All along I saw massive ruins, not particularly
picturesque or beautiful, but huge, mountainous piles, chiefly of
brickwork, somewhat tweed-grown here and there, but oftener bare and
dreary. . . . . All the successive ages since Rome began to decay have
done their best to ruin the very ruins by taking away the marble and the
hewn stone for their own structures, and leaving only the inner filling
up of brickwork, which the ancient architects never designed to be seen.
The consequence of all this is, that, except for the lofty and poetical
associations connected with it, and except, too, for the immense
difference in magnitude, a Roman ruin may be in itself not more
picturesque than I have seen an old cellar, with a shattered brick
chimney half crumbling down into it, in New England.
By this time I knew not whither I was going, and turned aside from a
broad, paved road (it was the Appian Way) into the Via Latina, which I
supposed would lead to one of the city gates. It was a lonely path: on
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.
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