Here Are
Subjects Of Still Life, As Provisions, Dead Game, Bottles, Glasses,
And The Like; Familiar Classical Stories, Or Mythological
Fables,
always forcibly and plainly told; conceits of cupids, quarrelling,
sporting, working at trades; theatrical rehearsals; poets reading
their productions
To their friends; inscriptions chalked upon the
walls; political squibs, advertisements, rough drawings by
schoolboys; everything to people and restore the ancient cities, in
the fancy of their wondering visitor. Furniture, too, you see, of
every kind--lamps, tables, couches; vessels for eating, drinking,
and cooking; workmen's tools, surgical instruments, tickets for the
theatre, pieces of money, personal ornaments, bunches of keys found
clenched in the grasp of skeletons, helmets of guards and warriors;
little household bells, yet musical with their old domestic tones.
The least among these objects, lends its aid to swell the interest
of Vesuvius, and invest it with a perfect fascination. The
looking, from either ruined city, into the neighbouring grounds
overgrown with beautiful vines and luxuriant trees; and remembering
that house upon house, temple on temple, building after building,
and street after street, are still lying underneath the roots of
all the quiet cultivation, waiting to be turned up to the light of
day; is something so wonderful, so full of mystery, so captivating
to the imagination, that one would think it would be paramount, and
yield to nothing else. To nothing but Vesuvius; but the mountain
is the genius of the scene. From every indication of the ruin it
has worked, we look, again, with an absorbing interest to where its
smoke is rising up into the sky. It is beyond us, as we thread the
ruined streets: above us, as we stand upon the ruined walls, we
follow it through every vista of broken columns, as we wander
through the empty court-yards of the houses; and through the
garlandings and interlacings of every wanton vine. Turning away to
Paestum yonder, to see the awful structures built, the least aged
of them, hundreds of years before the birth of Christ, and standing
yet, erect in lonely majesty, upon the wild, malaria-blighted
plain--we watch Vesuvius as it disappears from the prospect, and
watch for it again, on our return, with the same thrill of
interest: as the doom and destiny of all this beautiful country,
biding its terrible time.
It is very warm in the sun, on this early spring-day, when we
return from Paestum, but very cold in the shade: insomuch, that
although we may lunch, pleasantly, at noon, in the open air, by the
gate of Pompeii, the neighbouring rivulet supplies thick ice for
our wine. But, the sun is shining brightly; there is not a cloud
or speck of vapour in the whole blue sky, looking down upon the bay
of Naples; and the moon will be at the full to-night. No matter
that the snow and ice lie thick upon the summit of Vesuvius, or
that we have been on foot all day at Pompeii, or that croakers
maintain that strangers should not be on the mountain by night, in
such an unusual season.
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