Her
heart was full of her young warrior, who had been slain, and of her
father, from whom she had parted in the hour of his wrath, as she now
feebly followed the Pagan's steps, and resigned herself to a speedy
exhaustion and death in her utter despair.
They turned from the Pincian Gate and gained the Campus Martius; and
here the aspect of the besieged city and the condition of its doomed
inhabitants were fully and fearfully disclosed to view. On the surface
of the noble area, once thronged with bustling crowds passing to and fro
in every direction as their various destinations or caprices might lead
them, not twenty moving figures were now discernible. These few, who
still retained their strength or the resolution to pace the greatest
thoroughfare of Rome, stalked backwards and forwards incessantly, their
hollow eyes fixed on vacancy, their wan hands pressed over their mouths;
each separate, distrustful, and silent; fierce as imprisoned madmen;
restless as spectres disturbed in a place of tombs.
Such were the citizens who still moved over the Campus Martius; and,
besetting their path wherever they turned, lay the gloomy numbers of the
dying and the dead--the victims already stricken by the pestilence which
had now arisen in the infected city, and joined the famine in its work
of desolation and death.
Pages:
539
540
541
542
543
544
545
546
547
548
549
550
551
552
553
554
555
556
557
558
559
560
561
562
563