Such is the task in which you may be called to share. When you have entered upon it and have learnt something of its trials and responsibilities, as well as of its joys and rewards, you will look back with gratitude to the training you received within the walls of this College. You will feel even more keenly than you do now how much you owe to the patient kindness and educational skill of your teachers and to the healthy stimulus of contact and competition with your class-fellows. Most heartily do I wish you success in your several careers. Following up the paths which have been opened for you here, may it be yours to enlarge still further the circle of light which science has gained, and to wrest from Nature new aids for the service of mankind.
FOOTNOTE:
[102] An address to the students of Mason University College, Birmingham, at the opening of the session, on Tuesday, 4th October, 1898.
X
The Roman Campagna[103]
Among the capitals of Europe Rome has long had the unique distinction of standing in the midst of a wide solitude. Other cities in their outward growth have incorporated village after village and hamlet after hamlet. As their streets and squares merge insensibly into a succession of villas and gardens, cottages and hedgerows, followed by the farms and fields of the open country, so the noise and stir of causeway and pavement gradually give way to the quieter sounds of rural life. But with the Eternal City this normal arrangement does not hold good. For sixteen centuries she has kept herself within her ancient walls which still surround her with their picturesque continuity of rampart and tower. Inside these barriers we still encounter, by day and by night, the 'fumum et opes, strepitumque Romæ.' But outside the gates we find ourselves on a lonely prairie that sweeps in endless grassy, almost treeless, undulations up to the base of the, distant hills. The main roads, indeed, that radiate from the city, are bordered on either side, for the first mile or two, with a strip of suburban osterie, booths and shops, varied here and there, perhaps, by a villa and its grounds. But these fringes of habitation are too narrow and short, and cling too closely to their respective arteries of traffic, seriously to affect the solitariness which broods over the intervening landscape up to the very foot of the walls.
This surrounding district, known as the Roman Campagna, possesses a singular fascination, which has been often and enthusiastically described. The endless and exquisite variety of form and colour presented by the plain and its boundary of distant mountains, together with the changing effects of weather and season on such a groundwork, would of themselves furnish ample subjects for admiration. But the influence of this natural beauty is vastly enhanced by the strange and solemn loneliness of a scene which living man seems to have almost utterly forsaken, leaving behind him only memories of a storied past which are awakened at every turn by roofless walls of long-abandoned farm-buildings, mouldering ruins of medieval towers, fragments of imperial aqueducts, decayed substructures of ancient villas and the grass-grown sites of ancient cities whose names are forever linked with the early struggles of Rome. European travel offers few more instructive experiences than may be gained by wandering at will over that rolling sward, carpeted with spring-flowers, but silent save for the song of the larks overhead and the rustle of the breeze among the weeds below; when the mountainous wall of the Sabine chain from Soracte round to the Alban Hills gleams under the soft Italian sky with the iridescence of an opal, and when the imagination, attuned to the human associations of the landscape, recalls with eager interest, some of the incidents in the marvellous succession of historical events that have been transacted here. If, besides being keenly alive to all the ordinary sources of attraction, the visitor can look below the surface, he may gain a vast increase to his interest in the ground by finding there intelligible memorials of prehistoric scenes, and learning from them by what slow steps the platform was framed on which Rome rose and flourished and fell. He will thus discover that, as befitted the city which was to rule the world, its birthplace was fashioned by the co-operation of the grandest forces in Nature; that, on the one hand, subterranean upheaval and stupendous volcanic activity combined to build up the plain and hills of the Campagna, and that on the other, the universal and ceaseless working of the subaërial agencies has carved it into that varied topography which is typified in the isolation of the Seven Hills of Rome and of the many crags and ridges that served as sites for the towns of Latium and Etruria.
Seen from the crest of the Vatican ridge, the Roman Campagna stretches as a plain from the base of the steep front of the Apennines to the coast of the Mediterranean—a distance of some thirty English miles. To the north it is bounded by the ridge of Soracte and the nearer heights of Bracciano and Tolfa. To the south it runs up to the base of the Alban Hills and sweeps between them and the sea onwards till it merges into the flat and pestilential Maremma. Even from such a commanding point of view, however, this apparent plain can be seen to be far from having an even surface. Not only does it slope upward and inland from the coast, until, where it abuts against the foot of the hills, it has reached heights of 600 or 800 feet, but when looked at more closely it presents a somewhat diversified topography. Though the heights and hollows never vary much from the general average level, they include not only smooth, grassy ridges but also low cliffs that run along the declivities, rising sometimes into craggy scarps; likewise narrow gullies and ravines with steep walls, as well as wide, open, smooth-sided valleys. The surface is for the most part clothed with pasture; yet the brown and yellow rock that forms most of the plain protrudes in many places, not only where it has been laid bare by natural causes, but where it has been artificially cut away or scooped into subterranean recesses.