Before leaving Rome, we went to Tivoli, of which so much has been said. The morning was bright and cloudless; but a thick mist rose from the low, rank, marshy grounds of the Campagna, and enveloped a number of curious objects to the right and left, till we approached the sulphurous stream of Solfatara, which we could distinguish at some distance by its noise and smell, and which crossing the road like a blue ugly snake, infects the air in its hasty progress to the sea. The bituminous lake from which it springs is about a mile distant, and has the remains of an ancient temple on its borders. Farther on is a round brick tower, the tomb of the Plautian family, and Adrian’s villa glimmers with its vernal groves and nodding arches to the right. In Rome, around it nothing strikes the eye, nothing rivets the attention but ruins, the fragments of what has been; the past is like a _halo_ forever surrounding and obscuring the present! Ruins should be seen in a desert, like those of Palmyra, and a pilgrimage should be made to them; but who would take up his abode among tombs? Or if there be a country and men in it, why have they nothing to shew but the relics of antiquity, or why are the living contented to crawl about like worms, or to hover like shadows in the monuments of the dead? Every object he sees reminds the modern Roman that he is nothing—the spirits of former times overshadow him, and dwarf his pigmy efforts: every object he sees reminds the traveller that greatness is its own grave. Glory cannot last; for when a thing is once done, it need not be done again, and with the energy to act, a people lose the privilege _to be_. They repose upon the achievements of their ancestors; and because every thing has been done for them, sink into torpor, and dwindle into the counterfeits of what they were. The Greeks will not recover their freedom till they forget that they had ancestors, for nothing _is_ twice because it _was_ once. The Americans will perhaps lose theirs, when they begin fully to reap all the fruits of it; for the energy necessary to acquire freedom, and the ease that follows the enjoyment of it, are almost incompatible. If Italy should ever be any thing again, it will be when the tokens of her former glory, pictures, statues, triumphal arches are mouldered in the dust, and she has to re-tread the gradual stages of civilization, from primeval barbarism to the topmost round of luxury and refinement; or when some new light gives her a new impulse; or when the last oppression (such as in all probability impends over her) equally contrary to former independence, to modern apathy, stinging her to the quick, once more kindles the fire in her eye, and twines the deadly terrors on her brow. Then she might have music in her streets, the dance beneath her vines, inhabitants in her houses, business in her shops, passengers in her roads, commerce on her shores, honesty in her dealings, openness in her looks, books for the censorship, the love of right for the fear of power, and a calculation of consequences from a knowledge of principles—and England, like the waning moon, would grow pale in the rising dawn of liberty, that she had in vain tried to tarnish and obscure! _Mais assez des reflexions pour un voyageur._