have disengaged yourself from the Apennines,--the picturesque Apennines,--in whose sunny vales the vine still ripens, and on whose sides the olive still lingers. You are advancing along a high plateau which rises here and there into conical mounts, on which sits some ancient and renowned city, dwindled now into a poor village, whose inhabitants are husbandmen, and who move about oppressed by the languor that weighs upon this whole land. Beneath your feet are subterranean chambers, in which mailed warriors sleep,--for it is the ancient land of Etruria over which your track lies. Before the wolf suckled Romulus, this soil had nourished a race of heroes. The road, so filled in former times by a never-failing concourse of legions going forth to battle or returning in triumph,--of consuls and legates bearing the high behests of the senate to the subject provinces,--and of ambassadors and princes coming to sue for peace, or to lay their tributary gifts at the feet of Rome,--is now solitary and untrodden, save by the traveller from a far country, or the cowled and corded pilgrim whose vow brings him to the shrine of the apostles. Stacks of mouldering brickwork attract the eye by the wayside,--the remains of temples and monuments when the land was in its prime. You scarce take note of the scattered and stunted olives which are dying through age. The fields are wretchedly tilled, where tilled at all. The country appears to grow only the more desolate, and the silence the more dreary and unsupportable, as you advance. "Roma! Roma!" is chanted forth in melancholy tones by the postilion. "Roma" is graven on the milestones; but you cannot persuade yourself that Rome you shall find in the heart of a desert like this. You have gained the brow of a low hill; you have passed the summit, and got half-way down the declivity; when suddenly a vision bursts on your sight that rivets you to the spot. There is the Tiber rolling its yellow floods at your feet; and there, spread out in funereal gloom between the mountains and the sea, is the CAMPAGNA DI ROMA. The spectacle is sublime, despite its desolation. There is but one object in the vast expanse, but that is truly a majestic one. Alone, on the silent plain, judgment-stricken and sackcloth-clad, occupying the same spot where she "glorified herself and lived deliciously," and said in her heart, "I sit a queen, and am no widow, and shall see no sorrow," is ROME.