Sometimes they lounged at the steps of a church, and sometimes dallied among cypresses against a cloudless sky; sometimes they made love by a Renaissance well-head, and sometimes they wandered through the
Campagna by the side of an ox-waggon.
Ah, if I were only a habitant of the Campagna five and twenty miles from Rome!
I would go to America, and see, and learn, and return to the Campagna and stand before my countrymen an illustrious discoverer.
In that land are mountains far higher than the Alban mountains; the vast Roman Campagna, a hundred miles long and full forty broad, is really small compared to the United States of America; the Tiber, that celebrated river of ours, which stretches its mighty course almost two hundred miles, and which a lad can scarcely throw a stone across at Rome, is not so long, nor yet so wide, as the American Mississippi--nor yet the Ohio, nor even the Hudson.
He can see the broad green Campagna, stretching away toward the mountains, with its scattered arches and broken aqueducts of the olden time, so picturesque in their gray ruin, and so daintily festooned with vines.
Nevertheless the sun hides not Virginia's Dismal Swamp, nor Rome's accursed
Campagna, nor wide Sahara, nor all the millions of miles of deserts and of griefs beneath the moon.
25 Frimaire; year XIII; Coronation of the Emperor Napoleon by his Holiness, Pius VII.' On the next morning, the inhabitants of Rome saw the same balloon soaring above the Vatican, whence it crossed the
Campagna, and finally fluttered down into the lake of Bracciano.
The sun had gone down full four hours, and it was later than most travellers would like it to be for finding themselves outside the walls of Rome, when Mr Dorrit's carriage, still on its last wearisome stage, rattled over the solitary Campagna. The savage herdsmen and the fierce-looking peasants who had chequered the way while the light lasted, had all gone down with the sun, and left the wilderness blank.
After that, what with dozing and what with castle-building, he lost himself for a long time, so that there was a touch of morning on the eastward rim of the desolate Campagna when he crept to bed.
She had been led through the best galleries, had been taken to the chief points of view, had been shown the grandest ruins and the most glorious churches, and she had ended by oftenest choosing to drive out to the
Campagna where she could feel alone with the earth and sky, away-from the oppressive masquerade of ages, in which her own life too seemed to become a masque with enigmatical costumes.
Five minutes elapsed, during which Franz saw the shepherd going along a narrow path that led over the irregular and broken surface of the
Campagna; and finally he disappeared in the midst of the tall red herbage, which seemed like the bristling mane of an enormous lion.
The stars at night stoop down over the brownest, homeliest common with all the spiritual magnificence which they shed on the
Campagna, or on the marble deserts of Egypt.